currently in: St. Bernard State Park near New Orleans, LA

Sorry about the double post there; we're still getting used to all this new technology. Or to be more precise, we're still playing with our new toys. When we first went cruising in 1999, we had a big, clunky cellphone that could occasionally be coaxed into a 9600 connection but more usually gave us 4800 for a few minutes before mysteriously disconnecting, using an expensive and complicated cable which we'd had to special order, clipped into a dongle hanging off a PCMCIA modem card. Now the modem's built into the teeny phone, which connects via a (cheap) USB cable, and we have 14.4K that seems quite reliable.

I can update the website by email, upload photos by email; we can even look at websites as long as they're not too graphics intensive (or we keep the graphics off). I'm already missing our DSL! And yet, this is all only good until we leave the US coast; then we'll be limited to perhaps 4000 baud SSB or ham radio email.

We each have our own laptop, and we recently upgraded our DeLorme Topo program to version 5, so we're charting our course as we go. (Sort of the land-based equivalent to the computer charting we do at sea, using Nobeltec's Visual Navigation Suite.) Britt has Bluetooth on his computer, which is a sort of wireless connection thingummy, and just bought me a Bluetooth adapter and wireless mouse, so supposedly we can connect our laptops together wirelessly, although so far all we've managed to do has been transfer single files between us. Britt bought an mp3 player called an iRiver, and is figuring out how to use it; the little cellphone is my toy, I guess, and I'm still trying to learn which buttons to push. We've got the new digital camera stashed away somewhere. And each bit of equipment comes with its own cable and power cord and adapter and connector. When we've got everything out, it looks like Mission Control in here.

Yay technology. Lynn and Larry Pardey went to sea with an engineless wooden boat and read by candlelight. Not us, you can bet.

(Speaking of technology, you can now get automagically notified by email every time we update our logs courtesy of Bloglet. Just stick your email address in the little Bloglet box on our sidebar.)