lawnmower man

I finally went into the lawnmower shop and bought a new lawnmower. Our old electric one isn't big enough to cope with the grass we have. Plus, it's got a loose handle and the cable is a pain to get out. I've bought a 19" petrol one. There may even be a rush to be the first to use it!

The chap who sold me it didn't push me towards a more expensive model and was really happy to chat. I even ended up with the name and address of someone who can service my Fireblade. This strikes me as pretty typical for this region. People seem to have more time for each other.

last day on the road

Up ridiculously early (3.30) to catch the 6.10 flight from San Diego to San Jose and then onto a 9.30 meeting. The Acer disgraced itself by being unable to sync to a projector and display a presentation. Onwards to lunch with Rod (always good) and then the airport where I finally go mobile broadband to work, although slowly.

Conclusions? It's too small for comfortable working and it's not quite trustworthy enough to depend on for business meetings. The software needs refining. Battery life is unacceptable. Back to the MacBook then...

evolution

I spent the morning in a meeting and several hours this afternoon sorting out my email. Not helped by the wifi connection being dropped every 10 minutes (by the hotel's router). As vpnc only supports UDP connections, I had to use Cisco's VPN client from su mode, so doubly painful. Evolution often loses its connection with the 'exchange backend'. Lovely.

sort of figured out podcasts

After a bit of playing I found out that podcasts are not filed under podcasts for the 3rd generation ipod nano. There's a bug listed in the Ubuntu lists. Also figured out that I had to explicitly download them, not sure how to make that automatic.

airports

Good meeting followed by going to the airport. Couldn't get multiple screens with the presentation going to the projector working.

In Ottawa they have US customs at the airport, so you can do immigration before you set off. Despite not handing back my green visa card at the end of the last trip to the US, they let me in. Ottawa airport has free wifi, so I used that. I also found somewhere to plug the Acer in.

The transfer in Detroit was easy. It's a huge airport but clean and organised. Unfortunately no free wifi and couldn't get the mobile broadband USB to work.

I used the Acer to show a TV program. The battery lasted just long enough to watch an hour long program. No sockets on the North West airlines plane. By the time we got to the hotel in San Diego, we were both exhausted.

free internet

This hotel in Ottawa has free wi-fi, so connecting with work, home and the internet is easy. I've updated this diary, done work e-mail and edited a presentation so that I can give it externally. Not very easy on an 8" screen, but doable. OpenOffice Presentation appears to support displaying the slide show on an external monitor. I'll give it a try later.

travels with a netbook

As an experiment, I've decided to take the Acer Aspire One on this business trip. I travel really light anyway (under 6Kg Samsonite rucksack that has room for clothes and equipment). This lasts me a week. The bag was certainly lighter, my MacBook is heavy.

Yesterday I reformatted my iPod to Windows and downloaded the Banshee music player as that had good reviews. After a lot of faffing about, I managed to get my music onto the iPod but I had to frig the podcasts.

At the airport I used my Mobile 3 broadband USB to connect to the web / world whilst we had breakfast. Evolution allows you to tag mail directories for offline use (unlike Outlook which caches everything). This all seemed to work pretty work pretty well.

Air Canada has power sockets, even in economy, so miserable battery life not a problem. Watched a film, listened to podcasts and did off-line e-mail. The sound amplification is pretty rubbish and not good on a noisy plane, even with noise cancelling headphones.

snow day

Another snow day and this time I didn't have a dodgy tummy so Gill and I went for a walk around the village. Very pretty but we needed our hot chocolate when we got back.

chickens in the snow

This is a picture of the chickens that Gill took yesterday. They were somewhat reluctant to come out of their egglu.