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The creative tutorial home of image wrangler, Lesa Snider.

Winter adventures in LA

December 06, 2004 by

I wish Delta Song flew out of DFW. I really do. I hear all these tales of $5 shaken martinis made fresh in the aisle by your seat, stories of being presented with menus of gourmet food choices (???), the brightly colored leather seats, the cheerful trivia messages played over the PA. Instead, I flew American where there were no martinis and certainly no food. I had an uneventful flight and slept the entire way. The only exciting thing was passing Danny Glover in first class :)

I had an interesting (though expensive--$42.50!) cab ride to my hotel with a driver from the Ukraine. With a heavy accent, he told me all about his recent two-week European cruise with his wife of 50 years. So we get to the hotel and oddly enough, it looks completely Russian. It's just gorgeous—very ornate and leaves me feeling as if I should don a ball gown. The hotel staff was amazingly attentive, and didn't mind sending up a coffee maker complete with spoons which will come in really handy seeing as though I brought an entire box of instant oatmeal packets along!

My internet connection is really funky though. My hotel, the Millenium Biltmore, advertises free wireless. What they don't tell you is that it's only available in certain rooms and it only works intermittently. They also have rooms with both wireless and ethernet, which the manager was happy to move me to. After getting nested (this means taking out Altec Lansing speakers and setting up music with iPod), I started fiddling with my connection. It was only stable if I placed it on the shelf underneath the TV, and even then it would sporadically go from 5 bars of signal strength to 1 to nothing to 5 to 2 and so on. Arg. That's not gonna work. So after finishing up an article for MacTech that was due, I started playing with the ethernet connection and my new Airport Express. It worked like a CHARM and I had a strong signal everywhere in my room. The bad thing was that I could no longer send email. Turns out I had to turn authentication off in my Mail preferences and then it worked fine.

darkness