Home again

Home as a relative term that is. (Bear with me, this is being posted without the aid of coffee or anything - my body thinks its 4:45 am. The subject changes quickly from paragraph to paragraph so stay awake!)

I am back in Uruguay. The hotel I'm staying in is in the heart of Ciudad Vieja in Montevideo. It's early fall so the weather is quite nice.

30 hours of travel time to get here this time - long layover in Miami.

My computer decided to crap out after the long trip... fortunately the machine has a hidden recovery partition. Equally fortunate that my business surrounds me with IT people so it was easy to extract the machine's hard disk and grab the 17GB of files that contain my last three months' work.

The conversation was the same with all of them. "Do you have a backup?"

IT people always preach to everyone how they should backup their files mostly because we're the ones that get whined at and have to dry the users tears when something goes awry.

"No, I don't have a backup, this is it." (Well, I had a backup of the very most important stuff but it would have been bad to lose all of it...)

But amongst ourselves we don't preach. The answer with regard to everyone's personal PC is just that - most of the time we don't have a backup.

I'm just glad that I was able to recover it. The prospect of buying a replacement laptop in Montevideo is possible - but to do so is like voluntarily going on a date you know is going to be bad. The selection won't be good and you know you'll be paying at least 50% more for the machine than you would in the US. When you need one you need it NOW - there's no time to ask someone traveling from the US to bring you a new one.

No one traveling from overseas ever has baggage laden with electronic wizardry. It never happens. You have to carry it on. Well, hypothetically.

But the laptop was able to recover itself while I went off and had dinner with my friend Ale. The food was incredible. The restaurant's wine list started with the $300 bottles, it was a nice place.

She and I chatted about lots of things - like how far removed we were from a boliche (any small local watering hole) in Pando.

She met me at my hotel earlier in the evening and marveled over the room - it's a neat place.



It's very pretty but not very practical. If I lived here for any length of time I would kill myself on these stairs. They are about .4 meters wide (I'm overseas, deal with the conversion yourself if you need to...) and its very easy to mis-step on the way from the bed to the bathroom and go falling right down them. One wrong move and POW! They're made from a beautiful hard wood - which is lovely to look at but very very slippery walking in just socks or barefoot! But this isn't a nanny state, there are no guardrails or warnings in a lot of places - just like in life. The photo is proof that trial lawyers don't make much money here. In the US you might be able to build this in private construction but in a hotel - the place would be sued out of existence.

It's sort of like waking up in a set from A Clockwork Orange especially with the sharp contrast between the age of the building and the style of the construction.

Walking the streets here feels like being home again.