Saturday, January 10, 2015

A Phone and RV Fix

Saturday: (01/10) We did our usual Saturday morning grocery shopping run this morning. Lou made waffles and sausage for breakfast. For dinner I made stuffed peppers.

My major project for the day was emptying my dirt buckets. My dirt pile is getting quite large. In fact, Ernie has christened it Mount Donald. It's nearing my height now.

My other project for the day was to fix our home phone. I was ready to abandon the house phone and just use our cell phones. We use Vonage, an Internet based phone system. Our interface was missing some indicators and restarting it didn't fix it. It's over 10 years old so i guess that have a limited life. We have an application called Vonage Extension on our cell phones that works as the house phone so that when anyone calls the house, All our cell phones ring. The screen looks different than the actual cell phone so you know it's the house phone ringing. Lou wasn't prepared to use the app instead of a cordless house phone so I went over to Fry's Electronics to get a new interface device. A replacement Vonage device would have cost $40 dollars. The service is <$30 per month. Since I'm cheap, and I noticed the Basic Talk interface was only $10, included a free months service and the service was only $10 per month for the same unlimited US and Canada calling, I bought the Basic Talk device instead. Unfortunately, I pay for Vonage yearly so I'll have both services for a while. That will allow me to be sure it works as well as Vonage. Vonage dos have some additional features that Basic Talk is missing but I'm trying out Google Voice, a free phone service, to see if it can fill in the missing features. So for now, calls to our Vonage number simultaneously ring the Basic Talk number so effectively all is working as before, except, that we now have two additional phone numbers, one for Basic Talk and one for Google. If Vonage is terminated I'll port our old phone number to the Basic Talk line and all we be just dandy.

Other than that, I succeeded in relaxing the rest of the day.

Sunday: (01/11) We all headed up to San Mateo to Jack's restaurant for breakfast. It's that nice new place we found a week or two ago. Great omelets and corned beef hash. We then dropped Dawn off at the San Mateo Mall  where she could do some shopping and Lou and I were off to the Alameda Fairgrounds in Pleasanton to attend an TV show. This is supposedly the biggest RV show in Northern California. In years past when we attended it it was Big with a good assortment of travel trailed=rs, weekend motorhomes and then some quality RV's as well. It was probably at least twice as big as now. What is now missing is the quality RV's. We did enjoy looking around at the different models and actually found a nice 19 foot class C that had a pretty good layout but unfortunately wasn't built too well. Just poor quality and bad finish details. We are finicky.  Of course we had no intent of buying anything but since we didn't find anything we liked anyway, there was no problems avoiding to do that. We had a nice day looking. On our way over we took a different route than we normally do and drove through the Niles district of Fremont. It's the old town where the movie industry resided before it moved to Hollywood. We noticed a large number of antique shops there so Lou and Danw will be returning sometime to explore. We had leftovers for dinner.

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