Hello from a restless person, currently residing on a bed, typing on a laptop rather than doing anything useful.
It's nearly time for my second ever international trip, as I'll be headed to London Monday afternoon, arriving Tuesday morning at 6:55 BST.
To put it mildly, the anticipation is killing me... or would that be the tension, or perhaps my mother? In either case, I'm ready to get out of here for a while... At least, I'm pretty sure I am.
I've found my passport, which was in a really stupid place, acquired some handy UK pounds for cab, bus, train fare, etc. found presentable clothes for the occasion, and have mostly gotten all the portable technology together for the journey.
Naturally, something had to break, and yesterday, not today, this being Thursday, something did.
The battery on my Iriver H320 hasn't been too great for a while, but was still usable to a point. Yesterday, however, I noticed it was flat after an over-night charge. Thinking that perhaps my charger had become unplugged, which has happened several times, I checked to make sure that this was the case. Of course, it wasn't. I then used my handy dandy volt meter, I.E. my tongue, to get a reading from the charger... and, there wasn't one. You should notice something at 4.5 volts with 2 amps behind it, right?
"OK, fine," I said to myself, "I'll charge it over USB instead."
And now, ladies and gentlemen, after 24 hours of charging from USB, I now have about 24 seconds of battery life. Yay!
The cool part, however, is that I have a replacement battery, which I bought for my first Iriver H120 over a year ago, but was never used, since I broke that particular unit... or, at least, I thought I did. Now, after reading some posts on Misticriver, I'm not so sure that either one or both of my H120's are not recoverable. Of course, I can't verify anything until I can find a Torx T5 screwdriver, which I don't have. Furthermore, no one in this area seems to sell Torx screwdrivers quite that small, just 10, 15, 20 and larger.
Boring!
So, I have this lovely new internal battery that I can't use until I can acquire a screwdriver. Had I known this would happen a week ago, I could have ordered one from somewhere and been done with it. Of course, these things always find the worst possible times to happen. Oh well, no portable music playing thingies for me on this trip, I guess. Let's hope I can sleep on the plane. I should, theoretically, be able to do this, since I can sleep just about anywhere, including brick basement floors and kitchen tables, as I found out during the Nashville trip last year.
On the plus side, I have a new set of Sennheiser PX100 collapsible headphones, which should come in handy for various things. I broke my old ones in a bad accident with a crappy old sound card at fake job, which decided it wanted to send a loud DC pulse directly to the poor, defenseless diaphragms of my PX100's.
Last month, I bought two 8GB SD cards for the H4, so recording for long stretches or at 24/96 (should I need to do so for any reason) should not be a problem. Plus, the free 250GB Freecom ToughDrive I'm getting from![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
freakyfwoof should insure plenty of storage for fun recording times.
Yes, folks, the Cad M179's and jecklin disk will make their first international trek across the Atlantic. I'm going all out with this one! More toilets, yeah! Even more reason to rebuild my website... but I'll work on that when I get back.
I have UK phone service, brought to me by Orange, and have setup VoIP routing so I can make calls inside the PBX, and thus, outside it as well, for only the cost of a local London landline call. While in a wifi coverage area, I can both make and take calls from my sell or home numbers while there, and, as soon as I change a few things, will have a forwarding system in place for when I can't get wifi reception. I'm still not sure what hotel we'll be staying in when not at Andre's place, or whether I'll have reliable net connectivity while in said unknown location.
Thus, although this is supposed to be a vacation, I can still be bothered by people from home without incurring lots of scary charges. Ain't technology great?
I've got streaming configurations for both the laptop and netbook for the Louis wedding, and for times where I am incredibly bored, such as, perhaps, waiting for connections. I'll be hanging around in Philadelphia with not much to do for about four hours, so I might just show up on TBRN while there. After all, none of us TBRN folks have streamed from an airport before, although this has been done bynick6489. So, while not a first, assuming there is enough bandwidth available on their network, I'll also take phone calls, making a variant on that.
Apparently,seather12 will be streaming at some point as well, when he makes it to Philly, although I'll be there longer, since he's coming from Las Vegas, and has a shorter connection.
Sure, it's something to do, after all.
Speaking of having something to do, this is the point of writing all this now. That, and it gives me an excuse to stay awake for at least a few more minutes. Lately, I've been going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon and waking up at around 10:00 PM, which really isn't a good idea. If I can just shift this whole thing by four or five hours, I'll be at just the right point to exist in BST, assuming jet lag doesn't do bad things to me like it did last time I went to London in 2004. Going from west to east was bad, but not much happened the other way around. That first day I got to Andre's Mum's flat was the only time I can ever remember sleeping for 18 hours, and I'd rather not do that again if you don't mind very much. Way to make a first impression, eh?
This up-coming week is going to be a mad one. Stay tuned to this blog, as well as my other outlets, for continuing coverage of this once-in-a-lifetime deal. Who knows? I may even set up a podcast, or something.
What I'm going to do now, however, is crash on the floor and temporarily die. I have things that must be done, but attempting them in my current state would be a really bad idea, thus, I won't bother. Good night, and pop off!
