More on Groupon

OK, Groupon has me flummoxed.
I didn't understand how they could walk away from a $6B payday from Google, a bumbled deal that led to the ouster of their CEO.
You might think that, with fresh leadership and a renewed direction, they' might have a clue about revitalizing their once mighty revenue stream.
Here, instead, is what they think might interest me, starting with a mysterious burn on their nephew, Steve

Which was preceded by a skull massage:

Which was preceded by, well, this:

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

The Five Easy Pieces model for newspaper subscriptions

We have the New York Times delivered to us on Sunday morning. It's a nice tradition, letting us pick at the major sections, including the magazine, book reviews, and opinion pages. With that subscription, I also get All Digital Access that includes web, tablet, and phone access for the whole week.
Increasingly, though, I find that I'm reading the stuff online a day or two before the paper arrives. The Times online editions start showing on Thursday. Something might be posted on Twitter or someone else's blog includes a link to a story that's destined for print on Sunday.
As a result, there are weeks when I've already read the pieces of interest and the paper goes straight to the recycling bin.
Maybe, I thought, I could save a tree and just get the digital editions.
The digital editions cost $8.75 per week. Home delivery of the Sunday paper, which includes the digital access, costs $8.10 per week.
I save 65¢ by throwing the paper away.

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Full disclosure: I am a contracted employee of the Worcester Telegram and Gazette, a company formerly owned by the New York Times. A most wonderful benefactor, John Henry, recently purchased the T&G along with the Boston Globe. The Globe has a more sensible policy, allowing me to pay a lower price for digital-only.

Rethinking school size

In our efforts to reduce class sizes in schools, we are missing a more important metric.
Son Adam noted years ago in his school safety findings that there's correlation between school size and school safety. A smaller school is more likely to be a safer school, irrespective of other factors in the community.
Researchers have published a working paper that shows this and other benefits of smaller schools in New York City.
Regionalization has been in use in Massachusetts for nearly 60 years. The goals was to save on administrative costs and make programs available to students who would not have had access in small-town schools. We're now seeing that the benefits of this consolidation weren't quite as grand as we'd hoped.

h/t Freakonomics

Lysistrata in the modern age

The Aristophanes play, Lysistrata, noted how women ended the Peloponnesian War by denying intimacy to their husbands and/or lovers until the war was ended.
Now, however, it's getting really serious. Global Post reports that a group of women in Colombia are refusing to have sex until the roads near their homes are repaired.

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Beyond Patents: SSL Trade Secrets

Patents aren't the only way or even the best way to protect your intellectual property. Read more in my All LED Lighting blog post, Beyond Patents: SSL Trade Secrets

Just because you can build it doesn't mean that you should

Lots of people put LED lights into things that you never knew they could.
Read more at AllEDLighting.com: Not Every Bright Idea Is a Good Idea 

More on WiFi passwords

Last week, I wrote a piece for The Mobility Hub about the challenges of managing WiFi passwords on various mobile devices. In brief, because of arcane guest WiFi policies, users must learn how to change the WiFi password on their devices. Setting aside the problem of entering passwords in the first place, most devices don't have a direct way to change the password on a saved network connection. Generally, you must tell your gadget to forget about the connection, connect anew, and enter the new password. It is one of the most unfriendly aspect of mobile computing.
We've found a new variant of this exquisite defliction. At Hilton hotels, you can get free WiFi if you are a) staying at the hotel or b) visiting the lobby, provided that you ask for the password at the desk. The lobby password is a 14-alphanumeric-character string. The hotel guest password is your room number and last name; it's only enabled when you are registered at the hotel.
This means that if you log in with the lobby password while you're waiting to check in and/or waiting to have your in-room account to come alive, you have to change the password when you get to your room (which is beyond the range of the lobby connection).
It's good to know that, Mordac, Preventer of Information Services from the Dilbert comic strip, has found regular employment with Hilton.

