Occupation of Independence

Soon after most people become acquainted with the RV travel blogosphere, they start to see patterns, enough so that they might classify them like this: RV 101 blogs. How to. Chock full of useful information for newbies. They work pretty hard for their nickels and dimes of Google ad income. Too bad there are so many minute details, which are intended to be practical but really aren't, since the reader's circumstances are different than the blogger's. Readers can feel insulted when such blogs appear to offer friendly advice to a "fellow" RVer, but then the reader learns he is just a chump being hit with a thinly-disguised ad. (The Linkbait Syndrome; it gets 'em every time.) Ah dear, the sordid topic of coin... RV travelogues. Where are Fred and Mildred today ? Aimed at armchair travelers and RV wannabees, these blogs offer pleasant entertainment as long as you live life purely through your eyeballs; mentally you will leave the blog completely starved. Final

No, I didn't go out and buy one, the gadget that is. But I did follow through on a commenter's suggestion of downloading Kindle ebooks from Amazon onto my netbook. I chose a freebie of course. Buying books is a "bridge too far". I firmly rejected the option of reading the eBook in the over-hyped "cloud" since that requires an internet connection, the very thing I want to liberate myself from. Instead, I opted to download the Kindle eReader onto my (Windows PC) netbook and to do the same with the eBooks themselves, since an internet connection is only needed during the downloading process, itself. Soon I was using it on a free classic, Samuel Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare . By his own admission he could write a preface to anything, even a cookbook, and the preface would be more popular than the book, proper. There is no "Edit" tool at the top of the screen; to copy a juicy quote you must highlight it first and then right-button for copy

At the moment I am in the Valley of the Sun, the Phoenix megalopolis. (If only it would run out of water and start shrinking. It would be a better place.) Its only real significance to me is that it is still on the Gila River migration route. But I can't help wondering about Verizon's 4G wireless service, available only in big cities like this. My mi-fi gadget is only a 3G model, so I can't actually sample the 4G service. It seems like I should be as excited about this improvement as I was when Verizon upgraded from 2G (1xRTT) to 3G (EVDO) a few years back. But back then there was no 5 Gigabyte per month limit. It makes sense that there should be a limit like that, despite the howls of gamers and video-addicts on the tech forums. So I have no real complaint against Verizon. But it does make a customer wonder what is so great or important about 4G wireless service: the only thing it's good for is watching videos, but if you give in to that temptation, you'll smac

It wasn't so long ago that "AT&T" charged $20 per month for wi-fi at Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, McDonalds, and various hotel chains. Now all the wireless telecoms are delighted to give you free wi-fi at such places. Off-loading data to wi-fi hotspots to lessen the data traffic jam at cell towers is a huge trend these days. In theory this should be a nice help to travelers. Having failed to win any looks of envy (or even respect) at Starbucks with my new $200 netbook, it seemed like McDonalds might promise more success: surely some toothless old man would be impressed with my spiffy new machine; you know, the old boys who find section D of yesterday's newspaper and read it in slow motion while drinking bottomless refills of senior coffee. Old habits die hard: walking into the store my eyes scanned the walls for an electrical outlet. First, they seem to design public wi-fi places without a single electrical outlet. That must be deliberate; they're not

It was a thrill for this chronic late-adopter and used-computer-buyer to finally have his first new computer. I boldly squatted in the parking lot outside the Target where I bought my new 11.6" Acer netbook at the loss-leader price of $200 and brazenly challenged a security guard or parking lot Zamboni to even try to kick me out. Nobody dared. I stayed up until midnight -- real midnight, as in media noche , as in mitternacht , not motorhome midnight of 9 p.m. -- transitioning to the new netbook. I had always feared doing this but it ended up being fun watching functionality and the software breath-of-life appear on a soul-less machine, step-by-step. At 530 in the morning I practically leaped out of bed, wondering if Starbucks would waken at 6 am. I didn't have to drive far in New Mexico's megalopolis, Albuquerque, to find one. Soon I was ensconced in a chair next to a personable floor lamp, with a scone and a (disappointing-tasting and over-priced) espresso, and pr

Act fast if any of this pertains to you. November 12 is the last day! How nice it was to be shopping for a new laptop when the old one isn't quite dead. What an energy hog the old laptop was, consuming 4 amps DC during normal operation. And I use it many hours per day! It's hard to find power consumption data on the internet or on the boxes at the stores since nobody really cares except a traveler who is running down his coach batteries. Fortunately I got some good numbers from tdhoch of RV Sabbatical, who has a Kill a Watt device for measuring power consumption in watts. (I use a resistor-based DC current sensor in the line between RV frame ground and the negative post of the battery.) Going through a Target recently (blush) I noticed a superb deal on an 11.6 inch netbook by Acer, model Aspire One AO722-0473. You can't get it online at Target since they are using it as a loss-leader to drive the consuming masses wild and bring them into the store. It would have been an

