"On the road again …The train hasn't left the station yet, and already my back is hurting. <sigh!>
I can't wait to get on the road again …"
11:05 and we're leaving right on schedule … first trip in a Very long time … first journal entry with Orion, the IBM ThinkPad I got for half price (factory reconditioned).
Brian is supposed to meet me in Providence, RI at 17:47 … he lost one of the ferrets (Wynona?) a few weeks ago, the week after FurFace crossed the Rainbow Bridge, so we're going to console each other … this is also a shakedown for Orion and the Kodak digital camera I bought at the same time … I skeptical of the repairs, because the image quality Really Sucks … either it has a severe focus problem, or else the shutter speed is too slow and I'm getting motion blurs from not using a tripod … that's something I can check at Brian's
I guess my last train trip was 18 months ago, going back to Boston after Mom's funeral … the only thing I seem to have forgotten today was the food (a can of coke and a cup of yogurt), but I simply bought some fig bars and cranberry juice.
I'm actually pretty impressed with this machine … after a false start (that involved repartitioning the 6Gb hard drive and reinstalling Win98) I finally started porting directories and applications from Zathras … I got a PCMCIA adapter for the camera's memory cards, so I put the USB card reader that came with the camera on Zathras and use one of the PCMCIA slots on Orion.
The camera came with a 8Mb card and I bought a 64Mb card for under fifty bucks … I discovered that the card looks just like any other removable device to Windoze, with the JPEG images in a subdirectory … bits is bits, so I can create directories and copy files just as if it were a floppy disk … it's a solid-state sneaker-net instead of rapid rotating magnetic storage media. ("Primitive, bulky solid state devices … I think they called them … transistors."
It's a cloudy day, and I didn't even try to lie down last night, so I'll probably sleep well this trip … Orion turns out to be a very good software development platform …since there was so much disk space, I decided to load the Micro$oft Developer's Workstation with the Visua C++ compiler … I started building the WiZ WORX IGES Utilities, and the speed just blew me away.
Sometime over the weekend I got the bright idea of adding support for IGESPEEK(tm) to WISLjr, so I've been doing it on Orion, and planned to spend some of my travel time pushing bits, but I think I'm gonna just save this page and crash for now.
Had a cigarette on the platform and thought about how the Roosevelt Hotel was overhead, and how I'd stood in the caverns of Penn Station 20 years ago when I met Jean at NYC Mensa's annual RG … that was when Naomi Rose added the star to The Wiz that I kept for the WiZ WORX logo.
I was telling Brian that I'm still thinking of taking a boat to the UK … I promised I'd return to the crows at the Tower of London, and I want a picture of Jason (the dismem-bear) in front of Nelson's Column in Traffalgar Square … he says he'll be working in a few weeks, so I told him that he could join me in Rejyavik by plane for a few days and I'd go on to London on my own.
So many things I'd planned to do on the train, but I'm just wasted … I discovered that the ear phones I've been carrying for years got crushed since the last time I used them … will have to get another pair ASAP … the volume controls are so coarse that it's very annoying to other passengers to play any sounds without the ear phones.
Well, I think I'll try to find the cafe car and get some more
juice … maybe] something caffinated to keep me going.
Last update:
2002-08-27 by Dennette@WiZ-WORX.com