Live. Travel. Play.

The last two weeks have been a zoo. It turns out that working and vacationing at the same time is rather time-consuming. And scavenging time for blogging is a bit of a challenge. Last week, Gregor attended the annual Apple World-Wide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco, where he overloaded his brain with binary banter. His mind was so active that he kept having really vivid dreams, and he would sometimes speak to me like we were on Starship Enterprise because I couldn’t understand him half the time. He said that the conference was “crawling with geeks”. Indeed, our downtown hotel was full of them. They kept hogging up the hotel’s Internet bandwidth in the evenings, so surfing the net was slit-your-wrists slow. (more…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Henry, our travelling plant, is not well. Gregor says he’s going to meet his maker soon. I’m not ready to accept that yet. He started to show signs of illness a week ago in Monterey, after spending yet another chilly night in the van (~ 9 degrees Celcius) – first, he lost a leaf and then the top of his stem started to split. (more…)

It’s been a crazy couple of days. We left Monterey last Wednesday and drove 3 hours south to Los Osos, where we dropped off the van for a week to get a makeover at GoWesty (new engine, new cooling and exhaust system, new tent…). From there, we drove a rental car back north to San Jose to visit David, an old work friend of Gregor’s. (more…)

Well, it turns out that Janice really is the writer in this family. I’ve been sitting here for ½ hour trying to come up with the the words to describe the perfection of our day.

We started out in Sacramento. Now Sacramento was not in our plans, we were going to head to the coast and enjoy the drive and scenery in leisure, but our VoIP woes with Verizon would not allow it. I had to fix our connectivity issue and Sacramento was the only city near our route that had a Go-Wireless franchise, the franchise that we bought the MiFi4510L from. Long story short…I walked away from the store with a Verizon FiveSpot wifi device that worked perfectly, no charge. We are now happy…right Janice…we’re happy? 🙂 (more…)

Our first sunny day in a week. Finally. It had to be in California, of course. While working this morning in the van, we discovered that our mobile Wi-Fi device (Verizon’s MiFi 4150L) doesn’t allow voice-over-IP (VOIP) calls. This means that we can’t make low-cost phone calls using our computers. Very aggravating, since we need to be able to communicate with clients by phone, and getting a US phone plan is just not a cost-effective solution.

We drove to the nearest Verizon dealer in Redding to see if they could help us out. In the end there was not much we could do about the VOIP thing, leaving Gregor our IT hero rather defeated. So we decided to cheer ourselves up with some “food”. (more…)