My friend Brenda Speidel calls me Gadget Boy because I am always looking for some neat new toy to tell my readers about. But that’s okay, like the old saying goes, “the only difference between men and boys is the cost of their toys.” With Christmas coming, there has to be a gadget out there for every guy on your shopping list.

One of the most useful upgrades I have come by in years is my HTC Incredible Android phone.  I’m not a true geek, so I can’t tell you all of the technical specifics that make the Droid so much better, but it has the Blackberry beat in every way, in my opinion. It’s more user friendly, it gets better reception, it has more built in features, internet access is much faster with it, and there are more and better apps available.

One free app I recently downloaded is ShopSavvy. This is pretty cool. When I am in a store, I hold the Droid over an item’s barcode, and the software scans it, then tells me the price of the item online and in nearby stores. It even gives me directions to local stores stocking the item, and their addresses and telephone numbers. Now I never have to worry that I paid too much, and I can show a salesman the price just down the street and ask them to meet or beat it. Way cool!

I’m finding that I use the GPS features on the Droid as often as I do our Garmin GPS, and usually it’s more accurate and up to date. I especially like the Google street view, which shows me exactly what the neighborhood looks like where I’m going.

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Speaking of GPS units, blog reader Roger Parrish told me about a new techno toy he got; a Garmin Nuvi 465T Trucker GPS. Roger said this has all of the features of a regular GPS, with the addition of specialized routing options suitable for commercial trucks. If you have ever let your regular GPS lead you onto narrow, winding residential streets hardly suitable for an Oldsmobile, you can see the value of this GPS already! Roy said it  displays warning information of upcoming road conditions to make drivers aware of sharp curves, steep grades, side winds, and other possible hazards along the route. The GPS even has an FM traffic receiver to give drivers free alerts about traffic delays, road construction, and detours around the problem area.

Now, I haven’t actually seen this one, but somebody sent me a link that every RVer who uses WiFi to get online should have; a T-shirt with a built in WiFi signal detector! You could be the first in your RV park to have your very own WiFi Detector T-Shirt!

My buddy Phil May from TechnoRV is the guy who really knows gadgets, and he’s always got something new to drool over. Check out Phil’s You Tube video of The Beast, which has to be the brightest LED flashlight I’ve ever seen! I want one of these for the motorhome, and another for the Explorer!

Of course, I can’t afford every new gadget that comes along, and even if I could, I wouldn’t have any place to carry them in my motorhome. The good news is that since I can’t try them all, you can try some of them yourself, and tell me about them!

Now if somebody would just just invent a gadget that makes mornings go away. I have to take the Explorer to Camping Connection this morning to have the base plate installed, which means getting up way before my usual time.  I tried to get Miss Terry to take it over to them, and let me sleep in. But apparently there’s no app for that! 

Thought For The Day – My mind not only wanders, sometimes it leaves completely.

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What better way to start the New Year than spending it with good friends? Yesterday Greg and Jan White drove over from Friendswood, Texas, south of Houston, to spend the day with us. What a treat!

We last saw this fun couple exactly two months ago, when we left Elkhart Campground on November 1^st. Greg and Jan are fulltimers who are spending a few weeks in their old hometown for some family time, but Jan admitted yesterday that hitch itch is really setting in, and they’re really looking forward to getting back on the road. We know that feeling all too well.

Greg is one of those techie guys who can fix anything, from a stubborn generator to a cantankerous computer, so once the greeting hugs were out of the way, and we had some of Miss Terry’s delicious homemade cinnamon rolls, I put him to work hooking my new netbook computer to the Silverleaf engine monitoring system. I was just getting hooked on this great addition to our Winnebago motorhome when the burglar(s) who broke into our rig stole it, and I missed it in our most recent trips.

Jan loves animals, and she was looking forward to seeing some of the deer who live here at the Thousand Trails campground that I had written about. Though there is a huge herd of deer on the grounds, when Greg and Jan first arrived, they were off hiding somewhere, maybe sleeping off deer hangovers from whatever deer do on New Years Eve.

But, a couple of hours later a lone deer stepped out of the trees across the field from us, followed soon after by a second, and then a third. Before long we had a dozen or more grazing their way toward our campsite. I guarantee you that by the time the afternoon was over, Jan saw plenty of deer! They were munching away right outside our windows, and we enjoyed watching them from such a close vantage point.  

About 6 pm. We drove into Columbus for dinner at Nancy’s Seafood Grill, and the restaurant changed my mind about there being no place decent to eat in this little town. Everything was delicious, and the service was very good. About the time we finished our meal, we had some excitement when one of the portable buffet tables collapsed with a huge clatter. We all looked to see what had happened, and saw flames as several of the little Sterno cans used to keep the food hot rolled around on the floor. Greg and I hurried over to see what we could do to prevent the fire from spreading, but a couple of restaurant employees poured water on them and quenched the fire before it could get out of hand. Once everything was under control, I couldn’t help but quip to the other diners “The good news is, the buffet is now half off!”

It was great to see our friends, and we said our goodbyes with promises to see them again in Arizona in a few weeks. Thanks for driving so far to visit with us, Greg and Jan. We had a great time!

