We were going to invite Mike to breakfast at the hotel where free breakfast came with the room, but he had better ideas: The kettle!
Off we went in his car that really cold, windy (but clear) morning and soon found ourselves being regaled with a story of his exploits trying to catch a plane (or two) to Canada as we waited for a table to clear at The Kettle. This was a popular place indeed for people to brave the cold wind for breakfast.
The food was delicious: we decided today was going to be our shopping day (our all-time favourite activity anywhere, eclipsing visiting museums, art galleries and going bungie-jumping, even): warm clothing first on the list, then tablets and a RAM upgrade for the netbook I'm typing on.
You know, a strawberry is not a strawberry (wait till you have had strawberries in the US: they beat any Aussie strawberries I've ever had!), and in the US Target is not like our Target at home! Wow, they sell food here.
Went first to Fry's Electronics to upgrade the RAM on my netbook. Mike confided in me he doesn't much care for Fry's, and I've come to agree with him, based on my experience there. Customer Service is definitely not their strong suit. I had to *buy* a screwdriver to open the RAM cover of the netbook to show the clearly bored, not excessively helpful clerk the exact RAM I needed. I should have looked closer at the available slots: had I done so I would have realised I actually had to *replace* the existing SIMM for a two-gig SIMM in order to upgrade. I just bought a single-gig SIMM.
Their tablet selection was pov, were out of everything we were considering.
We finally ended up at Best Buy. They only had the 32-gig Toshiba, so I ended up getting that. Nanny picked up the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (32-gig) and - surprise-surprise!! - Julia got herself the Acer Iconia Tab, which she is tickled pink over. This, despite the fact she wasn't even looking at getting one when we went into that store.
My tablet weighs almost twice what the Galaxy does... pretty much what my little netbook does.
It's a pig. But, it's what I wanted.
No special deals per se... I thought being in LA, you'd be able to find stuff for cheaper, but this is a latest-greatest technology thing: everyone wants one, so only minimal deals to be made.
After a bit of poking around in the mall, we finally ended up at Michaels, where the ladies showed incredible restraint: all they got was a few ribbons and stuff! Meanwhile, this is where I found out that I couldn't just add a SIMM to the netbook to upgrade. So, we dropped Julia and Nanny at the hotel for a nanna-nap and then went back to Fry's to exchange the 1-gig for a 2-gig SIMM, which is working well.
Dropped in for a bit at Mike's, met his reclusive cat Pele and sat in admiration and a wee bit of envy at his amazing programming skills. Okay, a LOT of envy! I could have hung out with him longer, but we'd made dinner reservations at Kinkaid's, so we finally left to pick up the ladies at the hotel and then headed down to Redondo Beach.
The promised storm never made landfall - thank goodness! - but the wind and cold more than made up for it. At the restaurant, up on pilings over a crashing surf, the wind buffeted us with gale-force gusts as we scurried from the car.
Dinner was every bit as good as Mike had claimed it would be: it was the very best meal we'd had so far on our holidays.
The visit with Mike was very pleasant: he's a vivid, interesting, highly intelligent person to be around. I think if he ever saw my code, he'd wonder what the heck I was trying to do, writing code at all. Maybe when I retire and have time, I could do a proper programming class at Uni and learn to do it right. But it doesn't keep it from being fun for me and also makes me admire people who can develop stuff like Mike does all the more.
Please note: we will be posting images from this and the last and next few posts very soon. Need to organise the images: this will happen!
No comments:
Post a Comment