Final Preparations

Man, I am going to miss this passport when it’s time to renew it in a few years. It has all my stamps in it!

Time is growing short and we’re making the final preparations to leave the country.

  • Dooley has been dropped off at Adventures In Birds. They’ll board him till we get back and we know they’ll take good care of him. Still, it breaks my heart to have to do this to poor Dooley. He’s like me, a creature of habit and prone to homesickness.
  • Called the bank to let them know I would be using my debit card overseas. In these days of aggressive fraud protection, you don’t want your money stream frozen because the bank thinks there’s something amiss.
  • Made Xerox copies of important documents. Hopefully, they’re not needed. But it’s good to have a record of your account and passport information just in case.
  • Cleared the fridge of spoilables. Don’t want to come home to post-hurricane like horror.
  • Packed and re-packed. Everything except the camera in a single backpack. Camera is in a small camera bag with a few lenses. The backpack is loaded with sundry electronic doo-hickies including chargers, socket converters, CPAP, netbook and tripod with a little room left over for a change of clothes or two.

    • In an unexpected turn of good fortune, I found my Flip Mino. It had been lost for several months. I thought it must have fallen out of my pocket while out and about and lost forever. As it happened, I was looking for something else the other day and my search lead me to look under the couch, and there was the Mino. A good omen!

    We’ll be doing a final check of all system before departure and then I am off to do my final Technology Bytes show of the year tonight. Geekradio on Xmas eve promises to be a lot of fun so tune in if you are near a radio or stream it live from kpft.org.

    I’ll be updating here during the trip as often as I can with photos, videos and commentary. If you are on twitter go ahead and follow @baldheretic as I hope to “tweet” with some frequency.

    Wish us luck!

    Tool User

    When you have your roof replaced, it generates a lot of waste as a byproduct. For the most part, the crew did a good job of loading it all into trucks and hauling it away. Several truckloads of debris by my reckoning.

    Unexpected, but not surprising, some nails ended up in the pool. Now that it’s getting a little cold here, wading in and fishing them out was unpleasant thought. Waiting till summer was also not an option. I tried using the cleaning net attached to the telescoping pole, but could not quite scoop them up.

    Then it dawned on me. I’ve had in my possession a chunk of ferromagnetic rock since my teenage years. I found it near some railroad tracks when I was a teenager and I’ve just hung on to it. By placing it into the cleaning net I was able to collect all of the loose nails at the bottom of my pool without much effort and, most importantly, without getting wet.

    Touch The Android

    When it comes to mobile computing I’m not a Mac or a PC. I’m an Android! That’s right, I am now the proud owner of what has come to be called the Google Phone.

    Officially, it’s the G1 from T-Mobile. The phone itself is made by HTC and runs the an open source operating system created by Google called Android.

    Much like the infamous iPhone, the G1 utilized the G3 network for fast Internet access, has a nifty touch screen and accesses an online application database to add programs and functionality to the phone.

    Unlike the iPhone, it’s not slaved to the problematic AT&T network which seems to plagued with dropped calls and continues to make the iPhone less of a phone and more a clearing house for a pocket full of silliness.

    It’s not an iPhone killer, but it comes pretty close. I got one because the monthly service is cheaper and more reliable than the iPhone, it’s open source so there’s a lot more potential for applications and it has a full QWERTY keyboard that’s accessible with a simple flick of your thumb…

    The G1 has GPS and it’s fully integrated into Google Maps and it’s all tied to your Gmail account. When you first turn on the phone, you are presented with the Android logo and instructed to “Touch The Android” to get started and it configures your e-mail and downloads your contacts.

    I really like the device and find it a joy to use!

    Large Hadron

    From a variety of sources.

    Geneva, 10 September 2008. The first beam in the Large Hadron Collider at CERN was successfully steered around the full 27 kilometres of the world’s most powerful particle accelerator at 10h28 this morning. This historic event marks a key moment in the transition from over two decades of preparation to a new era of scientific discovery.

    www.hasthelargehadroncolliderdestroyedtheworldyet.com