Brussels
April 27, 2011

I worry a lot about Alzheimer’s.  I guess it’s natural at my advanced age.  It doesn’t help that I can sense my memory deteriorating daily.  A few weeks ago I couldn’t think of word “Toronto” for over an hour.  Seriously.  “That big city in Ontario . . you know, the biggest city in Canada . .  WTF is it called?!”  This really actually scared me.

Stumbling around Europe, though, I’m getting a surprise boost to my memory morale.  How?  In my pathetic, yet largely successful, forays into French. 

Yesterday I was in a charming little Chinese restaurant where I made friends with a pretty pure white cat named Vanilla.  Yes, inside the restaurant.  At my table. 

This is not my complaint – I think all business should have pets, and people who are allergic can just order off of the internet.

Anyway, the reason I know the fuzzy one’s name is that I somehow pulled this question out of my ass:  “Comment s’apppelle-t-il?”  What is his name?  Now, this is not at all impressive except for the fact that I haven’t studied French since 9^th and 10^th grades.  And kids, by 9^th and 10^th grades, I mean 1974 and 1975.  Yeah, before the Second World War.  I was NEVER fluent in French by any means.  And I don’t mean to suggest in any way that my miniature linguistic successes such as asking a cat’s name are impressive on their own.  I just mean they make me feel like perhaps my memory hasn’t been completely shot to merde yet after all.

By the way, I went back to the same restaurant today, and was disappointed to learn that Vanilla was sleeping in the back. 

The owner of the restaurant is a very nice Chinese guy, and even though he knows I speak English and he speaks French, when we speak to each other, I use my shaky French and he uses his shaky English.  Because we’re just attempting to be polite. 

///

Another laptop scare last night! 

I forgot that I didn’t have the stupid thing plugged in, and it ran out of power right in the middle of a Very Important World of Warcraft dungeon run.  Blast.  I plugged in, fired up the computer again . . . and, to my horror, it would no longer connect the internet!  Consternation!

I didn’t panic.  I tried every troubleshooting technique I could think of.  I did a system restore.  I disabled and enabled the wifi device.  I rebooted several times.  Nothing.

I sheepishly took the beast in to work today, and as I expected, Bert solved the problem in about two minutes.  Now I know what to do if it happens again:

At a command prompt,

Configsys /release

Configsys / renew

The machine was stuck on a bad address.  This fixed it.  Relief‼

Other Important Things I’ve Forgotten

•  . . . huh what?