Archive
Back from Europe….. I thought you had the camera?
Well we made it back from our amazing holiday. We blogged as much as we could, but it was also a break from technology in a way, so we werent sitting on our Inboxes, or trying to keep up on everything.
The little HP Netbook we took was purely for searching, some blogging, and of course finding the next winery :). One thing it was also good for was backing up our photos. All 409 of them. It should be all 450 of them. Why? Well, we headed out of Provence towards Nice again on Saturday as we had a pretty early flight Sunday AM up to LHR, then across to SEA. When we got to Nice, we went out for a nice dinner and a walk along the Med, before an early bed.
We got in the taxi, lovely driver, nice new VW Toureg, tinted windows, black leather, air con, (phew). The driver was on his way home, last fare of the night, saw us with Gav and had a son his age, went out of his way to get us to our hotel. He knew a pile of Canadians, and was just a really nice guy. We chatted when he dropped us off for at least 5-10 minutes, he got a great tip etc. Then, we left our camera in the back seat of his car. 
I spent all week calling the hotel, calling the Taxi companies in Nice, having the hotel call the Taxi companies for me, no luck. Nice is a small place. How many VW Toureg taxis could there be? I truly believe that nice Taxi driver would want us to have our camera back, but alas, its gone. It is taking me quite a while to put some closure on this, we have even already replaced it with the same one from Costco. the Panasonic Lumix DMC FS15. Actually this one is slightly newer, but I want ours back. Its just not the same.
BUT, we have our photos. I was backing them up all through the trip, all we lost was that Sat night in Nice. A hilarious spaghetti dinner, and Gav’s first carousel ride. Some great family pics along the Nice boardwalk. About 20-30 in all. Oh well, it happened.
So, we are all back to work, Gav did the best on managing the jetlag, for the past week we have all been going to bed at almost the same time. The other travellers Grand Pere and El, Jen/Alex/Mark have all landed now in YVR, and we are planning a potential long weekend at 7Trees. TBD at this point.
Coming back from our trip I have a renewed interest in improving my home backup strategy. Our local MS Hardware vendor – North West Hard Drive – put me onto these little NAS devices, Network Attached Storage, made by Dlink – the DNS-321. For under 300USD, I am now running a 3Tb home NAS on our network where all data is now stored. The speed is lightening, and I am running the new Western Digital 7200rpm ‘Green’ drives, that run more efficiently, cooler, quieter, at lower power consumption rates. Fantastic setup, highly recommended. I use this for backup along with the main data replication of Windows Live Sync.
We are getting to know our new camera, here is a video I took tonight of my chasing Gaver around the kitchen right after his dinner, bumping into mom! 🙂
our visitors
the wettlaufer's.... 