Dreams, Moments, Travels
So enamored we are with this place, we have been members for years now. The Monterey Bay Aquarium in Monterey, California, is the terminus for the drive from San Louis Obispo to Monterey. Highway 1 is one of America’s greatest drives, and this section of road that snakes along the coast over mountains and through redwoods is one of our all-time favorite drives. This jellyfish posed for us back on January 18, 2004.
Caroline and I love visiting the Native American cultural locations dotting the southwest and this trip to New Mexico was one of the best. Sky City, also known as Acoma Pueblo, lies just off Interstate 40. The guided tours of the village atop a tall mesa are offered daily from a nearby visitor center. One of the highlights, besides the great historical sense you get, is when the guide allows you to leave the Pueblo down the old trail. Today, a graded dirt road takes you up and down the mesa, but years ago, a small cut through some rocks and a steep climb on some carved footholds were the only way to come and go, and it was the way we chose to go. This visit was back on September 1st, 2003.
Click Here to view that trip.
With my mother-in-law Jutta on vacation with us for a cross-country road trip, we are on our way back west after going snorkeling just two days before in the Florida Keys. This stop was on the Tennessee / North Carolina border in the Smoky Mountains National Park – the path looking north is the Appalachian Trail. Taken April 25th, 2003.
Over a lengthy Thanksgiving holiday, Caroline and I drove north, ending up at Olympic National Park. This Pacific Coast rainforest is an absolute treasure that has drawn us back numerous times. The photo above was taken on November 29, 2002. I will return to the current photo of the day postings on June 15.
During our first cross-country joy ride, we stopped at Fort Niagara in upstate New York on November 6, 2000, following our visit to Niagara Falls earlier on that beautiful Fall day. For weeks, we meandered on small roads, ending up in Bar Harbor, Maine, before turning southwest to amble back home. I hope you enjoy some old photos over the next week, as circumstances have prevented me from capturing a photo of the day.
The storm clouds above brought rain. They, along with yesterday’s dust storm, are early signs of the coming monsoon season. And what blew in that will knock me out of updating my website for the next week? Microsoft Windows Vista.
Digg dot com made an announcement early in the day that Vista beta 2 would quietly be released this evening. So I rushed out using this as my excuse to buy an extra gigabyte of ram and a 300-gigabyte hard drive. Hey, I was down to my last 11 gigs! At 6:18 p.m. I check the Microsoft site and there it is, I click and in just a second the download has started and it is coming in at 154KB per second – for about 15 minutes. Then the world awoke. By 11:30 p.m., following 40 or 50 broken connections, I have a 3.13 gigabyte BROKEN copy of Windows Vista. Just to make sure it’s broken I jump through a dozen hoops and then I’m certain I’ll be downloading again. Only now it’s not that easy to begin a fresh download.
Ultimately I get a functional version, but my pc is hiccupping with bad capacitors which are causing 3 to 4 blue screen reboots per hour. So before I get to installing Vista, I obviously have to go return yesterday’s purchases and buy new hardware. Armed with a new Intel Dual Core 3.0Ghz D930 CPU, an Abit IF8 motherboard, 2GB DDR2 PC4200 RAM, 2 new 500GB SATA II hard drives, a nice quiet Antec Sonata II case, oh, and a Pioneer 16X DVD burner, well, I’m ready to tackle Vista.
But, Vista tackles me. It won’t recognize my hard drives as valid for install. It finds them, it partitions them, it formats them, it just doesn’t want to install itself. Format the drive for XP with another boot disk and I’m ready to go. Don’t install Kaspersky Anti Virus 5.0, you can’t stop it, it doesn’t function, you can’t even remove it. So I re-install Vista with Kaspersky 6.0, which works for a while, but then the entire Vista security center turns off. Within minutes I’m overrun with encroaching hordes of malicious crap. The sound won’t work correctly, but I need to use Skype, so here I come beta drivers for my Realtek sound chip – yeah like that’s gonna work. Did I tell you about my blue screen of death after trying the Aurora screensaver? Upon reboot the auto-check disk utility runs and finds a dozen corrupted files, did they get repaired? Is my installation gonna hold up? I haven’t mentioned that it is now Saturday the 11th of June – heck, it’s time to pull the plug and get back to business.
If you are reading this on or about the 15th and see there have been no Photo of the Day updates, it’s because I’ve been putting together this new pc and organizing, cleaning, purging, updating, and otherwise putting in great working order, my new Windows XP computer that is working fantastically.