April 6, 1998

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

Dear Charter, trading a bad ZIP code error for a stack dump isn't progress

I've been having a go-round with Charter support for several months. They have an iOS app that offers channel information and a bunch of other stuff. Each time I enter the ZIP code of my home, however, I'm not that it's not a valid address. (We've had Charter service and Greater Media before than for 20 years.)

iOS error

Through Twitter, I learned that there is a problem with the iOS app and that the Android one works OK.

So, I installed the Android version on my phone. I was able to enter my ZIP code and get my channel listings. That it needed to fetch the channel listings anew each time I changed from portrait to landscape mode, requiring about seven seconds on each turn, was bearable.

Then I checked out the other features of the app, such as the listing of products and services.

I then checked out their newsletter:

And, if I wanted to find a nearby service location, such as in Worcester, well, ...

Computing with light

Decades ago, Grace Hopper, aka Queen of Software, championed light as a communication medium that could be used to build fast, secure computers. The boffins have pushed through another limit, this time silicon photonics. 

Here's David Letterman's interview of Admiral Hopper shortly after she retired from the Navy and joined DEC. "How do you get a pair of pantyhose that fit?" wonders one of the greatest minds of our time. (via Scripting News).

Happy 14th Birthday, Lily

Lily wins her age group at the Joseph's Project Shamrock Shuffle 5K in March

We could use a slow news day

iOS ease-of-use? Ha!

For inexplicable (or, at least, unexplained) reasons, Apple doesn't allow browser extensions on iOS (iPad and iPhone). Browser extensions are small apps that allow you to things such as save a link to a service such as Pocket.
Pocket, formerly Read It Later, allows you to save links for later reading. It also provides a cleaner version of the web page so that you can read it without ads and other cruft that accompanies most web content. I've been using Pocket/Read It Later for years and recommend it to anyone who uses the web a lot.
Installing the extension on all browsers on Windows and OSX is easy and fast. You get an icon on the browser toolbar.

On Windows, Mac, and Android, you can then save a link from your browser to Pocket. Clicking the icon saves the link to Pocket.
On Safari on iOS, however, here's what you have to do to set up a bookmarklet so that you can save to Pocket. (For the record, Chrome on iOS doesn't support extensions, either.)

How to Save to Pocket on iPad

For people new to or not adept with computing devices in general, this is onerous. For the record, Pocket isn't the only one afflicted by this Apple limitation. Other apps such as Instapaper and Evernote have to provide the same gnarly work-arounds.

You can save links to a Reading List that is synchronized with Safari elsewhere, such as on your Mac. You cannot, however, get at your Reading List from other browsers, via iCloud, or on an Android device.
In a word, pfft.

Friday the 13th comes on a Friday this month

She's a-goozin' up like Trump of Doom, indeed.

Dear Google, let me Google that for you

Google has chosen Amherst NH as the Granite State's eCity. There's just one problem.

Emily Dickinson was born, lived, and died in Amherst, Massachusetts.
Let me Google that for you.

419 Recursion

My Gmail spam filter just caught this gem.

Just send us your contact information and our scammers really promise to send you money that you'd lost from those other, less virtuous scammers.

Blitzed by @FeedBlitz

Some of you may have seen a scary message when you clicked on a link to my blog post this morning. The service that handles distribution of my blog, FeedBlitz, had a bit of a meltdown this morning. They've explained the error in an email and on their blog. In part,

This morning, shortly before 8am US Eastern, one of our databases became overloaded and, to use a technical term, crapped out.
Our monitoring apps told us of the situation, we quickly jumped on the apparent problem, and we thought we were done … but there was more to the issue than at first appeared.
One of our downstream web servers that handled tracking became horribly overloaded as a consequence of its being unable to reach that specific database. That in turn caused a failsafe in FeedBlitz to kick in, which had the nasty and unintended consequence of putting up a scary malware message.

There was no risk to your computer or with anything on www.roasterboy.com. I'm sorry for this false alarm. FeedBlitz responded quickly and correctly, getting the servers back online and communicating pretty well.

Twitter / RoasterBoy: It appears that @feedblitz ... via kwout

They did continue their regular Twitter posts, which did not relate to the crisis at hand and, for while, leading to the impression that it was business as usual. 

