Fort Lauderdale to San Jose

By RV, we would probably take a month to make this trip.  By plane it was one day.  I much prefer RV travel – but flying certainly has it’s advantages!  The main one of course is that it makes short trips possible.  Google wanted us here to be on a panel on Thursday, then we’ll do our Picasa Webinar on Friday, and be back home in Fort Lauderdale on Saturday. 

 

The other advantage is the view.  I always get a window seat because I love to look out and see places I’ve been from this unique perspective.  I suppose I’d get tired of it if I flew for business all the time – but, as it is, I’m fascinated.

 

Here’s the view leaving Fort Lauderdale.

 

And, here we are landing in Chicago.  Yes, I said Chicago! … No clue how they plan these routes …

 

Then comes the midwest – and I think this is the Mississippi River, around Dubuque.  We were there earlier this year and visited the River Museum. 

 

Then came Denver airport, and the Rocky Mountains.

 

And, last is the rolling hills of California – Mt. Diablo in the distance I think – coming in to land at San Jose.

 

It was a relaxing flight – we read the magazines, and our books.  We had our computers in our carry-ons, but there was no power at our seats and no Wi-Fi – so they stayed in our carry-ons!  Now we’re at the Santa Clara Marriot, using the Wi-Fi at $12.95/day!  We’re looking forward to having dinner with the Google Picasa Team tonight.  And lunch with my oldest friends – Lanz, a friend since 8th grade who lives in the Bay area, and Arynne, a friend since 9th grade who lives in Santa Cruz.

 

I hope we get to take a nap sometime since we were wide awake at 4:30 am!  Now there’s another advantage of RV travel – the time zone changes are much more gradual!

We’ve Said it Before…

… and I’ll say it again, If you really *need* the Internet, you need more than one way to connect.

 

Circumstances this past week really brought that home again.

 

We are spending the winter season at our home park, Paradise Island RV Resort.  There is WiFi here, and it is pretty good right now.  But as more “snow birds” flock to the park and connect, the bandwidth and speeds do suffer.  And a single infected computer can really bring things to a crawl.  Chris has been taking her laptop over to her Mom’s place and working there.  Marilyn has cable Internet.

 

There are phone connections at all the sites here.  I called AT&T and had our site set up with high-speed DSL for the months we will be here.  They have a plan where you can get only data if you do not need a voice line.

That is perfect for us, because we use our Verizon cell phones and Google Voice.

 

We were very happy with the speeds on our DSL connection until the DSL stopped working Friday.  I had experienced a couple of short outages previously, but this time it didn’t come back on.  I finally called tech support on Friday evening and they walked me through all the things I had tried at least 3 times before.

They determined the line was bad.  I figured I’d be without DSL until Monday, but they said a tech would be out in the morning.

 

To get work done, I connected to the WiFi.  It worked pretty good, but it wasn’t as fast as our dedicated DSL.

Chris need to do some heavy duty uploading, so I took her laptop to the park office and plugged into their high speed line.

 

The tech didn’t make it in the morning, but he did call and said he would be out at 2pm.  He was here promptly at 2 and traced the problem to 2600 feet from our site.  He found the problem, connected me back up, and we were back in business! 

 

I sure hope that doesn’t happen again.  But I am prepared.  If the DSL goes down, I’ll connect to the park WiFi.  If that is not good enough, I’ll turn on the Verizon Cellular Broadband. 

 

What will we do next year when we are traveling out west?  Cellular and WiFi is not always available. 

I will probably need to upgrade my MotoSat DataStorm satellite Internet system because Chris really *needs* the Internet.

Going to Google

We’ve Twittered about it, it’s on our Facebook page, our latest newsletter, and we just sent out a notice to our complete 4,000+ mailing list (members, newsletter subscribers and Picasa tip-o-the-week subscribers) but I just realized I haven’t told you about it on this blog yet!  :-(

 

We’re going to Google!

 

Google has invited us to speak at an internal conference in Mountain View, CA. No, we won't be driving the RV! They agreed to fly us out there and put us up at a hotel. We will also be co-hosting a webinar on Picasa.

 

On November 13, at 1pm Eastern time, you can watch a webinar (seminar delivered over the web) on the basics of using Picasa for managing your digital photos. Jaysie, from Google, will introduce Picasa, and Chris, from Geeks on Tour, will show you how to make your photos look better with just a few clicks from her favorite software. We hope you can all join in. Please take a moment now to register for the event. It's one hour long and it's free. If you can’t make the live webinar, it will be recorded.  We’ll post the link as soon as it is available.

 

We couldn't be more excited about this opportunity. We promise to take loads of pictures so we can share the whole experience with you. Google is well-known as being Geek-Heaven, and a great place to work. We've been promised a tour of the Googleplex (Google's Headquarters in Mountain View, CA) as well as lunch in one of the many employee cafes. Oh Boy!

Here's more ... this video even says that workers at Google can bring their dogs to work! Odie says he'd like that! But then Jim told him, 'y'know, if you come to work ... that means you'd have to actually work.' "Oh ... never mind!"

Chris will also be on a panel at an internal Google conference discussing what users want by way of support from Google. If you have anything you'd like us to tell them, send us an email.

 

I’ve been hard at work getting our Beginners Guide to Picasa updated and expanded for Picasa 3.5 – and making new videos to go along with it.  I posted a couple of them as a freebies on our Youtube account: 2GeeksOnTour (someone else actually had the geeksontour account !*@!???)

Kayak Diving

What a gorgeous day yesterday.  I decided to take a break from working on our new book … Beginner’s Guide to Picasa 3.5 … and go kayak diving with Jim.

 

What an excellent choice.  Just take a look at that ocean!

 

We take our time getting the kayaks ready, and socializing with other Kayuba members who are also going diving.

 

 

 

I had a song in my heart to be paddling on this flat calm ocean.  And, I might have let a few lines slip thru my vocal chords as well … sorry Jim and Bill :-)  This is church to me.

 

Then, we went diving!

 

Jim caught 3 lobsters of legal size – we had a good dinner.  We also saw a nice turtle, and my favorite … the yellow headed jawfish.

 

Here’s dinner, ready to put on the grill.  It doesn’t get any fresher that this!

 

Happy Halloween

There’s not a whole lot of trick or treating that goes on in most RV parks, but we did have one.  The manager’s daughter, Marie, came to our door dressed as a black cat. Instead of saying trick or treat, she said ‘Meoooooww’.  Jim gave her some candy while I put on my witch’s hat and answered with my best cackling, “I’ll get you my pretty.” 

That was the second time I had the opportunity to wear my witch had that we bought at the Salem Witch museum this summer.  The first was our Toastmasters meeting on Thursday, and Jim took a picture.

We’ve belonged to this Toastmasters club since the 90s and it has a history of getting dressed up for Halloween.  I found this pictures from 2001.  Yes, I promise that is me and Jim.  Who else do you know who would dress up as Dilbert?!

 

Hope you had a great Halloween.  And don’t forget to turn your clock back for daylight savings time.  That means we’re getting an early start to go diving today!  Jim’s been out kayak diving a couple times already, but this is the first time for me.  And, it’s a beautiful day.