http://www.busdriverjim.com
Our poor dead hottub (murdered by Fall River Electric last year) serves as our snow depth indicator these days, and it has inspired me to create a new app!
I acquired the domain name snobud.com this morning and I’m creating an app that shows snow data for our four local ski resorts. It’s not ready for prime time yet but it should turn out to be quite useful to the powder heads around here.
It’s been snowing all day and the roads are icy. Just another day on the job in the high country. The parents flowed into the Community School while I loaded up a bunch of kids for the drive to Barrels and Bins in Driggs.
I set my Cube up on the dash and recorded the drive north:
… and the snow level at the house had doubled by the time we got home.
t.g.i.f.
I have a senior citizen client in a motorized scooter that visits a therapy place here in The Valley once a week, for counseling. I recently learned that the place of business does not have a ramp to allow my client access to their waiting room. It’s only a six inch step, but enough to block the scooter. Instead, she has to enter the office next door and wait in the shared bathroom for up to twenty minutes before the therapist can see her!
The process is reversed when her session is over, at which point she has to wait in the bathroom again until I arrive. This is outrageous! I can tell she is humiliated but endures it because she has no perceived choice in the matter.
Well, I’ve been in the paratransit business for more than twenty years and trust me, I know she does. The counseling outfit is collecting Medicare money for these visits!
Actually, I have a history with these people. Several years ago I questioned the owner about a ramp for a wheelchair client of mine that was a resident of theirs at a different location in town. I was consistently blown off and always had difficulty getting him inside. It’s like they have an issue with ramps…
I’m going to get involved here. My main question is whether to pursue it on a local level, a state level or a federal one. Maybe a simple chat with the mayor could convince them to spend a few bucks and build a ramp. I realize they just rent the place but portable ramps are not that difficult to make.
The other options are to contact the agencies involved in ADA enforcement. This is a big step, and one I know this counseling outfit would very much rather avoid.
My gmail = tetonpost, (update: Ramp Installed).
The place where I park my Trpta bus is actually the old Driggs Public Works lot where I keep company with snow plows, graders and Start buses. I’ve got a little cubbie hole carved out where I can plug in some electric to my block heater at night, that I used to share it with Karen, but she parks her rig in Victor now.
Driggs was founded in 1888 by Benjamin and Don Driggs and this Public Works lot has been around since 1916, which means it will be a hundred years old in a couple of years.
An interesting side-note, two of my regular customers are an old guy named Driggs who lives in a nursing home and his daughter who lives down the street from him. This valley definitely has history and I guess I’m becoming part of it.
I really thought we were going to miss that big Alaskan cold front heading towards the East Coast but it turns out we’re catching the westward edge of the storm. Picked up six inches last night and wind chills are heading down to the two digit minus mark tonight.
People around here are happy! Most everyone is into winter sports and Grand Targhee will soon start drawing business into the valley. You don’t live here if you can’t handle the snow! I guess I’m sort of happy about it myself. I don’t ski but bring it on! The sooner it does it’s thing, the sooner I can go on summer vacation. My new snow tires are great and the same brand on my bus make her drive like a tank.
Here’s the edge:
Last nights dusting was our official first snow of the winter. It wasn’t much, just enough to beautify the surroundings. As we head into the depths of winter you won’t be able to make out shapes, it’s just all going to be deep snow…
Click on the photo for a couple more shots of my drive home this morning.
The only way to get an opportunity to purchase Amazon’s trick new toy Echo is to request an invite. Well, I did that. I suppose the reason for this is that they’re only manufacturing a limited quantity and they want them going to the coolest Amazon customers. Ok, if I was Amazon I would look for long time customers, with a Prime account and a purchase history involving a lot of electronic gadgets. (i.e. Geeks!)
I decided this morning to take that process to the next level by creating a program that identifies myself to Amazon, proves to them that I’m a geek by showing off my code, and then presenting a table reminding them of all the cool geeky things I’ve bought from them since 2008. I’ll then figure out a way to email the link to the people who are making this decision for Amazon.
My blueprint consisted of:
The program is done. It doesn’t show the items I bought (only Amazon can see that) but it does illustrate my fascinating purchasing history with Amazon!
You can see that I’ve spent a bit of money ($4,986.57) at Amazon.com, not counting shipping. I’ve had a Prime account for the last few years so shipping charges are becoming a non-item. It’s interesting to note that I’ve saved some money ($1824.29) off their list price ($6,700.70 – $4,986.57) by ordering when I did. $831 per year average spent over six years is also interesting.
