American mailboxes

Mine has a flag that's connected to the mailbox door. When the door goes down, the flag goes up.

Of course not. They have a route that takes them most of the day to traverse, so somebody's going to be first, and somebody else is going to be last. My mail arrives around noon, more or less.

Cindy Hamilton

Reply to
Cindy Hamilton
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They don't let the real stupid ones out... When I was driving OTR, I'd sometimes load Avon cosmetics. They used common carriers for the long haul and the USPS for the final mile delivery. Nothing like arriving at a USPS facility at 4 AM. Can you say 'sheltered workshop'. I mean that literally.

Reply to
rbowman

For years here my postal address was RR2 box 109. They finally standardized it to the normal grid address.

Reply to
gfretwell

Ok if your porch is sheltered from the rain.

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

Because they've told me.

No. You misunderstood me completely. Nobody gets important mail every day, so they don't check it every day.

And your postman can?

I didn't whine, I asked how the system worked, but your stupid answers in this post have proved I should have done.

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

Even worse, he has to go 0.4 miles to check his own mail?

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

Some postmen here have been stupid enough to put things in the recycling wheelybin. If the bin is collected before the owner spots the package....

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

Same here in North Carolina. For years mine was Rt. 3 box 242EE. This was on a country road. The road had a name and when the county went to the 911 phone system every one had to have a street address. Most started at the start of the road and the numbers went up about every tenth of a mile. The address was then changed to 2345 Saw Road . Being about 2.3 miles from where the road started.

Reply to
Ralph Mowery

It it well enough except when there's too much wind. Also there's a hedge so the package isn't visible from the street.

I may want to set up some kind of switch that turns on a light if anyone steps on the porch. Preferably one that can tell the difference between delivery people and cats.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

I grew up on "Emory Lloyd Road" (named after my great grandfather). Now it's CR231.

Reply to
Mark Lloyd

I guess that's one of the disadvantages of living in a wider open space. But then you do get more land to yourself.

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

You've probably noticed some people here know about when the mail carrier arrives. It's just a ritual to check for mail daily. My parents were avid readers. Getting the daily paper(s) was a big deal. There were also the monthly magazines. I think we got at least three farm related magazines. Getting the mail daily wasn't any different than feeding the cattle and feathered critters, picking eggs, etc.

Reply to
Dean Hoffman

Per Ralph Mowery:

Last year I stumbled on a global coordinates system called "What3Words".

Basically, somebody has figured out how to identify every 3-meter square on earth by assigning it 3 English-Language(?) words.

My front door seems to be roughly at purple.snippets.whispering.

My side/rec-room door looks to be close to tulips.countries.amused.

The entrance to my driveway seems to be greyhound.stems.spectacular.

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Seems like, logically, there has to be some way to integrate it with Google Earth, but I have not been able to find it yet.

Maybe somebody else has ?

Reply to
(PeteCresswell)

For some reason most people who fit those leave them on the default settings, which means they detect anything within half a mile, including on the road, and stay on for only 5 seconds. So if you stand at the door, they go on and off repeatedly.

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

What a fun life....

Reply to
James Wilkinson Sword

Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people have told you they don't check their mail boxes every day. You must be one busy troll to know when people do and do not check their mail box.

How do you know they don't get important mail every day? Let me guess, you ASKED those hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people. You're probably just nosey and looking in their outside mail boxes to see what they're receiving. Heaven forbid you're lifting up that flap on their front door slot and peeking inside.

Don't be deliberately stupid. I've already told you my mail box is on the front porch, I don't have a mail slot. Reading compre- hension is not a strong suit with you I see.

My answers nor anyone else's have been stupid. We've explained to you but you insist on being an obtuse jerk.

Reply to
ItsJoanNotJoann

A guy at work has his front door wired up to his smart phone. It alerts him when someone approaches the door. He gets video and audio feed and can also give a delivery person instructions if need be.

Reply to
rbowman

Per Mark Lloyd:

Security equipment shops have mats that close a circuit when stepped on.

... and maybe they have other stuff that might work better...

Reply to
(PeteCresswell)

Per rbowman:

I suspect that may have already happened. A year or two ago I looked up the words for my driveway entrance and recorded them in my address book.

When writing my post, I tried doing a lookup on those words and it failed.

For emergence response, I am surprised that there aren't cell phone apps available that will inject data-to-speech for the phone's current GPS coordinates into a phone call.... seems like one of those bread-and-butter/no-brainer type niches.

Reply to
(PeteCresswell)

Why go from data to speech? Your call goes to a PSAP controller, a piece of hardware. We get a data stream, over a RS-232 serial line in the old days or some sort of socket connection now. When a dispatcher picks up the phone, we create a 'call for service' screen with the location we've gotten from the data stream. The complainant's location is already filled in for most calls. 39.203453 -92.79823 doesn't mean much to most people, so we take the coordinates and find the nearest street address.

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The slowdown for Phase II implementation was the cell phone manufacturers. It costs money to add a GPS receiver to the device and tie it in. Some of them dragged their feet and paid the fines for selling non-compliant devices but everyone is on board now. The stream often includes a quality value for the coordinates.

NextGen expands that capability to handling SMS messages, photos, or the other stuff that can be sent with a modern phone. That's been slowly coming with a lot of vaporware and hand waving. It takes a coordinated between the carrier, the PSAP controller manufacturer, and the CAD (computer aided dispatch) vendor. There is no real standard that's honored so it has to be implemented on a site by site basis.

The article mentions USNG. That's sort of a UTM derivative.

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That can be converted to/from UTM or latitude/longitude algorithmically, unlike what3words. I added that capability to our system years ago. I'd have to look at the Subversion log to say for sure. afaik, none of our sites ever used it, including the federal government ones.

There are a lot of schemes, proposed standards, working committees, and so forth. After the chaos of 9/11 there was a push to get everybody using the same standards to allow interoperability. Ain't happened yet. For me, it's been job security as I write yet another interface to some third party using their own little data schema and protocol.

Reply to
rbowman

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