With the cancellation of the planed activities up in Port Douglas due to Cyclone Olga, we took our first formally organized tour – a bus tour up into the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
The weather threatened (again) but things turned out quite well.
Yep – I took that, and yes, that’s the view out of our hotel room.
Actually it’s a small part of the view, since to the right is Circular Quay, and to the left the Sydney Harbor bridge.
I did take a panoramic shot from the roof of the hotel. (Because of the layout of the accessible roof portion, the picture’s mostly roof, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless.)
Folks overseas probably thing this is kinda silly, but as it turns out our cell phones simply won’t work overseas. In our case our carrier (Verizon) uses CDMA technology which isn’t even used overseas. Other carriers use the more globally accepted GSM technology, but “lock” their cell phones to their networks. Get a phone from AT&T, and it’ll work with AT&T, and that’s about it.
With our upcoming trip, we don’t really need a cell phone, but we’ve come to rely on its convenience and security.
The Dungeness River flows north from the Mountains on Washington’s Olympic peninsula along side the city of Sequim and empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca which separates the United States from Canada’s Vancouver Island (and, coincidentally, my birthplace, Victoria).
Along the way from mountains to ocean, the Dungeness passes the small community where our vacation rental happens to be located.
Sequim, Washington, on the north coast of the state’s Olympic Peninsula, is a two and a half hour drive and ferry-ride from home, and a world away. We decided to take a few days away prior to Christmas, staying at one of the Sequim Retreats vacation rentals owned by a very good friend.
Naturally I took the opportunity to dry-run some of the things I plan for our longer trip earlier next year.
Another year of Ask Leo! and the questions don’t fail to inspire … and
dissappoint.
Here’s this years collection of the odd, the strange, the off-the-wall quesions.
As always, every question is a real question I’ve received via Ask Leo! within the last year, presented exactly as I got it
(except that any potentially identifying information will have been removed). Each “answer” is the answer that I’d be oh-so-tempted
to give…
(For perspective – remember that Ask Leo! is a tech site where I answer computer questions. Makes some of the following even more … puzzling.)
The recent deaths of pop icon Michael Jackson and pitchman Billy Mays caught
me be surprise. Not that their deaths shouldn’t have been unexpected – they
were – and by everyone, not just myself.
No, the problem, and the personal impact, relates to the fact that they were
my peers.
[I was asked once again to speak at the spring luncheon for Providence Marianwood, the long term care facility at which my father lived for his last 4.5 years. The keynote speaker for the luncheon was Robert Fulghum. I was also preceded by Gene Muren, whose wife Debra is a resident of the same wing that my father had been on, and who suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s. Debra was diagnosed at the age of 46.]
I want to thank Gene as well for sharing his poem and story. Debra’s a familiar face to those of us who’ve spent any time in the Alzheimer’s wing. I also have to echo Gene’s characterization of the experience as both educational, and humbling.
This is the “Family Story” and “Ask” that I presented at the Elder and Adult Day Services luncheon on Februay 5th, 2009.
(Dr. John Medina of Brain Rules was the keynote speaker.)
I’m here to tell you some things that you probably already know.
August 10th marks the 5th anniversary of Ask Leo!. Technology changes, some things come and go, but one thing
that never changes is the stream of the odd, the strange, and the
downright … ok, I’ll say it … stupid questions that show up in the
Ask Leo! question queue.
As has been my tradition, it’s once again time to clean the question
barrel, so here are this year’s collection of odd questions scraped
from the bottom.
As always, every question is a real question I’ve received via Ask
Leo! within the last year, presented exactly as I got it (except that
any potentially identifying information will have been removed). Each
“answer” is the answer that I’d be oh-so-tempted to give…
[Warning: there may be “bad words” in some of the
questions. You’ve been warned.]
The Bible turns out to be a handy unit of measurement,
particularly when you’re trying to help folks some grasp
large storage media or data transfer rates.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe in what’s in it, of
course, it’s just that most folks have seen one. I’d wager
that most folks have a reasonable concept of its size, even
if only in heft or “thud factor”.
I used it as an example way back when as I tried to convey
some concepts to my parents. This disk? It could hold X
bibles! And this connection here, we can send the entire
Bible in Y seconds! Wow!
A random copy of The Bible, text only, from project
Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org) “weighs in” at roughly
5 megabytes.