Techie Tuesday

The wind blew almost all of Tuesday.  Just when we thought the wind was strong, it got stronger.  Just when we thought the wind was hard, it got harder.  Man!  It was cranked up!

And the wind actually caused some lasting damage.  What? How so?  Well, we went to what we call our phone booth.  I opened the driver's door and the wind ripped the door out of my hand and danged near bent around the front fender.  It dented the door edge.  Of course, now the door won't quite close and open the way it once did.  Luckily, it still closes and locks but it's definitely not the same.

Tuesday turned into a Tech Fest. What with the fierce, howlin' wind, we pretty much hunkered in our tiny home on two wheels and entertained ourselves with techie toys.

Of course, the biggest tech trick was getting the cell signal booster set up in the truck.  It worked about as good as we expected and definitely good enuf to post a big fat video file.  All-in-all, we're pleased with it.

We fired up our dormant dash cam at the phone booth and recorded the drive back to the Visitor Center. Luckily, the entire drive on Utah 24 fit in a couple of the cam's two-minute videos.

We were able to use an Android app to splice them together and add a title.  Even at the cam's low resolution, the video turned out pretty good.  That VAVA dash cam records simultaneously in both low and high resolution.  A two-minute file at high resolution is over 250 megabytes.  Luckily, the same file at low resolution is a mere 25 megs.

Then we set up our phone for a time lapse of clouds rolling over one of Fruita's signature cliffs. The wind was blowing so hard I had to tie down the tripod. Even tied down I feared the whole rig would blow to Hanksville....or somewhere.

In 51 minutes we captured 1,505 frames.  We set the replay rate at 12 frames per second and condensed those 51 minutes into a little over 2 minutes of replay run time.  It's pretty good looking, too.

We used our long lens Nikon L840 to get some pictures of a local buck. Deer have no fear here.  The tech trick was resizng each photo from 11 megs to one meg and then getting them transferred to the Android so that they can be posted next time we visit the phone booth.

We have a nifty little techie toy what allow us to plug a full size SD card into the Android phone.  Using a equally nifty little file manager app, we can extract photos from the SD card and get them into the phone's Gallery.

And there was a lot more techie tricks, actually too numerous to mention, but quite a bit of fun for this aging geek.

By and by, around 3 PM, we headed up to the Visitor Center to pose our list of questions.  The pleasant volunteer at the front desk actually took our questions seriously and summoned the "Cultural Resources Manager," a guy named Thann (with two "N's").

Thann was real nice but wasn't so sure he could help us because of the "chain of command."  He said he'd have to get clearances from a long list of higher-ups.  If you know the NPS, that's pretty much the way it goes.  We did get a link to a public gallery of NPS Capitol Reef photos so we didn't come away completely empty-handed.  Since we had zero expectations, our experience at the Visitor Center exceeded our expectations.

Susun might have turned the tide on her cribbage woes.  She won two games last night and was quite pleased with herself.  The first game came right down to the wire and the second game was a blow out in which I nearly got skunked.  The photo shows what it means to "come down to the wire."  Susun's peg was in the last hole and mine two holes away. 

The campground really was FULL overnight not "wink, wink" full like it was the night before.  The wind laid down late Tuesday and the sky cleared so this morning's low was a brisk 34 degrees.

Today we're probably going to drive out and back through Castle Valley. Summer storm damage closed that road for awhile but the NPS workers bees have it feng shui again.  Maybe we will visit the phone booth beforehand...or maybe not.

Thanks for reading.