11/25/02 - 18:22
Room 121, Gresham Hyde Park Hotel, London
We're back in the room after a half day at the British Museum, seeing stuff we missed last time. A half day is enough; we both have museum feet. We have no real plans tonight save for dinner at the Leinster Arms, a pub near here.
Tracy's freshening up with a cup of tea now (using a little electric hot pot in our room which makes extremely hot water). I have the laptop out to download pics from the camera. I thought now would be a good time to install AOL. Last Friday, I got a copy of their stub installer from aol.co.uk and after it had downloaded it's main installer (the little 200K one does nothing but grab the real 40MB installer) I had copied it to a temp directory. I just ran it now while I was typing this and AOL is installed.
I figured AOL was the only decent way to get online. The rooms here are being upgraded with "ISDN" (which is really an ethernet jack in the suite that is patched into a pretty standard LAN and fromthere to the Net at large) and may also have dedicated fax/modem jacks. Our room has neither and it's going to cost 34p per minute to get online (that's roughly $35 per hour, but if I'm online more than an hour total this whole week then something's not been right with my vacation). AOL is icky and screws up your PC but it's an easy way to get online when fussing around costs money. Besides, I'm going to re-image this machine when I get back.
AOL said I have to reboot now to finish the install, presumably so it can finishing ruining the poor laptop's registry and TCP/IP stack...
11/25/02 - 21:07
The Swan pub, London
Tracy and I just had dinner here at a pub called The Swan. It's kind of tourist trap, but I'm surprised at how many local Brits there are. We met one of them. His name is Ted. The place was crowded and he asked to sit down at our large table. We said sure, he sat down. He waited until we finished dinner ("roast of the day" -- a leg of pork in this case -- and potatoes with veggies) before striking up a conversation. He is 82 years old, and married to a German woman that he met while in France during World War II, in which he was a diver. British soldiers were paid 14 shillings a week, but divers got three pence (pronounced "threhpence") more and so he signed up for mine de-activation duty. When ever I meet someone that has a "real" history like that, it never ceases to amaze me. Doing what he did only to laugh about it now. I bitch about electric bills being too high, or traffic being bad. He invaded Vichy France and swam with German mines.
Before I forget: London at night in November smells like, in order:
- cold, wet pavement
- wood (hickory?) smoke, from the roasted chestnut carts
- car exhaust
- wet leaves
- old wood
- cooking (all varieties)
- cigarette smoke from passersby
One more temporal note: Tracy's favorite new beer is Kronenbourg. I quite liked John Smith's, although it left a bit of an aftertaste.
Guess what I just discovered? An Orinoco card which is in discovery mode can eat through tiny, circe-1997 laptop batteries in about an hour. My battery has, just now, gone from about 70% to 40% in the 15 minutes I've had the lid open. I had it on batteries last night and ran it for like an hour and a half. Should have at least downloaded Netstumbler before I left the States. I need to find an access point. I could go meander over by it long enough to squirt these up to the web if I did. Maybe I'll try that Internet Cafe near the hotel...