9 April 2012 Weather Station back in battery

          The thunderstorms that rolled through last week caused multiple power outages regionally and locally.  One of the local effects was to desynchronize my weather station base unit from the Virtual Weather Station display software.  This created a false “battery bad!” error indication.  Since I look at the communications links panel each morning as I power up my notebook and put the weather station into service, the error was impossible to miss.  It called all input information into question. 

          The manufacturer, Oregon Scientific, sent me a suggested fix.  This morning I applied the fix, hoping that I would not lose any stored data.  It appears that I haven’t lost data at either end and that the base unit has been repaired and is back in battery. 

          Such small things make us happy.

          We now return to the search for new cell phones and a more suitable carrier.  Our current contract with Verizon is nearly expired and we would prefer to have a provider who is less blatant and unrepentant about ripping us off while providing next to no service. 

          We would prefer to keep some currency with cellular phone functions but we don’t live on them or want to live on theme.  We don’t routinely use text messaging.  We don’t download movies to watch on a two-inch screen.  We actually talk to each other.  We send and respond to e-mail.  We don’t require a peer group consensus before deciding what to eat for lunch. We don’t need to be in constant contact with our peer group; nor do we want to maintain that proximity.  We don’t want our presence displayed to the public at large, or often, to anyone at all. 

          We want a capable phone but don’t want to pay for data packages and texts that we will neither use nor want to use.    To complicate that, we need a carrier that serves the mountainous terrain of the Appalachians in N.E. Tennessee.  If you think of anything suitable, please let us know.