piku
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Re: American Eagle, Country Coach, Newmar
Yep :) We bought a 1999 42' U320. we took delivery on New Years Eve. It was a hectic experience because it wasn't the best dealer and I don't think they were planning on fixing all of the issues that we identified. But they did and we ended up paying much closer to asking then I'd like. But it is a beautiful coach with crazy awesome features and has a brand new full body paint done in 2010 by the Foretravel factory. It looks like a million bucks. The first owner was dilligent in maintenance and spent a lot of money chasing things down. The second owner, the one I bought from was not proactive but was willing to throw a ton of money at the coach reactively which sufficed. All in all the coach was unmaintained from 2011-2013 but everything seems to have survived. The way it drives is amazing. It's like a night and day difference between the bagel (our old winnebago) and this thing. Silence, smooth ride, and corners very well. It's a cummins ISM 450HP. Most hills it doesn't even want to shift out of 6th gear. It definitely hits all my bullet points. Only real issue I found so far is that on these 42' models (of which there are very few in the 90's) the front a/c sits beside the fridge. The exhaust fan causes a back draft into the fridge vent (up on the roof) which causes the fridge to stop working right. I put two oil cans in the way and viola fridge started working right again, so I'll have to install some kind of baffle.531Views0likes0CommentsRe: Thoughts on a second vehicle while fulltiming
We're in a similar boat. We have 3 cars and a motorhome. One car is a barely street legal race car that stays where we tend to spend a lot of time in the summer in storage. Another car we've been trying to sell but seems unsellable. It's nice to have 2 cars where we're at. We have a Lexus GX470 as our toad. It does well and fits the family. Looking forward I plan to sell the unsellable car and buy a small crotch rocket motorcycle which I will hang off the back of the lexus with a hitch hauler. Perfect solution for me since the second vehicle only ever has me in it anyway.485Views0likes0CommentsRe: Full-timing on contract CAD work
I think the logistics of working remotely doing CAD work is pretty similar to programming or really anything. There are two types of clients. Those that are comfortable with remote work because they prefer working remotely themselves and those that are not. You will always have endless struggle with the nonremote people. For instance one of my clients will give me no work and interact very little remotely despite prodding from me. Once I fly in though, he has a laundry list of stuff for me to do and constant lunches, dinners and onsite consulting. He just can't get the remote thing down. Another works for a company that has an entirely remote workforce. He himself is never in the same place for very long. The remote thing is no problem at all and he's very good at communicating and working around the various issues. The other problem I had is that you really have to handhold people through webinar software. I tried to use google hangouts to do a presentation and it bombed. I ended up having to use gotomeeting under windows and thus wasn't able to complete the entire presentation. They had "social media" blocked with websense and it ruined my plans ;) I suggest you tell your proposed client base that you are or will be out of the area for X period of time. You can really be there but lie. See how it works. See how they handle the various intracacies of working remotely. It really involves effort from both sides.559Views0likes0CommentsRe: Our blog, Geeky Nomads
JimM68 wrote: As for your plog, I did read it, or at least everything I could get at. While there are previous/next buttons on may articles, they only go back so far, not to the beginning. I'd love to read the beginning of your story. I know it's out there, at least 6 posts that are there but I cannot figure out how to get to them. The entire site needs some work! But this is the general idea. There is a menu bar across the top with categories. There are blog posts which is just me making general noise, Campground reviews, relocation reviews which are places we've gone to that we consider relocating to, vacation spot reviews which are towns that are more tourist oriented and maintenance and mods where I will post about any repair work or how to guides we create. That is ALL of the content of the site. The beginning was the post on Tionesta, PA. That was our first outing. In terms of the very beginning - picking an RV, selling the house, etc. I've yet to post about all of that but believe me I have plenty to say. I've just been concentrating on making actual money first and that seems to be going a bit better now that I can pay some attention to the blog again. But I do realize the template is terrible, the comment/next previous stuff is terrible, etc. The fonts are too big (hey maybe my older demographic would appreciate that). But it's all functional and easy to maintain now and that's what's important for now. If you click on an image it brings up a nice slideshow. That and the images on the front page are not the easiest things to implement in Drupal (the blog software). It has been a learning experience. And as for being a bully. I certainly hope you didn't mean me. Frankly I was being serious and didn't mean anything bad. A forum is the best possible thing you can run on the internet. A forum with good traffic is largely self maintaining with volunteer moderators doing the lions share of the work and ad revenues are a good supplement due to all the repeat traffic. The users really do generate all the content and you as the operator really do get to tell them how to post. It was tounge in cheek but at the same time it's reality. Spend an hour sorting and uploading pictures and pecking out a blog article that you can be pretty sure will make you very little if any money and you'll see the difference ;) The same phenomena can be seen on a blog though when it reaches critical mass too. Users fight for you to post their (well written) articles to get a link on the front page back to their site boosting search engine rankings. The comment sections on each post can become something special in and amongst itself. Look at http://slashdot.org as a prime example of this. No work is done to run that site except some poor editing ;)458Views0likes0CommentsRe: Our blog, Geeky Nomads
The question is - how do I make it more interesting? I am going to change to using my iphone to do the feed now. The image will be much larger. No more rear camera, that was just silly. Additionally the resulting timelapse movies will be in HD or something closer to it which will be nice. A lot of people I know who might check in on the blog will probably never make a trip across the country, so the idea was to show them a little bit of what we're seeing. I'd like to find some kind of liveblogging iphone app/drupal module so that I can just randomly upload pics of things we see without too much effort.196Views0likes0Comments
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