Friday, August 8, 2014

Update on my riding or lack there of

I am now back in California. I came back home to visit my kids and grandkids and the rest of my family. After a short stay in the San Francisco Bay area I flew to Wisconsin to celebrate my Mom's 93rd birthday at Castle Rock Lake. The weekend was a great time. It was good to see everybody.

Then I flew to Las Vegas and after a night there I took a bus to Barstow California where my daughter picked me up and took me to Fort Irwin which is the army base she lives on. I will stay here for a couple of weeks helping out with her kids and getting to know my grandkids better.

Ft Irwin is truly in the middle of nowhere with nothing going on as far as entertainment for me. The temperature is very hot averaging well over a hundred degrees until the end of October. I will get very little bike riding in here because I left my bike in San Francisco. My daughter did borrow a bike for me to ride here so I will get some riding in. I have previously posted pics from around the base here so I won't subject you to a lot more of the same dreary landscapes again.

I finally bought a new computer to replace the last one that went up in smoke while I was in Costa Rica. I bought the cheapest one I could find. It is an HP half tablet half pc type of computer with windows 8.1 for the system.

I have only been using Windows 8.1 for a couple of days now and I hate it. The system is not designed for the user, instead it is designed to extract the maximum personal information about the user as it can squeeze out and then my bet is it interpolates even more things by tracking everything and assuming the rest. Did I say how much I hate it? By the way I strongly dislike HP as much as I dislike Microsoft. HP screwed me over with an earlier computer and I swore I would never buy another one from them but unfortunately poor people can not always make choices like that. I had to buy the cheapest computer I could find because that is all that I can afford. I hope it lasts as long as my last MSI computer did. I liked my MSI computer way better than this one. New and improved is usually not an improvement.

I will not be posting again until I start planning my next ride. I am leaning toward finishing my ride to Argentina. I was disappointed that I had to end the ride this year due to my health and the wet weather in South America, but, I'll be back.....