It's nearly time for my second ever international trip, as I'll be headed to London Monday afternoon, arriving Tuesday morning at 6:55 BST.
To put it mildly, the anticipation is killing me... or would that be the tension, or perhaps my mother? In either case, I'm ready to get out of here for a while... At least, I'm pretty sure I am.
I've found my passport, which was in a really stupid place, acquired some handy UK pounds for cab, bus, train fare, etc. found presentable clothes for the occasion, and have mostly gotten all the portable technology together for the journey.
Naturally, something had to break, and yesterday, not today, this being Thursday, something did.
The battery on my Iriver H320 hasn't been too great for a while, but was still usable to a point. Yesterday, however, I noticed it was flat after an over-night charge. Thinking that perhaps my charger had become unplugged, which has happened several times, I checked to make sure that this was the case. Of course, it wasn't. I then used my handy dandy volt meter, I.E. my tongue, to get a reading from the charger... and, there wasn't one. You should notice something at 4.5 volts with 2 amps behind it, right?
"OK, fine," I said to myself, "I'll charge it over USB instead."
And now, ladies and gentlemen, after 24 hours of charging from USB, I now have about 24 seconds of battery life. Yay!
The cool part, however, is that I have a replacement battery, which I bought for my first Iriver H120 over a year ago, but was never used, since I broke that particular unit... or, at least, I thought I did. Now, after reading some posts on Misticriver, I'm not so sure that either one or both of my H120's are not recoverable. Of course, I can't verify anything until I can find a Torx T5 screwdriver, which I don't have. Furthermore, no one in this area seems to sell Torx screwdrivers quite that small, just 10, 15, 20 and larger.
Boring!
So, I have this lovely new internal battery that I can't use until I can acquire a screwdriver. Had I known this would happen a week ago, I could have ordered one from somewhere and been done with it. Of course, these things always find the worst possible times to happen. Oh well, no portable music playing thingies for me on this trip, I guess. Let's hope I can sleep on the plane. I should, theoretically, be able to do this, since I can sleep just about anywhere, including brick basement floors and kitchen tables, as I found out during the Nashville trip last year.
On the plus side, I have a new set of Sennheiser PX100 collapsible headphones, which should come in handy for various things. I broke my old ones in a bad accident with a crappy old sound card at fake job, which decided it wanted to send a loud DC pulse directly to the poor, defenseless diaphragms of my PX100's.
Last month, I bought two 8GB SD cards for the H4, so recording for long stretches or at 24/96 (should I need to do so for any reason) should not be a problem. Plus, the free 250GB Freecom ToughDrive I'm getting from
freakyfwoof should insure plenty of storage for fun recording times.Yes, folks, the Cad M179's and jecklin disk will make their first international trek across the Atlantic. I'm going all out with this one! More toilets, yeah! Even more reason to rebuild my website... but I'll work on that when I get back.
I have UK phone service, brought to me by Orange, and have setup VoIP routing so I can make calls inside the PBX, and thus, outside it as well, for only the cost of a local London landline call. While in a wifi coverage area, I can both make and take calls from my sell or home numbers while there, and, as soon as I change a few things, will have a forwarding system in place for when I can't get wifi reception. I'm still not sure what hotel we'll be staying in when not at Andre's place, or whether I'll have reliable net connectivity while in said unknown location.
Thus, although this is supposed to be a vacation, I can still be bothered by people from home without incurring lots of scary charges. Ain't technology great?
I've got streaming configurations for both the laptop and netbook for the Louis wedding, and for times where I am incredibly bored, such as, perhaps, waiting for connections. I'll be hanging around in Philadelphia with not much to do for about four hours, so I might just show up on TBRN while there. After all, none of us TBRN folks have streamed from an airport before, although this has been done by
nick6489. So, while not a first, assuming there is enough bandwidth available on their network, I'll also take phone calls, making a variant on that. Apparently,
seather12 will be streaming at some point as well, when he makes it to Philly, although I'll be there longer, since he's coming from Las Vegas, and has a shorter connection.Sure, it's something to do, after all.
Speaking of having something to do, this is the point of writing all this now. That, and it gives me an excuse to stay awake for at least a few more minutes. Lately, I've been going to sleep in the middle of the afternoon and waking up at around 10:00 PM, which really isn't a good idea. If I can just shift this whole thing by four or five hours, I'll be at just the right point to exist in BST, assuming jet lag doesn't do bad things to me like it did last time I went to London in 2004. Going from west to east was bad, but not much happened the other way around. That first day I got to Andre's Mum's flat was the only time I can ever remember sleeping for 18 hours, and I'd rather not do that again if you don't mind very much. Way to make a first impression, eh?
This up-coming week is going to be a mad one. Stay tuned to this blog, as well as my other outlets, for continuing coverage of this once-in-a-lifetime deal. Who knows? I may even set up a podcast, or something.
What I'm going to do now, however, is crash on the floor and temporarily die. I have things that must be done, but attempting them in my current state would be a really bad idea, thus, I won't bother. Good night, and pop off!