We have hitch itch too, and today we plan to hit the road, headed west. We’ll stop for a night or two along the way to visit our friends Mike and Pam Steffen at their place in Salt Flat, Texas, but we won’t tarry long. We’re eager to get to Arizona to see our family, and there are some grandkids that need spoiling! Depending on where we’re at, we may or may not have internet access the next couple of nights. West Texas is one of the few places in the country where we have had problems getting online with our Verizon air card. So if I miss a blog entry or two, don’t worry, as soon as we get a signal I’ll be back.

Thought For The Day – Life is a grindstone…it can polish you up or wear you down…what’s it gonna’ be?

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The title of today’s blog says it all. That’s how I feel sometimes, including right now. About the time I think I have a good handle on something, some unforeseen and unexplainable problem shows up.

After a couple of years of experimenting, we launched our digital edition of the Gypsy Journal several issues back, and after a lesson from my friend Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour and a short learning curve, I managed to upload the digital issues to the web with no problems.

But yesterday, when I tried to upload the new issue, it wouldn’t go. The Ipswitch file transfer program kept asking me for the user name and password to our FTP site, and when I entered it, I got an error message telling me to re-enter the information again. I could log directly onto our FTP site with my user name and password, so I knew it was correct, but it just wouldn’t work using the file transfer program.

After hours of frustration, just about the time I was going to call Chris Guld and ask for help, the darn thing logged right on and worked just fine. I didn’t do anything different, and it was the same user name and password I’d been entering all along. Go figure.

I know that computers are wonderful tools, and I wouldn’t want to go back to the old days before we had great things like websites and internet access. I just wish the darned gremlins would stay out of them!

We got our bus conversion winterized Wednesday, and yesterday morning we dropped it off at the building where we’re going to store it this winter. Even though it is going to be inside, out of the winter weather, we drained the water heater and all of the lines and filled them with RV antifreeze, just in case of a power failure or something like that. We probably overdid it, since we had never winterized an RV before, but we wanted to be safe, rather than sorry.

We had hoped to have the bus sold by now, and have several people who are interested, but we’re just about out of time and don’t plan to hang around here much longer. One gentleman asked if we would delay our departure until November 1^st, which is the earliest he can get here, and if he confirms he’s coming for sure, we’ll wait. But Elkhart Campground is closing in just a few days, so that’s about as long as we can stretch it.

Subscribers Greg and Jan White are parked behind us here at Elkhart Campground, and Greg has been helping me with a couple of last minute projects I wanted to get done on our motorhome before we hit the road for our winter travels. I sure appreciate your help, Greg!

We picked up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal at our printer yesterday, so the next few days will be a mad rush to get all of the envelopes stuffed and mailed out. As we were driving up to Michigan to get it and back, Miss Terry commented that we are very lucky. Even though we don’t like the cold weather, we get to see some spectacular fall colors, and then we can leave before the snow starts piling up.

Yeah, even with contrary computer programs and other little problems, I guess life is pretty good after all.

Thought For The Day – I believe in sharing the road with other drivers. They can have the part behind me.

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For the most part, I have been very satisfied with our Verizon USB 720 air card, which we use in a Cradlepoint MBR 1000 Router. We enhance our signal with a Wilson Trucker cellular antenna and Wilson signal amplifier. We have used this system for almost two years now and have found it to be far superior for our needs over the Hughes Net dish we used for years before that.  Except for only a couple of occasions, way out in the boonies of West Texas, we have always been able to get online. 

But yesterday I was ready to throw the whole darned thing into the nearest dumpster!

We been sitting in the same spot here in Apache Junction for a week, and our download signal speeds have averaged from 1500 to 2200 kbps, with upload speeds of 145 to 220 kbps. (By comparison, about the best download speeds we ever recorded with the Hughes Net system was in the neighborhood of 750 kbps.) But about noon yesterday everything came to a screeching halt. Suddenly I could not get online at all, and when I finally did, opening any website or checking my e-mail took forever. More often than not, the system would time out before it would open a website.

We have experienced temporary slowdowns from time to time, but they are usually short term, no more than a few minutes usually. But until about 10 p.m. yesterday we were just dead in the water.

Terry picks up our router’s WiFi signal to get online, and she was just as slow. I took the air card out of the router and tried it in both of our laptops and in a USB port on my desktop, and even though we had five bars of signal strength, service was moving at the speed of sludge. The one speed test I was able to run showed a download speed of only 54 kbps! Updating the router firmware through Verizon’s Access manger did not help.

I don’t know what the heck was wrong, but then late in the evening, for whatever reason, suddenly the card was back up to normal speeds. I ran a check at Speedtest.net and we were back up to 1955 kbps download speed. Very weird. I don’t know what the problem was, or what fixed it. I hate computer gremlins.

While I was grumbling about the air card and beating my head against a stone wall trying to get online. Miss Terry was making up a batch of her homemade pizza dough, and about 5 p.m. we went over to her parents’ house and had our own pizza party.

Since I couldn’t get any work done online, I drowned my sorrows in piping hot cheese, spicy pepperoni, zesty sauce, and a crust to die for. I’m never going to lose weight.

Thought For The Day - Real listening is a willingness to let the other person change you.

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