East Coast Adventures: Caught in the Rain, Fishing for Beer and Sisyphean Tasks

I have to catch a bus, so I'll make this quick. Maybe "have to" is a bit strong. I'm on vacation - I don't "have to" do anything.

After the movie last night, I caught the bus to the correct end of town. Not actually close mind you, but less far then I was. It was spitting rain a little and all I had was a tee-shirt, so I briefly contemplated catching a cab. In hind-sight, that would have been the better option.

When I got to the end of the line I was about 3k from where I was staying and it was pouring rain. I started my walk and had that odd mental exercise where you're gaging your chances. "Can I do this and not get soaked to the skin? Maybe I should run." I ran for about four blocks then stopped because I was soaked to the skin. Thankfully it wasn't super cold so I just walked briskly back. I got a call from garething about a kilometer short of my destination.

"Hey, where are you?"
"Walking home in the pouring god-damn rain."
"Where are you - I can come and get you."
"Don't bother - It's impossible for me to get more wet at this point."

I arrived looking like a drowned thing that's somewhat larger and paler then a rat.

So yeah, my judgement could have been better.

The next day I went out for breakfast with garething and stephtopia at some bay just outside St. John's and had my first touton. It's basically a fried pancake, only tastier then that sounds. Sort of what a pancake wants to be when it grows up.

We did a small amount of window-shopping, then got ready for H & B's jack-and-jill party. The party was pretty good, but I only knew a handful of people there - basically G, S and the bride and groom. This wasn't as anxiety-provoking as it might have otherwise been. Mostly this was due to the beer pond - a decorative pond in the backyard that had been filled with bottles of beer and soft drinks. You had to fish them out with a net.

For some reason, despite the bride and groom both being from Newfoundland, the bride's mother felt the need to give the party a "Calgary cowboy" theme. Cheap cowboy hats were thrust upon all who attended. G and I balked, citing numerous reasons, among them:

1. We were both from Calgary, so we'd paid our dues.
   
2. Stampede was lastweek.
   
3. The hats were manufactured in Mexico, and were therefore not Calgary hats - unlike the hats that both G and I sported.
   
4. In fact, my hat - being a beat up Tilley hat, looked authentic and G's ball cap actually was authentic - owing to the fact that modern cowboys actually wear them.

Sadly, the bride's mother is a force-of-nature and impervious to logic and we ended up wearing cowboy hats, at least briefly, until we were out of sight. Mine was quite comical, owing to the fact that my noggin is Megamind-sized.

We left when it became apparent that we were going to be re-screeched. Actually because G was getting a headache - but the threat of screechin' makes a better story.

Today I went for a run - to the top of Signal Hill. If you've been to St. John's I expect you to ooh and ahh now. Sadly, I didn't jog down from Signal Hill. While uphill was tiring, downhill was downright painfull - each step felt like someone punching me in the lower back. That's nature's way of saying knock it off. Still, it was a 5 km run uphill and a 5 km walk back to the apartment. Lots of exercise today, which is good since I feel like a whale and need to do something about that.

I wish I was at Dragonslayer. Specifically, I wish the wedding was last weekend so I could have avoided part of Stampede, gone to the wedding and participated in the Dragonblinder tournament. There's always next year.

East Coast Adventures: On Being the Resident Geek

Being a computer nerd, I'm often asked to do tech support for the less technically proficient. Like stephtopia's mom M.

M has an ancient computer that she'd been using to access the Internet. Her sister (stephtopia's aunt) B had bought her a refurbished IBM Thinkpad. The former was very slow and the latter wasn't booting up at all. And so I set to work on getting them up and running.

The Thinkpad just needed some BIOS settings set correctly and it booted up just fine. Then I had to talk to the local Internet provider to get it talking. There were some cable difficulties (solved), The connection needed to be set up (also solved) and finally, the long slog of getting the system up to date and not vulnerable to viruses.

I was loading Firefox when it shit the bed. The power cut out and it started making alarming beeping noises. After a reboot it seemed to work - for about five minutes, then it did it again with the addition of vertical rainbow stripes on the monitor. This usually means a main-board failure (though sometimes it's just faulty memory - given that the single USB port also didn't work, I suspect it's not the memory). This certain sucks for M and B. I, on the other hand, silently did a mental "Woo Hoo!" (with fist pump) when I realised I didn't have to work on this POS any more (it was a Pentium III/800 laptop that B had bought for way more then it was worth).

Of course, the other computer (a ten year-old desktop) was even worse, but had the advantage that it at least worked. However, running Win2K with 256MB of RAM means anything is going to be slow going.

I've offered to take them computer shopping tomorrow. I imagine any computer sold by Futureshop or Costco will meat meet M's needs. A netbook would meet her needs, except that her eyesight isn't the best.