Occupation of Independence

I really enjoyed my stay at Glenwood, especially at their public library since it goes a long way toward wiping out the hole in the Verizon coverage there. And they allow visitors to check out books and DVDs, which encourages you to stay longer.   It's always fun to drop in on the Cat Walk again: On the drive from hot Glenwood NM to cool Luna NM we passed a classic New Mexico wreck. There was nothing special about it except that I love all such wrecks. Using my notes from the past I chose a boondocking site near Luna NM that is quite high. We just barely made it in. Then I walked over to my RV community camper, pulled a sad face, and apologized to her for only being at 7000 feet. She was gracious about it, and promised not to rub my nose in it, too bad. As it turned out, the GPS needed a little longer to find the satellites through the ponderosas. We're actually at 8250 feet. It's easy to see the hotspot of the Whitewater/Baldy/Gila f

Even people who don't watch television can't help but be aware of reality TV hit-shows. Although I've never watched "Survivor", I can imagine it. It seems that our Quest-for-Community caravan is becoming the show. In fact, it looks like a 17-year-old miniature poodle is likely to be the eventual winner. So far, we've survived being towed up mountains, infected doggie sutures, possible food poisoning, cargo doors that wouldn't close, tooth infection and pain, bad U-joints, a holding tank's drain valves being smashed against a rock, and nearly stepping on a rattlesnake. To the hard-bitten realist, solving problems and surviving disasters is a better way to build a real community than rhapsodizing about dreamy platitudes in the clouds. So maybe all these problems are a blessing in disguise. The latest disaster created an educational opportunity. In cellphone service-free Glenwood NM, we were struggling to find an old fashioned public phone in order

Near Patagonia AZ. These days another blogger, Ed Frey , claims that he is reading the entire archive of Fred on Everything , start to finish. So am I. I'm not sure if he influenced me to do this or vice versa. But it honks me off to think that somebody else came up with my brilliant idea before I did. There is only one way to settle this honorably. I must demand "satisfaction". That's right, I am publicly challenging this idea-robber to a duel: after a couple more weeks of reading he is invited to join me on the field of polemical battle, if he's valiant enough. The rules of the duel are simple enough: I propose that we each select one of Fred's essays as the "best" or most important, and then explain why it is so. A substantial number of quotes from the essay will be permitted. How about the end of April, Mr. Frey? My factor will call on your factor:

Every internet junkie gets in a rut now and then. At that point some friendly help is needed. I got some recently from fellow blogger, Ed Frey , who brought Fred Reed's website to my attention. I was familiar with Fred Reed as a writer, but the website is a new discovery. Fred has the proper attitude toward contemporary American culture and politics: sheer disdain and curmudgeonly wit. I put his link in the link section of my blog. There are too many juicy quotes to begin listing them all, but just to give you a brief slice of the flavor of Fred's blog: "Things change, usually for the worse, and always against the innocent. (This truth is a principle of curmudgeonry.)"

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