We picked up some poboy sandwiches (a New Orleans version of a sub/hoagie/grinder) and then had a picnic on one of the mississippi levies. Was a great time with everyone.

Picnicking on the Levee in New Orleans

C & N at levee picnic

Next we dropped off C and Y at the convention center, C to get ready, and Y ro save the rest of us some seats. The rest of us went back to the hotel for relaxing and changing.

We left for the conv ctr after they had to wake me up. When we got there it was already crowded so we were lucky to get good seats. I got the aisle seat so I could pop up to grab pictures (arriving soon!).

The first half started at 4 and was just great. The speakers were entertaining, even the serious keynote, Tom Friedman, knew how to keep things entertaining.

Graduation Keynote Tom Friedman

One of the best parts was that Stevie Wonder was given an honorary doctorate, and he performed for us, and we sang Happy Birthday to him.

Stevie Wonder receiving his honourary doctorate

The second half was the roll call, which is boring except for the 3 seconds your own kid is on stage. We bugged out after C’s school finished and theybwere only about half done. The after party was at Mardi Gras World where they build and store the floats for Mardi Gras. It was cool seeing them (lots more pics). The food part was way too packed, so after we had some popcorn (the only thing you could get without waiting in line) we decided to go to dinner. I met a few of C’s friends and got some pics as well.

C Grad Walk

The Graduate!

Dinner was at Lebanan’s Mediteranian restaurant. They had fantastic hummus and falafels. I had chicken shawarma, which was excellent. A great time was had by all!

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What Will The Maid Think?.

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Bert The Conqueror's Toilet Monster

This was such a delight to explore. I am such a fangirl for SciFi, and remember watching all these shows and movies. The Eagle from Space:1999 was one I was always particularly fond of, as well as the Orion spacecraft from 2001: A Space Odyssey. These pictures set my heart racing with excitement. If only, if only…

Had lunch with Chelsea on Thursday. We got sammiches from Le Boul and ate them at her home while waiting for delivery of a fridge — they’re doing more remodeling on the kitchen. Chelsea is lucky she’s not going to be around for it as she left on Friday for Tulane, which she was all excited about.

Friday had lunch with Tig and talked over all kinds of stuff. Was a great chance to catch up on personal things and just spend time with her alone.

Saturday morning was birthday breakfast for Ruth up at their house. Lise was rolling around with her foot in a cast. She seems to be holding up well, if a bit confined. Was fun and good to see them both.

Saturday lunch was with Tig, Gail and Paladin. We had a good lunch and then did a little shopping. Outside the bookstore there was a group of ANONYMOUS protesting the Scientology bookstore next door. I took their leaflet and chatted them up a bit.

Long drive home on Sunday, good to be home.

The last few days in Australia were great. We went to Phillip Island and saw Koalas and Penguins (no penguin pictures unfortunately, photography is forbidden there). One koala came down and wandered along the railing in the tree-level boardwalk for quite awhile so we got a real good close look at him (or her!).

Sunday I spent the afternoon with Jax and Damien again and then spent the evening up at Bev and Lloyd’s one last time.

The flight home was unextraordanary. I cried when i left Australia, I really had such a good time and I met so many wonderful people, I didn’t want to leave.

Last night we went to see the footy (Aussie Rules Football). Ivy’s dad patiently explained the rules to me and I thoroughly enjoyed the game. Lots of action, lots of men grabbing men. Collingwood played a very aggressive game. Geelong just coudn’t keep up. It was very fun and very exciting. Collingwood is Ivy’s Dad’s team, so we were very happy at the play and outcome of the game. There were a whole bunch of Geelong supporters at our section of the stadium and a couple of Geelong supporters had to be taken away.

Aussie rules footy is a really a great game, better than soccer. Fast moving, high scoring, lots and lots of action, and very physical.

After the game, we went to DT’s, a gay family bar which was a lot of fun and met up with a couple of other friends and chatted late into the evening. I’m having the best time in Australia.

