Well, I’m on the laptop and I cannot believe that I’m doing ‘normal’ online tasks with it, like going through the blog’s spam queue and listening to Youtube videos! I look forward to blogging with it on the road. 🙂
Tech
A Chance For One Last Hike
Well, I will have no excuse for not staying in touch on the road! I just brought home ‘Kevin’, a 1.5Ghz, 12″, aluminum casing Powerbook G4. I did a lot of research and spoke with a lot of people, enough to feel confident that I got a good machine at a fair price. It’ll be nice to be able to watch DVDs on it; the battery has plenty of juice to watch at least one movie.
The seller lives in North Vancouver and I decided to just go meet up with him there instead of trying to find a mutually convenient time to meet ‘halfway.’ The meet up point, a Starbucks, was just a few kilometres from Lynn Canyon (which explains why I didn’t mind driving the 100 or so klicks round trip *g*), so I packed up my hiking boots this morning! We met at six, spent about a half hour going over the machine (which helped inspire confidence in the seller), and I was on the trail by six forty! The gates to the park close at 7PM, so I parked a few blocks away on a city street in order to not be rushed.
I couldn’t believe I was there, under those magnificent towering redwoods on a glorious Tuesday evening! If I could with me only one visual memory of Vancouver, it would be of the view from the Twin Falls bridge, of all that turquoise water smashing down on the rocks below. My boots were very comfortable, albeit stiff, and I savoured every second of my hike. I even stopped mid-span on the suspension bridge and looked down. How far I’ve come since Eagle Canyon!
Four months in the Greater Vancouver Region has been perfect–just long enough to fall in love with the area and savour its treasures, but not so long as to grow jaded. How marvelous it was yesterday and today to use the GPS as I did in Ottawa to only to fine tune my drive to a specific address while knowing exactly what route to take to get to the general area. I’m ready to go, but sad at the same time, feeling much the way I did last September. In fact, after so many months of hardly driving at all, I feel like I’m starting fresh, like a complete novice again!
Comparing Apples to Apples
Warning: this post is definitely geeky!
I’ve conceded that I’m going to need a faster laptop when I get up north (yes, departure is technically a week from tomorrow, don’t stress me out! 😀 ). I have a first generation blueberry clamshell iBook that I adore and souped up as much as possible, but it’s too slow to do any real work or surfing with.  I know that I’m going to be extremely dependent on hot spots when I get up north and that I might be without hookups for days at a time, meaning I won’t be able to fire up the iMac. So, I fired up Craigslist and eBay and ran a few searches, confident that I’d have this new laptop thing buttoned up within an hour.
Well.
My first Apple computer was a blue and white G3. Great machine, bought it used from a friend’s brother who spared me from having to actually shop and learn about Macs when I didn’t even know yet if I would be able to convert. Conversion took about a half hour. 😀 So, when all the stars aligned a few years later and I had both the money and the need to update to a new computer, there was no shopping involved. I knew I wanted a desktop all-in-one model and I wanted the biggest screen so I’d be happy watching movies on it. I called up the local Mac store and asked if they had a 24″ iMac in stock and that was that. I adore my iMac. 🙂 What I find interesting is that had I known at the time that I would end up RVing, I would have still gone with the desktop model instead of a laptop. It might not always be convenient to set up and put away the iMac, but since I’m spending a lot of time in one place before moving on to the next this inconvenience is really minor. I do appreciate the irony that my Apple keyboard crapped out and the best replacement I could find was from Microsoft. Apple should stick to making computers and Microsoft to peripherals and then we’d truly have the perfect computer!
But I digress. 🙂
I thought that upgrading my laptop was going to be just as easy, but I didn’t take into account the fact that the clamshell came out in 1999.
Let me add a sidebar here. I’m still using a laptop that came out in 1999, was used daily by someone, shipped from California to Ottawa, dropped by a customs guy at an airport in California, traveled all over Canada and the US with me, and which has cost me a grand total of 175$ including my purchase price in 2005, a new battery, and extra RAM.  I could resell this computer for at least 100$. My G3 was bought new in 1999, resold to me about four years later, and resold again two years after that. I paid 500$ and recouped every penny of that. Unfortunately, some newer Macs have been proven to be slightly less resistant, but those who say that Macs are overpriced when compared to PCs aren’t comparing apples to apples (pardon the pun). In my experience, PCs need to be replaced every three to five years to run optimally and are essentially worthless within months of purchase. Over time, a Mac is truly an investment. You are also much less likely to have problems with a used Mac than you would with a used PC.
But I digress. Again. 🙂
As I said, my current laptop is ten years old. There have been more than 50 upgrades since then!!! I am essentially wading through 10 years worth of material trying to narrow down exactly what I’m looking for. Thankfully, I’ve found some allies who have started the weeding process for me based on my budget and needs. I would have loved to have gone straight to the first generation Intel portable, the Macbook, but I can’t justify a cost of 600$ to 1,000$+ for a secondary computer. I’m also starting to unofficially look around for a tripod satellite internet system, which would just about render the point of the new laptop moot. So, as a compromise, I’m now looking for the deal of the century on the most recent and souped up PowerBook G4 I can find, which makes me laugh because it’s what I would have bought when I got the clamshell had I had not been having the argument I’m having with myself now about the laptop being a backup only! Ah, the infinite progress of technology.
