Safety

A recent article over on Technomadia really spoke to me. It addresses one of the big reasons why some folks feel they cannot full-time in an RV: Safety. I agree with every word of it.

Since there isn't much going on here right now, go poke around on their website. Lots of good stuff there!

Photo by lintmachine, used under a Creative Commons license.

Squatters

We are still in the parking lot of the Fort Walton Beach Elks Lodge. Sunday afternoon marked four full weeks here, and today makes it a calendar month. We are beginning to feel a bit like squatters, and we are trying to keep a low profile. Of course, at $10 a night, the lodge is making a fair profit from us, and no one else is using the spaces. We've also been in for dinner once, breakfast twice, and cocktails maybe a half dozen times.

As long-time readers know, I make an effort to post a blog entry from each location at which we stop, even if just for a night while passing through. Once we get settled in someplace, though, I tend to post only when something noteworthy happens, or if I have a lot of time on my hands. So I must apologize to our loyal readers for getting so far behind; I confess that I have had my nose down in my work, described below, and the time is flying by. As such, this post will also be a tad long, to catch up.

When last I posted here, some 17 days ago, we were just about to head over to the dump station, and we will again be heading out this afternoon for the same reason. We usually say we have a two-week tank capacity, but with some careful management we can get a few more days, and today is really the limit. Back then we decided that Henderson Beach State Park, ten miles east of here in Destin, with its $30 per night campground, was the most convenient public dump station. So we secured the bus, put some cones in our space, also delineated by our scooters, and rolled the ten miles to the park. We paid the day use fee of $6 at the gate to get in.

Once we were inside the gates, and after dumping our tanks, we decided we might as well take advantage of the park's day use area, which has convenient RV parking as well. As we walked over to the beach, we noticed a section of the parking lot cordoned off, and the Jacksonville Fire Department's large mobile incident command truck was positioned and deployed there. Apparently, this is the local command post for the oil remediation efforts, which were more or less at a nadir when we arrived. Lots of bored looking firefighters and other relief workers hanging around, and we though seriously about flashing our Red Cross ID's, explaining we were with the Technology department, and asking for a tour of the truck -- their tech guys would just love to show it off, I'm sure. Ultimately, though, we decided there would be nothing there we haven't already seen before.



We spent an hour or so in the water, lazing around on our pool noodles and people-watching. Henderson beach seems pretty popular on weekends, although I would say it was a mere fraction of "normal" occupancy for this time of year. It's a very nice park, and we'd consider staying there if the camping area was closer to the beach. As it is, it's much closer to highway 98, although a fence makes it impossible to just walk across the road for dinner -- you need to go half a mile west back to the park entrance first.

Back then I also reported that Louise got a virus on her computer, and after having spent the better part of two days eradicating it, I decided a software audit and refresh was in order. Between that and the file cleanup and reorganization that I had also started around then, I have literally spent the entire last two weeks buried in my computer and the file server taking care of things. It's still really too hot to go out during the day, although we've been swimming a few times and actually did some riding around on the two "reasonable" days we've had since arriving.

Even though I've had my nose pressed to a computer screen, I still have not managed to do any work on the web site or photo hosting, and the deadline for that project is rapidly approaching, just five days away. But our security suites are updated and the file server is back under control. I also upgraded my Blackberry, a project too frustrating to recount here, and dug the two Gateway laptops out of the closet where they have been languishing nearly a year, since I "upgraded" to this Acer netbook.

One of those Gateways was a hangar queen that I had hopes of repairing with a $4 power jack, then flipping on eBay for a tidy profit. After spending a day replacing the power inlet (soldered to the motherboard) I discovered that whatever is keeping it from charging was deeper than that. Or perhaps my solder job damaged the filter circuit; either way, that machine could only run from a battery, which had to be charged in a different computer, and I ended up stripping it down completely. I am in the middle of listing all the piece parts on eBay now, hoping to recoup some of what I spent on the thing. I bought it to repair the broken case on the other Gateway, which I was using at the time.

In any case, I have one fully working computer out of the two, which I will also be selling shortly. I have no CD drive on my current machine, and one of the projects languishing on the back burner for "some day" has been to make server copies of all the software CDs before I got rid of the machine with the reader in it. And way back when we first bought these multimedia laptops, I had the notion I would rip all our audio CDs, and I even bought am 8gB mp3 player just for the purpose -- two years ago. Hauling out the old machine and getting it running has prompted me to finally finish that project, and the very last audio CD in our collection is ripping even as I type.

