Thursday, January 8, 2009 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Dawn at Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM, January 8, 2009
It's up!
I wake up in the middle of the night and my eye catches a reflected blinking green light on the ceiling. That's the indicator light on the USB720 modem - indicating data is moving. I have a connection!
The race is on... to get to the laptop, connect to a couple of banks and credit card accounts and get my online banking done before the the signal drops again...
Success! Phew! That takes the pressure off for a while.
By breakfast time the signal has disappeared again. Could a pattern be developing here where there is night time access for some reason? That would be better than nothing and might be enough to keep me from leaving the park in search of better access. I really don't feel like moving. We'll see.
Night camp
Site 7 - Oliver Lee Memorial State Park, Alamogordo NM
- Verizon cell phone service - good signal
- Verizon EVDO service - very good signal and access speed ( I have to qualify this - during my January 2008 visit the signal and access speed was excellent - in January 2009 it was practically non-existent during the day and slow at night with unpredictable short periods of excellent access)
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park website
- Go to Oliver Lee Memorial State Park on my Nightcamps map
- Check the weather here
Alex Can Spell
Not very long ago, Dr. Pepperberg began trying to teach Alex and another gray parrot, Griffin, to sound out phonemes, which are the sounds that letters and letter combinations represent. English has forty phonemes altogether. She and her colleagues wanted to see if the birds understood that words are made out of letters that could be recombined to make other words, so they started training the birds with magnetic refrigerator letters.