bobmacliberty

Thank you all again. Lenny...you're just slightly off. I'm 61, although (most days) I feel like I'm 47. Every now and then, after playing golf or doing too much physical work in the yard/house, my true age shines through.

Thank you all!

Completely agree.

I had a great day yesterday. It was my birthday. I played golf with my regular Tuesday/Thursday guys group. I didn't play particularly well but still managed to shoot a decent score thanks to doing a lot of scrambling around the greens and a couple of birdies. I came home and watched the US Open on TV for a couple of hours. We then went to our club for wine tasting from 5-6 and followed that with dinner at the fancier restaurant in our ocean clubhouse. The view is great. I don't normally do food porn as I usually eat before remembering to take a picture, but I remembered this time. Our club does a good job with celebrations. They started us with a couple of glasses of champagne and then a small bite from the chef. It was some sort of tuna concoction on a small piece of brioche bread and topped with a bit of caviar. Very tasty. There may also be an Old Fashioned in the picture. 😉 We both ordered the grilled romaine salad to start. I had the seared halibut for my main. The fish was cooked perfectly, and the mushroom risotto was excellent. Micheline had a salmon dish that was also great, although I did miss getting a picture of that one. We were pretty stuffed at that point, but they brought out a happy birthday piece of key lime pie...one of my favorites. After the dessert, they wouldn't let us go without a couple of small macarons and chocolate ball things. (and finally monsieur, a wafer thin mint). We made it back to the house and worked off all of that food by sitting and watching a couple of episodes of Stranger Things season 4. We're enjoying season 4. Because my birthday and Father's Day are so close, sometimes even the same day, Micheline usually turns it into a birthday/Father's Day weekend. The US Open golf tournament is always on Father's Day weekend so a good part of my time through Sunday will be watching golf. It's my favorite tournament to watch, followed by the Masters and The Open (aka The British Open). We were thinking of doing something outside on Saturday but the high temp is supposed to be 96F. We might just stay in the house with the A/C on full blast.

Technically, @RedIguana is correct. Speed is how fast bits travel and really should be measured by latency. The upload and download measures are actually bandwidth. In reality though, up/download bandwidths are mentioned as "speed" because with you can push more bits through more bandwidth and it appears (and is) faster speed to an end user.

Business travel took me all over the world. Combined with cruising and land vacations, I've visited 50 countries at last count. Much of western Europe and some of eastern Europe, much of Asia, the middle east (Dubai/UAE only) and some of central/south America. There are a bunch of Caribbean islands that contribute to that total. While the logistics of travel are often a pain, I usually flew business class and stayed in nice hotels. That certainly makes things easier. I really enjoyed seeing different places and experiencing different cultures. In many ways, people are the same everywhere.

Sydney is high on my list of places I've never been to. Scotland first (home of golf and my ancestors), then Australia.

I think a better comparison would be against HughesNet, the primary satellite service provider.

My answer would be...more than you want to sit in a plane, but worth it (for both cities).

Thanks for confirming the answer. Don't know why I missed Nevada/Vegas. Seems obvious now that I know. Hawaii surprises me a bit. It does get a lot of visitors but it's just so small. One of the reasons that I like Hawaii is that it never seems too crowded, other than around Honolulu.

Here is what Greg posted (I immediately saved it 😉). No amounts listed. I tried 1 oz ginger syrup, 1 oz lime juice, 2 oz rum, 2 cups ice in a blender but it was too much liquid and/or not enough ice. I might try freezing the ginger syrup in an ice tray to help it freeze better.

Current RC internet is from high orbit geosynchronous satellites. Starlink uses a constellation of thousands (currently 2,000+ but planned for 10,000+) low orbit satellites. Faster speeds and much lower latencies.

Bunnies are not at all welcome in our yard. It's amazing how quickly they will mow down flowers.

I think you are correct JC. Tankless heater exhaust gases are acidic and will quickly rust the existing tank vent galvanized pipe. Tankless vents need to be a different material. Unless you want to run a new pipe up through the house through a roof penetration, you're better off exhausting horizontally. That will involve making a penetration through the foundation. The other option is to get an outdoor tankless heater and extended the water pipes through the foundation. Not sure what limitations exist in mounting outside in a cold environment. Wherever you install the tankless unit, you need to run gas piping as well. All of that combined with the large extra price tag had me just retrofitting on Ohio with a bigger tank. It would have taken several years to recover the added tankless installed cost in energy savings. I think.

