Where iz we hiding?

[Tea]

Tannin and I are slipping off for a few days birding and with any luck we won't be on-line again till next week.

Bags packed, batteries charged, car filled up with petrol, great big bag of bananas in the back, and Tannin has shouted himself to a new notebook so that we can sit in motel rooms at night and upload our pictures onto it so as to (a) make room for more pictures on the flash cardz tommorow, and (b) admire them. Or possibly (c), console one another because they weren't as good as we thought they would be.

Seeing as we won't be here, I thought I'd get my friend the pelican to stand in for us. Here he is:

He was last spotted down at Peterborough (near Port Campbell, on the south coast) a couple of weeks ago.

This time we are heading west, to the Little Desert. (Or possibly north, if we get lost again.) But we don't have to worry. We can't get really lost here in Australia. After all, it's an island. If you get a bit confused, all you have to do is keep on going till you hit the beach and then stop. Can't go wrong.

 

[Buck]

Have fun Tea. Help Tannin take lots of good pictures, I expect to see some of them posted next week.

 

[The JoJo]

Yes, I hope will get a chance to see the pictures too?

As buck implied, try to get tannin occupied so that you can take some decent pictures .

Have fun!

 

[Tannin]

Errr, I don't think it's quite as easy as that, small hairy one. Aside from the risk of going round in circles, there is the small matter of what happens when we run out of bananas.

But I thought I'd mention how impressed I am with my new notebook. It's just a little one, a Toshibe Satellite 1130. 14 inch screen, 1024 x 768, Celeron 1800, DVD, USB 2.0, XP Pro, 30GB. Comes with 256MB and a one-year warranty but I took that up to 3 years and 512MB, and it still retails for under $2300.

To my surprise, it cooks along rather nicely. Not exactly an XP 2500, but perfectly usable, even (gasp) rather nippy. I really only wanted it to be a portable flash card downloader. (Otherwise I have to come home to empty out the cards every night, and it takes 2 or 3 512MB cards to store a day's worth of pictures.) So, essentially, I could have bought enough flash cards to last me a four day trip, or I could have bought the little Toshiba for about the same money. Not too difficult a decision.

I decided to give the XP Pro a chance to prove itself with this thing. I'd never buy a copy of it - that goes without saying - but seeing as the Toshiba comes with XP and you don't get the option to have anything else, I thought what the hell?

Well, that lasted about 15 minutes. I fiddled about turning all the zoomie-zoomie kiddie crap off, plugged it into the network, and .... Nothing. There were 4 machines on the network at that particular time (not counting the firewall) and it could only see the NT box. Crap! Two different ECS machines it couldn't recognise, and it didn't even want to know about the Windows 98SE machine! Hey - a TCP/IP address is a TCP/IP address, yes? And most of the machines have NETBEUI and various other protocols loaded as well. How do you spell "incompetent", Mr Gates?

So I fiddled about, rebooted once or twice and said "bugger this". Out came the Windows 2000 CD with the fixpack 4 already added (thanks Groltz - that is a really handy thing) and zap went the XP Pro install.

Worked straight off, not the slightest trouble, bar Toshiba not supplying you with a driver CD or an XP CD, just a pair of those stupid recovery disasters. But the plain vanilla 2000 install picked up the NIC all by itself and I simply opened up a browser and grabbed drivers for sound, main board, modem (just in case) and video card off the web. Falling off a log easy.

In short, a very nice little unit. The keyboard layout is a little weird (no left control key bugs me), and the touchpad mouse is actually pretty decent as those things go. It came with a really nifty little cordless optical mouse, but I managed to pick up a Kensington Orbit 3D trackball from (of all places) Hardly Normal's, in the remainder bin for $49.95. It has a standard USB cord and a bizarre system that makes it "tactile". When you load the drivers, it vibrates in your hand every time you pass the cursor over a clickable link. Yuk! Stupidest idea I ever saw. But unistall the drivers and it's an excellent little ordinary two-button trackball - and good trackballs are almost impossible to find, these days.

(Time we went to bed, small hairy one. Early start tomorrow.)

Stay safe all and we will post some nice bird pictures when we get back.

 

[Groltz]

I hope you have a good time Tony. We'll be looking forward to the wonders of Australian bird life captured by your camera.



BTW, here is a bird that lives here in Puyallup:

 

[Buck]

The Cascade Range is home to many unique creatures. Don't the Puyallup Tribe of Indians have some tall tales about that creature?

