Hooray! I'm in a good mood for no reasonable reason. My notebook (a Toshiba Portégé R200) has been having problems with its AC power cable for the last couple of weeks -- never quite staying connected, flickering on and off. I've had to do a lot of jiggling and plugging/unplugging and general chicken-waving voodoo just to get it to stay running off of wall power.
This afternoon, at Caffè ArtJava, it just gave out. I went over to have some coffee and do a little work after our weekly status meeting with IB, and when I got there it just wouldn't connect -- and, of course, the battery was almost dead. I gave up, enjoyed my latte, then went down to The Source and got some contact cleaner, in hopes that that would do the trick. It didn't.
Faced with hours of jiggery-pokery, I instead came home and went for a bike ride with Amita June. She's usually been pretty excited about riding bikes, but yesterday we rode out to the playground at Parc Mont-Royal and she refused to wear her helmet or get in the bike seat for the way back. If you've ever walked a bike while walking a two-year-old home, you'll know how much our walk back sucked.
But this afternoon she was all excited about riding in the bike again. I didn't take her out of the bike this time, but we rode all over the Plateau and had a great time. "More bicycle!" she said when we got back home the first time. OK -- we went for another short ride. Then she was happy.
But I still had a dead notebook with no power when I got here. Then I remembered that I had one of these iGo "Juice 70" power adapters in one of the boxes marked "office" in our not-quite-yet-unpacked house. The Juice is a universal (well, close) power adapter for notebooks. I'd bought it once on a business trip because I'd forgot my power adapter at home, but I hadn't needed it since. I nearly donated it to computation.to when we moved, but kept it on a whim.
And I'm glad I did, because it worked fine for my notebook. So I got this unjustified emotion of self-satisfaction out of the whole thing. Hooray!
tags: igo juice70 artjavacafé portégé bicycle amitajune
Paysages Éphémères
A couple of weeks ago, a stenciled bust of Obwandiyag showed up on the corner of rue Pontiac and rue Bienville. Obwandiyag, better known as Chief Pontiac, led Pontiac's Rebellion at the end of the French and Indian War. A sign on one of the buildings on our street notes that Pontiac, "vainquer des anglais", had a camp in this area sometime 1760s.
I saw some new stencils today as I was riding around. They're part of a cool installation arts program in the Mont-Royal area called Paysages Éphémères. It's a pretty neat project; I'm glad they're back for the summer.