Ruminations of an Expatriate

I have spent a bit of time tending to a few blog presentation details.

Perhaps some of my five readers noticed that I added a bit of date and time java script, freely available through the internet, which should display the date and your local time at the top of the sidebar. I also added links to Xalapa,  Elma, and Merida weather reports and forecasts.

Also I have linked to a much larger version of the uncropped header photo which shows just how lush it is hereabouts. You may find the link a few scrolls down on the sidebar.

I’m watching the Bears/Packers game and wondering if Brett Favre is older than his coach. He’s certainly grayer.

Those of you, like me, who missed 60 minutes a couple days ago, may enjoy this Lesley Stahl report on Rex, a blind musical savant. The report is fascinating, and the child and his mother are both quite inspiring.

I was on the D. C. metro train, returning from a day of conducting business in NW Washington, after which I walked to the mall to enjoy the beautiful, temperate, sunny afternoon, and a woman sat down in a seat perpendicular, and very close, to mine. I was gazing at her astoundingly beautiful corn row do, when she turned to me with a wide smile. Thus the conversation ensued.

We exchanged pleasantries and it soon became clear that she was devoutly Christian. The New Testament she was clutching was a dead give away. Though the conversation covered a variety of subjects, at one point she indicated that she hopes that I had at some point given God a chance in my life. Being a pagan, in the sense of a non-believer, I responded that I have found no need for religion in my life.

She expressed her belief to me, as she got up at her stop, that God had ordained our meeting.

It was for me one of those serendipitous, uplifting encounters I often experience when traveling.

I am in the Washington D. C. area for  few days to take care of a bit of business and to attend my 40th high school reunion this past Saturday evening.

Yesterday I took the local light rail train system on a grand adventure into D. C. to attend to business at the Cuban consulate.  It was day of serendipitous encounters with strangers on the streets.

I will report on my trip and encounters upon my return home Thursday.

If you haven’t yet seen it, and understand that there are times when adolescent humor is entirely appropriate, you really ought to have a copy of the Pastor Gas video.

I will be traveling tomorrow to Washington D. C. where I will stay until Wednesday morning. My posting may be even sparser than it has been. I am not at all looking forward to the three different flight trip there and back; but at least I will be flying all of the way with Mexicana, my favorite airline.

I think I have taken care of the problems that were causing the gigantic fonts when the blog was viewed with Microsoft IE. At least it’s rendering correctly on my machine using IE 7.

Sorry about the problems, I had tried to get a bit fancier than my level of competence really permits.

I have apparently done something to cause the blog to not render properly using the Internet Explorer browser. I have absolutely no idea what might have caused the problem but will continue investigating.

Because my pop mail was set to leave messages on the server and I reached my limit of mail storage sometime on September 1, and didn’t figure out there was a problem until September 4, when I corrected the situation, I have missed some messages.

If you happened to send me an email between Sept 1 and Sept 4 I did not receive it and, thus, I am not intentionally not responding.

This is what I’ve been working on for the last couple of days, in the furtherance of my web site design and construction education. The links on the left are live and correct through Community Dev.

The site was built around a basic template that provided the header, left column, and main content container, to which I have added much. The content and photos I have pirated from Elma’s current web site, to which  about four years ago I added the photographs I’d taken and the commentary.

One of my wireless routers recently quit working so I did a bit of internet research to determine what type of router I should look for; logged onto Mercado Libre, Latin America’s Ebay affiliate; and located the router which I wanted, a Linksys WRT54G.

I placed the order, was promptly contacted by the vendor, deposited the funds in the vendor’s bank account, and two days later received the router all in good order.   I have discovered that one may find electronic products through Mercado Libre much less expensively than those available in stores here.  Relative to the router, most stores here do not have routers that operate on the faster 802.11g wireless protocol and the prices charged by those that do are 40% - 50% more than I paid.

The cost of the router, together with the delivery charge, was right in the neighborhood of the costs, less  shipping, I encountered when I searched Yahoo Shopping for USA prices.   Shipping prices from the USA to hear are quite high and mail delivery is unreliable, thus ordering from the USA was never a consideration.

I experienced a bit of difficulty establishing an internet connection through the new router so I logged into the Live Chat section of the Linksys support site and within seconds received a response.  I explained the problem I was having, the  service person asked a couple of questions, and I heard no more .

I finally figured out that I had an incorrect setting in my laptop and everything is now working fine.

This morning I received a call from Linksys support to ask if I had resolved the problem and to apologize for the disconnected live chat session.

