May 2014 – Page 2 – Bus Driver Jim

Driver Meeting

Karen and I had a mandatory meeting last night in Idaho Falls. We dropped off her bus in Rexburg for some service work and slid in to my little Chevy bus that was waiting to come back up here. We picked up some more drivers on the way down and made it just in time for some decent driver meeting food.

I have to say, having been in this business for going on twenty years, I have never attended a meeting that started off with a guy eating fire, but this one did. Then he had a driver familiar with animal traps set one for him and he jammed his hand into it. I don’t know who this guy is or why we started off a meeting about discrimination with his act, but it was different.

The luxury of being a passenger allowed me to grab this moon rise on the way back:

Old Photo

I picked up a box of old photos from the See & Save thrift store the other day and one of them was quite striking. It appears that Steph and I had some look alikes from another time. Ahh, that would be on the left, thank you :-)

Sohft

I created a new domain this evening called Sohft. I applied the latest WordPress code to it with some full page tweaking, and I like it a lot…

Sehxe

Here’s my latest program, pronounced Sexy, and it is! NPR (National Public Radio) has a huge and somewhat complex database that handles all of their content. Sehxe breaks it down into categories and sets, allowing you to drill down to any article that interests you.

Click the image below, or click here, to launch it.

Poem

The land line rings, but seldom for me. I don’t pickup, my ego to ease. New code is written, but no one to see. The mind is sad and nobody to please…

Fattening Up

Birdseed is cheaper than cat food. Nuff said?

Sleepover

1,002 days ago (2 years, 8 months, 28 days), Piper became a permanent member of our family when her previous owner Megan passed her care to us. (The Permanent Cat).

During all that time she has never spent the night anywhere but our house. On the two occasions that Steph and I were both gone at the same time my nephew Brian stepped up and stayed here and watched her.

Tonight, we took her to my sisters house for a sleepover. My niece is home from studies in New York and between the two of them I’m hoping Piper will feel at home. Sis’s house is large with many rooms so I’m not sure if Pipes is going to be given free range to explore, but we’ll see.

The grand scheme is to have Piper spend a week with my sister when Steph and I travel to Washington this summer. I’m hoping she’ll understand that she’s just visiting, when we pick her back up tomorrow.

Piper seems to have made herself at home, her bed and food are set and we brought along a box with her treats, brush, morning gravy and favorite toy.

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Big Red

I’ve got to hand it to Broulims, our local grocery outlet. Since I started making fruit smoothies last summer they’ve had a consistent amount of reasonably priced fresh strawberries in stock. Their latest supplier is Red Blossom out of Salinas, CA and from the size of this Big Red I pulled out of the carton this morning, it doesn’t appear that their water shortage is affecting northern California that much.

This bad boy no longer exists in the state below as it’s juices are coursing through the tips of my fingers as I write this post :-)

Wired Cab

This is the current state of my wired travel cab. The new power converter only has the GPS plugged in so far and the three pronged power source has the CB, phone charger and inverter attached.

The three remaining powered USB’s are for the Tablet, GoPro and Stephs phone when she rides along, and the 120v charges the netbook.

All I need to do now is to clean off the winter dust, and wait for summer to roll around!

Travel Toys

My box of travel toys arrived today from Amazon. There are two items here that will significantly enhance my travel experience this summer.

First off, that round thing in the middle is an Energizer 120W inverter which converts 12V DC to 120V AC. It plugs into one of my three cigarette lighter power sources (or hooks up directly with the included clip). It will be velcroed to the center spot between my seats and provide AC power to charge my netbook and four powered USB ports to charge my phone, my TomTom GPS, my Nexus 10 tablet and my GoPro video camera. This is all part of a grand scheme that began with my new battery.

The other item is an Alfa AWUS036H 1000mW high gain long-range WiFi network adapter. I’ve been using Alfa’s original adaptor with my netbook for years but I’m now upgraded to the most powerful one on the market. I just tested it out in the kitchen and normally I see three hot spots around the neighborhood through thick log walls and now I see fifteen. Can’t wait to get it out in the field :-)

More Juhnk

With all of my new domain names you would think I’d be working on cool stuff to plug into them, instead, I’m just playing with my Juhnk.

I’m actually developing this tool for my own use this summer. Besides dragging two big markers around the U.S. to generate instant directions and distance between two cities, I can now zoom down and extract data about the underlying point.

Clicking either marker brings up an infobox with links to the current weather for that place and to Google’s new map which shows me places of interest like motels, gas stations and bars. I can also create permalinks for each leg of the trip which I can store in a database and access anywhere on the road.

It also detects your location now and uses it as the initial position when you start it up!

↑ Click the map above to try my first leg permalink out…

btw: Cohke has become the new repository of my Juhnk permalinks.

Big Nest

I spotted this thing yesterday in front of the Community Center and drove down this morning to grab these shots. I have no idea what it is or why it’s sitting here. Maybe it’s going to be an exhibit inside the Tourist Center?

Update: It’s a man-made piece of art that will be on display in the new plaza.

(Skoge was right :-)

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Corona

Sometimes the simple act of fueling my bus at the Victor Gateway can turn into a photo-op. Let me be clear that no Cerveza was consumed before, during or after this picture was taken. I have a route to drive today.

Dirty Potatoes

For you Not in Idaho folks, our area is one of the premier seed potato locations in the country and many new crops are created from the potatoes grown here. They’re stored in giant silos all winter and then trucked out to farms around the U.S. in the spring.

This truck is sitting on a relatively small farm at the base of the Big Hole mountains and I was struck today by the amount of dirt mixed in with the potatoes. It dawned on me that these were the farmers seeds from last year, sitting in his own private silo, ready to be used in planting his crop this year. He’s not selling them so who cares if his own dirt is mixed in, and it probably protects them from the cold winter.

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