Shane's blog, journal, whateveritis

Tired...

2004-02-06T07:46:24Z

I don't remember getting up early this morning. I think that's mostly because I didn't.

Chris drove me home tonight, which was great. Thanks Chris!

We watched a movie -- The Devil's Own -- and I was falling asleep before it was over.

It's now over two hours later. How do you think I feel?

On a side note, I think I've mostly configured an MT blog over at my real site, http://www.kf6nvr.net. The new blog is at http://www.kf6nvr.net/blog/, naturally.

On another note...

2004-02-05T17:00:50Z

If, in another 12 years, home speed increases by the same 540k% margin, that same download would have taken about 11.1 milliseconds or come in at a rate of 3.26 Gigabytes per second. That just might be a little fast, although it's hard to tell. Certainly right now that's even fast for motherboard memory transfer rates. But then, my first RLL hard drives, which came long after the 1200baud modem, were lucking to write at 50 kilobytes per second. So, the hard drives back then couldn't keep up with my connection now. It's not too unlikely that the hard drives now might not be able to keep up with the connections in 12 years... But, of course, at some point physical limits will start to affect things even more. Maybe... people have always said that and it hasn't happened yet, really.

On DSL, WiFi, Ethernet, and Time of day...

2004-02-05T16:52:15Z

So, this new DSL is spiffy and all. But my WiFi isn't fast enough to fully take advantage of it!

This morning, I plugged in our Netgear WiFi (802.11b) router and tried the speed. I couldn't get over about 2300kilobit. So, to factor out the Netgear itself, I plugged into the switch part of it with ethernet. The speeds went back up to about where they were. Things were a little bit slower, but it's not 1am anymore, either!

Curiously, though, I was connected to the WiFi from about 5 feet away and it was claiming 11megabit which, in theory, is 10% faster than the 10baseT connection I use to the switch or directly to the SpeedStream DSL modem.

That really isn't too impressive for WiFi speeds. Granted, it's still about 2x the speed of the previous DSL, but with the potential for so much more, how can I give up on it?

I mean, back in the early 90's I remember tweaking modem settings to get 120 bytes per second rather than 110 that the default settings would give. And it made a difference in how many minutes it took to download stuff.

The different to now is amazing -- and it's barely been twelve years. That 37.1megabyte file (which would have taken many floppies to hold -- no hard drive at the time!) would have taken 3.75 days to download. Now it takes 1 minute! That's 540,000%!

Standard dialup modems, like that 1200 baud was, haven't actually gotten than much faster with 53k being the legal limit. That's "only" 4522%.

And now with 1xEV-DO we'll be getting wireless speeds of up to 2.4megabit. That's faster than a T1 (at least in one direction) and most DSL lines. And it's wireless. And it costs less than $100 per month for unlimited use. Of course, you have to live in Washington DC or San Diego (or South Korea). But still...

Even now with my 1xRTT connection I can get speeds in the 120 kilobit range.

Of course, this new DSL will spoil me. I think I can live with it, though. ;)

New DSL update!

2004-02-05T09:11:47Z

I got the DSL modem on the doorstep today. It's smaller than our previous one, which is nice. It also came with cables on lots of filters.

Our DSL wasn't supposed to be activated until the 9th. But it's on now.

So I just had to do a speed test. Our old connection got 1212kilobits/second at the c|net bandwidth meter. It was with SBC.

Our new connect gets 4117 kilobits/second according to the same bandwidth meter. The lowest I've seen has been above 3400. I had some bursts around the 13megabit range, although it just looked too fast. ;) Well, the reason I say that is because the connection is only 10baseT ethernet. Heh.

2wire consistantly was giving me in the 5300kilobit range.

It's with DSLExtreme.

On to downloads....

So, I didn't have any updates to download from Microsoft and having just reinstalled my computer, I couldn't actually think of anything else it needed at the moment.

So, I went off the pocket movies (http://www.pocketmovies.net/) and downloaded ornaments.avi in divx format, which weighs in at 37.1megabytes (38,922,240 bytes to be exact). The download took 60 seconds, which translates into 633.5kilobytes per second or 5068 kilobits/second. I think that's rather acceptable. It's essentially rolling in at half ethernet effective rates.

Standard web browsing seems limited by the sheer number of requests that have to be made on a typical page to grab all the little images and rendering time (this machine is "only" a 1.13GHz P3). No idea how to confirm this, of course.