BoA getting it wrong in Holden

So, the Bank of America in Holden recently repainted the entrance to its parking lot. In the process, it got the arrows wrong in all the ways possible.

In this view, we're facing Main Street.

1. Left turns form Main Street into the BoA parking lot are prohibited. Nevertheless, there's an arrow on the parking lot showing how to make that left turn.
2. Coming out of the parking lot, only right turns are allowed. Therefore, there's an arrow for a left turn.
3. Both of those arrows are on the wrong side of the island. 

21st Century media via 19th Century communications technology

While my mother-in-law was in hospice care, we watched closely for signs of pain. If we saw grimaces or if she cried out, the nurses could give her more morphine.
Sometimes, though, the prescribed amounts weren't doing the job. The hospice team would quickly confer, in person or by phone, and recommend an increase in the regular and/or PRN dose and/or frequency. The nurse would then send the recommendation by to the doctor who, in turn, would send the prescription by fax to the pharmacy.
If the fax machine is out of paper or otherwise not working properly, the request or orders can be delayed. An hour's delay for a normal prescription is no big deal. An hour's delay for a terminal patient who is in pain is, well, do you want that for your mother?
The first patent for the process that would become a fax machine was issued in 1843. Based on those ideas, a commercial fax line connected Paris and Lyon in 1865.

The Pantelegraph in 1865, by Giovanni Caselli

The Pony Express had come and gone.We were still a couple of decades away from the telephone.
Physicist Michio Kaku observes that paperwork is, to descendants of hunters and gatherers, proof of the kill. Our caveman selves, instantiated as CYA bureaucrats in insurance companies and government offices, demand hard copy to prove that we've done something useful.

The Hawthorne Effect is alive and well

Research shows that LED lighting generally improves working conditions in the office and on the shop floor. Control over the lighting, however, matters most.
Read the rest on my blog post at All LED Lighting, LED Lighting in the Workplace: Hard to Measure

Starbuck's Wi-Fi vs. Verizon 4G

Speed Test with Verizon 4G at 1 West Boylston St., Worcester

Speed Test at Starbuck's at 1 West Boylston St., Worcester with one other user in the shop

Advertisers have a new way to get into your head.

It's been a long day. You're tired. You muscle your way onto the train and get a window seat so that you look out the window and start the process of not thinking. You rest your tired head against the window, hoping that the rhythmic rumble will shake out the weariness.
Advertising shows up inside your head.
Watch the video and then make plans for an aisle seat.

via Boing Boing

More on language, good times, and wishing the best for others

When you have a good time at a gathering of family and/or friends, it's not unusual to say, "I hope that you had as good as time as I did."
Courtesy suggests that we wish for better things for others than we do for ourselves. Saying "I hope that you had a better time than I did," however, doesn't have quite the effect that we're after.

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One of an occasional series.
A bunch of years ago, I worked for a software company. It was hard work for long hours. At one point, senior management made the pronouncement that the development team needed to focus more on a particular aspect of the product. The QA manager and I agreed that we'd be Focused More-ons.

Putting things in more or less order

A good vacation doesn't fit in a box, tied up with ribbon, that you can open years from now to say, "Yes, that's what it was."
A good vacation has time enough to look over the handiwork of spiders who've woven their webs in the overnight and now those webs glisten in the morning dew.

A good vacation has unplanned visits, particularly with young ones who bring their own views of us and what's important.

A good vacation marks transitions, from young to not-young, from before-adventure to after-adventure.

A good vacation lets us learn about the big world in our small corner.

Fisher Museum - Harvard Forest

A good vacation lets you sleep as much as you need to, work until it's time to swim, swim until your toes are pruney, air-dry on the bench until the mosquitoes have had their fill, and talk for a long time because there's always this one more thing to say.
A good vacation spills out of the box, onto the floor, and leaves tracks all around your house and yard and life.
It was a good vacation.

