Sunday, January 13, 2008 - Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
< previous day | archives | next day >
Where am I?
You, dear reader, are probably wondering where I've wandered off to. It's been 5 days now since I've posted a page here. It's Thursday the 17th as I write this, trying to catch up with this journal.
My kilter is off
I got nicely settled in here only to discover a problem with internet access that threw me off kilter to the point that I gave up trying to post my ramblings here. What you are reading was posted much later and from far far away.
My internet access is unusable here.
As you probably know I use Verizon's Broadband service for internet access. It has been working pretty well - until now. Coming south in the fall I had EVDO high speed access most of the way down and good solid 1X service nearly everywhere else. There is a good 1X Extended Network signal here but I've suffered several dropped calls on my cell phone and so many drop outs on the modem access that I've just about given up trying to do anything significant on line. This is a first. Slow service, yes, but not drop outs, no.
My hard drive is full
On top of that my Mac iBook's hard drive is full enough that it slows the machine down (and at one point locked it up). There needs to be some free space on the drive for working files and virtual memory. In particular iPhoto seems to need quite a bit. I try to prune out questionable images as I go along but even so this new camera creates big files and fills up my limited drive space. It is getting to the point where I've got to do something. Prune some more. Reorganize my backup drive and move some there. Get another backup drive. Soon. Soon as I get my equilibrium back from this poor internet access that is.
My how easy it is to get thrown off kilter these days. Why is that?
Night camp
Brantley Lake State Park, Carlsbad NM
- Verizon cell phone service - Access is via Extended Network, roaming
- No Verizon EVDO service - access is via the Extended Network and service varies with many drop-outs.
- See a list of the nights I've camped at Brantley Lake State Park
- Locate Brantley Lake State Park on my Night Camps map
- Go to Brantley Lake State Park website
- Locate services on my Resources map
- Check the weather here
Beware of Hypnotic Media
To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in your ear what you should desire, what you should fear, what you should wear and eat and drink and enjoy, what you should think and do and be. They have planned a life for you — from the cradle to the grave and beyond — which it would be easy, fatally easy!, to accept. The least wandering of the attention, the least relaxation of your awareness, and already the eyelids begin to droop, the eyes grow vacant, the body starts to move in obedience to the hypnotist’s command. Wake up, wake up — before you sign that seven-year contract, buy that house you don’t really want, marry that girl you secretly despise. Don’t reach for the whiskey, that won’t help you. You’ve got to think, to discriminate, to exercise your own free will and judgment. And you must do this, I repeat, without tension, quite rationally and calmly. For if you give way to fury against the hypnotists, if you smash the radio and tear the newspapers to shreds, you will only rush to the other extreme and fossilize into defiant eccentricity.