The challenge for me as a blogger has always been to gradually migrate my readership away from the pure travel genre and towards the topics that I'm interested in enough to write about, as given in the subtitle at the top of the blog. Somehow I have to do this without knowing much about my readers or where they come from; most readers probably still come from RV travel blogs. A cross-category blog is inherently difficult to match with readers. Perhaps that's why most blogs are "pure-breeds", such as news, politics, financial, vacation-like travel, sports, friends and family, etc. Imagine the disappointment of a the standard armchair traveler/RV wannabee who stumbles onto my blog. He wants escapist dreams and pretty pictures to help numb the pain of having four more years to go, in his cubicle prison; there's nothing wrong with that, but it's not what I do here. Offering anything but sugary fantasies will come off as being overly-earnest at best, or neg

It's rare for me to experience gadget lust. Normally all the sex appeal has gone flat for the boring ol' gadget by the time this late adopter gets one. But recently I've gone crazy reading about Tablets; not the iShackle line of products made by Apple, of course. Their gadgets are for aspirational consumers, whereas I am a maximum bang-for-the-buck, no-nonsense type of customer. This is about the Toshiba Thrive tablet, 10 inches, with the Android 3.1 (Honeycomb) operating system. The Thrive is distinguished from all the other Android tablets by its user-removable battery and its ports: it has a full-sized USB port, a slot for a full-sized SD card, and a full-sized HDMI port. Thus, the Toshiba Thrive tablet is the one most suitable for functioning as a substitute for a mini-notebook computer. So you can see why I got excited. Then I searched for Android versions of the programs that I use now on my Paleozoic laptop: Firefox with AdBlock, Picasa on disk (not in the cloud)

My circa 2004 Toshiba laptop doesn't like to boot up on cold mornings, and I thought that was the problem today. But instead, it gave a message about a hard drive crash being imminent. I wonder if it meant it. I have mixed feelings about this. It's nice being the Second Chance Store for the surplus gadgets of an RV friend, and this laptop has been a winner. But I've been impatient waiting for the oldie to die so I could get something modern. Unless somebody knows of a stupendous deal, I will probably go with a 12 inch Asus mini-laptop, with an AMD E350 processor, Windows 7 Home Premium, 2 GB of RAM, $440. I couldn't care less about how big the hard drive is; in fact, I wish it didn't have one. The 12 inch size should be just perfect for easy reading plus portability; after all, I will need to cart it into a wi-fi spot on occasion, and I hate dragging in a larger laptop since they're like a patio flagstone. I wish that the gadget write-ups mentioned how man

Here is my first post back on the Verizon network. Gee, I remember it being faster when I dropped the service three years ago. My campground's WiFi is actually twice as fast, even though it is all coming through a 3 Mbps DSL line, and then sharing that signal amongst all the users in the campground.

Perhaps you are spending a lot of time these days reading financial websites. Today I have been drowning in informational trivia; maybe it's my fault for not choosing better websites. Why is it so hard for business writers, in the opening paragraph, to compare the relative sizes of Lehman (September 2008) and the current sickies, Bank of America and SocGen in France? That would let the reader quickly assess the risk and importance of the current mess with one already experienced. Sure, there are many facets to a comparison of SocGen and Lehman. But American news sources underestimate the importance of anything outside the USA; they are famously parochial. A simple numerical comparison might help their readers overcome some of this.

I said "net", not internet. As an experiment I've decided to stop moderating comments; thus, comments show up on the screen immediately after typing them. After all, if a potential commenter thinks the blogger doesn't trust him, it's natural for the potential commenter to just back away, without wasting his time. I never really moderated anyway, except for an occasional spam comment. I only insist on comments not being personal or on names being used. Blatantly commercial comments will be deleted.

There seems to be a connection between animals hunting in the field and combat in the business world; a person who enjoys watching one should be expected to watch the other. Over Memorial Day weekend the world's most noble and handsome labrador retriever visited me, along with his mommy, who is the best cook in Patagonia AZ. (The fact that I helped to name him, Chaco, has nothing to do with my praise.)

