Yes, but you would need a bigger raft.

Hey, watch it wonton. (See what I did there)

Good afternoon, Yard.

Randy, I'm sure you understood that I meant you would catch bigger fish than Huck Finn would.

Good morning Yard, and especially to my friend whose name in Chinese is TuFatMach.

Afternoon Yard!

I figured I would pass on some information that might be helpful.

After our power outage I picked up a small power station from Goal Zero and a folding 100 watt solar panel. I picked up an aftermarket 8mm adapter so I didn't have to spend almost double the cash for a Goal zero panel.

I could not get the solar panel to work with the power station. My charge controller was saying the battery was less than 3 volts and went into a default mode. I used my multi meter to check and the panel was putting out 23.4 volts before it hit the charge controller. I then hooked it up to an ATV battery and it worked exactly like It should. No matter what I tried it wouldn't send power to the power pack.

I spent a whole lot of time looking at the internet for an answer and the consensus from lots of posts was the polarity was swapped. Not the case on this one. One post on an obscure forum mentioned both the solar panel and power station had charge controllers and they wouldn't work together so you have to bypass one of them.

The solar panel is really easy to bypass by disconnecting the mc4 connectors and putting the charging adapter directly to it. The power station controller is internal and I wasn't tearing into it.

It worked just fine. It's overcast today and I'm not in prime sunlight but the panel is easily charging the powerstation.

On the off chance you get a similar setup. Keep that in mind. It might save you hours of troubleshooting and trying to remember how to use a multimeter.

Boy, it’s a good thing my name doesn’t translate into Chinese. BUT if i5 did! I’m sure it would translate into One Awesome Dawg.

I can’t get a break!

About a week ago my debit card got hacked, again. Got a new card and TODAY it was hacked, TWICE!

Went to the bank and got a new new card. Well I think I figured out what happened. The bank is having problems with the sign on portion of the website. It appears it is in the section that matches your password and authorization picture together. Well I remember a couple days ago I signed in to check our account status and it showed a different picture. I didn’t realize this until after I typed in my password and it failed to log on. I tried it a second time and was successful. I guess when I signed on with the wrong picture it was just like sending my debit card number and password to the open internet.

So, if your cards have something similar, PAY ATTENTION TO YOUR SIGN ON INFORMATION. It could save you a lot of headaches, let alone money. Thankfully we have a fraud alert where it notifies us anytime a charge of $1.00 or more is put on the card.

The banks are not above making mistakes, that's for sure. We were getting monthly paper statements in the mail and noticed that you could read the account balance due to improper folding of the statements. We notified the bank and they said they would correct the problem. Next month's statement had the same problem, so I took the statement to the bank (local branch). They said they would get the problem corrected. Just to be sure, I called the bank's out of state headquarters and told them the history of the problem ; they got it corrected.

Sometime ya gotta boil the water to make the tea.

There you go again with your Chinese connection.


Good afternoon Yard.

Ah man.