Doc rejoins Celtics, sort of

With Rondo on his way to Dallas, Pierce and KG heading to Brooklyn, and Doc moving west, Celtics fans may despair that the once-great team is being shattered.
Rest assured. We've been to this movie before.
In 1978, the original Celtics franchise was sent to Buffalo in a baffling deal that brought the then-Braves to Boston. (There was as baseball team called the Boston Braves that played at what is now Nickerson Field at BU. That franchise is now in Atlanta.) Included in that shuffle was one talented and troubled player, Marvin Barnes, whose story is featured in the "What the Hell Happened To" blog.
That same year, GM Red Auerbach had brilliantly drafted Larry Bird as a junior, even though Bird would return to Indiana for his senior year. The great teams of the 1980s had their basis in the train wreck that was the Celtics ownership of the 70s.
Astute readers will note that current GM Danny Ainge was a good basketball and baseball player and a pretty good basketball executive. Red Auerbach, however, Ainge ain't.
Meanwhile, the Buffalo team moved to California, first to San Diego and then Los Angeles. So Doc River is now coach of what had been the Celtics.

Ikea numbers

• The probability of placing an upside-down board in an Ikea project: 1.
• The probability of two or more people, each assembling the same Ikea piece of furniture, making the same mistake: 1.
• The step you will have to redo: 3.
• The number of times that one's grandfather, a cabinet maker, rolls in his grave: ∞.
• The number of better ways to spend a \vacation day with your wife: 0.

Mr. Hakkarainen goes to Helsinki

In Massachusetts, we've just completed a special election, characterized by tepid candidates and low voter turnout. Politics used to be something special around here, but we've become as dull as Wonder Bread.
Meanwhile, across the pond and to the north, Tuevo Hakkarainen has released a karaoke recording that will be featured at the Gold Cucumber competition in October. (You have to slog through a few translation services to figure out what's going on. Even then, if the resulting phrases are Gold Cucumber, karaoke, and evil foreboding name, you know that you're onto something.
In the case that you have doubts, here's the man himself, singing at an outdoor festival.

And if that wasn't enough, Hakkarainen missed the opening session of Parliament because of gastroenteritis. News reports referred to him as " the Lost Teuvo Hakkarainen."

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This post is one of a series about Teuvo Hakkarainen, the True Finns Party MP from Viitasaari. For the record, my grandfather was born in Viitasaari.

Comcast uses Catch-22 as a system design manual

While reviewing my credit card bill, I noticed that the bill for our Comcast service at the camp was higher than expected. I went to the Comcast website, logged in to my account, and clicked the b to see the details on the bill. I learned that I needed a PIN to access the bill.

For security reasons, Voice management and billing information on your account will be limited until you enter the Security PIN we sent to your home address or email. Enter your Security PIN now, or have it re-sent to you.

Fine. I clicked the link to have it sent to my email. Quick as you please, I was brought to a page where I learned that the PIN will be sent to our camp address in five business days.
Less fine. We don't receive mail at the camp address.
I looked around around to find another way to find out my PIN. I found none. I initiated a chat session with customer support. After I provided my account info and exchanged niceties, we went to the matter of the PIN.
I learned the following from a nice customer service representative.

• Even though the message says that they can send the PIN to my email address, they can't.
• They can only send the PIN in two ways: by USPS to our camp address, where we don't receive mail or to our Comcast phone number as a voice message. We don't have a phone to plug into the phone jack on the router to access the voice service that we didn't order.
• They can't send a text message with the PIN to my cell phone, which the phone number by which the CSR located the account.
• When I said that I would have to buy a phone to be able to access my Comcast voice mail, she said that wasn't necessary, that I could borrow a working phone from a neighbor.
  The CSR was very sad for me (her words) when I told her that I don't have a neighbor from whom I can borrow a phone. 
• I would have to go to the Comcast office 20 miles away to get real help.

When I got to the Comcast office 20 miles away, the nice customer service rep looked up my account information (based on my cellphone number) and then told me that the system could only send my PIN to the service address (the camp), not to the billing address. I quietly tapped my forehead against the glass that separates customers from service reps. She resolved to fix the problem. Twenty minutes later, she was able get the PIN sent to my home address ("in six to eight business days").

