docj

No offense intended, but I don't think I've ever watched any programming on a local channel that wasn't a major network outlet. We watch very little broadcast TV beyond the news and some commentary. Most of what we watch for entertainment is streamed. The DNS channels serve our needs quite well. The weather we get from Weather Underground and Accuweather without having to turn on the TV.

I'm not sure where you got this information. All I've ever used for an ID on a cruise is a passport. That includes an Alaska cruise on Norwegian that left out of Seattle and a Princess Cruise that left out of Southampton UK. Even if you don't have a passport, it's easier to get one than to go to SD to get a new license.

My automobile insurance increased by roughly $10/mo as a result of the move. We have Progressive.

FWIW the guy had been the owner of the business and we have no way of knowing if he still was a part owner. Everything we have been discussing is speculation and hearsay. There's no way of knowing what the truth is IMO the derogatory post I made may have gotten this guy off his butt to arrange the mail forwarding by usps. I'm sure he didn't want his bank customers to think he had stiffed his mail forwarding ones. I'm pretty sure that the mail forwarding isn't something Terri could have done on her own since it's a direct violation of usps policy. Quite honestly, all of us who were MDA customers were treated badly with respect to how this business closure was handled. I don't feel as if I owe MDA's management any more respect than they gave me!

I'll be that this isn't an "official USPS" action, but the work of a local postmaster who is trying to reduce the embarrassment resulting from a business associated with one of the town's leading citizens being unable to fulfill its responsibility to forward mail for another 6 months. If my post did anything to cause the postmaster to agree to forward the mail even though it contradicts USPS policy then IMHO the post was worthwhile. In small towns, pressure on prominent people can often achieve results.

I can't find it online, so I assume it's been removed.

Admittedly, I switched instantly last week, before the crowd, but I've gotten great service from Your Best Address. The price is a bit more per month than Terri was charging, but there's a much larger staff of people to do things. For example, there's one person who just does motor vehicle stuff. Also, the outsides of pieces of mail are actually scanned and are accessible online to you so you can see what a mail item actually looks like.- As for Terri, she provided us excellent service over the past 8 years and I have no complaints. Looking back, I think failure may well have been in trying to do everything herself and not charging customers for special services. For example, I've asked that a fair number of mail items be opened, scanned and emailed to me. That takes time but she didn't charge extra for that. Similarly, she personally would go over to motor vehicles to process registrations, etc. The only other staff in the office always seemed to be part-time and, relatively, temporary. One of the common points at which businesses fail is when they grow to where the "key person" can no longer manage all aspects of the business and is unwilling to delegate authority to others. As much as I liked Terri, she mail well have succumbed to that problem. For example, it's been reported here or in threads on other forums that she had failed to invoice some customers for extended periods of time which definitely would have messed up her cash flow. The invoices I received from Terri were always manually prepared, presumably by her. IMHO, that's time consuming and a potential source of errors. A commercial billing service would have ensured that no invoices were overlooked and would have substantially reduced her workload in return for a modest per customer monthly fee. From personal experience I can say that small businesses also fail because business owners don't fully analyze their overall cashflow. It's all too easy to feel giddy because monthly cash inflow is going well but you have to look at things from an annualized basis before you declare yourself a success. Owners working for businesses may take salary or "draws" but in either case, it's easy for an owner to take out more money than the business can withstand. If that happens the resulting cash shortfall may be deadly!

Thanks for this update. I know from personal experience that running a small business is a challenging effort. Now that we know that at least some customers weren't receiving invoices one can speculate as to what other financial issues weren't handled properly. The rumors that the tax authorities closed her down now seem more real. As a small business owner, I always tried to delay my tax payments as long as possible. If you're short of cash you might try to get away with not paying at all. That's when bad things happen.

If your new Medicare card has been issued you can print a replacement one online. Just follow the link for "send me a replacement card" and it will suggest that you print it. I printed my new card even though I haven't received it in the mail. OTOH, my wife, who is also an SD resident hasn't had her new card issued yet and can't print it online. I had no problem signing into SSA and changing my address. They have made security a bit tighter these days, but once you are online it was easy to change the address.

I've just posted a nasty review on his bank's Facebook page. I encourage others to do the same. At least we can get some revenge. I'll believe it when I see it. Terri refers to this as being a financial problem. I restate my supposition that it is a Chapter 7 bankruptcy. If that's the case, the least they should do is fess up and provide a proper explanation.

