Tuesday, April 11, 2000

Yet another day without internet connectivity. This is starting to get mildly annoying; I don't have any 2.3.x kernels here that work sufficiently well on my laptop, and I don't have access to newer ones to try so that I can start making progress. They didn't bother to assign the phone code yesterday as they said they would, and waited until late today to assign it. When I finally was able to use it, it turned out that my internet connection at XS4ALL still hadn't been activated.

In the meantime, I've been unsuccessfully trying to make PCMCIA and CardBus work with 2.3.99-pre4-{3,4}. I have a sneaking suspicion that I need a new pcmcia-cs package, which I can't get without an internet connection. However, in that process I've come up with a few tangential ideas that might be useful, and found a few bugs in Red Hat Linux 6.2 that swept by QA because they were rather conceptual in nature and fortunately won't have the potential to cause much trouble except in future versions, which trouble we can mostly avoid by fixing them now.

Went this afternoon to take a long walk through the real city center with Kim, since this is supposed to be the last day of good weather for a while. Walked for several hours, then had supper at a delightful Moroccan restaurant, El Manzah. Kim had a stuffed pastry (Moroccan-style) and I had "Couscous Royale" (couscous with various steamed vegetables and cinnamon served with three types of lamb: lamb chop, lamb steak kabab, and a ground lamb kabab). After dinner, we had mint tea, which was some of the best tea we have ever had. Brewed from fresh mint (at least spearmint and peppermint, I think, and maybe more varieties), it took longer than we expected to prepare (nearly half an hour) but was worth the wait. Very minty, and quite sweet.

While in town, found after much diligent searching another rechargeable battery for my digital camera. This made up to a certain extent for my having forgotten to bring the camera along to town, but there are no pictures today.

When we got back, we discovered that we had forgotten to refrigerate the milk that we bought before we left. Oops. It's in the fridge now, and we'll see if it's any good in the morning...

Incidentally, found out today why "guilders" are abbreviated "f" or occasionally "fl": they used to be called "florins", and "fl" is intended to distinguish them from francs.