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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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