Well, mostly…
I’m ditching my land line with Verizon in favor of Vonage VoIP. The monthly cost will be less than half of what I’m paying now. And, since I have this wonderful fiber connection with all this bandwidth, I might as well get some use out of it. So – I’m keeping Verizon for my fiber connection – which is really worth the cost especially now that I will be able to save some money on my phone service!
I ran across this post on Divester:
Divester contributor Eric Brodeur has a dive buddy who rode out Hurricane Wilma in Cozumel. Locked in his hotel’s main dining room for three days, his friend nailed pieces of furniture to the walls to reinforce the shutters, “stacked credenzas and other furniture against one doorway to the outside as a barricade to keep it from collapsing,” and generally went without sleep for the duration. What a terrible, exhausting experience. What’s more: when it was all over, his escape from Mexico was equally stressful and chaotic. Check out this, uh, “trip report” on Eric’s blog and be happy you weren’t there.Or, as Eric writes, “if you suffer from ADD, skip the words and go straight to the photos.”
What makes this important to me is that the resort in the pictures is my favorite resort in Cozumel: Fiesta Americana. Having stayed there before many times, I’m saddened by the devastation. I am, however, glad to hear of the co-operative nature of not only the staff but also of the residents/tourists when the chips are down.
I encourage you to read the entire post – it’s quite moving.
Success!
I have finally done it. I have migrated the entire site to the Windows platform. I tried this once before, but I couldn’t make it work. The server is now running on Windows and IIS with roughly the same performance I was getting with Linux. So – it was fun and I’ve learned a little. I’ve also learned that I really didn’t like the Gallery 2 software that I upgraded the photo gallery to, so I downgraded it back to the previous version. The old version is actually much faster.
Not that there weren’t a few hiccups along the way and that things don’t quite work the same as they did before. At least, though, I can now log in to the gallery and add some more pictures – which I’d lost the ability to do when some Linux patch changed something on my system… couldn’t figure that one out.
I have updated the ::: airports i’ve seen ::: section of the site to include the most recent addition to my “have been to” list of airports: Seattle/Tacoma airport in Washington State.
Yes, I know it’s been a while since I’ve been there and I should have done it long ago, but circumstances have kept me busy. I’ll try to be better in the future…
It’s starting to get rather chilly. This morning, on my ride to work, I began to shiver.
“Hmmm…”, I thought, “it seems to be getting somewhat cold.”
Almost at the end of my ride, I started up the steep slope of the mountain only to feel the temperature drop yet again. “Did I say somewhat cold? I meant pretty cold.”
It was 44 degrees.
I think I’m glad I was already planning to stop by the motorcycle shop this evening to buy a heavier winter-ish riding jacket. I really hope they have warmer gloves! I might have to invest in some thermal underwear, too…
Now that I’ve gotten the splint off my wrist, I can now exercise my hand and do things that have for the past three weeks been rather difficult. Like riding the motorcycle. Today, I took my longest ride since the accident – 43 miles. It’s the usual commute to my customer site, so I’m familiar with the drive. However, this was the first time that I’ve ridden that far since the accident.
And, of course, it was also raining…
And I’ll do it again when it’s time to go home from work…
This morning, I got my wrist x-rayed again and it appears that my fracture is mostly healed. I say “mostly” because we could barely see it to begin with and you never know unless you do a bone scan… that sounds scary – “bone scan”…
Anyway, I can ditch the splint now and start to strengthen back my wrist and regain my range of motion. I was going to ride my motorcycle to work this week, but I will be in Houston for the funeral and therefore unable to ride my bike. Ah, well. Guess I have to wait a week for that. Probably for the best anyway.
Today, my last grandparent, my mother’s mother, passed away. She lived a long life and we are all saddened by her departure. We are also happy that she is now with God and will have all her questions answered and her eyes opened.
I’ve now posted some more pictures of our Chicago trip including pictures from several parks in the Chicago area (Grant Park, Lincoln Park, and Millennium Park). Of course, I still have many more to post and with my upcoming trip to Seattle, my backlog looks likely to increase.
Next week, I will be in training/orientation at the Redmond campus. This means that not only will I be traveling again, but I will be able to add a new airport to my list. My first trip itinerary was to pass through my home town of Houston on Sunday. That’s not going to happen now – not with a rather large storm hanging offshore at the moment. Now, I’ll be going through Newark – much less fun, but actually a shorter flight.
Bad thing is, though, I lost my upgrade…
