Pinnacles Morning

Pictures from our window this morning. The deer are quite comfortable. The sitting deer each have a bird standing on their backs, left deer a magpie, right deer a blue jay. (Sorry for the lack of focus) The dog was at a camp nearby. He belongs to one of the resident ranger campers and doesn't seem to mind the deer, nor they, him. The two bucks are rutting for play.

Slingbox

Tonight we're at the Pinnacles. There are two things that occur here. There are no cell phone signals and there are no TV signals. There are great views and there aren't many places as nice to visit as the Pinnacles, but no signals.
So...
We use Vonage for our IP phone and that fixes the first problem.
A couple of days before I left I went to Best Buy and bought a Slingbox. This is a device that connects to your home network and a TV antenna or cable box or other video source. You run a player on your computer and video and audio are streamed from you home to your computer, wherever it may be where there is a broadband connection. It works great from point to point on the network at home. Tonight we tried it out for the first time away from home. After a shakey start with the feed dropping and requiring a manual restart, every 5 sec to 5 minutes, suddenly it started working continuously with ocassional short dropout but returning automatically. It does work! That's great.
We enjoy our home broadcast stations. There are a lot of them and ocassionaally, something is worth watching. I'm too cheap to pay cable of DirecTV rates. The cost is just 2-3 times what it should be. I'd prefer it if they charged by the channel and you could select which channels you wanted. I'd pick a couple and pay my $2 month and be happier, but that's not this world. So, paying the $200 for the Slingbox seems to be a good alternative. It will pay for itself at that rate in 8 years. Actually, since DirecTV costs $41/month, minimum, as an alternative, it pays for itself in 5 months. I still have to learn what the impact of streaming video over the Datastorm system will be. If it gives us 4 hours before we reach our daily bandwidth allotment, that's OK.
Update on how it works:
Well, I've used the Slingbox several times now and can report it works with the Datastorm. I watched as much as 5 hours one evening and there was no impact to bandwidth of the internet connection over the satellite. I was even doing a lot of website updates at the same time. In the evening, there was some momentary dropout, not enough to bother me and, oddly, just as David Letteman came on it became perfect and stayed that way until I called it a night after another hour or so. The same effect on a subsequent night. Must be a lot less traffic that late. I did set down the bandwidth setting from 310k 30 frames to 220k and 20 frames. I think it will work out OK.

Pinnacles,Ca

For some reason it took a really long time to get ready this time. Of course, we did reorganize just about everything. Stuff that hadn't been used or was seldom used stayed home. Somehow we seemed to eventually get everything into place.

Friday I wired the Hughes Autoformer into a compartment. Since I got it, I've been having to chain it up outside. When we were in Pomona a few weeks ago, a representative from Hughes said it would be OK in the compartment as long as it had some room for air circulation around it. The RV had a permanently attached 30' power cord which I shortened to 2' to plug into the transformer.
We spent most of Saturday morning preparing to leave. I built a shelf where the coffee pot used to be. We removed the built-in coffee maker because we use the microwave for our tea. Lou has an occasional cup of coffee and uses coffee bags. Easy to store, easy to brew, always fresh.
We finally got away a bit after 2pm. We had a few errands so I took the RV on mine and Lou and Dawn the toad for theirs. We met In Gilroy, about 54 miles South of home. Not far, but it ended up being as far as we got. It seems to get dark early now. We had dinner at the Longhouse restaurant. We asked if we could spend the night in their lot and they said OK. The local Walmart doesn't allow overnighters, due to a city ordinance. The restaurant is also in the city but we stayed and had no problem.

Except that we had a very heavy rain that night. The window by the dinette leaked. Made Dawn's bedding quite wet and ruined the laminate on the table top. I clamped it together and Hope it turns out OK .
We didn't do much better getting away from Gilroy, and then Hollister. We finally arrived at the Pinnacles a little after 1pm. It's been raining all day. For some reason there aren't any other transient campers in the campground. There are the usual 6 or so ranger/botanist trailers here. They're her working on the California Condor restoration. We've spent the afternoon lazying around watching the beasts outside.