That was two weeks ago.
Update:
In the process of testing the links for this blog post, I clicked the Send me a PIN links. I just received the following email:

I logged in, entered the PIN, and can now view my bill. Thank you, Comcast, I think.

Father's Day 2013

I'm a very fortunate guy.

Not only did I  receive some clever and thoughtful gifts, but, most importantly, we got to spend time together as family. We ate well, laughed loudly, and heard good stories of hope and adventure.

Making Baby Jesus cry - 2013

And the winner for the earliest last-chance Christmas deal is ...

Dept. of Non-obviousness: Drupal configuration message

You might not think that this stream of messages would be caused by character encoding:

I was editing a configuration file and switched to UTF-8 because I needed to add a few unusual characters to a web page. When I did so, the stream of errors appeared. It took a long time of searching before I discovered. this discussion page where ANSI vs. UTF-8 was mentioned.
It's not a universal law, but experience shows that the bigger the gusher of error messages, the cause is usually quite small and and the least obvious.

If you get there last, leave a message

There's a scene in Three Little Pigskins where Moe and Larry are arranging to meet at a predetermined location:
Moe: If you get there first, put a chalk mark.
Larry: Okay. What if you get there first?
Moe: Then I’ll rub it out.¹
Anyway, The Reg reports that scientists have done this, only better, sending a message from one photon to another that that was already deceased.

Measuring P1 destroys it; even so, it gets its state from P4
Image: Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 210403 (2013)
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.210403

¹The Marx Brothers may have done this first, but I can't locate the scene.

On Google maps and education

At lunch today, I talked with a former professor about some of the issues that he sees with his students. This, by the way, is at Amherst. The students who get in there did so because they knew how to present themselves to their high school teachers and admissions boards. They knew how to win.
Many student wrote papers that were focused on a narrow topic, crisply-defined, but with little connection to other ideas or domains. These students did well well because they showed a clear answer to a specific, albeit esoteric, question. Their research skills were limited to delivering a precise answer with no ragged edges.
If you ask Google Maps (or any GPS system) for turn-by-turn directions, you get good results. Using those directions will get you where you intend to go, but with a curious side effect. You are delivered as in a tunnel, without context.

Time was, we studied maps and knew not only the path, but also the frame of reference. Recently, I had to travel to a part of a nearby town that was unfamiliar to me. The person I was visiting said that his street is right near the so-and-so school. I used Google Navigation. It made no mention of the school as a prominent reference point. Instead, it said, "in 600 feet,  turn left." I got where I was going, but Google told me nothing of the fact that this family lived near a school.
It turned out that living near a school was very relevant to this person and his wife because his kids could walk to school. Google told me what was true, but not what was meaningful.

How to lose a sale and win a customer

While cutting firewood this weekend, the chain slipped off the bar on my chainsaw. In the process of re-

tightening the chain, a small clip and, I later learned, a bearing fell out of the sprocket assembly and into the underbrush. I took it as an omen to stop work for the day. I put the chainsaw into the back of my car.
I went back to Holden the next day to tend to a few other errands and brought the chainsaw to the repair place near our house, Parker Power Equipment. They have worked on other saws before as well as our lawn mower and snowblower.
The young man behind the desk looked at the saw and said that they don't always have the right Stihl parts in stock, that I might do better to go a Stihl dealer such as the one in Worcester. I had errands in Worcester, so I went to the dealer. They had the parts and installed them at the counter.
Both places did well, but Parker did better. They said that losing this sale was better for me, the customer. They were right. My chainsaw could have been with them for several days while they tried to get the right parts for this simple repair. They earned my loyalty as a customer.

Plans for the weekend? The weather says, "Ha!"

