Perils of Caffeine in the Evening

Clouds as my plane approached Minneapolis last night (click to enlarge):

Home after a week in Milwaukee, working and sleeping in hotels.  I had packed my electric drill but, sadly, Erin Andrews was definitely not in either room next to me.  In fact, I believe that my hotel in Milwaukee is a ghetto for old white-guy road warriors.  I’ll spare you the video.

I did get out on my bike while I was there, as well as a couple of workouts at the nearby gym.  The weather was surprisingly temperate, actually about 10 degrees cooler than Seattle.

I haven’t posted it here (I have to keep telling myself that Facebook is not blogging), but I went with a group last Saturday to kayak in and around Deception Pass, at the north end of Whidbey Island.  It’s a narrow passage between two land masses, and builds a rousing current at each flood and ebb.  When the wind is blowing against the current, the result is standing waves that are sort of like riding a bronco.  We surfed the waves, and had some fun crossing eddylines.

A friend who decided not to paddle into the pass took my camera up on the bridge above the pass, and got some nice shots, including a series of me being rescued (I can’t yet to an eskimo roll) after a wave kicked my ass:

Here’s the GPS tale of the trip.  It’s amusing to click the forward arrow at the top and watch the marker trace our route, especially in the pass as I go around in circles.

In other news, the screen on my laptop has been experiencing blackouts.  I’d been thinking it was time for a new laptop anyway, and it might have picked up the vibes of betrayal.  When it first blacked out, I specked out a new Dell Inspiron 15, and was almost ready to type my credit card number when a guy I was working with that day said, “Whoa, read these reviews first!”  It was typical malcontent user-review fodder, but enough to make me wait a bit.

Then the guy suggested I look at a Macbook.  I’ve never considered Macs, simply because all the consulting work I do is with Windows software, but I was intrigued that it seemed, as I read about the Macbook, that the recent Macs can run Windows sessions pretty seamlessly.

So I went to the Apple Store to see one.  Even in jeans and Keens, I was the un-hippest person in the store.  I shook it off and allowed one of the swarm of eager salesfolk to give me the tour.  Reader, I was completely smitten.  Once I convinced the salesperson that I knew a little bit about computers, he passed me on to (God, and they do this with straight faces) one of the Genius Bar people.  This guy was able to show me the VMWare add-on that runs Windows in a concurrent session with the Mac OS, and I made it do a bunch of stuff.

In the meantime, of course, my laptop screen has been working, at least most of the time.  I have a quote in hand from The Genius, about $1k more than I was going to spend for the Dell, and my mouse finger is gettin’  itchy.  One more deep breath, and I’ll order one or the other sometime this weekend.