Anyone who has an inflated ego should just spend more time as an amateur prophet in the business world, politics, or any place actually. That said, Google's Chromebook seems more portentous than anything we've seen in the computer industry for years. I am willing to believe that, five to ten years from now, Washington state politicians will be frantically patching up a government bailout of Microsoft Corp., which will then be called Government Software. The future might be as dark for anti-virus firms like Symantec, or for regular PC manufacturers like Toshiba, Dell, and HP. In order for Google's Chromebook to supplant Microsoft Windows and Office as the desktop standard, there must be an enormous expansion in internet traffic. So the biggest beneficiary of the new paradigm might be the telecommunications industry.

It's so rare to have a success in the gadget world that I want to brag up LG, the cellphone manufacturer, and Verizon, the service provider. I managed to lose my old LG cellphone, after a run of six years. It had even survived one trip through a washing machine. I'll probably find it under a heap of something someday. But I couldn't call the lost cellphone with somebody else's phone, because the prepaid minutes had expired. It was a pleasant surprise to learn that I could keep the old service plan (which no longer exists for new people) and the old phone number. And all of this was explained by a nice young man who spoke English as his first language. I had another cellphone success, of a different type. Unaccustomed as I am to finishing a nice mountain bike ride with a coffee and cookie at a local coffee shop, I did so today. It was so pleasant just sitting there, thinking about the perfect ride and weather. Just then a woman had the effrontery to intrude on this

Naturally I want to be Fair and Balanced on this blog. Sometimes I might be too anti-government. The current administration claims to know something about pollution, even going so far as to declare carbon dioxide -- a gas without which life could not exist -- as pollution; perhaps these folks would be doing us more of a favor to remove some of the pollution off of the internet. The obvious place to begin is with the least controversial purging: surely most people would agree that travel blogs are internet pollution. Then they can quickly move on to bigger fish, such as product reviews. Yesterday I was reading reviews of RV parks, including the one that I'm currently in. Most people were charmed by the rustic nature of the park, but were disappointed by gravel, grass, "weeds", wind, sunlight, and juniper trees. The reviewers were disappointed that there was no cable TV here, and that there were few broadcast channels in our town. Such deficiencies detracted from thei

Recently I've had trouble in the New Post editing window when user blogger (blogspot). It didn't show the editing icons (font, bold, italics, etc.), which made it harder to post of course. An associated blog (Wandrin.blogspot.com) got me started with the Help capability of blogger. Normally I give up on such things before giving them a fair chance. The solution didn't come from tech thinking; it came from "cui bono" paranoia: I've always been afraid that if internet users get hooked on freebies from Google, they would sabotage adblocking capabilities, since ads are how Google rakes in obscene profits. (I use the Firefox browser with AdBlock Plus.) Paranoia is useful sometimes: I guessed that I should turn off AdBlock Plus on the page in question, which is one of the options on the pull-down menu of AdBlock Plus. Sure enough, the editing icons showed up again: problem solved. Shame on me for expecting a free blogging service, free Picasa photo-editing, a

This morning I remonstrated with a woman who has long practiced a book-besotted lifestyle. She even refuses to apologize for it, and as we all know, getting people to admit that they have a problem is half the battle. I fear she is irredeemable since she resists all of my efforts to improve her. (It's their job to improve us, you know.) In contrast to this sad story I'd like to report a small success in the book world. I am in the habit of downloading classic books as text files from sites online, and then editing the crap out of them. Basically that means deletion, but it wouldn't have to. There is a profound and exciting difference between editing a book and merely reading it, since the latter is mechanical tedium more than anything else. It's high time that we did something fundamental and truly revolutionary with all this information technology. I am currently finishing the second iteration of abridging Boswell's Life of Johnson . It will be difficult to br

As much as I appreciate comments, I had to drop the Recent Comments gadget that sits in the margin because the comment text wouldn't show up in this new design. I played around with the template designer, but couldn't get it to work. If anyone has any ideas, let me know.

Advertisements certainly have their place on the internet. How else would you pay for websites? Government grants? Do everything with volunteers? Guilt-ridden PBS-style beg-athons? But today I went to an economic/political blog and found a flashing ad in the right margin. I tried to cover it with a popup window, but that didn't quite work. Then I enlarged the font of the website, hoping that would bump the flashing ad off screen. That too failed. Long ago -- back when "call waiting" was a new high-tech phone option -- somebody told me how he got a telephone call from somebody who immediately asked, "Can I put you on hold?" He responded by hanging up; it made his day. It's not quite as fun as that when you quit going to a website because of one of those obnoxious flashing ads, but it still counts. It's hard to believe that anyone would put up with them. What does it say of a person or society who does put up with flashing ads?