Get Set

Dawn wraps her semester Wednesday and we'll be heading out very shortly there after. It's amazing! When we returned home, it seemed like it would be a long time before we got back on the road. Now it's already time to go. I have some things to do to the RV before leaving. We'll be heading south along the coast, through Bakersfield, then toward Las Vegas and Quartzsite. Dawn has to be back mid January for the start of next semester so she and Lou will take the toad home from Quartzsite leaving Don there for the big RV show week. Lou should be able to return to Quartzsite a couple of weeks later. Bad timing on the universities part. Hopefully the flea market is good during that week before the RV show.

The "gutter cleaning" project in San Jose has been going well but won't be finished before departure. The trees are gone but a couple of stumps remain and the concrete sidewalk is still to do. It's too cold for concrete work anyway, right?

Fun With Maps

I have always wanted good maps for this blog that show where we camp and where we have gone. I rather dislike static maps and want an interactive experience using the maps. What I want is a way to navigate the reports of our travels by clicking the map to get more detailed information. I also want this to not be much work on my part. Impossible? Maybe not.
I am trying out the Google Map API to display data points on a map with an interactive user interface. The user can pan around and zoom in/out on the map with the data points still properly displayed. The user can also select a satellite view or a map view of the data. The data is from an XML database not from static images.

Here are links to individual trip campsite and route maps.

I've tried other static maps and haven't found anything that looks good and is easy to use mostly because they depend on a lot of effort to draw them manually. Then there is the copyrights problem, Google Maps may be the solution. One of the problems though is that it is difficult to use with blogger pages. So far that hasn't been fully eliminated so the map pages are just called from the blog.

A tool used to obtain lat/lng coordinates.

A New Restaurant

We had dinner last night from Hawiian Barbecue. They just opened up last night a couple of blocks from home and sounded good. We got three different items, to go, to try them out. Don found them interesting but slightly high priced. Lou and Dawn thought they tasted good but didn't ride well. It's nice to have another option available.
We are lucky to have quite a group of places nearby. Within three blocks are: Thai City, Compadres and Celia's (both Mexican Restaurants), Taqueria El Grullense, Taco Bell, Ace Sandwiches, Mr Chau's (a Chinese cafeteria style fast food), Jack In The Box, Happy Donut, Quisno Subs, Baja Fresh, Boston Market and more.
Within ten blocks there are probably 30 or more restaurants, most local places but some chains.
Our favorite nearby places are Mr Chau's, Pizz'a Chicago, The Fish Market, Celia's, Olive Garden, and Joanie's Cafe. All are within an easy walk.

Warranty?

The end of August we got Dawn a new refrigerator for her apartment from Fry's Electronics. We got the extended warranty. A few weeks ago a puddle was seen on the floor. The repair man was called and couldn't do anything on the first visit because we had wiped up the leaked water. A couple of days later he was called back and found that the defrost heat strip had failed. He didn't have the part. The part couldn't be located so Fry's requested we return the refrigerator for a credit. They didn't have that model for a replacement. Through all this, Dawn needed a refrigerator so it was left in service until we returned it this afternoon. We returned it and checked for a replacement. They had one almost identical except for the model number. It cost $10 more, of course. We bought the replacement, ask for and got a $10 discount to match our original price, but, we had to buy a new warranty. No pro-ration of the remaining 2 years 9 months left on the warranty. This was a little upsetting, but still cheaper than having to replace the refrigerator at our cost. The warranty couldn't be credited because the service man had come out to repair it. He couldn't repair it, but he came out. I'm not sure I understand it but it all makes me wonder if extended warrantys are worth it. Each repair visit involved waiting at Dawn's place for the repairman in a 4 hour window of time, two visits. Each visit was toward the end of the window. Add the time it took to return the refrigerator and the cost is significant. If I was billing my time for this at $75/hour (what I'd like to bill) I wasted more than $600 in time plus the $50 warranty plus the original price of $300 for a total of $950 plus tax. The replacement refrigerator would have been $310 for a total of $610 (300 + 310) plus tax. Not having a warrantee would have saved $340 (950-610)? It's a good thing I actually have a lot of time to waste anyway.