Archive for January, 2008

January 24, 2008 | Filed under: travel

Five times a day, you hear the Islamic call to prayer. No matter where you are in Istanbul (on the European side, anyhow) you can hear it. Early (really, really, really, really, really, really early) morning, noonish, late afternoon, just after sunset and then again in the evening. Here are just a few of the wonderful sights and sounds of Istanbul, including The Haigha Sophia, The Blue Mosque and the Bosphorous Sea.

January 21, 2008 | Filed under: travel, 20 seconds and under

Been here a week in Istanbul and only just today realized the wifi signal was stronger in the garden than it is in our room.  Duh.

While visiting the incredibly gaudy, gold-leafed and crystal banistered Dolmabahce Palace we were made to wear shoe condoms so as not to mar the…umm…new carpets that were already protecting the 200 year old parquet flooring.  Whatev.

We all looked very goofy.

January 13, 2008 | Filed under: un-vlogged, Uncategorized

Oops..did I say that out loud? Well, there haven’t been any videos because I can’t upload anything larger than a lo-res photo the way my internet connection has been behaving these past few weeks. I called TWC/RR on 12/19 to report the problem and was told “It’s not just you. We’re working on it.” Then the problem got worse. Loading web pages feels like I’m back in 1994 with my Performa 550, America Online and my 2400 baud modem dialing the one access number at 6pm on a Friday night. My point here is that the sucker is slow.

So I call back yesterday and I’m told “Oh, no, it IS just you! We’ll send someone out. On January 26th.”

“Fine. So where’s my credit? Surely I’ll be issued some kind of credit for this $60/mo service that’s working at 15% capacity, right?”

“Yes, of course”, she says, but they’ll only issue me a credit from the time the service call was requested. That is to say NOT from 12/19 when I made the initial complaint was was told I didn’t NEED a service call because it WASN’T just me, but rather from 1/12 when they decided to send someone out to fix it. Nice.

Four transfers later, some Tier-Three Customer Service Rep in the Please Don’t Cancel Your Cable Dep’t assured me that I’ll receive some kind of apology-credit from 12/19. We’ll see if they actually do it.

In the meanwhile, I’m off to the fair exotic city of Constantinople for two weeks! My first real vacation in a lonnnngggg time. And although I’ve been instructed my many to leave the laptop at home, I can’t. The choice was either buy more storage for my camera or drag the computer with me so I have a place to dump the media.

Also, there’s wi-fi in the hotel lobby.

So there you go.

And here *I* go!

January 7, 2008 | Filed under: art

I don’t think I’ll ever quite get used to quirks of living with an artist.

That’s okay, though, because sometimes art is fluffysoft.

January 4, 2008 | Filed under: technology, misadventures

After watching the Guitar Hero wunderkind, BigB and I were inspired to get back into the swing of gaming. It had only been, what, 20 years? I’m exaggerating, of course. The last system I owned was a Sega Genesis and man, I could kick some serious Mortal Kombat II butt. I could rip out hearts and deal out fatalities (and Babalities!) with the best of them. Sometimes I’d disconnect the Genesis and plug in the NES. Mario and Luigi were my very own brothers, and we would sail into the clouds, collect coins, bounce those damned turtles around and save the girl on a nightly basis. That was high-tech stuff!

Adventure? Well, that was high-tech in its day, too. Somehow.

I have no idea how I EVER got through that game. All I know is that now I can’t. It’s totally embarrassing. My only consolation is that BigB can’t break his way out of Breakout’s first layer of bricks to save his life.

These games aren’t even in a console. They’re stuffed into old-skool joysticks that plug directly into the projector. Sweet hotness.