Travels and Thoughts

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WEEK 46 2005

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Saturday 19 November 2005

Saturday - we went to the wild animal park, and got a picture taken of me with a bunch of lorikeets standing on my arm. These are parrot like critters, who drink sugar water stuff out of little thimble sized cups that they sell there for $2.00. But it's worth it - it's pretty cool to find oneself covered in dazzingly birds.

Saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (gratis). I was down near the front, but it was such a big theater that it turned out to be a pretty good seat. I'd say it was an OK movie, but it lacked the sparkle of the earlier movies, for me. But there is so much going on that I think it's hard to make these later books into movies. They stay very true to the book, but they lack the time and resources to do the expositions of the plot nuances that the book has.

I liked the old Dumbledore better.

Friday 18 November 2005

Friday - my friends mother had broadband, cable, installed. She also had a technician from Best Buy lined up to install a wireless router and such, but I did that for her. It was a nice WRT54G and I've done several of those now. But there was, as there always is, some problem. Though the laptops could see the WAP they couldn't connect. I tried all my tricks, but no luck. I told my hostess that it was probably a bad WAP unit, and went to bed frustrated.

Upon waking up in the morning I recalled that she said one of the neighbors was a network wizard, had wireless, but wouldn't share his password (the cad). He had his SSID broadcast turned off, so there wasn't any way to check using his stuff. And it came to me: these geeky types sometimes add more power to their systems - what if it was interfering with the default WRT54G channel? So I changed it from channel 6 to channel 2, and voila!, we were communicating.

She'd also bought a Dell 9200 laptop, at a pawn shop, for $700, to replace her aging duron laptop. Wow. It was fast, about the snappiest responding laptop I've ever used, including my own. It also had built in wireless G, with WPA, and was a snap to configure. I horsed around with the older laptop for a while, trying to get the old wireless B pcmcia card to understand WPA, and then we just went and bought a G card (actually and A/G card) for $25. And that worked fine.

Thursday 17 November 2005

Thursday - on vacation. Again. Heh. Down to a friends' place for the weekend. Listening to the audio tape of 'Around the World In 80 Days' on the drive. It's actually pretty good, once you get by the narrator's rather odd accent, and the rather odd characterization of Fogg by Verne. Even the 12 year old boy in the mini-van, whom one would expect to be completely engrossed in his new PSP, would chuckle at certain passages, so it was holding his interest as well.

The decision of this obsessively routine-bound man to travel about the world just doesn't ring true. I seem to recall reading a SciFi book some years back, The Other Log of Phineas Fogg, which purportedly told the true story of why Fogg went on his around the world trip. It portrayed Fogg and Aouda as agents of two warring galactic civilizations, if I recall rightly. But true love, as in Verne's version, wins out...

Wednesday 16 November 2005

Wednesday - acckkk. I'll be commuting again...

Tuesday 15 November 2005

Tuesday - I need to talk to my current guy, and let him know the news, precisely. He knows something is in the work, but I need to wrap things up nicely, he's a good guy.

Also he emailed to say that I forgot to invoice him for October. Sheesh.

Monday 14 November 2005

Monday - I'd interviewed for a new job the other day. Not really expecting to get it, I went on vacation, and when I got back there were lots of messages from the company interviewing. So, I called back today, and, to make the story short, start as a contractor employee out at NASA next week, on the 21st. I was thinking of December 1st, or even January 1st, but they were in a hurry.

Sheesh. I'll miss working with the cats...

Sunday 13 November 2005

Sunday - still tired.

Update: [11-15-2005]
My friend Tim suggests that I was being particularly lazy in not posting my trip pics. Well, he knows me, and he's probably right. But I was very tired when I got home, and there was some sort of bug at work as well, I think. So, here were are, a week or two, behind the times...

Therefore I am updating last weeks page, and this weeks page, and next weeks page, as I get to them. Generally I don't do that, but it beats trying to do everything now.

Picture of the Week

Photo Notes: Just below the south rim, on the South Kaibab Trail, heading down. The sun is up, but the trail, and much of the Grand Canyon, is still in shade.

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