I can’t believe it. All it took was a couple of television advertisements, Flight Centre’s European Holiday Expo and their Early Bird Airfares ad. All day I have been staring up at the aircraft as they flew over and I have an incredibly strong urge to book flights to Europe. Then I could start planning our trip – the one that we are not going to take next year. The international travel bug has bitten me and it’s a chronic infection!
Unlike last year’s trip to Europe, where I arrived back exhausted, with a very bad case of jet lag and a number of assignments to complete, I returned from this year’s trip feeling pretty good. In fact, I really did not want it to end – I was enjoying it far too much. Because schedules and clocks played a relatively minor place in the trip – we did things when we wanted to – and because we stayed for a few days in a location with a timezone only two hours different to home the jetlag seems to have been minimised.
Thankfully, my reintroduction to “normal life” has been relatively gentle. Tuesday and Wednesday of last week were spent listening to science presentations at Sydney’s Luna Park during the annual Centre conference. The main struggle was keepingawake in the afternoon as my body still has some adapting to do.
I am still trying to get the Sony Vaio Type M computer we bought in Japan to connect up to my network. I have tried a USB LAN adaptor, a wireless adaptor as well as the integrated LAN, but without any luck. Windows just doesn’t get the address from my DHCP server – in this case my Billion router. I know it’s not a hardware fault as a Ubuntu Linux live disk had no such problems. It’s all in Japanese too, but that was expected. The 100W step-down transformer supplied by Yodobashi could not cope with the power requirements of the Vaio and tripped periodically. I could not find a step-down transformer here that could output 100V (Japanese), so I bought one that outputs up to 250W at 110V (US). The Japanese transformer can supposedly do 240W with a 110V input, so I hooked this up to the new transformer and so far no problems.
Time to get back to working on that computer…