Smalltalk with James Robertson

I stayed up a bit late on Wednesday (making late changes to my demo), and then got up early yesterday (to fly home). I had been a little sick before the trip, and not sleeping well - which all became apparent when I awoke this morning after 11 hours :)

Technorati Tags: sleep

Lately, if I do a demo, something has to go wrong. Yesterday was no exception - I was sitting in the back, showing Arden my demo in the Windows 7 VM I use in Parallels, and everything was working great. I suspended the VM, and waited, then fired it back up just before we were about to head up - the plan was for him to show slides off my machine, and then go to my demo, so we didn't have to flip devices.

And.... Windows 7 suddenly lost its mind, and decided that it couldn't see the internet, or my Mac. This was a problem, as I was loading things from a database on the Mac side. So... Arden did slides while I panicked. Fortunately, my XP VM was behaving, and the demo went off without any trouble.

This is getting to be tiresome though :)

I may well be offline much of the day - the room where our event is being held probably has no internet access. If only ATT had gotten their act together and supported thethering by now...

Technorati Tags: seattle

So not only did I have to run the car to emissions check this morning while sick, now - still not feeling 100 percent - I need to take my daughter to the Orthodontist, get on a conference call, and then go to the Sorint store for her broken phone (or usb cable - it's one that doesn't match anything else we have, either).

Awesome day :)

It's been an awesome start to the day - didn't sleep well last night, and when I woke up, I immediately got sick. On the upside of that, I felt better afterwards. Then I had to take my wife's car to get its emissions checked, but it failed the test due to a faulty sensor - why they don't just test what's actually coming out of the tailpipe in that situation mystifies me. Let's hope that tomorrow's flight to Seattle goes better...

On of our car's has to get its emissions checked, and the deadline (before a fine) is Tuesday. So, I went down to the station this morning... only to discover that they are closed today and Monday for Martin Luther King observance.

Well, this is what I get for putting things off to the last minute, I guess...

This series of before/after satellite photos of various parts of Port au Prince makes it clear just how much damage the earthquake did. If the "after" shots were black and white, you might think they were WWII era photos of some European city that got bombed a lot...

Technorati Tags: haiti, earthquake

No sooner had we decided to get a new dishwasher (arriving Thursday) than my wife's car decided that it needed a new tire - fortunately, she was only 3 or so miles from the house when that became obvious. If it's not one thing, it's another....

Spotted in Instapundit

The real irony of this disc is that the amount of memory you can write to it (1.44 MB, if memory — heh serves) isn’t enough to store the jpeg of the picture of it which came out of my camera (1.49 MB). That’s progress for you.

"Back in the Day", we booted an entire OS from floppies that held even less data :)

Our old loveseat has had a good run, but it was time to replace it. Since my wife has knee issues, we decided to get a pair of recliners:

They are pretty darn comfortable, but this changes my standard "sit in a high back chair with a table" arrangement with the laptop. So I headed to Amazon and ordered a lap desk. I should have that Friday; I'll write up a review after I see how well that works out.