Updates And Follow-Ups On A Few Of My August Blog’s

It’s September already! How about that? Won’t be long before we turn our thoughts towards heading south across the Medicine Line towards sunny Palm Springs for another season at the Sands RV & Golf Resort. Normally, August is a pretty quiet month for us but not this year. The big event, of course, was ‘The Wedding’ and the fun of having so many of our family home for a week. It was an unusually busy blog time for me too and I never got a chance to follow-up on some things so now I will.

Mason really enjoyed attending his first ever family Wedding

In my post Do You Have Medical Insurance For Your Dog Or Cat?, I wrote about a company called Trupanion that insures pets by paying up to 90% of the costs for most Veterinarian services plus medications. As per anything to do with pets, RV’ers responded with many comments and a lot of questions too. The biggest concern was, of course, the cost of insurance. I said I’d do a quick check using our Rylie as a “guinea dog” and so I filled out the Trupanion web’s Online Quote.

What I got back kind of shocked me because according to information I had read about Trupanion the average cost for dog insurance ran about $40 a month. But, when I put in Rylie’s info it came back at $78 per month or $936 a year. That’s too high for me as I could put $1,000 a year into a special savings account to allow us to self-insure Rylie. I know I probably won’t do that but I still think close to $1,000 a year is a little too high. We’ll just continue to do what we’ve always done – pay up!!

A Day In Cowichan

Another few comments I found interesting were the concerns about bandwidth use relating to the above video clip in my blog about the Beauty of Cowichan Bay where we live. The clip was 5 1/2 minutes long which is much longer than I ever like to use but then it wasn’t my video clip. Bandwidth use is especially important to RV’ers as so many are on a 5GB cap limit. Here are some average numbers pertaining to video clips:

Some facts about Video Clip Bandwidth Use

5GB	5,000MB
Avg. Video Clip Bandwidth Usage per Minute	1MB
“Once Upon a Day…Cowichan” video clip length	5.5 minutes
Bandwidth Used	5.5MB
Percentage of 5GB cap used	0.11%

The next time you run across a video clip embedded in a blog or any other site you can approximate your bandwidth use by remembering the bandwidth use of an average YouTube video equals 1MB per minute. Plus that, your 5GB cap is equal to 5,000MB’s.

Another event that I promised to report back on but never did was August 12 Update Tuesday. In case you’ve forgotten this it was easy to do as it was a non-event. This was the Windows 8.1 Update 2 and by now all of you who have Windows 8.1 on your computers with automatic updates turned on will have it. I didn’t report back on this because there was nothing to report. It doesn’t mean to say it was no good as it most likely was but it was all “under the hood” stuff. It’s likely the last we’ll see until Window 9 next spring!

As every Canadian knows by now Tim Horton’s Donuts is now officially part of the Burger King Chain – what a revolting development that was! Nothing much will change at Timmy’s we hope but unfortunately for middle-class American taxpayers they’ll have to foot the bill for this tax dodge. What a whopper!

All Ferguson, MO police officers are now wearing mandatory body-cams!

I wrote about events surrounding the tragic events in Ferguson, MO a few times in August. Now, police in the St. Louis suburb where a white officer shot and killed an unarmed 18-year-old black teenager have started wearing body cameras. The body cams were donated to the police department by two companies and each officer will get one to use. Video is going to be an invaluable tool in determining why an officer acted the way he or she did - and whether he or she acted appropriately.

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