12 Jan 09 Out Of Town
It’s the first time we’ve had the opportunity to get out of town for a weekend for a long time, and as we were looking forward to meeting up with our friends again anyway, it was good to get away.
No, we didn’t fly anywhere. It was only 100 miles, well that’s what the GPS said, but the odometer was around 93 when we turned up the drive.
Well it’s not really a drive, it’s across the field. It was dark so I was very careful in case there where any landmines. Not real landmines but enormous great holes to bottom out on. There weren’t though.
We got there in pretty good time, after stopping for some food and drink on the way.
I almost always forget something, and this time was no exception. I got out the camera, and I’d forgotten to put the SD card in the darn thing. (when I got back home, I found I’d left it on the living room table). So all the photos that I took, were with my Blackberry, which is ok in good light – for a cellphone at least.
It was quite dark, so we just enjoyed a snack, and a few beers, and turned in for the night.
The next day we took a short walk down to the Pee Dee River, which is about a mile away. It was a most pleasant afternoon, and it was good to be able to walk around in the countryside. Much as I enjoy living in Charleston, I always prefer the country to the city.
We got back home, and grilled out in the evening. Pork chops and a hearty salad went down a real treat after that walk.
Sunday, we went into Pamplico for brunch, and had some excellent ham and friend chicken, accompanied by cabbage, and beans. It was an ‘eat all you can’ buffet, so I did.
Slight panic on the way home. We were low on gas, and we seemed to drive for miles and miles before we found a gas station that was open, and in the process we took a wrong turning, but it didn’t really take us too far out of our way. Only downside was that it made us too late to get to the Amazon Grill in Goose Creek for the Lowcountry Bloggers meetup, before everyone else went home!
All in all, it was, of course, good to spend time with good friends, and it was good to take some real chill out time and relax. I actually didn’t sit at a computer all day on Saturday, which is a first for me for a long time!
Tags: beers, blackberry, cellphone, fly, food and drink, fried chicken, good time, gps, holes, landmines, living room, long time, odometer, pamplico, photos, sc, sd card, snack
20 Nov 08 Do You Use This Free Phone Service?
Do you use the AIM Free phone line service? I tried it out for a while some time back, and it worked quite well if you didn’t mind running AIM on your desktop all the time.
AIM Free Phoneline is
I haven’t used it since I moved my business lines to Skype, which gives me much more portability, and the ability to use my cellphone as well via their service. AIM free phone line tied you to your desk. Still it was, well, free, and it was useful before I had GrandCentral to separate my personal and business calls for me.
Anyway, it’s another service that AOL are closing down. From January 13, 2009, it will be no more. They seem to be taking stuff down bit by bit. The AOL journals went recently too.
I don’t use AOL myself these days, and I only dabbled with it out of curiosity in the past, but they seem to be slowing fading away. They’ve attempted to become more and more part of the ‘mainstream’ internet in recent times, but I wonder if they’ve left it too late. Perhaps they could have been one of the leaders of Social Media Networking if they’d followed a different strategy. After all like ‘em or loathe ‘em they were one of the leaders at one time in online connectivity, with millions of customers. It was where the majority of the newbies went, and it was part of the crapware installed on many many store-bought home PCs.
Come to think of it, I can’t remember the last time I had one of those AOL CDs appear in my mailbox…
Tags: aim, aol cds, bit by bit, business calls, business lines, cellphone, connectivity, crapware, curiousity, desk, free phone line, home pcs, journals, last time, mainstream internet, newbies, skype
