2006-09-05

The weather continues to be nice, despite earlier forecasts. Swam in the morning, then it rained and stormed heavily but briefly during the burn hours (we got some photos and video), then we went shopping to get some missing items. On the way back I wanted to take a closer look at the high-rise hotel which is almost the first thing you see when you drive over the second bridge onto the island, because I'm pretty sure it has to be the site of one of the slides I scanned from JERS's collection, and sure enough I recognized the name – Station One. Took a couple of photos for comparison (and for HTYP, of course).

Technology stuff: we've been fighting with the hotel's wireless internet since yesterday. Today we found out that the wireless transcievers are out back, on two white towers, so the way to get a better connection is to take the laptops out to the balcony. This helps, but the signal is still terrible; we're now blaming our outdated late-1990s wireless cards.

Also, I managed to install a disused hard drive in my Vaio laptop – the one that got peed on by cat or cats unknown, which dissolved some of the circuit traces on the hard drive and made it not work, while somehow managing to avoid damaging much of anything else (the keyboard also has problems, but that problem pre-dates the cat pee problem by over a year) – in the last few minutes before it was time to leave Durham. Upon arriving here, I ran the laptop off a liveCD for awhile, and finally decided to go ahead and install it, overwriting the WinXP/Win2k dual-boot that was already installed, largely because Windows didn't have any built-in wireless drivers for any of the half-dozen wireless cards I brought with me, whereas Linux had drivers for two of them.

And that's about all I should write for now, because we're about to watch (I think) the season premiere of House MD.