Regardless if Amazon thinks I’m cool, I now have a list of everything I’ve bought from them since 2008, and I know how much money I’ve spent!
Here’s the Program! You can sort the table by clicking any title at the top.
Update 11/10 at 0930. I discovered some cross-browser issues with the program this morning and it should be working fine now…
It’s a peaceful early November afternoon in the High Country. Here’s a two segment video of our backyard, shot with my Cube and presented with my new Video Player.
Along with with a nice pot of lamb stew…
And I signed up for an Amazon Prime invite to purchase this for $99:
And here’s an (NSFW) parody of the above.
The new antenna works perfectly. All ten digital channels are coming in solid, and better than before. The fact that I was able to keep the mount low means we can brush the snow off while standing on the deck, and the omnidirectionalism means we don’t have to move it around with the broom after the wind blows it off track.
I noticed that the coax had become frayed from realigning the previous antenna frequently, so I patched it up. I also used some gel vibration pads I was going to use in a camera project to protect the cable from the mount at the top.
My new HD Omnidirectional antenna arrived today. Our current off-the-grid setup has a directional antenna that we have to constantly tweak to pull in our channels. There are two sources broadcasting HD content here and they’re on opposite sides of the valley and I’m tired of threading the adjustment needle to capture both signals.
Hopefully, this one will work. Tomorrow I’ll mount it in place of the old one and see what happens. If I need to shoot it up in the air by ten feet, I can do that. btw: That’s a quarter sitting in the middle of the second shot so you can see it’s pretty good sized.
Man, that first step is rough! I would like to be able to explain why this door is where it is, but I can’t. I was leaving the Johnson Trailer Park with Johnie on board and she pointed out this door. I come in here often and I’d never noticed it before.
Here’s this mornings sunrise, shot with the Cube from my mailbox, as it fades to blue:
What options do I pursue as the countdown to the end of my life approaches zero? They are endless, provocative, and without borders. My soul is like the tumbleweed that flashes into your peripheral vision, never knowing where it will land. I am much more than the old guy that drives the bus around town. My passion for life co-exists lovingly with my partner yet explodes continually from my brain like acid down on the Haight.
I’m an enigma, a man approaching seventy, a freight train powered by cayenne pepper. My integrity is intact and the way I’m viewed by my fellow human beings is for the most part, positive. At what point do we just walk off the stage with dignity? Walk off, not take the idiots way of self destruction but take a voyage down the last stages of our life where we have fun, and die with a smile on our face.
The moon was rising over our mailbox this evening as I walked out to check the mail. It made a good solid base to grab a low-light photo of the foothills.
Here’s my neighbors house, a car on Ski Hill Road, the Grand (upper right), the Grand Targhee Ski Resort off to the left, and the moon.
I had seven Community Schools kids and six Victor Elementary kids on my twelve-seater bus this afternoon, for the ride down to Driggs. The regular school kids all go to gymnastics and fortunately two of them are pretty small and they were quite willing to share a seat and a seatbelt. Whew… There was only one problem, the cute young Com School girl directly behind me, had gas.
She let one loose as we were leaving her school and another shortly after we left the Elementary school. OMG, how can one little kid foul the vehicle air so bad? I fixed the situation by rolling my window down and cranking the heat up so we all wouldn’t freeze.
Now, here’s the interesting point: Not one of the kids said a word as I blasted the gas from a kid in the front to the kids in the back. Their energy was high and several conversations were happening at once so I guess it didn’t matter. Fascinating…
I’m always amazed at the amount of political signs that flood our valley around election time. I also make a mental note of the last ones to be pulled out of the ground after the election. I hate these signs, they’re a real distraction as I make my living driving around here. Do they really think my vote is based on seeing someones name on a piece of cardboard sitting out in a field or someones lawn?
I voted early last week and it was evenly spread across the Republican and Democratic landscape. I vote for character and honesty, not names, and I’m certainly not influenced by the one billion dollars spent on two million political TV advertisements nationwide.
I truly despise this process, and tomorrow it’s over. If the Republicans can kick Harry Reed out, and Sid Kunz goes back to landscaping, I feel my vote will have mattered…
Nov 5 Update: Goodbye Harry! Goodbye Sid! Goodbye Signs!