Ivy had to go into work, so Hannah and I went to her work. I met Hannah’s business partner, Jesse, and we had great conversations about the things they are working on and generally geeking out. We went downtown on the tram for the afternoon and hung around a nifty magazine shop. We all picked geek magazines to read. From there, Hannah and I went to pick up Ivy from work, and we road the tram back to Jesse’s house to get the car the went off for the evening to friends of Ivy and Hannah’s, Ben ad Lloyd. They are an absolutely wonderful couple a little older than me that have an open house so people just drop in. Lloyd threw together a very nice simple meal and we sat around and talked late into the evening.

Saturday, we went to the Victoria State Library, which has a couple of large reading rooms. One is absolutely huge, with a domed glass cieling letting in natural light and is just gorgeous. We walked around looking at the displays they had there. On of the most interesting was the complete armor of Ned Kelly, an outlaw who has become a legend of Australia.

Next we went to the Melbourne museum, where Hannah and I got in for free, her on her student card and me cause I’m old. We saw a few exhibits, the best was CSIRAC, the first computer built i Australia. CSIRAC is the only first generation computer still in existence in it’s entirety.

On Sunday, we met Leesioh from a chatroom and had a great lunch on the way down to Ivy’s parents’ pllace. We spent Mother’s day with Ivy’s parents and had a lovely time. I met Ivy’s sister and her nephew and niece. Ivy’s mom put on a great dinner with vegetables grown in her garden.

After we got home, we watched a video of Bill Bailey and all had a good laugh.

On Monday Ivy and Hannah had errands to run, so we went downtown, I hung out at the library reading then we headed back to Jesse’s house and hung out thare then back to Ivy and Hannah’s for a bit, then another errand, then we went off to the airport to see Ivy’s mom off on her trip to the UK for a few months where she’s to take care of her sister.

I am having the best time here in Australia. I am so glad I came here.

I’m planning on keeping the Xandros distro on it and not do anything particularly fancy with it.

First thing i did was add some additional repositories to /etc/apt. I added the following repositories:

deb http://xnv4.xandros.com/xs2.0/upkg-srv2 etch main contrib non-free
deb http://dccamirror.xandros.com/dccri/ dccri-3.0 main
deb http://www.geekconnection.org/ xandros4 main
deb http://download.tuxfamily.org/eeepcrepos/ p701 main etch

Second thing I did was install screen(1). How could they leave off this Tool of the UNIX GODS!!!

Third up is getting it to work with my Treo 700p over the USB connection. After that, I’ll tackle getting it to work with the 700p over bluetooth.

There isn’t any real documentation on how to set up the 3epc over USB phone. I’ve had to scratch out information from friends and the internet as best as I could. Best thread so far is http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=1127 (both pages). I’m also finding good templates from the USBModem site (http://www.mobile-stream.com/usbmodem.html) even if I don’t need their software (I bought Sprint’s Phone-as-Modem plan).

I needed to make sure cdc-acm was installed. I added cdc-acm to the end of /etc/modules and rebooted.

Go back to Network Connections, try to add a new dial-up network, and…… the phone reboots! ARGH.

Ok, turns out I didn’t need cdc-acm. I needed a utility called USBModem which sells for $25 that runs on the 700p. WOOOT! IT WORKS!

But it’s not perfect. As per http://forum.eeeuser.com/viewtopic.php?id=21392, I edited the file /etc/ppp/peers/dialup1 (created by the network creation program) and added the following two lines:

lcp-echo-failure 4
lcp-echo-interval 65535

Unfortunately, the network still seems to time out after about 10 seconds of no activity, so I launched a ping to yahoo.com to keep it open. I hope they don’t mind too much.

You’ve been sent a Flickr Mail from Emma J. Williams:

————————————————————

:: Schmap Lake Tahoe Third Edition: Photo Inclusion

Hi Tamara,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo
has been selected for inclusion in the newly released third
edition of our Schmap Lake Tahoe Guide:

Alpen Sierra Coffee

If you like the guide and have a website, blog or personal
page, then please also check out our schmapplets -
customizable widgetized versions of our Schmap Lake Tahoe
Guide, complete with your published photo:

Schmaplet
Thanks so much for letting us include your photo – please
enjoy the guide!

Best regards,

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides