As Virginia and I headed to the office this morning, we noticed that the Dona Luisa was back at the dock after delivering containers to Curacao yesterday.

Today I again spent all day at the office/studio. I was studying up on a way to use the pager output on the security system to contact a cell phone and leave a text message. It appears the differences between the two protocols are too great to allow that to even happen. I also found out, from various user’s experiences documented on the internet, that the pager output may not even work to call about an alarm. We will make an attempt to test this out tomorrow. We had hoped to use this to avoid the ‘comm failure’ error that always occurs with the other method of ‘phoning’ an alarm.

On the way home for lunch, we went by Warehouse Bonaire Supermarket to get some milk, cereal and a couple more things to just tide us through til Saturday. They did not have milk (except for a big can of powdered milk) and had only the more expensive cereals. After lunch, we then went by Cultimara Supermarket, which tends to have slightly higher prices, to get what we needed.

A shipment of muffin fans had arrived this morning and Joe Barker asked me to install one in the amplifier assembly for the Intelsat satellite dish. This fan had a problem getting water into it and failing because of the high dish angle required closer to the equator. At higher latitudes in the U.S. the dish is tilted down more and the water runs off, but here it runs into the fan shroud.

When it failed they did not have the right size fan, so two smaller ones were installed instead. An extra shroud was built to help keep out water.

I had to remove both shrouds, remove the two fans, and install and connect power to the new fan. Fortunately the fan voltage is only 12 volts, so all this could be done with power on. When putting the shrouds back on, I added additional weather stripping on the original shroud and some silicon seal on the extra shroud to help keep out most rain water.

Joe asked me to look into the cost of an internet module for the security system and whether it would be useful. After quite a bit of research, I discovered this module is mainly a way to use the internet to contact the alarm monitoring center if phone lines are not available. It would also allow the user to program the system over the internet, but not allow the internet to directly report an alarm to the user. The cost for the additional equipment would approach $1,000, which is 4 or 5 times the cost of the basic system itself! Why am I getting the impression that this system is designed to give job security to the installers and monitoring services of these systems?!

We got home a little after 6pm and the sun was almost setting, so we decided to forego our evening swim. We did have a special treat later this evening — homemade Coca-Cola floats.