Stijn!!

[Jim Richards]

After raining much of last night and this morning, it’s raining again here. We also had a good rain here a week ago. The weather channel is predicting rain again next Wed/Thurs. I’d love to see a weekly rain here throughout the Winter. Dare to dream...

[GH85Carrera]

TGIF everyone, except Jim. Happy Saturday Jim.

Pete, that sounds like lots of work for you. Plowing snow and cutting trees. The good news is you will have a lifetime supply of firewood. Stay warm!

[Porsche-poor]

Morning all. Nice day off and now back to reg schedule mess......TGIF

[GH85Carrera]

I received a text message from AT&T saying my bill is ready to view. I have it set up to auto pay, so I mostly ignore it, until it clears. They said the text message was because my email had failed. So I had to log in to check, all is fine. Who knows what happened. Of course since it had been a while since I logged in, I had to set up new security questions.

My bill is $154 for three cell phones. We never get remotely close to the data limits. It got me wondering about what my bill was in the past so I fired up Quicken. I just click on the last AT&T payment and it will run a report. I changed it from last 4 months, to all activity. It did just that. Since 1989 I have spent over 20K on phone bills. That included buying the phones, and even the olden days of full on land lines, with (Gasp) long distance charges. I used to log in the charges for long distance costs. It was such a rip off. Now of course no one pays long distance unless you call out of the country.

It was funny to see the bill go from AT&T to Cingular, and back to AT&T, and I never changed anything, it was all them. My old original cell phone the Nokia candy bar size phone was $31 pr month. When I drank the kool-aid and went with a smart phone, the bill went up a lot, but I can't imagine going without it now. I lived without it for most of my life. But I lived without Air Conditioning & B&W TV as a kid, and I am never going back to that either.

[GH85Carrera]

One of the thinks I had almost forgotten about was back in the Cingular days when I still got analog phone bills I opened the phone bill about fainted. The bill was over $2,500. For whatever reason (of course it was blamed on a computer error) they dropped all my plan minutes and I was calling at the full rate. It took multiple phone calls and one very explicit letter, and 14 months to get it all corrected. They had some real idiots working there. The letter prompted a phone call from a higher up the ladder manager with real brains. She looked at the issue, instantly saw my point, and fixed it on the billing. Bam, done. In the letter I had to threaten to go to the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. They have total authority over all the utility companies and they actually help consumers. That was enough to prompt a phone call from the smart people at Cingular, and it was resolved.

[flipper35]

No brand on them anywhere I could find. Here is a closer upper view.

[flipper35]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Yea, those are cool wheels. When I replaced the 14 inch wheels on my Elky I found a set from a S-10 that look identical, but are 15s. Of course I had to have them painted, and new beauty rings, By the time I did all that I could have bough a nice set of Craigers. I wish I had, but I ain't going down that rabbit hole.

Good thing cause you need some period correct Corvette wheels on it.

[flipper35]

Pete, hope all gets back to normal, er, power back up in a short time. At least you are busy. Maybe now is a good time to go visit Rick.

[Evans, Marv]

Pete. What you are going through, we went through a couple of weeks ago. However it wasn't as bad as you have it. We had either four or five days without power here in SoCal because of a wind event and fire danger. I have a 10Kw generator hooked up to a transfer switch that feeds certain circuits in the house. I definitely wouldn't like to have to go through the snow and low temps like you do. Because of the noise my generator makes, I'm considering looking at water cooled diesel ones. Good luck and hang in there. It sure makes you appreciative of all those little comforts you have when things are back to normal.

[pete3799]

So about 20 minutes ago a Washington Electric Co-op truck pulls into my door yard. The guy in the passenger seat looks through his binoculars at the pole just the other side of my house. I'd already checked that the fuse was still in place. So i opened the door and stuck my head out and offered them some coffee. They declined but said they just need to check out to the end of our road ( power dead ends at the neighboring farm) and they'd have the power on shortly.

About 5 minutes ago the light over the kitchen table came on .........YES......the electrons flow once again.

[GH85Carrera]

Ain't it great when the juice comes back on.

I get to looking at generators, and I usually end up wanting a natural gas powered whole house generator and they are 8 grand of so installed. We have few few power outages. It just does not make sense. Out power lines are all underground in the neighborhood. I ma well break down and get a small Honda inverter unit to run the fridge and a few lights. I want one that is easy to drain and store for years unused.

[RKDinOKC]

Att been trying to charge me for internet that I turned off several months ago...
Just gott a check from them for the rest of the month that was left when I turned it off.
Don't they they know what they are doing.

[flipper35]

They are being ATT.

We seldom have power issues and the longest we had was during a bad storm when the power was out for 4 hours. I guarantee if we get a generator we would not have to use it.

We are thinking of putting a gas fireplace in the basement where an old wood burner stove used to be. We have a 250 gal propane tank for just the stove/oven and i think we could piggy back off that for how often we would use it, though we might have to fill it every 4 years instead of 5 years.

If only it were white!

[GH85Carrera]

That is nice. It all depends on what they did to it. Tires and wheels look good, not oversized 21 and slammed to the ground. It looks good.

Richard, you are dealing with the low level idiots. It takes about three levels up to get to smart people. Good luck getting them on the line, are protected like the secret service protects the vice president. Hard to get to if you are just a peon like us.

[Jim Richards]

Where in CA is that, Brent?

[flipper35]

Where is what?

[GH85Carrera]

Dang government and their desire to "simplify" things.

I used a super simple logical web site for a long time that allows me to download free government imagery. It is only one meter resolution, so not great stuff, but its free! It would be OK for background planning of a future flight, and sometimes it is good enough for a client if they are looking at a large area and don't need high resolution.

Anyway about 18 months ago they "simplified" it the first time and the files are there, but now instead of using the county names like would be simple, they have a code number so Pottawatomie County is now 40,125. Yea, that is simple. And the files are not in alpha order or number order. Just kinda random. So I have to look through all 77 counties in Oklahoma. Then I can download it.

No wait, they just "improved" the site again. Now I have to log into a special account and download it from their "cloud" to a different temporary "cloud" that only had 10 MB of space. Then I can download it from there. Golly that is simple.

What a fudge cluster. They must have hired some government staffers from congress that normally write out Federal tax code.

[RKDinOKC]

They probably moved everthing to sharepoint in the cloud.

[GH85Carrera]

No, they are wanting me to sign up with Box. Never heard of Box. They have a free 10 GB account, or for $60 per year is is bigger. I don't want to have to mess it with at all. I HATE the cloud. I want it local.

[flipper35]

IIRC Box can be HIPAA compliant.