Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 – The day after Sharon Mock’s birthday – +1˚C / +34˚F – Grey & Damp & Cloudy @ 2:48 pm Atlantic Time.
– South end of our porch, now happily guarding sensitive plants –
— { Above is the interior of our porch. Cathi calls it the front porch. My scrambled brain thinks of the door from the dog run on the East side of the house as the front door. Even if the West side porch with its door to the North is closer to the driveway – Wellington Court runs Westward from Canada Street – and bends slightly more northerly just west of our driveway. Confused? Join the club. 🙂 } The deer hill is slightly washed out beyond the windows on this grey Tuesday afternoon. }
— We recently upgraded our security camera stuff, bought a new DVR unit that came with 4 new 1080-p cameras. The DVR can handle 8 cameras with sound. Our original DVR ( Manufacturer’s name available on request – contact xhyrean@aerendel.org for details – suffered from terminal planned obsolescence after two years’ use – and couldn’t handle the 1080-p cameras anyway. I had to find a couple very long connecting cables and the 12 volt +2 amp power unit that came with 720p Q-See cameras, which I believe have the best color of the three different brand cameras we are now using.
– The DVR couldn’t find its Hard Drive at this point. – but here’s the array. –
– The bottom two cameras are the old 640-p cameras that came with the original cheap system. That’s me looking like a gnome taking the shot you see on my latest iPhone 7 camera. Re: iPhone 7 – its “improved” 7 MP camera has the same 4032 pixel wide capture specs. that my older iPhone 6-SE (or ES?) had, but the selfie/Facetime camera has 3088 pixels wide (or height? if you hold it upright?) capture – um, is that almost 3 times more than the 1280 pixels my older phone/ now backup camera has? Not quite, 2.5 times more pixels wide? I need more caffeine before I can compute that in my head.
– This is me? as seen by my new iPhone’s selfie/Facetime cam. … Reduced to 1280 pixels so this version of WordPress won’t die of a heart attack when I try to upload it here. 😉 –
— The new selfie cam didn’t improve my looks to red-carpet star quality, or de-clutter my home-made monitor stand. or the East Facing – Altar like shelf above it. I may need to wait until one of my sisters wants to Face Time with me before I get to know if the Facetime experience is at all improved.
— & Regarding my experience shopping for the ‘upgrade’ with the special deal they told me in a text message would expire two days before my next cheque { ‘check’ for those of you in the States } arrives. The on-line ‘store’ told me the upgrade to the iPhone 7 would be free and my monthly bill for Koodo’s service would only go up by $5.00 Canadian. { I am not sure you get Koodo in the States – it’s Telus’ step-child, that doesn’t charge the extra monthly fee that they’re not supposed to charge anyway, according to Canadian Law. } So – we had a couple things we needed to get at a couple different stores last Thursday, or was it Friday? { Shrug- } And a hungry trip to the food court at the Regent Mall in Fredericton, New Brunswick sounded good, so while we were there, I thought I’d talk to the guys in the Koodo Kiosk, which is strategically located on the fringes of the food court – and the first guy was eager to help, but he was working on another customer’s order and the next guy to finish with still another customer came over, smiled and said he could finish my order. { I had wanted, basically, to learn if the ‘special deal’ would magically evaporate two days before my cheque arrived. } —> First off, the new salesman, who might be their boss or shift manager, smiled and said the iPhone 7 would cost me $120 Canadian Dollars up front. I know I looked confused, “It said with a ‘Medium Tab’ – that phone would be free.” He told me I could trade in what I wanted to be my happy back-up camera for $100.00 credit and fork over 20 Canadian dollars on the spot or discover that I had to go up to the next higher level to pay off the ‘tab’ which would increase my monthly bill by $15.00 , not $5.00 { grumble grumble – } Well, sigh. I went along with this, wondering whether that salesperson would have to spend his next few lifetimes as a slug and be stepped on and smeared all over sidewalks by people he looked down on in this life. And then, of course, I shuddered, shook my head and gave him the benefit of the doubt, thinking he may be a pawn to corporate ethics, and corporate dictates and corporate policies, even if Koodo is a step or two above most other Canadian Mobile Phone ‘providers’.
– So far – This is my NaNoWriMo Word Count for this month – last night when I entered the word count it said I’d written 10 days in a row. But I haven’t added to my total yet today, so it thinks I’m slacking off –
— My National Novel Writing Month project for this year is adding in the missing pieces to what I started last year. I have written 100,246 words so far this month, with the first three days thinking I wrote 30,000 words on that third day and did nothing on the first and second days. —> They are “Working on fixing” their software so I would have been able to go back and tell their stat page that I wrote 1287 words the first day, more like 10,000 the second and closer to 18,000 the third. Being ‘retired’ & not called back to work at the Museum this year, and working on something I’m excited and enthusiastic about makes the time fly and I get a lot out of it. This Novel might just be ready for publishing this year. { Wow? }
— Sigh, We got early snow and unexpectedly low temperatures so far this autumn up here. But I still feel pretty good about things, even if I’m wondering what the bleep is going on with the impeachment schnarr back where I came from. Canada feels more like a happier parallel world than a walk across an imaginary line our human contemporaries call a ‘border’. Hey, we may be developing stress related problems, but we will definitely not die of boredom… Ya think?
~~~~~ Jim { the colour choice suggestions call this shade of blue ‘Royal Blue’ – Looks closer to ‘Dodger Blue’ to me….. }