In a few minutes we will again roll out to the dump station. Somewhere in the last two weeks we learned there is a commercial RV park just five miles from here with a $10 dump, and that works out to less money than the extra ten miles back and forth to Henderson Beach, so that's where we will head. We should be right back here tonight. We are, of course, keeping a close eye on Hurricane Danielle, Tropical Depression Seven, and yet another region of tropical disturbance already in the Gulf of Mexico, but at this writing nothing is threatening. We did briefly have our status raised to "Alert" for Tropical Depression Five a week ago, but it fizzled before anything came of it.

Rocking the vote

We learned this week that there is a good chance we'll be part of a panel discussion on Technomadism at SXSW next March.

If you are thinking, "Techno-what-ism at xyzzy HUH?" I'll try to explain.

SXSW stands for "South by Southwest" and is an annual festival in Austin, TX. The organizers call it a

...unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies...fostering creative and professional growth.

Translation: a big party. Spring break for nerds. We've heard really great things about SXSW and have had a hankering to go for a couple of years. For, uh, the professional growth.

Technomadism, coined by Chris and Cherie, is a portmanteau of technology and nomad, and means the lifestyle of geeks on the road. Nerds to go. Buses and RVs and boats full of computers, GPS and other digital goodies. Karen Nace describes a technomad as "someone who lives a fully mobile lifestyle while using technology to make that possible." Hey, we know a few folks doing something similar!

Cherie and Chris have put together a proposal for discussing exactly that digital-on-the-go lifestyle at SXSW, and asked us to participate. Karen will be on the panel, as well as her partner Ben, and the Boyinks family.

Since lots of panels are proposed for SXSW, community support is vital to the selection process. Will you please vote for our panel and help get it approved? The voting page is HERE. Just click on the "thumbs up" icon at the top of the page to show your support. You don't need to register just to vote, but if you'd like to leave a wildly enthusiastic comment you will need to create an account. Comments help the selection committee choose the final panels. Even if you have no plans to attend SXSW, the committee wants to hear from you. According to the PanelPicker FAQ, "Rallying your friends and associates to vote for your panel proposal demonstrates energy, motivation and organizational ability. All of these skills are important when it comes to organizing a successful panel for SXSW."

We're looking forward to seeing Ben, Karen, Cherie, and Chris again in Austin, and meeting the Boyinks for the first time. If you think you might be at SXSW, leave a shout-out here in the comments. And please, please vote. Thanks!

(Edited on Saturday: The panelpicker page seems to be down. If you get an error when you try to view our panel, please try again later.)

Beach bums

We are still parked at the Elks lodge in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. Tomorrow will mark two full weeks that we've been right in this same spot, which is actually pretty unusual for us. We'll have to move the bus tomorrow, though, even if we end up right back here, because after 16 days, our waste tanks are full and we will need to empty them.

The lodge here has been very accommodating. Even though their web site indicates a 7-day stay limit, when we inquired they told us as long as we paid up and did not look like we were "moving in" (whatever that means) we were OK to stay. It's not as if we are keeping anyone else away, either, as there have been only four nights when we've had a lone neighbor since we arrived, and there are four spaces.

The donation here is $10 per night, and by my calculations we are using $6.00-$6.50 of electricity each day. We've also used a little water, maybe a total of $0.50 worth. That's an unbeatable deal; the state park ten miles east in Destin (where we may go to empty our tanks) wants $30 per night, considered a bargain in Destin, and commercial parks west of here are at least that much and mostly more. We're also closer to both the gulf beach and the bay here than at any of those other spots.

We finally did make it to the beach, during a brief overcast that provided some respite from the non-stop brutal heat wave that has been gripping the south since we arrived. The Gulf of Mexico was 90° when we waded in, and even at that temperature felt refreshing. The air temperature has been in the mid to high 90s, with daily heat indices ranging from 110° to 121°. We've more or less confined ourselves to the bus with the exception of dinner each evening.

