Thursday, February 16, 2012 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
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White-crowned Sparrow, San Antonio NM, April 8, 2010
Phew!
It's now February 26th and I'm finally getting back here to try and catch up with these Journal posts. It's been an interesting few days.
For a while now I've been wanting to upgrade the hard drive in my old Late 2008 MacBook Pro to something larger and faster and today, the 16th, I ordered a Seagate Momentus XT 750 GB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 32 MB Cache 2.5 Inch Solid State Hybrid Drive ST750LX003 from Amazon.
The drive came in Saturday and I set about cloning the old hard drive onto it to make it my primary internal drive. That went fine but about half way through transferring my pictures from the external drive where I kept them onto the new drive the external drive died, taking half my pictures and my primary Time Machine backups with it.
Yikes!
It's taken me a week to recover to the point where I have everything under control and backed up. You can't have too many backups folks - the drive that failed was less than a year old.
Phew!
Night camp
Site 8 - LoW-HI RV Ranch, Deming NM
- This is a spacious 65 site campground with most sites offering full hookups.
- Locate LoW-HI RV Ranch on my Night Camps map
- Verizon cell phone - strong signal
- Verizon Broadband - strong signal but often slow
- Check the weather in Deming NM
Heliograph route between Fort Cummings NM and Tubac, AZ
1886 heliograph transmissions between Tubac near Nogales Arizona/Mexico, and Fort Cummings New Mexico: Joe Marques (Flagstaff) was doing some research in old Flagstaff newspapers and found something that might interest. In the Arizona Weekly Champion, Saturday August 7, 1886, page 2 column 1, it says: "A message was recently sent by the government heliograph (signalling by sunlight flashes) from Fort Cummings, N.M. to Tubac, Ariz., a distance of 400 miles, and an answer received in four hours." What a great [research] find! This was during the Geronimo Campaign of 1886, and the heliograph system at that time did indeed extend between the two stations. From Tubac, the most westerly terminus, the intermediate stations were Baldy Peak or possibly Josephine Peak just a little south of Baldy), Fort Huachuca, Antelope Spring, Emma Monk, White's Ranch, Bowie Peak (or Helen's Dome), Steins Peak, and Camp Henely (east of Fort Cummings). This means the message would have been relayed seven times, one way. It most likely was a test message, and relatively short, but I would love to know what it and the reply really said. The 1886 "airline" distance between Tubac and Fort Cummings; and of course on to Fort Cummings. I calculate the one-way distance between the two extremes as being 241 miles, with round trip of course being 482 miles.