 

[Mercutio]

Really, Tannnin, Toshiba???
How could you!

Did you even look at anything decent? IBM? Er... IBM?

Hope you had the good sense to buy an extra set of keycaps when the ones you have start popping off.

OTOH, have fun with the vacationing.

 

[Groltz]

The Cascade Range is home to many unique creatures. Don't the Puyallup Tribe of Indians have some tall tales about that creature?

Most assuredly, Buck, but I guess they are held in confidence within tribal circles. Pale faces like me aren't privy to the knowledge.

 

[Tea]

We ain't got nuffin like that ... er ... is it a Greak Awk? Nuffin like it here, Steve.


Cascade iz beer, sez Tannin. "Bes bere in the iuniverse" iz hiz usual phrase, I think. I prefer gin though.


Anyway, Mercutio, what's wrong with Toshiba? Sold quite a few of them, never see them come back faulty. Only brand we sell, other than IBM.

5:30AM and I'm just out of the shower. Nearly time to go. Dam fur, takez forever to dry.

Holidayyyyzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!!

 

[Mercutio]

What's wrong with Toshiba?!?

As if there are enough hours in the day!

Executive Summary: I've had nothing but problems with them. NOTHING. One of my regular jobs is maintaining a small fleet of them for a research group. Once a month I go over to campus to fix whatever has broken on them since my last visit. I've replaced all the keyboards, a half-dozen hard disks, displays, CD-RWs, bad RAM... not to mention all the re-imaging.

I get it. You must sell Toshibas to get more service business! That must be it.

For the record, for that research group, I recommended Apple machines. Their applications are all java; it wouldn't've mattered. They got some insane discounts on the Toshibas, though, and thought they were getting a better deal.

 

[e_dawg]

The cheaper Toshibas I was not impressed with. I looked at the Satellite line in the late 90's but decided to buy a ThinkPad 385XD instead. Much better laptop initially, but the IBM proved to be unreliable.

The higher end Toshibas are supposed to be decent, though.

 

[Handruin]

Merc, I know you have far greater exposure to laptops and PC equipment than I do, but every IBM I've encountered has had some problem in one way or another. I've seen probably 25+ which is a small amount, but I'm not impressed with them. My last job used them as the education PC of choice, and we had a bunch of silly little problems and their support was no help.

 

[timwhit]

I agree with Merc on this one. Whenever I have worked on laptops/notebooks the IBM ones are the easiest to work on and the easiest to fix. Plus they break a lot less than other brands. I would still buy an Apple notebook if I were buying one right now. They are just so much cooler than anything else on the market.

 

[Pradeep]

Perhaps a digital wallet thingymabob with a 10/20GB HDD would have been more suitable for you Tony? Oh well a laptop is more versatile. 1.5GB a day is a shitload of pics, how many EL-1s have you got?.

 

[Mercutio]

IBM notebooks are fantastic for a whole bunch of reasons. Some of them are little things, like the fact that their keyboards are fantastically nice. Some of them are just amazing engineering decisions - I can boot off a USB hard disk or thumb drive with my 5-year-old Thinkpad 540. I don't think I own any other computer that can do that. IBM notebooks use parts that I'd normally look down on (Top-end models tend to have S3 graphics chips and mini-PCI winmodems), but I've found that most models are genuinely hard to break, and that they have fewer weird software problems than certain other vendors (Compaq and Toshiba being the top of that particular list). I'm not saying I've never had problems with IBM notebooks. I'm saying I've had a lot less, and those I did have were a lot less annoying than the problems I've had with other brands.

 

[Mercutio]

On an utterly unrelated note, my ISP is having serious upstream connectivity problems, making it largely impossible to read SF at home.

So I wasn't able to post this weekend about how cool it was to meet Kevin Smith (the guy behind "Clerks" and at least at one time, NRG's avatar), or perhaps even the fact that I left my house this weekend to do something besides go to work.

 

[Drakantus]

You got to meet Kevin Smith?

Thats awesome. How did you manage that?

 

[Howell]

You got to leave your house this weekend to do something besides go to work?

Thats awesome. How did you manage that?

 

[blakerwry]

heh, we're installing new carpet.. whcih means im fixing squeaks and running wire before they get the new carpet down...


Also means my computers are packed up ... my only access is via work at the moment.

