Mar. 2004
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Check out Weeks ending:  [6 Mar 04] [27 Mar 04]

Week ending 6 Mar 04 (Bob)

Recovery Mode - Unfortunately, Judi picked up a cold while in Oregon and Bob seemed to have acquired a case of flu or food poisoning on his last day of travel.  Thus, much of this week was consumed by wheezes and trips to the head.  Fortunately, by the end of the week, most symptoms were vanishing and we both feel perkier.

3 Weeks ending 27 Mar 04 (Bob)

Preparing for a Summer Visit - We have invited Judi's 13-year old niece, Bekah, to visit us from Oregon for a couple of months this summer.  So the excitement builds on both sides of the Atlantic as we try to orchestrate tickets and travel plans, while Bekah and her mother learn about the Roman empire, Turkey, sailing, and organize passports.  It promises to be an interesting summer for all of us.  

Varnish City - The hot sun and sandstorms of the Red Sea destroyed Judi's 8 coats of varnish from Thailand, so the last few weeks have been occupied with back-bending sanding and varnishing - it now gleams with 6-8 smooth coats and she is a happy camper again.  The cool Mediterranean Spring weather is very good for varnishing as it dries slowly with a smooth finish, and it looks great.

Installing new Toys - Judi lugged about 60 pounds of stuff back from the US (and that did not include the new clothes she bought!), and so Bob has kept busy playing with:

  • New Switch panels - only an engineer could get excited about finishing up an electrical project that made the boat easy to operate from 110 volt (US) or 220 volt (rest of the world) or its own inverters - it cost a bundle, but eliminated a bunch of cables and complexity.

  • New Laptop - we acquired (and Judi lugged) a new Toshiba laptop computer with DVD writer and a brilliant screen - now DVDs and VCDs look great, so we can watch all of those VCDs sold by the Malaysian copy-pirates.

  • Wireless Networking - One pie-in-the-sky plan was to connect our 2 computers together via a wireless network.  However, we cannot get the two faces of Bill Gates (Windows 98 and XP) to talk to each other - is there a message in there somewhere?

  • Vicious Virus (the computer kind) - a side effect of trying to network the 2 computers together was that we picked up a computer virus that finds it way into networked computers.  Our (now secondary) Toshiba with windows 98 picked up the Opserv32 worm and we have spent the last 7 days trying to rid ourselves of this little creature.  Fortunately it does not destroy any files, it just makes a nuisance of itself by disabling the mouse, hanging up the computer and causing printer problems.  After downloading fixes from Microsoft, Norton and McAfee, we think that we have finally rid ourselves of this obnoxious bug.  Bob is now planning to offload all of our data onto the new Toshiba computer and reformat the hard drive on this one to insure that we completely free of it.

 

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