What's been weirdest among the many weird aspects of this weekend's weather has been nearly two days of precipitation with a strong northwest wind.
In typical patterns, systems move up the east coast, dragging a cold front behind them. The cold front shifts the wind to the northwest and brings in colder and drier air. In this case, the wind started to shift on Friday. The rain continued, hard, through Friday and Saturday. Lighter on Saturday night, we saw or thought we saw some snow mixed in.
Three months earlier, we would have called the a three-day Nor'easter.It's not uncommon for winter storms to strengthen as they get into the Gulf of Maine. Bombing out, they call it. The weather charts don't show that this happened, only that the systems moved slowly.
There are breaks in the clouds now. There are whitecaps on the lake.
The fireplace, even if we had good, dry wood, doesn't put out enough heat to fight against the wind and cold. The porch of the camp has single-pane windows with broad exposure to the northwest wind coming across the lake. When I was a kid, we had a pocket door and a pocket window on the wall that separated the porch from the main room. My father removed those during a renovation in the 70s. We could have used them this weekend.
We're burning wood that's long past its prime, stuff that was cut five or more years ago. My plan had been to cut and split the fallen hemlock that's in the front yard. There was still plenty of good meat on much of the tree. Split, it'll be good for both the fireplace and sauna. It was too cold and rainy on yesterday and on Friday, though, for me to spend very long outdoors.
The rain will stop. The winds will calm and shift again. By the end of the coming week, it'll be 90.

When cool is too cool

As states, cities, and towns replaced their traffic signals with energy-efficient LED lights, they discovered an underappreciated feature of the old systems : the heat melted snow and ice.
You can read more in my blog post on All LED lighting: Of Light, Snow & Ice

Happy 15th Birthday, Tess

Our party was a day after her birthday, but the joy was undiluted.

With Lynn, Krista, Cassie, Joe, and Lily.

Reading by Kindle light

For the second time this week, we lost power. It was earlier in the evening this time, about 5:30. We listened for our neighbor's generator. Sure enough, the low hum was rolling across the cove.
Ours is such an exciting life. Friday evenings are anchored by several PBS shows (Newshour, Beat the Press, This Old House) plus a couple of items on DVR. As a half hour became an hour, we set ourselves up for a different time.
We heard the sounds of the Northern toads in the swamp, a long, low call offered to potential mates. We had a round of checkers. Sandra won two of three. We had our supper on the deck by the sauna and lingered until the black flies and early mosquitoes drove us away.
The dark filled the house and eventually the outdoors. We could see our neighbor's flag, waving in an easterly breeze. The hour became two. We read for a while, Sandra on her iPad, me on the Kindle. At nine, we went to bed.
I'm usually awake a couple of times during the night, for an hour or two each time. I woke at midnight, read for a while, went back to sleep, and got up again shortly before three.
National Grid, our electric company, has a website that let's you check on the status of outages in an area. Cell phone coverage at the camp is faint, barely 1 bar.

(National Grid uses Amazon Web Services, AWS, to handle its outage map.)
Sitting by the window and with the phone high, I waited and eventually collected enough bits from the sky to get to the website and learn about the state of things.

As I was reviewing the information, the WiFi signal icon came on. Odd. I looked at the floor and noticed that the lights on one of the power strips was on. The power was restored an hour earlier than estimated.
Dunno what happened. My guess is that a transformer blew out, affecting a small part of a small town. I stayed up for a while longer, drifting off at first light.

VZW giveth, taketh away

When we watch British detective shows on TV, I regularly marvel at the quality of cell phone coverage available to all. They can be in the catacombs of some office building, out in the barrens and moors, or on the North Sea coast. The cell phone rings. They talk.
Around here, and certainly at the cove, an unaided phone struggles to gain one bar of 1G service. Verizon, AT&T, and Sprint all have the same reception. Other folks in the lake may fare better, given the variability of terrain and the amount of granite between their locations and their carrier's towers.
With a MiFi gadget from Verizon, we could get passable Internet connections, provided that the receiver was set in the proper location, high on a north-facing wall.
Last year, we tried something different, a network extender from Verizon. The device sits on a window sill and fetches the faint signal from the tower over the hill, just enough to make the connection. The rest of the call is routed through our cable Internet service (Comcast).