Regardless of what Terri wrote in this email, if you try to enter a USPS mail forwarding using the 110 E Center St address it will be rejected and you will receive this error message: Mail addressed to an addressee at commercial mail receiving agency (CMRA) is not forwarded through the USPS. The CMRA customer may make special arrangements for the CMRA operator to re-mail the mail with payment of new postage. A CMRA must accept and re-mail mail to former customers for at least 6 months after termination of the agency relationship. After the 6-month period, the CMRA may refuse mail addressed to a former customer. The Application for Delivery of Mail through Agent (PS Form 1583) requires an addressee and agent to comply with all applicable postal rules and regulations relative to delivery of mail through an agent. For more information on mail forwarding regulations, contact your local Postmaster. I've tried the mail forwarding as a single and as a family, with and without my mailbox number. It simply doesn't work. As most of us are aware, all these PMB addresses, including Escapees, are coded as PMBs in the online directories that USPS and financial institutions use. Clearly, the owners of MyDakotaAddress are trying to avoid the 6-month requirement described in the above paragraph. That pisses me off just as much as the no-notice termination we received this week. If the owner is a bank president, we ought to write his board of directors telling them what a creep he is.

My speculation is that the suddenness of the closure and the lack of any advance notice smacks of what happens in a business bankruptcy. No advance notice of a bankruptcy is given and, in the case of a liquidation, the doors are essentially locked the day the papers are filed. Although it may be possible to reverse a credit card charge, I wouldn't hold out any hope of other funds being refunded. All the business's resources go under the control of the bankruptcy trustee.

Thanks for the heads-up. Frankly, I am so appreciative of how supportive the staff at Your Best Address has been that cost has become a relatively minor factor. FWIW, despite Terri's endorsement of Dakota Post, Your Best Address is FMCA's preferred mail forwarding company, which is not an insignificant endorsement. YBA has extremely positive Google reviews and I was impressed that the owner personally responds to every review. I'm sure that both YBA and Dakota Post will be able to provide us "displaced persons" the support we need to get our lives back in order. A couple of things I discovered today: 1. If you have vehicles registered in SD, you can easily update the address using the MY SD Cars website. Just set up an account using your SD license number and all your vehicles will be displayed. You can then update both their mailing and permanent addresses. 2. For driver's licenses, you have several choices. If you don't care about having a license with a current address, you can simply email the Department of Public Safety (DPS) with your new address so they would know where to mail you things like traffic tickets. 😀 However, if you prefer to have a license with the proper address you can request a Duplicate/Replacement License using the DPS Duplicate/Replacement website. Be aware that you will be required to provide two pieces of mail sent to your new address (although a copy of your new, signed mail forwarding agreement may suffice) and you probably ought to sign a new Residency affidavit. I was told today by a DPS worker that if I come into the office next month to get an updated license I would need the two pieces of mail as well as a receipt for a night's lodging just like we were getting a renewed license. I didn't think to ask if this would change my renewal date, but I wouldn't be surprised if it did. We're going to be in SD anyway so it's not big deal to stop by DPS to get this done. 3. Virtually all my accounts have now been changed to the new address. You need only to update your Social Security account which will also update your Medicare account. The Social Security website makes the address change very easy. Our Medicare supplemental and Part D insurers both required phone calls rather than allow address changes online. Every other financial account we've been able to update online. I'm still quite annoyed by the abrupt way this has all come about, but there's no point getting aggravated about things outside one's control. Forget about it and move on!

I spoke with Terri yesterday. She said that there was still a chance that the business might be sold and she said that she would know that today (Thursday). I decided that I wasn't going to play around and worry about whether or not they would stay in business, so I opened an account yesterday with YourBestAddress in Sioux Falls. Tanyel (605-334-5313) is the person to talk to there and she was very helpful and efficient. They offer roughly the same services as Terri was providing at similar prices. FWIW I know for fact that MyDakotaAddress was not a sole proprietor business (at least not initially). Terri was an employee but I don't think she was an (original) owner. At the 2011 Escapade in Gillette I happened to meet a guy who identified himself as "one of the owners". He was a faculty member at an SD university, although I don't remember his name. That always gave me "confidence" that the business had some staying power. So much for my sense of confidence! I'm not sure what happened to the business but closing your doors in less than a week without any form of formal notification to customers is a dreadful way to do business. FWIW USPS requires mail forwarding services to provide forwarding of additional pieces of mail for, I believe, 6 months (at your expense) after a termination. However, if the business is no longer functioning I'm not sure what can be done about this. From USPS's perspective, this is in lieu of the fact that it doesn't provide "change of address" service to people using PMB's. One reason for going with YourBestAddress is that the Sioux Falls address allows me to retain the East Coast DNS feed from DirecTV. We aren't grandfathered into both feeds and didn't want to end up with the West Coast one which, I think, is what would happen if we chose a mail service in the western portion of the state which is on Mountain Time.

