(no subject)

[meanfreepath]

Julian graduated from high school on Tuesday; congrats to him.

I got issued one of the new Delaware County fire pagers tonight... it's a Motorola Advisor II digital alphanumeric pager that will eventually replace the old low-band, voice-only Minitor system. The word on the new pagers, however, is that reception is problematic (as it also was for the Minitors). The other complaint is that they're not very loud. Furthermore, these do not have an amplifying base station that you could keep on your night table, unlike the Minitors. So, I think one's best bet is still to rely on the honker to get up at night. I have heard suggestions that at night one put the pager on vibrate mode in an empty can, and presumably the rattling around would be noisy, but I'm not sure what the can would do electromagnetically to its reception.

Edit: A RIT call to Broomall this morning provided my first test of the system. The pager beeping woke me up; I fumbled around for it, wondering why the honker wasn't going off, until it did a few seconds later. I guess it's in whatever way the new pagers are activated versus the old low-band tone system, which sets off the honker. It does take several seconds for the tones of a particular company to be sounded.

Comments

[obcordate.livejournal.com]

You could create some sort of Rube Goldberg contraption, involving a few feet of string, thumbtacks, a plastic spork, a toy helicopter, a 3.5 oz lead weight, some delicious black bean paste cakes, a large styrafoam bat and, finally, your poor, sleepy head.