New DSL

2004-02-03T18:50:13Z

Our order for the new DSL went through. With Laurie leaving Thuridion, they'll no longer be covering our 1.5Mb/128kb with 5 static IP addresses line. So, we found a special on a 6Mb/608kb line with one static IP. In fact, at $60/mo, it's cheaper than the current line. Unfortunately, it doesn't have enough IP addresses for us to host all of our websites. So, my site is being moved over to he.net. Laurie's site is going away for a while in favor of her company site, http://www.mamlambo.com. My site will still be available at http://www.kf6nvr.net. However, it's not currently available because our server is having issues. Once the domain changes go through, though it'll be available again. It is, of course, going through yet another change. This will be the fourth major change in it's life.

I'm thinking this time around I may have it be host to a blog as well as some form of Wiki. I may try to use asp2php to keep the current stuff, but that may be more trouble than it's worth. It may be easier to do a text import of current stuff into a new system.

In any case, I'm looking forward to a 4x boost in download speed and nearly a 5x speed in upload speed. We'll see if it's actually that fast. We're pretty close to the CO, so I'm confident it'll be fast.

Smelling the roses...

2004-02-03T17:11:16Z

...or so to speak. Well, I guess it's "stop to smell the roses."

Chris Haseman Post

That post prompted me to think about my commute. I commute over Hiway 17 everyday. It's not too long of a commute over the Santa Cruz mountains, which are full of redwoods. Now, I've always lived around redwoods (or at least my dad has). I tend to take them for granted and make comments like "why are the trees so short here?" when I go elsewhere.

The first time Laurie and I went to Redwood National Park was very eye opening. Many of the views were less interesting and less spectacular than the view I get every day while commuting. So why'd they make a national park out of it? Well, that's the wrong question. The real question should be: Why aren't the Santa Cruz mountains a national park? Well, they certainly are many state and county parks that cover a lot of territory throughout. And the rest of it are either small residences (relatively speaking) or vineyards. Gotta have our wine! ;)

The difficult thing about this is finding something you take for granted. For instance, I no longer take the commute view for granted (although I try not to look at it too much while driving -- that could be unhealthy!).

Spam

2004-02-03T16:31:21Z

I had the best piece of SPAM yet today, as far as I can tell.

It appeared to be a message from an eBay buyer about an item I'm selling. The problem was: I'm not currently selling an item.

Additionally, the item # in the subject line differed from the item number in the URL line in the message. Oddly enough, the link itself was valid -- just not to a valid item.

Also curious is the fact that the item description was for a ham antenna. Now, I might have passed it off as a mis-typed email had it gone to my primary eBay address, which is at kf6nvr.net, but it wasn't.

Curious... in looking at it closer, it actually appears to be a response from the seller... unfortunately, neither seller or buyer IDs exist.

What I haven't seen in the message is the hook -- some link to some outside source.

Google searching

2004-02-01T23:40:44Z

It's odd, but I had always assumed that a search on Google on two computers at the same time would have the same result. Heck, I even thought searching in the browser and search in the Google toolbar and in the Google start menu bar thingy would also return the same results.

Well, I wouldn't be blogging this if that were true. And this isn't a browser caching thing.

Yesterday, LD could find something and I couldn't. But I could from one of the Google bars, just not from the Google main page. Now it's just the opposite for us, expect that she can't find the result at all...

It must be hitting different back-end Google servers that have a slightly different cache version. But it's still curious and perhaps a little disturbing given the power of Google these days.

Curious...

2004-02-01T20:19:24Z

I had been searching for ".HACK//SIGN" stuff. Of course, Google didn't get the dot part of dot-hack. One of the first links was this site, that kept me distracted for quite some time:

http://hacks.mit.edu/Hacks/

Sure, it's hacks and MIT. But it certainly wasn't what I was expecting...

More Laptop woes...

2004-01-31T06:42:53Z

Last Friday, I had finally gotten my laptop back and working again. Tuesday, the hard drive started making noise.

Wednesday, it died. Called Dell.

Thursday, received new drive in mail.

Friday night, laptop still not 100% configured, but workable.

So, the Dell call was surprisingly pleasant. I had walked outside so as not to bother my coworkers. This was actually after I'd emailed tech support online. I got a real person who spoke reasonable English within about 5 minutes. I told him it was clunky. He asked if he could listen. I said the machine was off. He said turn it on. I said I was worried about losing data. Immediately, he backed off, said he would get a replacement out overnight and went on hold for a few minutes. He then confirmed shipping information and had me run a quick diagnostic, which the drive actually passed. That was it. I quickly received a confirmation email about this -- which was a first. Overall, I was rather impressed. They even gave a recommendation for a data recover place.

