The red
umbrella and I have been
reunited. It actually arrived on US soil a few weeks ago
but was waiting for a strong southeast wind. At least
that's what Zsolt says. No matter that a southeast wind
would carry it way west from the Framingham lab and I
live way east of the Framingham lab.
It was inevitable that his email
would break when large popular email provider named after
a Roman goddess installed an automatic upgrade. It was
inevitable that I would go to Framingham and not be able
to fix it. Neither could his other source of tech
support, a guy purportedly more Windoze-literate than I.
The mind of the ancient Roman email provider is even less
scrutable than that of the Colossus of Redmond. My
favorite part was that the email announcing you'd been
automatically updated and that's why it took so long to
open your mailbox was sent after the upgrade.
Fortunately, I was able to find a workaround to access
the inbox, but not the ultramegagigabytes of archived
mail, using web mail.
I'd been there awhile before it
ocurred to me to ask if he had any turtles or Chinese
grad students hibernating in his basement. Either of
these is possible, but there aren't any today.
They insisted I stay for supper.
Sometime during supper a snow squall came thru leaving
about 2 inches of snow. The drive home through snow,
sleet, freezing rain, ice, and mass quantities of sand
took forever. By the time I got home my car looked like
I'd been offroading. One doesn't offroad in an Accord,
but you could've fooled me.