Plantagenet Penguinista

...on the ’phone with a girl, in intelligent conversation, & getting good practical results, does that mean thimgs are getting serious? (-:

It looks like I will be visiting the USA shortly (bouncing through Sydney en route ), & will only require about one suitcase full of gear. The airline says that I’m allowed 2 such, total mass 23kg (50lb) for each case. So... convince me! Make an offer! (-:

(plus a 40c flagfall?) Try fring , which installed & works on my (Symbian OS) Nokia E63, then open your Skype account through it. Skype calls to US cell-phones are 2.7c per minute. My Virgin $29 cap includes only 20MB of data per month for the ’phone itself, which is not an enormous amount of talking, but OTOH, the most I’ve used in a month sans fring/Skype is 1MB, & I can boost that quota by 50MB for $5 (or 300MB for $10). Pull a figure out of the air, & call that 4200 kilobits per minute, so about 90 minutes of talking for $5, or 5.25c per minute for data, plus 2.7c for Skype time, gives ≈8c, which certainly beats 180c per minute. If I wanted to yak for 9 hours a month, that works out to 4.45c per minute. The wonders of modern technology... (-:

I’ve been watching air tickets this week, ’coz I need to take a trip to the ’States. I lined up a deal I liked on Monday, but didn’t have $$$ available. On Tuesday, the flight was going to be $600 more, but by shifting it away 2 days, I could contain the increase to $100. Money was made available, appeared in the account 9PM Tuesday — by which time the price had risen another $100 or so. So I bit. By “risen another $100,” that refers only the main drag on United. Qantas, in second place, had risen over $200. Canadiar, ex 3 rd place (now 5 th ) had risen $350. Was SMSed this morning to be told that the transaction had bounced. Grrr. Rang up, queried, the support girl retried the transaction. It worked. The price had not changed overnight. Yay! Around noon today, the United price fell $280. Nih! )-: Meanwhile, Qantas has risen another $100 (by about $300 for 3 rd & 4 th slots), Canadair had escalated another $500. Skype: this has been fun, talking to people all over the planet (i

Why, Albany, of course! No, not Albany, state of New York. Albany, state of Western Australia. There were also sundry Cortinas buzzing around on Sunday, even a Jaguar sedan, plus some seriously antique rally cars. Girlfriend would have liked it, born in the Year of the Tiger (like me, Leon the Lion), drives on the wrong side of the road (as for York Street here, other streets they used both sides), has Jaguar Avenue running west from the town of Leon, which is 150km NW of her town (about half a Geraldton but a bit more spread out, has some excellent lakes, less sand, less double-gees, fairly close to the other side of the planet from here). If you like coincidences, she was born one day after & two timezones east of me. The Albany Car Classic started off a bit damp, but it had stopped raining, was sunny & nearly dry by noon. Wasn’t today a miserable winter day? Bright sunshine, 19.7°C... (-: