The Time Sink

Shelley and I hit the summer bonus round yesterday and didn't even realize it! Brad had spent the night over at my sister's place after some 'night fishing' and Daniel ended up at a friend's house and out for pizza. I'd just gotten up from a nap and Shelley was putting some asparagus in the over to bake (heck, I don't know; I don't eat the stuff) when we realized we were child free at dinner time. ...and that we had coupons from a local restaurant we were saving for just such an occasion! Whoohooo, dinner for two sans kids!

I'm working on 'low key' this week in an attempt to relax enough to enjoy our upcoming vacation. (Long time readers can stop laughing anytime; they know I don't even start to wind down until four or five days into things...)

...but I have the computer 'stuff', the reading material and most of the minor things ready to go. And Shelley has much of the sundries stacked up for me to pack. I think about all we really have to do is pack the clothes...

Getting closer... I spent almost all day yesterday away from the office picking up stock to make sure the shelves would be full of sundries while we're away. And most of the night trying to keep the guys away from Shelley so she could have a moment to collect her thoughts on what she had left to do.

I spent the last few hours of Wednesday evening/night loading the van as best I could with the travel goods. Shelley did one heck of a job to have as much of the "Stuff" we needed to take along (sundries and the Costco bulk goods) gathered and ready to load...

She also had darned near everything that she could get to packed up; about the only things left to deal with this morning are the toothbrushes and the last minute laundry items. ...but if we keep adding clothes and such, we're going to have to look into one of those roof-rack cargo pods! Man, that was a lot of stuff...

Ah, remember the days of guerilla connecting? For those of you who only know this thing called broadband, that was when you would dial in to Compuserve at 300 baud, grab your mail, log off, process the mail, write responses, dial in again, send your mail, and log off again. ...all to save the minutes of connectivity. 1200 helped, but still, time equaled money...

...and it still does for those of us on dialup if you don't have an "unlimited" plan. ...or if you are outside your primary area and connectivity is a problem. ...which it became for me last night when I found out the 'local' (not long distance, but not a freebie) number would connect but not allow a login from the lashup I brought over to the coast. And it's the modem rack here that is the problem: I can hit the Fresno number (long distance) just fine and at decent speeds, but this one hangs on the login.

So... For now I'll be logging in, getting mail, logging out, answering mail, writing posts, dialing in, uploading posts, sending mail, getting mail, logging out... Well, you get the drift. Chat may not be all that much of an opportunity. Well, okay, maybe once or twice...

I'll be giving tech support a call later today, but I'm not expecting much: I just cannot see a level one understanding I need access to a modem rack with Rockwell chipset modems rather than Lucent chipset. ...and that is likely the deal here: in the past I'd swap out the modem in the laptop to they Zoom product when I came over to garner the compatibility bonus; this time around I'm running USR equipment and that isn't matching up so well.

We made it into the water yesterday despite the temp only being in the sixties and a pretty decent wind kicking across the beach. I'm glad we managed it Friday because that is likely it for a few days while the holiday crowd comes in and enjoys the scenery. We only lasted a hour or so, but we caught some decent wave action. I'm thinking it's going to work out okay; our bodies should recover from today and be ready to go again on Monday.

I'm still using AT&T's backup number and guerilla dial up. So far the way the schedule has worked here I've been offline more than normal. ...and frankly, I think I need a little down time before I start in on the projects I brought over.

...and I'm still learning the ins and outs of working steadily on the iMac. I'm getting the key combos down okay, but it's a shift of gears for things like learning PhotoShop. I'm used to one set of shortcuts/steps and PS6 on the iMac doesn't appear to have things like a file browser function... On the other hand, Dreamweaver has no problem with my plain text HTML and the ftp situation with it is just sweet!

Well, if (calories out) > (calories in) I should be losing at least a pound or two over here <g>... We ended up in the water again Saturday afternoon and didn't come out until we were darned near fresh frozen. ...and with sand places there shouldn't be be sand and sea weed in our swim trunks. ...but we had some decent rides, and all of it was at low tide. This next week the tide progression should have us out when the ocean is inbound and that could make for some wilder rides...

...and as a treat for Cecil and the other geeks who hang out on this side of the place, here's a couple of shots of the lashup that's bringing you the show from the coast:

Click image for larger version

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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