M posted the better of our trip photos to her photo blog. See here

Note: This was written by hand 3/4 of the way into a 4 shot Manhattan a few days later, so forgive me for being overly dramatic. I only corrected the spelling and a few gramatical errors.

March 7 2009

Normally I-5 South is my least favorite California drive, however, March has a feature that forces me to promote 680 to my least favorite stretch: cherry blossoms. Of the various fruits and vegetables that we produce here I never knew that we had such cherry orchards. In march the trees are full of soft white petals, some dust the ground lightly giving the orchard a fresh snow effect. The contrast with the dark green hills that I had only previously seen and my delicate nose felt as dry gold fields is striking with a clear blue sky. The miles melted away until we cut over at Bakersfield to cross the state line to Nevada and and my first visit to Las Vegas.

Vegas Baby! It looks like so much fun in the ads. I can't imagine the ads that would more accurately portray the feeling I had walking through the casinos. There was no party atmosphere; very little "woo!". There were lots of desperate looking people grimly placing bets and watching their chips raked to the house side of the table again and again. Our only gamble was in picking which celebrity chef restaurant to subject our snooty San Francisco palates. We wound up at Todd English's Olives in the Bellagio. Despite the feeling we were eating in the best food court in the finest mall in the States and our server, Ralph, pointing out that that third bound book on the table was the wine list as though it was some wild African beast we would never have seen in our much more usual and comfortable Olive Garden habitat, we had a very nice meal. My pork loin greens and polenta were all very well prepared and as good as anything I've eaten elsewhere. M's ravioli was "better than average" but I heard no noises from her side of the table that might otherwise be confused with something less wholesome than dinner.

After dinner we viewed the obligatory water fountain show in front of the Bellagio, got our Ocean's 11 photos, and a then took the monorail back to the Marriott. Yes, we managed to take public transit in Vegas and stay at a hotel without a single slot machine or other gambling apparatus.

One image dominates my view of Vegas: the row of men in t-shirts emblazoned with "Girls Direct" handing out cards with images of prostitutes in various stages of undress. The cards were obviously accepted and then discarded at various places along the sidewalk such that every step trampled on an anonymous cast off woman, like walking through an orchard of cherry blossoms falling slowly and forgotten.

A couple of weeks after my last DSL outage my line went down again. Same symptoms, loop length change, lots of noise on the line, etc. I went through the trouble-shooting bit with Speakeasy and Covad again, and that ended in Covad wanting to send a tech to my house to check my inside wiring. I'm a patient man, a carpet even, when it comes to things like this. I'm understanding. I work in IT, I know things go wrong. But even I have limits. I hung up the phone and started researching my other options.

In my neighborhood I basically had cable or something else as an alternate to AT&T's copper. Cable would be through Comcast and I really don't like their business practices. Our TV is through DirecTV and that wasn't going to change, so it really didn't make sense to get Comcast's service. I opted for "something else"; wireless.

There are a couple of wireless ISP options in the SF Bay Area, but I picked Unwired Ltd.. The network is run by a small local company whose founder was a poster to BAWUG of which I was an occasional email list participant. That makes Unwired my father's brother's nephew's cousin's former roommate, so you can see where I had to pick them. The dish went up a week ago and so far I'm mostly pleased. Web pages load super fast, latency is lower than DSL (14ms to my office!). The connection is pretty heavily policed though. I've been rsyncing a backup of my personal server in the evenings and the average throughput is around 512Kbps on a 6Mbps synchronous connection. My personal server is on a 10Mbps fractional T3 that was no where near fully subscribed during the rsync, so Unwired must be scaleing back connections regardless of available bandwidth. I'm not using a standard port for ssh on either end, so that might look like P2P traffic. I'll have to send them an email about that. The interesting thing is that my bandwidth wasn't limited to 512Kbps. New connections were fast and not affected by the limit. I wonder if I can apply some of the stuff they have set up to the conference wireless network...