Rain #1

Waking up to rain, an hour before your alarm clock goes off, is always nice. Waking up an hour later and seeing it's not done raining yet... that tends to be a problem.

One of those very rare days today, when I can't bike to work because it's just raining at 7 AM. And I don't mean a drop here or a drop there, or maybe an overcast sky... I mean really raining. True, it rains almost the whole year here, but it has a very clear schedule, which doesn't normally include commute hours.

In fact it was so bad this morning I actually had to turn around when I got to the office and head for the nearest supermarket to get an umbrella. I really didn't want to be walking a block from my parking spot to the building under that kind of rain. As luck would have it, the supermarket was closed. I finally decided to brave it, and as I was parking, the rain let up a bit, which left me wet to a point where I air dried about 15 minutes later.

Brownies

A couple years back Shell used to have some awesome brownies at their convenience stores. Every time I'd gas up, there was no question: just had to go get one at the convenience store.

Eventually they stopped selling those brownies, but not before I found out they were made by this place called Mom's Bakery. A few months later I found one of those bakeries near the University, but they had stopped making brownies =(

Today I decided to try my luck again and stop by... and sure enough, they had like 6 of them sitting in the shelves. If I hadn't eaten lunch something like 10 minutes before, I probably would have emptied the shelf =)

Made for a good late afternoon snack, although the popular vote at the office ruled that they still couldn't shake a stick at a chocolate cake from Spoon, another local bakery. I'll have to stop by eventually and get a picture of one of those too =D

Photo is geotagged BTW, in case anyone wants to stop by for one...

The City... finally done...

Finally done with The City Alone. Finished polishing up the last photo this afternoon. They should be up and available on my other site around the middle of this week.

... has a bit of mileage on it...

Ok, you can quit whining about your car having a lot of miles on it... see what I got to drive?

It's a Frontier pickup, one of the old ones that had the extra long cargo space. And it's got 505.216 Km (around 314.000 Mi) on it.

But the most surprising part is, it still runs like new. Most cars I've seen start to drag their feet around 100.000 Km, and start to have all kinds of weird hiccups and noises. Not this one. The engine was a bit loud, sure, and it had a loose screw here and there, but aside from that it ran like any other pickup you might drive.

Had to take it all the way across the ranges on the Atlantic, which was a pretty good test drive.

From what the guy who normally drives it tells me, the secret to getting 500.000 Km out of a car is maintenance. Oil, tuning, spark plugs, all that stuff... change it when the manufacturer says to, on the dot, and you'll never hear your car complain. This one in particular was like that: it´s had a maintenance schedule that almost borders on obsessive-compulsive.

End of story, almost

Finally. Exactly one month after I send the defective one out, I got my replacement drive from Western Digital.

I do have to give them credit, that month in the mail was mostly the local post and my package forwarding service. WD's did a pretty good job, and their part was just 4 days long: 2 to process the return, and 2 more to ship a replacement.

But my forwarder forgot to notify their address change, the package got stuck when UPS couldn't find them, and it sat there for a week while everything got cleared up. Which in turn made it miss the weekly flight. It finally flew this week and the package was released today.

Only thing left to do now is open the bag, and pop the replacement into the Mybook World II. And wait to see if it does its magic and syncs up. I'll do that before bed, otherwise I'll be up all night looking at the sync progress every 5 minutes.

Clear skies at dawn

Now it's looking a lot more like December. A drizzle here and there during the night clears the pollution out of the air and makes for a clear morning, so clear you can see all the way to the top of the local mountain ranges and even make out the trees and patches of grass.

If time permits and the weather cooperates, I'll stop by again on the weekend and get a better shot of the ranges =)

Night Rider 2

After last week's test ride downtown, this week it was time to pull off the real thing. We joined the local downtown nightly art tour, to see what would happen. And it went pretty well. The city at night, all the museums you might want to look at, and some stops along the way for necessary food and drink. 3 hours of good fun downtown, not something you get to do every day here.

From what I hear, around 70 people RSVP'd online... only about 8 of us showed up. Guess that's to be expected when you take reservations via the Internet for a free event. Reminds me of that joke on Saturday Night Live: "the Department of Homeland Security would like to thank the multiple anonymous college students who made calls to our hotline reporting the names of dangerous terrorists..."

But on the flip side, seems word of the bike tour is getting around. The organizers tell me there's a lot of embassies that have people that want to join the ride next time, and one of the local TV stations wants to try a "celebrity night ride" stunt in a couple of weeks. If you make it, they will come?