Having purchased through Mercado Libre three times with no problems I recommend it as a source for electronic goods and if you’re in the market for a router, or such, I can attest to the great technical assistance service Linksys provides.

Dean landed about 12:00 on the Gulf coast a considerable distance North of here and is heading Northwest, so Xalapa is experiencing Dean only at its periphery. This time tomorrow the whole thing should have passed.

Here in Xalapa the winds have picked up a bit around mid day, after experiencing only occasional light gusts since about 9:00 last evening. Intermittent rain also began about 9:00 last evening and steady rain began about 9:30 this morning. It is not what I would call a heavy rain, it is a rain from which an umbrella provides an adequate defense for an hour’s stroll around town.

UPDATE - By four this afternoon the rain had stopped and there is no wind.

Here is the latest product of my current obsession,  from scratch.

I’ve a report from one of my five readers indicating that he can’t view the archives list on the Archives page.

I ask my other four readers to let me know if they are able to see the archives list and what browser you’re using.

I can see them using the latest Firefox browser.

I have created an Archives page and have been able, after about five attempts, to actually get the archives and category lists to show up on the page.

I hope the page will make things a bit easier for my five readers should they be looking something specific.

If you haven’t been keeping up with You’re So Right’s latest lunacy, his Chronicles continue.

I have also dressed up his page a bit, including the addition of a Table of Contents and some color changes.

Poco a poco, as they say here and in Cuba, I am learning about computer code and am enjoying the flexibility afforded by my own domain.

And if you’re interested, you may check out the first web page I have produced from scratch.

I have returned to my Xalapa apartment after a month living in a very comfortable house at the end of a short dead end street and which fronts on water. I have had no internet service (since I didn’t pay the cable bill and I had to reconfigure one router to again communicate with the buildings DLS network) from my return last evening until a few minutes ago.

As I mentioned earlier the network at the Hotel Nacional was very slow and very expensive so I have not taken the time to post many photos, an omission for which I intend atone in the coming days.

Those checking here perhaps have noticed that I have been able to recreate the blog on my own domain and have been able to maintain that reconstructed for a day and a half without fowling things up so badly that I had to start over.  As I have once already.

I’m starting to get the hang of things to the point that I’ve been able change the colors of the title, sidebar headers, and post headers.

I have learned to rudimentally edit the CSS style and header script.  I still need to reconstruct the side bar to fully enable my use of the WordPress administration panel to more easily edit the content and to eliminate the category list.

Rave on.

The rough duty of not having to go to a job and rarely having anything important to tend to is wearing on me. I need a vacation, from the permanent vacation I’ve been enjoying for almost two years now.

So Saturday morning I am leaving for a month in Playa Baracoa. My good friend and neighbor of thirty years, Lifelong Harborite, will be joining me for a couple of weeks in mid-July.

I will be staying in a two bedroom home, from the rear terrace of which one may dive into the Florida Straights. Actually, into an estuary created by the entry of a river into the Florida Straights. I am hoping to be able to fish and collect other sea creatures for dinner on the terrace, accompanied by the omnipresent Havana Club and Buchaneros.

Suzy, the owner of the home where I will be staying, emailed me last week to inform me that her son-in-law will pick me up at the airport and drive me to her house, and that he will host a party for us on the terrace. (By the way, when you read that the Cuban government restricts computer ownership and internet connections don’t believe it.)

So I am satisfied with what I’ve learned so far relative to managing one’s own domain (5000 Gbs) in some computer server farm somewhere), and very excited about my impending trip.

I hope to take enough video footage to produce “Dos Gringos Locos on a Diplomatic Mission to Cuba” and hope to post bits and pieces every couple of days, or so.

Those two of you who have been checking here have no doubt noticed that the appearance has been changing periodically.

I am learning of CSS script editing; and, as I cut, pasted, and deleted, I eventually ended up with problems that, in my relatively quite ignorant state, I was unable to resolve.

Consequently I deleted the whole WordPress folder from my domain, uploaded a fresh version of WordPress, and have been able to rebuilt the site to a state very closely resembling my blof hosted by WordPress, which is still there by the way.

At any rate it has all resulted in lots o couch time, in front of my little Sony laptop, and incremental progress in my self-domaining education.

A guy has to have something to do, after all. It doesn’t provide the physical exercise as does, say growing peppers on the Northern Neck or turning the garden in the Satsop but I am finding it all quite interesting.

Those who you who may have wandered to take a look were likely disappointed today, as I somehow fouled up my WordPress installed on my domain, to which I never did have proper access to the control panel.

Consequently I expunged the WordPress install and reinstalled.  I have net yet been able to install the theme I want, but I’m working on it.