Christmas Day

After we got the laptop fixed we drove all night Christmas Eve, to St. Pete Beach, Florida. Rachel dressed appropriately for the day while Matt and Eve crashed for the day. Christmas dinner was at IHOP. Why the rush to the Tampa area? To make the Friday morning tour at Big Cat Rescue . We had great weather and very good tour before making our way down to Conch Key to spend the rest of our vacation.

Computers that won't behave

We drove to Charleston, got to the Mills House - and everything was going really smoothly. Then one of our laptops died. We were on a very tight schedule and thought that we would be able to call some old friends, who have been sending us invitations to visit for the past 8 years. But right after we had dinner with Matt's sister, Elizabeth, on Monday we had to spend the majority of our free time deciding how best to restore, rebuild or replace our laptop that was supposed to be used for updating the blog, and otherwise keeping up with work emails [we can't relax if we don't check emails]. The Compaq nc6220 [ne Hewlett Packard laptop] crashed with no possibility of recovery after about 5 hours worth of trouble shooting. The shortened version to this story is that we were able to rebuild the laptop with a new hard drive and a free downloaded copy of Ubuntu 8.04 - which we were able to get from Rachel's laptop on a fast internet connection [which still took 1.5 hours to load]. So a piece of useful information: Linux client software has come a long way. Once we burned the installation CD we just had to turn on the laptop, insert the CD into the CD drive and it began to install faster than any Windows application. It comes with Open Office [free word and spreadsheet applications], a firefox internet browser and the network drivers are ready to go as soon as it detects your wireless or NIC [network interface card] hardware.

Happy Holidays from our home to yours.

We will be posting to this blog during December as we go to visit family and friends in Charleston, and Florida. Let us know how you are doing. Post to our blog or email us at ebarkley@nc.rr.com we will be glad to hear from you. We will be visiting a lot places and we will ring in the New Year in the Florida Keys.