I’m in Longmont, Colorado, looking at a cloud-shrouded Long’s Peak behind the front range. Checking out, and heading up to Boulder for a few hours, then back to Florida this afternoon.

As Dale Amon notes, we’ve been getting a new company off the ground, named Wyoming Space and Information Systems. More anon, but probably not today.

I’ve got an old laptop that has some data on it that I need (or at least desire) for my trip. I haven’t used it in a year or so. I just tried to boot it up, and it seems to load Windows, but when I hit ctrl-alt-del to log in to W2K, as it prompts me, nothing happens.

The shift lock key lights up the light, so at least that part of the keyboard is working. Does anyone know what the problem might be, or if there’s some way around the three-finger salute to boot into Windows? My only other option (assuming that I don’t have a serious keyboard problem) is to boot into Linux, and then try to mount the Windows drive. If I have to do that, I’ll have to give up, because I have too many other things to do tonight. Though I guess I could throw the machine in the suitcase and try to figure it out when I get there.

[Update on Wednesday night, in Laramie]

OK, booted into Linux. Or rather, attempted to boot into Linux. When I type “root,” it comes out “rt.” No “o.” No lots of keys. Probably bad contacts from lack of use. I might try hooking up a USB keyboard tomorrow, at least to get the data off it. I suspect that if I wanted to invest the effort, I could open it up and get things good again with some contact cleaner.

I’m leaving warm and flat south Florida for cold and mountainous Laramie, Wyoming in the morning. It will be a nice change, but blogging may be insubstantial.

I like Mexican food (if it’s good–too often, alas, it is not), but after all the catering I’ve had this week–at the Symposium, at the AIAA thingie last night, and in the press tent (e.g., bacon, cheese and egg burritos this morning, and now they’re serving carnitos y arroz for lunch), I’ve had enough Mexicano food this week to last me a while. Which is good, since I’m going back to south Florida, the land of steak houses and Italian restaurants.

At least until I get home and have some time to go in and do a script rename, I’ve had to disable trackback. I’d gotten several hundred of them over the last couple days, and don’t have reliable enough connectivity to stay on top of them.

We have to come up with a general solution to comment and trackback spam. The blogosphere thrives on feedback and crosstalk, and will lose much of its value if we can’t allow this due to vandals.

It’s been a disastrous couple of days as far as Internet connectivity goes. My hotel has wireless, but it’s like a slow dialup. I can load static pages, but I get timeouts on getting mail. Worse, anything with a script times times. Which means no blogging. Worse yet (at least for me), it means that I can’t fight the human offal that have been spamming me. I’ve gotten hundreds of spam pings in the last couple days, and I haven’t even been able to blacklist them, let alone delete the offending graffitti. The connectivity at the symposium was flaky as well.

Anyway, I’m at a Barnes and Noble now, paying for an AT&T connection by the hour.

It’s worth it, but I see that I have to get a wireless card, so I’m not dependent on the whims of hotels with false advertising about their Internet capabilities.

Things worked out better than I expected. I managed to get an earlier flight from Dallas to El Paso, and when I got there, Advantage had a car (for the bargain price of only a hundred bucks a day, including all of the outrageous taxes and fees they put on rental cars these days).

I’m in my room now, and the broadband seems to work, sort of, though it seems more like narrow band.

I stupidly made air and hotel reservations for this week, but not car rental. No one has anything. Which should have been obvious. I thought about the difficulty of staying in Las Cruces, and got a hotel in El Paso, but it didn’t occur to me (as it should have) that everyone would be flying into El Paso and renting cars there.

Is anyone going there this week, and staying in El Paso, from whom I could bum a ride for five days? Including tomorrow afternoon, when I get in?

I’m off to DC for a couple days. I do plan to come up with some thoughts on the (sort of) new administration space policy, though, here or elsewhere.

…and hotels for that matter, that advertise free high-speed wireless Internet access. You often get what you pay for, which is not in fact actual high-speed Internet access, but rather, simply a connection that might pass a packet or two, one way or another, when it can be bothered to get around to it.

We’re on the fourth floor of a condo that has a wireless router in the lobby. In the afternoon, when everyone is out on the beach, it works fine. In the evening, when they’re all home, checking email, browsing for dive sites, browsing for the latest news on the playoffs, browsing for pr0n, etc., it’s…not. I can make no connection, and the wireless widget tells me that I have a low signal.

Now I’m not an expert on the 802 protocol, but I’m guessing that this is what’s happening.

The signal strength is a minor factor. When it tells me it’s getting a weak signal, what’s really happening is that it’s having trouble getting packets through, and interpreting that as a weak signal. When everyone is on line at once, those with the actual strongest signal (i.e., those nearest the lobby, which doesn’t include those on the fourth fargin’ floor) are grabbing all the opportunities to send/receive packets before my (relatively) weak signal can even get its boots on. The place needs more bandwidth, but doesn’t realize it, or doesn’t care. When there’s plenty of available bandwidth, my “signal strength” is fine, because there’s no competition.

For those who are wireless gurus, is that the deal?