Zathras' Great Machine

Whuff!

Well, life was all fairly routine until last Thursday or so. We had a conference on Wednesday, at which we experimented with offering wireless Internet access to our attendees. It didn't work right at first -- for some reason, I was able to connect to the router, but it was shutting everyone else out. The problem cleared up, weirdly enough, when I deactivated WEP. No, it doesn't make any sense to me, either.

Anyway, the conference went fairly smoothly and had some interesting presentations (including speculation from one futurist that in about twenty years, everyone will be wearing computerized contact lenses that automatically adjust their focus for near or distance vision and even show you things on a hands-free, heads-up virtual display -- to the point where ou'll even be able to say things like, "Computer, please identify blond male sitting at the bar," and a little arrow will pop up, point at him, and his head will be "captioned" with his name and contact information. Neat stuff.

But enough of that. Thursday, of course, was the big deal... I knew the storm was coming but wasn't expecting it until later, so I tumbled out of bed and did my typical morning routine, then when I was on the nearly-deserted Metro I read that all transit was going to be shutting down at 11 AM, so I got off at Union Station, grabbed some coffee, then turned around and went home. My power went off at 2 PM, which was rather annoying because it still sill barely drizzling at that point.

The next few days, needless to say, were not particularly eventful. The storm came and went thru, clearing up by Friday morning. I was among the more fortunate -- I lost power, but I still had a functioning gas stove and potable water, and I suffered no property damage. I spent most of my days reading and most of my nights on the phone with Denise, apart from a brief jaunt to the office on Friday to grab my email.

I stayed at a hotel on Sunday night just for the amenities and to get my laundry done, and, again, to grab all my email (I average about two hundred emails per day, for those who don't know). The hotel stay was pleasant, except that there was a huge backlog on laundry, so on Monday evening, I had to go back to pick it up and wait until 8 PM. I got back to the apartment little after 9 and the power was back on. I had just enough time to get changed and settled a bit (from having to walk thru the rain) when Denise called, and we had another enjoyable talk, coupled with puzzlement over her notebook's extremely bizarre behavior. After we hung up and I started getting ready for bed, I discovered that the laundry service had lost all my socks and undewear. *shrug* No big deal -- I'll write them a letter bitching about it after I've replaced it, and they'd *better* send me a refund check or reduce the charge on my credit card. If not, I'll challenge the charge.

I'm home today -- I had a doctor's appointment, but overnight, the power went out again, so my clock radio didn't go off when it should have. I probably could have still made the appointment, but I've been feeling sick for the last few days, so I decided to stay home and rest instead.

And that's the weekly update... only other big thing is that I've decided to buy one of the new 12.1" PowerBooks as soon as they're out, which is supposed to be sometime this week. I like this iBook well enough, but it's been having problems lately, and after giving it a fair amount of thought, I've decided to replace it rather than have it sent in for repairs.