Saturday, January 5, 2019

Winter Weather...

Yesterday morning (Thursday), it was a relatively moderate -2°F. By yesterday evening, it was -20°F. The trend continued today and by noon it was down to -24°F. I had an AARC (radio club) board meeting that evening and was originally planning to ride the Ural. That didn't happen. Not a good time to be in Fairbanks. The weather reports from Arizona have not been very uplifting either with lows below freezing and snow in Tucson. Fortunately, I do have my snow scraper and brush in the truck. I never expected to really need it in Arizona.

From the first picture, you may be able to tell that I replaced my Apple Watch. The display on the last one, known as Series 0, had almost completely died. I was kind of disappointed at its relatively short life but was intrigued by some of the new features of the new Series 4 such as heart monitoring, the electrocardiogram, and fall detection. And the new watch face with way too many options to keep one "informed". Plus, the simplistic fitness challenges were usually enough to keep me motivated. The screenshot on the right is showing activity with completed circles being the goal. As you can see, I have been keeping up even with my head cold.

I just picked up a burner phone for my middle son who is apparently moving to Los Angeles tomorrow. He asked for a ride to the airport tomorrow morning and was supposed to cancel his GCI phone today. I couldn't believe all of the steps needed to activate this phone. I don't see how they expect the average person to accomplish it. The ATT activation site wouldn't run on Chrome or Safari but did work on Edge. Handy to have this Windows 10 machine around I guess. Then you had to type in the SIM number, the IME number, and the service zip code. Then the site wouldn't accept the ATT prepaid number on the website but would accept it on the phone. What a pain. Anyway, he now has a phone with a Long Beach, CA, phone number and a few hundred minutes.

It's -29°F right now. Heading south is sounding pretty like a good idea...

11 comments:

  1. I believe they made it harder to activate burner phones. At least in Germany that seems to be the case.

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    1. It was more the provided directions didn't work and the website listed did not work on most browsers.

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  2. Brrrr, with those temperatures I'd be glad to be heading south too.

    If you found the phone difficult to set up a regular person would have had fits over it. They shouldn't make it that hard.

    How are you liking the new apple watch? A few folks at work have them for tracking steps, etc because we don't have our phones on us.

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    1. Originally, I was just going to drop the phone off but figured that he may have trouble figuring out how to pick a location other than here.

      The new Apple watch is working great. Much faster, a lot longer battery life and new features. And, supposedly, truly waterproof. And like the old one, you can answer your phone and receive and reply to text messages right on the watch. And the screen is a lot larger even though the watch isn't.

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  3. Safe travels south. The weather in AK is to be expected, but in AZ, not so much. We finally got a break in the rain here in GA...just waiting for the house to sell to get out of here. 😀 Although we are headed to FL for 2 weeks on the 15th anyway.

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    1. Looking forward to getting back though not necessarily looking forward to the trip itself. From the YouTube vlogs, I think that everyone is surprised at the cold weather in AZ. I figure that we will be going through a lot of propane...

      Good luck on the sale of your house. Let me know when you are going to be in OR. I will be on a sidecar trip around the end of July/early August. Have fun in FL! I hear that it's a lot warmer than AZ.

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  4. Coo! We will get to OR late July, no later than Aug 1.

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  5. I just replaced my running watch. I have some things up and running on the new one, and also a bunch of mystery stuff to google and youtube. I don't even know what a burner phone is. Probably don't try to explain it. It would still be a mystery to me. Safe journeys!

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    1. The Apple Watch is a decent accompaniment to an iPhone including the ability to answer phone calls and rely to texts. It now has enough memory to store audiobooks and stream them to Bluetooth headphones without the phone. And the built in GPS can track your walks (and runs) also without the phone.

      A “burner phone” is basically a pay-by-the -minute cell phone usually pretty cheap.

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  6. Wow...the watches these days are amazing! I used to carry a windup pocket watch, jewelry of any kind was not permitted on the job.

    I got rained on today (Jan, 5) in Death Valley, and tomorrow we're riding to Tuscon, and hoping for at least 55 degrees. That last sentence sounds bad until compared with your temps!

    I hope you have a Happy New Year Richard!

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    1. Enjoy Tucson! We fly there on Wednesday. Hopefully all of the snow has melted. The Internet was all abuzz about their snow storm last week…

      Happy New Year! Nice to hear from you.

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