Geeks on Tour Blog: 12/01/2018

Sunday, December 30, 2018

2018 goes out with a ROAR

We had nice quiet holidays at home. Always the perfect hostess, Jim's sister Debbie, held a wonderful Christmas day brunch at their place.

A couple days later we gave in to our itchy feet and got the Roadtrek on the road. We didn't go far, just about an hour away to a KOA that is attached to Lion Country Safari. It's a treat to go to sleep to the roar of Lions! But, mostly, we just have a need to sleep in our little cocoon.

I love the giraffes and how there is a platform so you can get up close and personal with them

Zebra butts - no two alike

Keep on Going

As it turned out, we didn't want to go back home after only one night out! Surprised? So we contacted our friends Chris and Cherie (Technomadia.com) who are living on their boat and currently docked in Sanford, about 3 hours up the road.
Perfect. It's always fun to get together with them and geek out a bit. We all love using our phones for photographs.

We didn't bother finding a campground. One thing we adore about our little camper van is that we're comfortable in just about any parking lot. So we can be right where we want to be when we wake up in the morning.
Chris and Cherie are well known in the RV community. Their business website MobileInternetInfo.com is THE go-to place for the most in-depth information on staying connected as you travel. They are also social media super-stars, with a business YouTube channel of more than 10,000 subscribers, and the personal YouTube channel with over 57,000!. They were recently chosen to host a new TV show on Public Television called The RVers. This should be good! It will be produced by the same folks that did The Aviators. The production will all be handled by an extremely talented group of professional video editors, but Chris and Cherie figure they still need to up their game on original footage, so they practiced on us while we were there. Jim admits to some gadget-envy seeing Chris' new phone camera grip and gimbal, called a Movi. Especially cool that you could use it for hand-held, or a stable platform to set it down.

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Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Home for the Holidays and a new phone

When we used to live a normal, mostly-at-home, life, we would use the holidays as a time to take a trip. For several years we would rent a houseboat and the whole extended family would spend Christmas week together on the St. John's river. Other years we would rent an RV for the week and 4 of us - me, Jim, Devon, Mom - would travel around Florida.
Now that we travel much of the time, we flip that around. The holidays is when there isn't much going on and we can hang out at home for a while. We try to take advantage of being here by doing things like going to a play at the local Performing Arts Center. This time we splurged and went to see Hamilton. We had to see what all the fuss was about. I'm glad we did. Even in the 'nose-bleed' seats the sound was fantastic. It's a good thing because the songs were sung in rap so fast you had to really concentrate to understand. Really a different type of play. I did learn a lot about our country's founders. Duels were actually a thing?!? The part of King George was really funny, "Just wait America, till you try to govern yourself - you'll learn it isn't so easy. You'll be back!"

We don't do presents. We buy ourselves whatever we really want, and I was ready for a new phone. I took advantage of a Black Friday deal for $400 off a Samsung Note 9 from Verizon. $400 off?!?! How much can a phone be? Retail is $1,000. It better be good. I have also decided that I like having my wallet/purse all combined with the phone case. This one even has a wrist strap so I can carry it without needing a huge pocket or a separate purse.

We were even inspired to do a whole show on How to choose a phone case. It was episode 158 of our What Does This Button Do YouTube show.

One fun thing that this phone does is make emojis that look like you. You open the camera app, choose the AR Emoji mode, then tap the button that says, "Create my emoji." You choose the hairstyle, glasses, etc. and you see the result. Later I realized that it automatically made a bunch of animated gifs from the emoji. How cute it this? I'll figure out how to use them one of these days.