By dinner time, of course, we are stir-crazy -- there are only so many indoor projects we can do. So having such a wide selection of restaurants in the area has been a welcome relief. In 12 nights we have not been to the same place twice. Last night we finally caved in and went to Olive Garden, but that's the first chain joint since our arrival. Even then, there are still quite a few places we have not yet sampled, but we're picky, and with such a large number of establishments within a five-minute scooter ride, we've stayed away from any that don't have at least three stars in the on-line reviews.

We did connect with fellow bus owners Brian and Cathy, who live right here in town. They took us out for a nice dinner in Destin, and a couple days later I ended up going over to have a look at his generator which has been having problems. Unfortunately, it is some sort of engine problem, I think in the fuel injection system, and was beyond my meager abilities to repair.

We also got new tires for Louise's scooter. We discovered the rear was leaking quite badly shortly after we arrived here, and the Yamaha dealer in town just happened to be having a tire sale. They don't stock that size, so we had to wait a week for the tires to come from Texas, but we got a great deal and she likely won't have to worry about tires on this bike ever again. I was concerned the whole time we waited that we'd be called away before the tires arrived, so I'm glad that's behind us. Also, I was tired of having to put air in the tire every evening before dinner.

All of this indoor down-time has given us the opportunity to finish up our Red Cross curriculum development work, at least until the next round of changes gets handed down to us, catch up on email, and get a few other computer projects out of the way. One of those turned out to be extricating a virus from Louise's computer, which took me the better part of two days. She likes to say that when she gets the "please contact your system or network administrator" message she can just reach over and poke me.

I'm not sure how she ended up with this, as it turned out to be a particularly nasty root kit. In addition to consuming system resources and network bandwidth, which threatened to get us throttled under the Hughesnet "Fair Access Policy," and generating unwanted pop-ups at random times, the infection blocked all access to Microsoft Update as well as any and all antivirus, anti-malware, and root-kit removal tools. I had to install the cleaners from a stick. It's possible she got this during the brief time our network was open and had some uninvited visitors; I've since set her up with the same firewall software I use on my machine. A little disturbing, though, that the antivirus we run did not trap it.

I've also been working on moving our static web site and possibly our photo hosting site from the paid services we've been using to free services such as Blogger. That's a tedious and sometimes frustrating process, all to save $50 a year, so it remains to be seen whether I will actually stick with it to the end. We now have several hundred more photos than we did before, owing to scanning all our old prints and slides going back four decades or more, and I'd like to get those backed up into the cloud, too, so maybe $30 a year for unlimited photo storage is not such a bad deal.

Other than rolling out to the dump station sometime in the next day, it's hard to say where we will go from here or when. Regular readers may remember we were in a similar circumstance about this time last year, putting around in Arkansas waiting to be deployed either to western wildfires or the southeast for hurricanes. After nearly a month of watching the Atlantic forecast maps with generally unfavorable conditions for cyclone development, we gave up and headed instead to New England for the fall foliage tour that we'd consistently been denied by our relief work.

Things are different this year, and while we have been mostly spared thus far, all the models and forecasters are in agreement that this will be a bad hurricane season. Having just been out swimming in the gulf waters I can say unequivocally that anything that makes it into the gulf itself will have plenty of warm water to fuel it into a monster. So far, we've been lucky, with Alex and Bonnie just skirting the southern edge of the Gulf of Mexico and making landfall before they had a chance to fully develop. Colin fizzled and then was deflected harmlessly back out to sea, and I expect the same from Investigation Area 93L following behind it. But we are just now coming in to the heaviest part of the season, and it will only take one storm in just the right place to make it into the warm gulf waters.

In the meantime, we'll continue to hang out here in the middle of the gulf coast, whittling away at the project backlog. If we get a break in the heat I may get up to the roof to replace the LNB on the satellite dish, the next step in the process of troubleshooting our persnickety DataStorm problem that has now plagued us for three months. It's a bit cooler today than it has been thus far, and I am hoping this will continue into Monday, when we can get out and do a few things without the weekend crowds

I say that, but of course the concept of a crowd is a relative one. In fact, the entire area is virtually deserted, even though there has been no oil here for some time. These two articles from CNN Money give some perspective. If we're still here in a week, we'll take advantage of the free Lynyrd Skynyrd concert on the beach, an event sponsored by the Emerald Coast visitor's bureau and intended to bootstrap the recovery here. Although, personally, I would have preferred Jimmy Buffett, parrot-head that I am, who did much the same thing in Gulf Shores, Alabama a month ago.