Day: October 31, 2022

TMP — Battery Life

Fandango12 Comments

Every Monday, Paula Light, with her The Monday Peeve prompt, gives us an opportunity to vent or rant about something that pisses us off. My peeve today is: batteries that don’t last.

I have an August Home WiFi-enabled smart lock on my front door. It’s a pretty neat little device. Installing it on my front door was a piece of cake, taking less than 30 minutes from start to finish. Now I never need a key to lock or unlock my front door. I have an app on my iPhone that I can use to unlock and lock my front door at the touch of a finger. It even recognizes me if I’m outside and within 10 feet of the front door and it automatically unlocks as I approach it without my even having to use my iPhone. It’s like magic.

One of the reason I got the August Home smart lock is because my son has one at his place and he loves it. And I love mine as well. Except that its battery life sucks.

I received an email notification on Saturday that my August Home smart lock batteries at my front door “are almost completely drained. Please change them immediately.” I had gotten a similar email on September 5th and changed the batteries then, less than two months ago!

My son says the batteries on his August Home smart lock last for almost a year, so why were mine burning out after not even two months?

I found the answer when I Googled “August Home battery life.” It seems that since my son bought his smart lock, the engineers at August introduced a new model, which is the one I purchased. It’s the first August model with the CR123 battery. The team at August estimates the lock’s batteries should last three to six months, versus the longer lifespan of six months to a year promised for the older, AA battery models.

I wouldn’t even mind if the batteries lasted three to six months, especially since two CR123 batteries cost about the same as a dozen AA batteries. But two months? Seriously?

The first thought I had after finding out that the latest, “new and improved” model of the August Home smart lock’s performance, at least from a battery life perspective, was that the August Home engineers and WordPress happiness engineers have a lot in common when it comes to introducing new features and functionality.

Share Your World — 10/31/2022

Fandango20 Comments
Share Your World

Happy Halloween. Di, at Pensitivity101, is once again sitting in for Melanie this week for the Share Your World prompt.

If you were a ghost, who would you haunt, and why?

I’d be the ghost of Christmases past, present, and future and would haunt Donald Trump.

If broomsticks were legitimate modes of transport, would you like one?

Only if the broomstick came equipped with a comfortably cushioned seat.

Would you cook in a cauldron?

We generally cook for two people, so cooking in a cauldron seems that it would be a bit overkill, so to speak.

Have you ever had your fortune told?

Other than occasionally reading my horoscope or the message inside a Chinese fortune cookie, no, I’ve never had my fortune told.

Who would you like to say thank you to?

Thank you to all of you who read my blog and like and comment on my posts. You make my day every day.

Blogging Insights — Success

Fandango20 Comments

It’s Monday and Dr. Tanya is back with her weekly Blogging Insights prompt. She provides us with a quote about blogging or writing and asks us to express our opinion about said quote.

This week’s quote is from Jeremy Schoemaker, a web entrepreneur.

“I think I am about 5 for 500 when it comes to successful ideas versus flops.”

I’m not sure if this quote has much to do with writing or blogging. I suppose when you’re talking about money-making schemes, if 495 out of 500 ideas end up hitting being flops, that might be okay if 5 out of 500 are hugely successful. But if I thought only 1% of my ideas for blog posts were successful, I’d find some other way to spend my time.

To me, successful ideas, when it comes to blogging, are those ideas that result in posts that I’m proud of, that readers seem to enjoy, and which engage readers enough for them to like and/or comment on them. Using that criteria as a guideline, I would hope that my idea success rate is better than 1%.

Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge #191

Fandango10 Comments

Welcome to Fandango’s Flash Fiction Challenge. Each week I will be posting a photo I grab off the internet and challenging bloggers to write a flash fiction piece or a poem inspired by the photo. There are no style or word limits.

The image below is from shutterstock.com

For the visually challenged writer, the photo shows a woman sitting crosslegged on the floor in what looks like an art classroom and she’s painting something, perhaps a still life that includes a blue-green tea kettle.

If this week’s image inspires you and you wish to participate, please write your post, use the tag #FFFC, and link back to this post. I hope it will generate some great posts.

Please create a pingback to this post or manually add your link in the comments.

FOWC with Fandango — Harmony

Fandango22 Comments
FOWC

It’s October 31, 2022. Welcome to Fandango’s One-Word Challenge (aka, FOWC). I will be posting each day’s word just after midnight Pacific Time (U.S.).

Today’s word is “harmony.”

Write a post using that word. It can be prose, poetry, fiction, non-fiction. It can be any length. It can be just a picture or a drawing if you want. No holds barred, so to speak.

Once you are done, tag your post with #FOWC and create a pingback to this post if you are on WordPress. Please check to confirm that your pingback is there. If not, please manually add your link in the comments.

And be sure to read the posts of other bloggers who respond to this prompt. Show them some love.