Then I have to move later this week.. so no use setting things back up in between...

 

[Mercutio]

I had a morning appointment for a contracting job I'm planning to do in late September in Des Plaines, IL. On the way back to the interstate I saw someone dressed like a Stormtrooper. I stopped and gawked for a minute, noticed signs for the Chicago Comic Convention.

Went in, wandered around. Saw folks with some amazing costumes (you want to make fun, but only until you realize that the costumes are AMAZING reproductions. Someone spends days or weeks and $500 putting together a perfect reproduction of Daredevil's costume... what ELSE are they going to do with it?): Ghostbusters, little kid dressed up as a Jawa, seven Stormtroopers, Daredevil (with SO dressed up as Electra. Brave, patient woman, she must've been), Link and the Princess from that ninetendo game, Spider Man, a Jabba's Slave Princess (who was, uh, very popular), Vampirella (ditto), a Cyclops...

So I went in, paid $20 to get in, another $30 to see Kevin Smith. I bought some toys, a few comics and some art... realized I now had to carry it around all day, since my car was a half-frickin' mile away, and decided to go wait for the Kevin Smith panel to start.

I was like the third person in the room, got a seat in the front row. Read, waited, room filled up. Kevin walked out. He talked about how awful Gigli is and how it won't mess up his next movie (which also has Affleck and Jennifer Lopez in it). He was really, really funny except when people asked him about Jason Mewes (Jay from the movies)

Anyway, after the panel was "officially over" I walked out and, because of the crunch of people and some impolite preteens, got pushed against the curtains dividing the main convention floor from the off-limit areas... which Kevin was standing right on the other side of. I said excuse me, and after listening to the man talk for two hours, his "no problem" in an extremely recognizable voice was pretty damn cool.

I ducked under the curtain. Got yelled at by a guard. Kevin waved him off. I told him I was sorry again, shook his hand, nice panel, loved the movies except Chasing Amy... what's wrong with Chasing Amy? I chase Amy, for real, can't stand to watch it. He said "woah" (this whole exchange took like 30 seconds). Told him I loved the other movies, and the comics, even the poop monster in Dogma... he told me there's gonna be a poop monster action figure (Cool!)... thought it'd be dorky to ask for an autograph - but as I started to back away he offered to sign the stuff in my View Askew bag, noting that, since I had a large one, I'd already spent some money on him today. So he signed my Clerks poster ', To Sam, don't trip" and my "Chasing Dogma" comic "Keep Chasing Amy", and then some guys with press badges walked up, so he told me he had to go. The guards let me go out the VIP exit, so I was a ton closer to my car and didn't have to contend with the crowds on my way out.

 

[Fushigi]

I had a morning appointment for a contracting job I'm planning to do in late September in Des Plaines, IL. On the way back to the interstate I saw someone dressed like a Stormtrooper. I stopped and gawked for a minute, noticed signs for the Chicago Comic Convention.

I've been to Chicago ComicCon a couple of times. Not a bad convention, but it's true that parking is too far away.

My weekend started with dinner here on Friday. Saturday, my wife's birthday and my birthday, we did some light shopping here before heading to Chinatown for a late lunch. We followed that up with Cirque du Soliel's Verakai (3rd row seats). Went home and basically collapsed. Long day. Sunday, our first wedding anniversary, plans to hit the Bristol Renaissance Fair got derailed so we played a little minigolf and otherwise just took it easy. Celebrated with a very sweet German wine.

 

[e_dawg]

Nice story, Merc. Sounds like you had a good time...

The guards let me go out the VIP exit, so I was a ton closer to my car and didn't have to contend with the crowds on my way out.

So basically, what you're saying is that the guards promptly escorted you out the nearest exit for harrassing Kevin Smith, and it just happened to be the VIP exit :mrgrn:

 

[Howell]

Sunday, our first wedding anniversary...

My parent's wedding anniversary was on Sunday. Forty-Five years. We went out to eat.

 

[e_dawg]

Sunday, our first wedding anniversary

Wow, how'd I miss that? Congrats, John!

 

[Fushigi]

Wow, how'd I miss that? Congrats, John!

Thanks. Funny thing is another couple we know got married on Saturday so their anniversary will be on our birthday(s?) and our aniiversary will be just a day later.

 

[Pradeep]

Congrats Fushigi.

I'm waiting for the UPS dood to come with a package Anticipation....