I’m here in Peterborough, Ontario, where my partner Caitlin and I met and where we lived 15 years ago. Today I drove past a place I lived in up in Lakefield, north of the city, where I took a room at the tender age of just-gone-eighteen. After 20 years, the house is still there and the town remarkably familiar.
We are travelling here and to Ottawa and Toronto to visit places we have lived so that our kids (now aged 9 and 5) can get a sense of some of the life their parents had before they were born. It’s remarkable to visit a place – even after 15 or 20 years – and be completely unable to see it as it is. Instead I see a storyscape in front of me with many places so full of meaning and cloaked in personal history that it is impossible to see them as my children are seeing them, as if for the first time. Good practice, this seeing.
It has been an interesting trip today, and will get more interesting tomorrow as we visit Trent University, with narratives running in my head as my kids squirm in the heat in the back seat of the car not seeing the point in any of this when they could be swimming in the river instead!
Anyway, this is the reason for light posting, and the light spell will continue for another week or so.
Oh and by the way, free wireless at the Holiday Inn on George Street in Peterborough. Gotta love that.
[tags]Peterborough [/tags]
Off to Chicago to celebrate the life partnership of friends Michael Herman and Jill Perkins. I’m looking forward to a weekend of fun and merriment and celebration of these two people. I have had the pride and pleasure to work with Michael for five years now on some amazing projects in Open Space, including an important summit in Alaska in 2002, to co-editing of the Open Space Technology Users NON-Guide, the Giving Conference in 2004 and practice workshops all over the place.
I met Jill at the Gioving Conference in 2004 and have rarely laughed so hard with someone. She is an amazing woman, a retired particle physicist (.pdf) and currently an organizational development consultant and coach.
And, as an added bonus, I get to stay with Ted Ernst in Chicago, who is another gem on this earth.
So light blogging ahead as we celebrate a terrific union.
So it says here that 38 is, among other things notable because:
38! – 1 yields 523022617466601111760007224100074291199999999, which is a factorial prime.
There is no answer to the equation φ(x) = 38, making 38 a nontotient.
38 is the sum of the squares of the first three primes.
37 and 38 are the first pair of consecutive positive integers not divisible by any of their digits.
38 is the largest even number which cannot be written as the sum of two odd composite numbers.
Also, it’s the number of games played by each team in the English Premiership, the atomic number of strontium and the number of slots on an American roulette wheel.
And it’s also the age I turned today. Yay! Cake for me!
I’m no expert but I spent much of yesterday trying to fix my new Dell laptop’s connection to the web. I was getting a wireless connection but was totally unable to view web pages. With linksys support on the router I deleved around in the guts of the machine but we couldn’t fix it. They did help me get a gateway IP again, which seemed to be one problem.
Searching the Dell forums for help I discovered WinSock XP Fix and ran it. The problem was immediately resolved.
Dells aside (I have never set up a computer by wiping more software than I installed!) this vexing problem seems to be common, and the ease and speed with with Winsock XP fix worked was impressive, so here’s a note here.
[tags]Winsock XP fix, web connectivity, Dell[/tags]
Parking Lot…ranked above the fold on Google for:
- beatitudes and commandments
- starbucks customer relations
- Examples of Great Websites
- appreciative inquiry experiences
- fido
- fido prepaid phone cards
…and that’s just from today. Interesting thing is that the posts on fido and Starbucks were both highly critical of their customer service. In the case of the last link, I actually rank number one, obviously higher that fido’s own website.
This blogging thing…it works?
[tags]blogging, google, fido, starbucks[/tags]