Can You See Me

We were offline for a couple of days. I thought there was a problem with our cable connection so called for service. It would be a few days before Comcast could send a technician out to check the line. Lucky for me I took on the problem myself and bought a new modem. The modem was the problem, the new one worked fine. The old one one only lasted six months but still I bought a newer model of the same one we had, a Motorola SurfBoard. It was $80, but at least I canceled the Comcast service call and didn't have to pay for that too.

The trip to buy the modem was interesting. There's a newish shopping center over on Moreland about a mile south of L5P. Target, Best Buy, Lowe's, Kroger, little local stores like Willie's, and there will be residential there as well. It's just like dozens of other similar shopping centers across the county. I went first to Target to get a lock for my locker. Don't laugh, it's not like high school. Well maybe it is, I'll report back when I see the cliques develop. Target also sells computer supplies, so I looked for a modem. There was one, a brand I hadn't heard of and it was $60. Surely Best Buy would be less expensive so I didn't buy it.

While browsing a young woman asked me if I knew anything about computers. Why she asked me I don't know. It couldn't be that I was wearing my old school, not even cool in 1982, athletic shoes and ten year old glasses. Knowing there was a good chance this could go really badly I said, "sure, what do you want to know?" She was returning a desktop camera because it was difficult for her to set up and wondered which camera would be better. I asked her what kind of computer she has, she replied "a MacIntosh G5 and I want to do video chats with my friend." How about that, a question I could answer. All the cameras Target sells are USB, and I remembered that even Betsy had trouble getting one of those to work. I told her "get over to the Apple store, get an iSight, and all you have to do is plug it in and you'll be iChatting in no time." The allure of the low price camera is enticing, but if it doesn't work, what good is it?

So then I headed over to Best Buy, which was uneventful except that the sales dude tried forever to sell me a surge protector. It must have been my shoes.

The first week of classes went well. It's quite a mixed group of students there. Young and old, many different experiences, and I don't appear to be the oldest guy in the class. I am older than half my professors though, but that's OK. This was orientation week, so we had reduced "real" class, and lots of "now you're in law school and it's going to be really hard and there's a lot of stress and you can do it but you have to work really hard." OK.

No class today, so I did some homework this morning, then did a few errands. I stopped by the vet to pick up some food for Daisy. There's a case discount, so I bought a case. I was on my bike but the cans fit in my bag just fine. I weighed it when I got home, it was 30 pounds. Luckily that was the last stop of the trip.

I also stopped by the library and picked up a few CDs. Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is a pretty good album. Sometimes you forget that and need to be reminded of it.

ANd just in case you missed it, there are snakes on the plane!