Our AHU is on the main (only) floor of the house, in a little closet off of our laundry room. The condensate drain is gravity fed.

Very helpful reply @twangster. My understanding is that Starlink dishes are self aligning (i.e. will physically move) but also use beam forming to ensure an optimal link. The boat owners in the video that I watched completely removed the mounting and rotating parts that came with the dish and actually modified the back of the antenna casing to attach a new mounting plate (certainly completely voiding the warranty...don't try this at home). The beam forming seems to adjust quickly enough as the boat bobs up and down. It would seem that Starlink has the hardware and software things needed to ensure that their antennas do not cause problems with other satellites. Maybe the FCC is just waiting on testing, or perhaps some fixes from previous tests that have already been run, before ensuring that Starlink antennas are safe on moving vehicles (or at least for exception cases like a cruise ship). Starlink is certainly expensive when compared to what you and I pay for our service, but it's a god send for people in less urban areas. My BIL lives in an rural part of Pennsylvania. His satellite internet service was slow and unreliable. He loves Starlink and I don't think it's a whole lot more expensive than what he was paying.

I remember many years ago being at my parent's house in Savannah for Thanksgiving. They lost power Thanksgiving day. We managed to make an entire Thanksgiving dinner using just the outdoor gas grill.

You win Cruise Critic today (yesterday). Or at least you would have won if I had listened to you. That was exactly our problem. For those who don't understand what @Vibe is talking about, the air handling unit (the blower that moves air throughout the house where your air filter is located) has a drain line to keep condensation out of the system. If the drain line gets plugged, condensation will back up in the line. There's a little chamber near the top of the drain line with a float switch in it. If condensation backs up enough to cause the float switch to rise, it sends a signal to shut off the system so that you aren't blowing condensate through your ductwork. When the switch gets tripped, there will be no power on the Rc wire at the thermostat. When the condensation slowly drains, the float eventually drops and the system turns on again. As @Vibe said, my A/C guy hooked up a shop vac to the end of the drain line to suck out the water and the slime/gunk in the line that was causing it to drain slowly. It was clogged enough that he had to also blast the line with compressed air on the other end to push to clog through. We are no set up for twice a year service checks which include cleaning the condensation drain. Costs us $165/year for two system checks/cleanings per year. Good peace of mind.

We don't have natural gas here. We have a large propane tank buried in our yard. Our tankless heater runs on propane, although it needs electricity also for the electronics to work.

I have no idea why the stationary restriction exists but it doesn't matter if a ship is outside of FCC limits. Starlink needs to follow FCC rules no matter where the customer is located. Dumb. I can't think of any technical or safety reasons to limit customers to being stationary, but maybe one exists. I recently watched a video of a couple who lives on a houseboat in Seattle and they installed an antenna on their boat. It works great for them but they can only use it when in their home marina. The antenna makes adjustments (electronically, not mechanically) as the ship bounces up and down. They turn it off when moving or even when they're stationary away from their home site. Starlink apparently tracks if you're moving and disconnects service, to satisfy the FCC. If they are stationary for too long in a new location, Starlink changes their "address" which causes some sort of problem for them.

We have one in Florida. No issues at all so far. I can take a shower while we're doing laundry and have all the hot water that I want. It's mounted on the side of our house and is very much out of sight, out of mind. I looked into installing one when we lived in Ohio to replace an old tank heater. There were a couple of problems that prevented me from doing so. First, the cost was at least 2X when compared to a tank heater. Second, it required a different lining in the exhaust vent pipe. Our tank was in the middle of our basement and it would have been tricky (not just expensive) to make the exhaust work. We had no good place to mount it outside of our house. I ended up buying the largest tank that I could get. I don't remember exactly but I think we previously had a 50 gallon tank and would run out of water. I replaced with an 80 gallon tank and that was no longer an issue.

This would be great. It's just a matter of time (and probably some of Elon's money) before the requirement to be stationary is lifted. Dish is trying to stop that so that they don't have competition.

Tankless water heaters...one of the greatest inventions ever.

Ours is off the garage entry also. Works as a mud/sand room, place to hang jackets/hats, utility sink, ironing station, storage cabinets, access to air handling unit, etc. It shares a wall with our master closet and would be really nice to have direct closet access, although we'd have to give up some closet space which is a hard no.

Like most things in retirement, I give it about a 10 minute try and if that doesn't work, I call a guy. One of a few ways that I've reduced stress in my life