These days KOA has split itself into three subgroups of parks---Journey, Holiday and Resort. Pricing for each tier is different as are the amenities. Most of the KOA's we have stayed at are the Journey type and we've always felt their prices were fair, particularly when one takes into account the 10% savings for having a KOA card. Furthermore, each year we get at least a couple of free nights by using our "reward points."

Our PMB address in SD is the address the licensing people would use if they needed to send me something. But pretty much everything I need from them is available online.

My comment was in no way directed at your Foretravel, but, rather, at the implication that your friends with Beavers had full wiring diagrams for their MH's. It does appear that better documentation may have existed for Beavers built prior to the company's acquisition by SMC, but thereafter the documentation became more generic and of less value. I have a chassis manual for my MH and that's about the only document worth retaining.

I have a 2000 Beaver purchased from an owner who appeared to possess every piece of documentation that came with the coach but there definitely was no wiring diagram for the 120V circuitry.

We've had DirecTV DNS for >7 years and have never been asked to recertify our eligibility. We get local channels at our "home base" in south TX. Some people claim that if you have DNS you're not supposed to get local channels, but we've always had ours and we have changed the service address a couple of times over the 7 years. However, in recent years we've left the address set for our home base even when we were traveling because I was always nervous that someone would try to shut down our locals. However, I can't advise you with respect any changes to the DirecTV TOS.

It all depends on how much security you wish to have. As with pretty much any router, using a WiFiRanger results in Network Address Translation (NAT) which means that the externally visible IP addresses of your devices aren't their actual addresses on your internal network. You can always add protection in addition to that. Personally, I run Kaspersky Internet Security on my computers which provides a bi-directional firewall. In addition I use Malwarebytes Professional. Safesurf is sort of a "VPN light". If you are worried about someone seeing your network traffic, as conceivably could be the case if you were using a campground wifi, Safesurf encrypts your data and sends it up the secure "pipe" that every WiFiRanger router creates for itself to connect with the main WiFiRanger server in Idaho. It's not a "true VPN" but it has a similar affect. When you use Safesurf your devices will have IP addresses that identify them as being in Idaho. I hope this answers your question. Each person has to decide how much security they think is necessary to protect their own information. Joel (AKA docj)

X2. We own a smart Samsung UHD TV with very disappointing software. We get far better performance from the Roku we connected to it. Next time I'll save the ~$50 and buy a dumb TV.

I think it is far more likely that your neighbor was doing something like using Kodi to stream illicitly obtained material. When you connect to the kind of peer-sharing sites that support that sort of thing, anything can happen. There is absolutely no reason to scare people with unsubstantiated references such as this. Streaming through the major streaming services such as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu should be free of any risks to your device.

Just to be very clear, we have been asked by exactly ONE credit card company with respect to wanting an address other than our SD PMB. We gave that CC company our daughter's Maryland address and they were totally satisfied. They didn't care whose address it was, all they wanted was an address they could use to fill in a blank on a form. IMHO, don't overwork that issue. It's not as serious as you may think. It's happened once to us in ~8 years of full-timing.

It's not that the TV doesn't have a way for you to enter the wifi password, it's that the TV can't handle what is called a "splash screen" which is the pop-up at the beginning of wifi session. That's the screen on which you agree to terms and conditions and, possibly, enter your name and site number.

I have a 43" Samsung 4K Smart TV and when I use it for streaming I almost always use the Roku that I have attached to it. My son, who is a computer scientist and techie-geek explains it this way: "the apps in smart TVs are rarely updated by their manufacturers and almost always are inferior to those available from Roku, FireStick, AppleTV, etc. which are updated continuously." I get far better performance from my Roku than I do from the TV itself so I wouldn't worry about the issue you report. My suggestion is to use your FireStick and not worry about the TV. If you are insistent on wanting to use the TV's apps, then, without making this a commercial post, you can buy a router, such as a WiFiRanger, that can handle the pop-up log-in situation for the TV.