SwimFinsSF

Friday Five – Travel

1. What’s the last place you traveled to, outside your own home state/country?
Most recent trip was at the beginning of July to New York – New York City and Fire Island specifically. Most recent trip out of the country wwas over the holidays – Kevin and I took two weeks and went to Paris, Cologne, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Was WONDERFUL (though REALLY Damn Cold)

2. What’s the most bizarre/unusual thing that’s ever happened to you while traveling?
Lord.. Probably the strangest on a trop to Europe right after College. My buddy Marshall and I were traveling around Europe on a Eurail pass and were woken up in the middle of the night on a train from Berlin to Budapest to a conductor speaking a language we didn’t understand. We both though our german had gotten really bad but, as it turns out, he was Czech and was telling us our tickets were no good in the Czech Republic. He was a facinating man and did his best to explain without speaking a word of english or german that we needed to get off the train in Prague and transfer to get out of the Czech Republic before going into Slovakia. He gave us a ‘magic ticket’ which, once we found someone who spoke German, we discovered got us to Vienna for free.. TOTALLY confusing but a fun little adventure anyway..

3. If you could take off to anywhere, money and time being no object, where would you go?
I’ve ALWAYS wanted to go exploring the mountains and forrests of South America. In particular I would love to see Peru, Brazil, and Argentina. I would LOVE to take off a year and vanish down there..

4. Do you prefer traveling by plane, train or car?
When in Europe where the rail system works and I have plenty of time I prefer the Train. In the US when I have plenty of time I prefer Car. Both because I LOVE having time to see the countryside. When I only have a week for vacation Plane is the only option..

5. What’s the next place on your list to visit?
TOTALLY depends on when Kevin gets more vacation time stored up.. Probably will be around the holidays so we’re going somewhere warm where we can sit on the beach and drink Margaritas… Mexico probably.

Blog sillyness

I added one more bit on here today… Have to see if anyone can figure out what it was… 😉

Geek / Blog Tool

Surfing around this morning bloggy pointed me at a tool called phntoolbar that looks REALLY useful. Among other things it will let you debug your layout by outlining the HTML elements on your site so you can see where the bounds of one element stop and another start. I’ve had a hell of a time getting some of my elements to function the way I’ve wanted them to so this will come in really handy… Looks like this is confined to Mozilla (and not even Camino) which is kind of a drag… But still – better than nothing.. May get me to check things out on browsers other than Safari..

Anyway… Just in case anyone cares..

iStumbler

i just ran across this in my morning news hopping and it makes me wonder what folks think about ‘sharing’ of wireless networks. In general my attitude toward my AirPort connection in my house is that, as long as people are respectful in their usage of my base station and don’t clog up my bandwidth to the point that I can’t use it I don’t mind sharing. However if I start seeing excessive traffic at times when i need to be using it I’ll start shutting it down.

I’m a fan of the whole ‘communal’ networking idea where people around the city help provide the infrastructure that would allow wireless access from wherever you choose to be. This would benefit me when I want to use my powerbook in a coffee shop in someone else’s neighborhood and it would benefit others when they’re in my ‘hood. New York City has started this in a public way in many of its parks already – the city is setting up access points in many parks so you can hang out in the fresh air and still get work done..

That said, I have seen a number of cars near our house lately with people sitting in them with notebook computers on their laps. I’m kind of assuming that they are ‘borrowing’ airtime from our block (which is particularly full of access points) and probably documenting this fact for others… I’m not sure if this should make me feel uncomfortable or not. I like the idea of sharing and if I wanted my airport locked down I would do it (and have before) but this kind of feels back handed to me. It does seem like many of these folks are perfectly OK with sneaking in the back door of someone’s connection without permission regardless of whether they’re wanted or not… Kind of like plugging an extension cord into an outlet on someone else’s house..

I’m kind of conflicted about this so for now I’m going to stick to sharing my airport without telling anyone how to find it and if I see the flashing light going nuts at times when I’m not using it locking it down…

LORD I’m a dork…

Got home from a party a little wile ago and started futzing with my blog and now its an hour later and I REALLY should be in bed…

BUT..

I got collapsable sections working so I could clean things up a bit.. Still need to look at the interface some to make how it works a little more obvious… but if you look at the right and left columns you’ll see a little plus (+) next to section headers – if you click on them you can expand them to see their content…

I’m just trying to clean things up so everything is much more crisp and clean… Was getting too busy and it was irritating..

Thanks to Scriptygoddess and Nunsense for the pointers I needed to get this stuff working! :):)

Such a Geek

So I’ve spent the day being a total geek… I’ve added MTMacros to my blog and used those to add smileys like 🙂 and :* to my blog ( thanks to Lisa )… I also added comment preview code… Seems silly i suppose but its a good way to learn how this stuff works! 😉

if anything looks crappy let me know..