It works well. All calls are clear and steady. Occasionally, we'll miss a call and it will go straight to voicemail.   Sometimes, the GPS setting is way off. My phone may report that I'm in  Gloucester. (When we use it in Holden, the location can show up as Cambridge.) Overall, though, we've been pleased with the performance. It's more than paid for itself.
That we need it at all is a point left for another discussion, having to do with the way that our national telecommunications policies have built an expensive, inefficient, and unreliable wireless system. (Imagine if you could drive your car only on certain highways; to drive on others, you'd have to change cars.)
Mark Gibbs writes in Forbes about several dubious features in the way that Verizon has implemented this much-needed product:

• Even though calls are routed through my Internet service from Comcast, Verizon charges me for the minutes and/or data that I use over the extender. The data shouldn't be an issue (I hope), because I use WiFi connections on my phone. 
• Any Verizon Wireless customer can connect to the network extender.It would be more of a concern if we lived in a more densely-populated area. The nearest neighbor is more than 150m away.  In theory, someone fishing just offshore might be able to connect and make calls.
  It's possible to give priority to selected numbers, but there's no way to whitelist just the phones in the household. 

AT&T. and Sprint have network extenders You can restrict access to certain phones to use them. Verizon has delivered a product that makes their bad coverage better, but manages to dent that outcome with bad policies. 

For that special mother in your life

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Light by sound

We lost power this evening for nearly an hour and half. To confirm that it wasn't just us, we stepped outside and heard the sound of our neighbors' generator. It kicks on automatically and can run for a long time on propane.
A rain shower had come through, but no thunder. I called the electric company and learned that it wasn't a widespread outage. A crew was on the way, but they weren't sure how long it would take to get us back online.
There was enough light for a brief walk around the cove. In case you're wondering, the mosquitoes are here and hungry. In the damp air as the darkness filled the woods, they found us delicious. We made our way along the dirt roads and paths. At each turn, we could hear the low hum of the generator and knew the power was still off.
Our neighbor, a retired dentist who served in the Korean War, has a flag in front of his house. He keeps a light on the flag all the time, even on generator power. Now at twilight, the flag stood bright and strong.
We returned from our walk and settled in to whatever it is that people do when there's no electricity. Sandra lit the hurricane lamp and we talked. In time, the lights came back. Outside, across the cove, our neighbor's flag waves gently in the quiet light.

One spring morning at the cove

There was no wind last night, so the cold fell straight from the clear sky onto our fair settlement.

It was in the low 50s inside the camp when Dame Judi decided that it was time for the household to rise and shine and give her her breakfast.

We had one of our earliest first saunas last night. We have a lot of spruce pieces left over from the construction project two years ago. Spruce burns hot and fast and pops loudly. The aches of the day's work softened and soon were gone. 

A month ago, the ice was still thick in the cove. Our first dip was tentative and brief. The second lasted a minute or two. There were a couple of guys fishing nearby.

"You got a sauna in there?" one of them asked.

"Yep," I replied, neck deep in the water. "We'd be even crazier otherwise."

The camp came through the winter in good shape. We lost one tree, a hemlock, just a week ago. It snapped about eight feet from the ground and fell sideways in the front yard.
It had been dead for awhile, likely because of the Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, and should have been culled when we had the tree guys here last year.

All the other trees look ok, but it's still early. The maples, birches, and oaks are still two or more weeks away from full foliage. 

Our neighbors visited yesterday afternoon, reporting on their winter and plans for the summer. At their shore, they'd been scolded by a male duck that had been protecting his mate. We later saw both ducks touring the cove.

In the evening, after sauna and supper, Sandra went outside and identified the sound of the Northern spring peeper in the vernal stream nearby. Our project this season, among others, is to listen to and catalog peepers and then frogs. 

It's that transition time, when something of what you need is at the other place. We have a list of things that we forgot to bring yesterday. Let's hope that we remember the list when we go into town today.

We've had our breakfast and our second cup of coffee. It's time to split wood for this evening's fire. 

If there is a ride back, it'll be all downhill.

Their summer project will be to ride 750 miles into a headwind  from sea level to 9000 ft. where, on a good day, the Centigrade and Fahrenheit scales converge.  These guys are planning to ride bikes to the South Pole.

The South Pole Epic

They're raising money on Kickstarter. If you pledge $75, you can get a t-shirt.