Tuesday
was St. Steven's day, another major Italian holiday, so almost everything was
closed, except the Chinese store. For the most part, we were home, though I did
go around and do a bit of IT Santa Claus work. It was good to have time at
home. Dee appreciated time to catch up on laundry and reading.
The Knieses, who live in the apartment building right next to ours, have
longstanding horrible WiFi problems at home with their iPhones and Macs. The
service drops in and out, and they can't get WiFi in their bedroom most of the
time, only about 20 feet from the router. Sure enough, their WiFi connection
was bad in my first testing using my laptop. However, when I connected with an
ethernet cable instead, I got over 50Mbps down and almost 20Mbps up -- turns
out that they actually have a fiber connection! That's well over 10x the
internet speed in our apartment, not that I'm jealous or anything <g>. So
I gave them a couple of things to try and report back on. First indications are
that it's now working well, but we'll see what happens.
I then went over to the mission office and helped out Anziano Paulsen, the
mission financial secretary, with some things on his work PC: the default zoom
setting in Adobe Acrobat, and getting the system language and keyboard set
appropriately for him (English and Italian, respectively). After a recent
Windows update, he had lost some of his language configuration settings. It's
interesting for Americans to use an Italian PC. He has a physical Italian
keyboard, which he needs for easy access to symbols like the euro sign and
accented letters, but he wanted the system menus in English. Another difference
in Italy is that the decimal point on the numeric keypad is a decimal comma,
so we still need to adjust that for his taste. There were a couple of other
issues I couldn't figure out easily and will get back to him on.
Meanwhile, I finished downloading the 10+ GB of photos for Sorella Manning and
put them on her flash drive. It took the better part of a day, with various
network/browser glitches causing a restart of the (very long) download. Anyway,
it just illustrates why I need a second laptop, because I'm often doing
something that runs for a long time but need to take my laptop somewhere with
me in the interim. So hopefully the Dell unit I ordered will show up soon; if
not, I will buy a cheap laptop locally. At home I had several laptops, which
were often all busy with various tasks.
My wife bought new cloth shower curtains for my bathroom. The existing plastic
ones were a bit worn out and, more importantly, difficult to clean, so this is
a good thing.
We packed for our Calabria train trip Wednesday morning, fitting into our very
small carry-on suitcases. It will be a busy few days on our trip, but nice to
have a bit of a vacation. We have found over the years that small luggage is
far preferable. For example, we each brought only a 22-inch carry-on and a
backpack on our last couple of three-week trips to Italy. It's so much easier
to get around, and also quicker for finding stuff.
In the evening I found a very disturbing problem: over half of my Google
contacts had disappeared! There apparently is a longstanding but very rare bug
(aren't I lucky? :-) that causes contacts to disappear. It has happened again
since I did a restore from a recent backup. We rely on our contacts for lots of
stuff, both on our phones and our computers, so not being able to trust them is
a big problem. Google has a way to restore contacts to any point in the last 30
days, but the issue has apparently been going on for a while, as each snapshot
I restored was missing different subsets. Yikes! I obviously need to back up
more frequently, and I'll also have to spend some time splicing different versions
of my contact list back together somehow.