**This is a set of phlog entries for 
August 10-12.**

I'm on a weekend vacation with my 
in-laws. They're all night owls, so 
I've been up for three hours and no 
one else is up.

We're at a resort and there's no wifi, 
so I'm using my data to surf, which is 
a rare thing. Fortunately, the old 
BlackBerry sips data. I'm kind of 
curious to see how much data a few 
hours of gophering (by proxy) and web 
surfing will produce. I'll report on 
that later.

I missed the bitreich conference -- 
not from lack of interest, but purely 
owing to the time. The daily events 
started at 1 am Pacific time and I am 
never up at that time. I'm a Ben 
Franklin type when it comes to 
sleeping schedules. In any case, I 
read the presentation slides this 
morning and I'm looking forward to 
listening to the audio later. Some 
interesting ideas were presented. 
Solene is right. I really need to 
learn Awk. I use it from time to time, 
but I crib it from stack exchange and 
modify. I'd like to know it well 
enough to produce solutions of my own.

We're going to the best thrift store 
around today. I'm looking forward to 
it. Years ago I snagged a Palm IIIxe 
and a set of chains for my truck 
there. I could have bought a lot more 
(boxed Win3.1 set, with manuals, $4, 
etc.), but I try to limit myself to 
useful items, and take something back 
to the thrift store for each new thing 
I bring home. That way, someone else 
can use it and I don't clutter the 
house too excessively.

I'll write more later.

           *     *     *

Sadly, the greatest thrift shop in the 
area is no longer all that great. It 
used to be a maze of rooms. One was 
full of mechanical stuff; another was 
loaded with electronics; yet another 
was overloaded with books. It was nerd 
heaven, with piles of great stuff and 
few people.

Now, they've taken over several 
adjacent storefronts. They've opened 
the place up. It's bright, spacious 
feeling, and it's been 'discovered'.

It's full of people and there's very 
little in the way of good stuff. There 
are big wide aisles and almost nothing 
of interest in them.

It's a shell of its former self.

           *     *     *

So, I'm home again. I've started 
listening to the bitreich conference 
audio, but I'm not too far along. 

I did check my data usage for the 
weekend: 20MB. Not bad for about 6-7 
hours of browsing.

It was fairly easy to get the 
preceding phlog entries off the Bold 
9900 and onto my laptop. I wrote them 
in memopad and then did a quick 
copy-paste into the texting app, from 
which I sent the material to my email. 
MMS-email gateways are still the 
greatest thing! In fact, I forward all 
of my email to my text messages. It 
saves data (MMS data is not charged 
to my account) and allows me to avoid 
connecting to my email account with 
the really old TLS on my phone. The 
account *will* sync with the phone, 
but I don't think it's a good idea.