We just got back from a week in Montana where we spent a lot of time reading, resting, and watching snow fall from the sky. We stayed at a ski resort in Northwestern Montana not too far from Glacier National Park. There was maybe 2 inches of snow on the ground, but a few die-hards strapped on their ski boots and walked up the slopes. We did not. Instead we sipped our coffee in front of the fire. I like skiing, but I think the ski lift was a really fine invention too.
With all this reading and resting, we blazed through all our library books. Fortunately, there was a huge Borders bookstore nearby. Although I didn’t buy it, I ran across a book called The Jerk with the Cell Phone: A Survival Guide for the Rest of Us (by Barbara Pachter and Susan Magee). It was particularly appropriate in Montana, where apparently people can’t drive anywhere without having a cell phone glued to their heads. It’s extremely scary to watch some dolt in his 4-ton truck weaving all over his lane at 80 miles an hour, tailgating and then almost rear-ending some poor unsuspecting victim who has the temerity to make a right-hand turn. It’s also easy to see why Montana has the highest per-capita highway death rate of any state in the US. Little crosses are placed along the side of the highway where people have died, and we drove by a LOT of crosses.
In more nerdy news, because of the trip, I got to try out my spiffy new laptop "on the road" as they say. Actually, it was more like, "on the dining room table" since we stayed in a condo, but still, it was cool. Once I set up the external keyboard and pen tablet, using the silver mini-machine wasn’t really that much different than being at home at my desktop computer.
The only thing that was a drag was the Norton Security Center that came pre-installed on the laptop. Basically, it’s a bundle of a firewall, anti-virus and who knows what else that’s supposed to keep my laptop free of vermin. The trouble is I can’t figure out how anyone can stand to use it. Setting up a simple dial-up connection is just about impossible. In fact, I could never get my e-mail to work at all, so I finally just turned the security garbage off. Although I still think Norton Anti-virus is great, all that extra stuff is SO not worth the money until they figure out how to make it work for regular people in normal circumstances.
Now that I think about it, I guess the theme of our vacation was "just turn it off!" 😉