Anyway, I know what I want now so it’ll drop into my lap soon enough. I think it’ll be my first boy Mac. My first three all felt very feminine and got women’s names (clamshell=Beatrice, G3=Victoria, iMac=Margot). I’m leaning towards Kevin. 😀
Bravely Forth Into the Ghetto
Well…
I think I deserve a ‘I stopped at a red light at East Hastings and Main and lived to tell the tale’ bumper sticker. *sheepish grin*
After all the worry and planning I realised that I was better off just going through this intersection than trying to contour it. East Hastings is a busy thoroughfare and it was rush hour; I figured that I was safer there in my car than wandering around blindly in neighbouring streets. I was accosted by a very aggressive squeegee guy, but I managed to convey through the glass that he had better back off.
East Hastings at highway 1 (a non scary section of this ill-famed thoroughfare)
Driving west on East Hastings was everything I’d been told it would be, a subtle descent into hell. I have seen some very scummy American slums and this is the first place in Canada that even remotely compares to the bad neighbourhoods I’ve been in south of the 49th parallel. Nothing I read about East Hastings and Main was exaggerated and I was very grateful to be in my car (albeit a target of one with a bright colour and an out of province licence plate!) and not on foot!
My colleagues all advised me to take public transit, but I am glad that I decided to drive. Majel has a hard time in the GVR for some reason, so I missed a couple of turns, but if it hadn’t been for that, I would have made it to my friend’s hotel in 40 minutes flat. I still squeaked in in under an hour when I’d been told it would take at least an hour and fifteen minutes! I parked at the hotel, which had better rates than I would have expected. My friend and I were so glad to see each other and we marveled that we were walking in downtown Vancouver of all places together!
For dinner, we hiked to Tanpopo, a sushi restaurant, where we had a great meal! We went for the ‘all you can eat’ option and let’s just say that we ate ALL we could eat. 😀 The food was awesome! There is a large selection of items on this menu and you pick the ones you want; they prepare enough portions for the number of diners. I’m more familiar with the ‘typical’ sushi restaurant menu, so I took the lead, but we did try a few items blindly. The real winners tonight were prawn gyoza (dumplings), salmon teriyaki (salmon baked with teriyaki sauce), and salmon sashimi (raw salmon, which I like with a bit of pickled ginger and soy sauce). Neither one of us liked the seafood fried rice and my friend wasn’t fond of the nori-wrapped scallop cones because she doesn’t like nori (a seaweed), while I loved them… because I love nori!
My friend’s hotel is on Robson Street, which I firmly intend to revisit as it is filled with quirky boutiques and restaurants! Getting there from home, or home from there, is a non-issue since it’s the same route I’d take to go to Stanley Park. In fact, I didn’t need Majel to get home tonight.
Driving home, I discovered soon as we passed the Massie tunnel in Richmond that I’d been afraid of the wrong thing.
We’ve been having gorgeous weather the last few days, but it hasn’t lasted. We got snow tonight and freezing temperatures and highway 99 became a sheet of ice. I took a full hour to drive the 20 kilometres I had left to go, passing at least a dozen cars in the ditch. People out here simply don’t know how to drive in these conditions. I geared down to second, slow enough for me to be able to stop on the snowy shoulder if I started to glide, glued my eyes to the road ahead, and just crawled all the way home.
So, I’m here safe and sound where it is freezing because I ran out of propane about five minutes after I turned on the furnace. :headdesk: There is of course no way I’m going back out there, so I’m hoping that the electric heater will be enough to keep us cozy tonight.
What a week I’ve had: crossing a suspension bridge (THREE times), experiencing East Hastings and Main, and successfully navigating my car down a 20km sheet of black ice. Can anyone recommend a good place in Vancouver to learn skydiving because I think that’s where I’m at now. 😀
Circumventing the Ghetto
I forget where I was in September, but there was one city where I asked my GPS to take me to a grocery store and when I got there, I discovered that it was in a rather unsavoury part of town. I was very nervous and realised that software can’t protect you from taking a bad off ramp.
This was further evidenced tonight when I asked Google Maps to plot my drive from work to a downtown hotel where I will be meeting my friend tomorrow. It gladly obliged, helpfully telling me to follow Main and turn left at East Hastings. *cue in the horror movie music*
Yes, I am finally going to see downtown Vancouver tomorrow. And I’m driving there. At rush hour. My options were a forty-five minute transit ride from work to the hotel and a two hour bus ride home, or a potentially two hour rush hour drive and forty-five minute drive home. I decided that with what’s been going on in broad daylight lately, taking an unfamiliar transit route in the dark wasn’t something I wanted to do. Nor is going through the ghetto, even if it’ll supposedly shave ten minutes off my drive.
Wish me luck finding parking!
(All this intrepidness will be worth it for a sushi dinner with a friend I haven’t seen in six months!)