addendum from last posts (technical notes)

My thought had been to move their network cable to my laptop. No network cable. WTF? Confirmed: no wireless detected. I started inspecting cables, and came up with an unaccounted-for USB cable. (At first I thought it was the mouse, but it wasn't.) A USB network connector? I've never seen that before.

Simply moving the cable to my iBook didn't work; I assume I would have to do some configuration, but I don't know what. So I fell back to plan B: I had, as a precaution, put those posts on my thumb drive. There was only one USB connection on their computer, so -- while off the network -- I plugged in the thumb drive and looked for a writable place on disk. C: was out but "Shared Documents" (whatever that is) worked. After I copied the files, I then disconnected the thumb drive, reconnected the network, and continued. (I had to open the files in Wordpad to select text to paste in; Notepad garbled the text and of course emacs wasn't available. Nor was any non-IE browser, but I expected that.) When I was done I deleted my files.

I hope that didn't disturb the clerk at the front desk. I had told her I was going to try to connect my computer and she said "good luck", so I took that as permission to explore more widely. I did notice that they've locked down the machine somewhat, which is smart -- in addition to not being able to write to the local disk, the network settings in the control panel were off-limits. (I couldn't even look.)

While doing all this I had a nice conversation with Stefan from DC, who is here for one night and then heading to Tel Aviv, assuming he can get a replacement for his dead rental car. Friendly fellow; I hope that works out for him.

Monday

Monday was Christmas. I didn't notice. How novel.

This morning we left Jerusalem and headed north. ( Read more... )

Tuesday

First a question for the LJ brain trust: ever since I first plugged my camera into my iBook, plugging in my thumb drive generates the message "no camera found". I can click on it and it goes away, but it's annoying -- especially as, once I get home, the thumb drive will be much more common than the camera. How do I make it stop?

( Tuesday )

Wednesday: heading south

This morning we left K'far Giladi. On the way south our guide explained a lot of the history of the kibbutz movement; eventually I want to write more about that philosophy, but not right now.

( Read more... )

future trips

My rabbi has started to talk about a possible trip (probably in 2009) for people who've already been to Israel at least once. I could go for that! I wonder if Dani would join us; part of why he didn't this time is that he's seen most of this stuff before.

(I would be especially interested in any future trip that is explicit about being high-paced and makes no apologies and few concessions. I doubt that will happen, though.)