Thursday, July 14, 2011 Lethbridge

6:20 am

The temperature is +13 C, with a high predicted of +23 C.

From the Environment Canada website: Today Mainly cloudy. 30 percent chance of showers early this morning. Clearing this afternoon. Wind west 30 km/h gusting to 50. High 23. UV index 8 or very high. Tonight Clear. Wind west 30 km/h gusting to 50. Low 10. Normals Max: 26°C Min: 11°C.

5:00 PM Geocaching

I spent a good part to the day playing with my Darmin Montana 600 unit.

I began by charging the battery in the Montana. This took almost an hour.

Much of the time involved getting the two maps onto both my Mac and the Montana.

First the Backroads BC and Alberta map on the micro-SD card. There were a few unexected screen displays (such as the Montana having 2 separate icons - one corresponding to the unit and the second corresponding to the micro-SD card embedded in the unit). It would have been easier to accept if the name on the second unit was something like the name of the map on the card, but the name on my screen was "No Name" so I was not sure that everything was working properly. Another problem had to do with an unlocking password of 20 some characters. I used a copy-and-paste for this since it was so long and it didn't work. I phoned tech support and they were stumped as it was clearly the correct password. I then decided to try typing it in and that worked just fine. Go figure. The download of the map for use on my Mac took over 2 hours. I think this map is now working properly on both the Montana and the Mac. There are no updates for this at the moment.

Now to discuss the City Navigator North America NT map which came on a DVD disc. It only took about 20 minutes to transfer this map to the Mac. Good. But I had a devil of a time figuring out how to get a copy onto the Montana. It took a separate program called Garmin MapInstall. I also tried a program called Garmin MapManager which didn't work. After another couple of hours it seemed to work but the name of the map was just a collection of the names of about 6 states. Nonetheless I think the entire North America map is now in the Montana unit. I will do more testing of this tomorrow.

I then spent about 20 minutes with the Profile feature on the Montana which seems to switch between the two maps with just a couple of taps on the screen. Once again, I need to test this further before I am sure I have this under control.

9:30 PM Literature

Throughout the day, while waiting for some of the maps to download, I read a few more short stories from "Ward No. 6 and Other Stories" by Anton Chekov. Here are the titles: "The Pipe", "The Princess", "Neighbours", and "The Grasshopper". Both "The Princess" and "Neighbours" were hard hitting. "The Grasshopper" would have been much better with a different title - this one gave away the ending.