Luckily I was able borrow some things from coworkers, including kf6gpe. This helped recover lots of data. I got all of what I really needed to get and some other stuff, including my entire 1 gigabyte Outlook PST file. *phew*

Netflix and post office bandwidth

2004-01-28T00:21:52Z

In this article:

I saw this line:

"The company frequently points out that the data which Netflix ships on a busy day on plastic discs is about half the total US Internet capacity at around 5,000,000 gigabytes per day. "

which is sufficiently interesting. That's 5 petabytes in a day (search for "5000000 gigabytes in petabytes" on Google). This is just one rental company that commands less than 2% of the entire movie rental market in the US. Sure, very few DVDs are shipped to consumers, but given these numbers, some 238.4 petabytes of movies are rented (and, likely, transported) daily.

Assuming your nifty new DSL line can actually do 1.5megabits a second, it'd take 43,265 years to transfer. ("(5000000 gigabytes * 50 )/ (1.5 megabits per second) " in Google). That's only one day. And DVDs don't even have HD quality video on them. That's a lot of data.

The article also says that the 5 petabytes is about 1/2 of the entire US internet capacity. In other words, to do full VoD delivery of all movies at non HD quality, the overall bandwidth in the US would have to increase 25 fold -- and that'd _only_ handle the video part.

I'm rambling.

Seems even when transferring digital data the USPS has a remarkably high bandwidth.

Netflix is absolutely great for us, too. If we send a movie in on a Monday, we get another one on Wednesday.

My ongoing Dell saga...

2004-01-16T05:22:51Z

Ongoing for me, but this is the first post about it.... *sigh*

Last week me Dell laptop (an Inspiron 8100, about 2 years old) died. Well, that is, it wouldn't power on (to put it simply).

So, I called Dell Tech Support (I have a 3 year mail in warranty, luckily!). After about a 40 minute call, I was disconnected. This guy called back and he said things were set so I could call Airborn Express and and get my laptop picked up (they ship both directions for free and provide the box).
I called them first thing. Nope, the reference number wasn't in their system yet. They said it usually takes about 4 hours. So, 5 hours later (it was now about 4pm) I called them again. This time they said it normally takes 4-6 hours. But, the?!

So, I called Dell Technical Support. After getting the call center run around, I finally got to tech support. And was disconnected after having been on the phone for about 40 minutes. Now I was getting a bit upset. So, I started hitting them from all angles: chat rooms, forums, etc. I then called again and after another 40 minute call, the Technical Support dude tells me that the first guy was supposed to have done a conference call with Airborne Express on the line. He does this and all is set.

Airborne Express picked up the laptop at about 4pm. That's normally when they come by, so I expected that.

I kept checking the forums for status. Finally, on Monday they Dell forums said my laptop had been received Friday. (Dell's online page has yet to list any sort of support status. That's just no right.) What's worse is they told me to check back near the end of the week. Come Wednesday (that's yesterday) I decided to post for status. About an hour later, my laptop arrived. Whoo hoo!

Or so I thought.

After using it, plugged in, I realized that the batteries weren't charging. I couldn't get them to. Nor could I get it to power for long on just AC power. So, back to Dell I call. The first 30 minute call ended up in a disconnect. The next call ended up with someone that I could understand fairly well and that went through all kinds of things. After all, the motherboard, CPU, heatsink, and keyboard (hey, not complaining!) had been replaced. But by the end, the machine was misbehaving even more. He came to the conclusion that the replacement parts must be defective. !?

Off to Dell my laptop goes. I told the Dell Technical support guy about the conference call thing, and he said they don't do that. But this guy gave me a reference number and, for whatever reason, an account number. I got a third number for Airborne Express (side note: the primary number the first guy told me to use was an adult 800 number... the "oh by the way, if that doesn't work try this one number" was an Airborne Express number) that was much better than the other working one. And this time I was able to schedule immediately. No 4, 4-6, or 24 hour waiting. It just worked.

So, it's back on it's way to Dell. If things are just as fast, I'll get it back again next Wednesday. I sent my AC adapter in this time, though. I hope it comes back. I didn't send my broken CDRW/DVD drive though. They don't seem to ever want to fix it.

Blah!

An odd experience...

2004-01-11T21:34:55Z

Due to events that I haven't yet blogged about, I don't have my own laptop with me for a while.

This means that I've been using Laurie's old laptop (a touchscreen Fujitsu -- absolutely brilliant for browsing) at home.

I had started to install things, like the Google toolbar, etc. In doing so, I started to get concerned that I would bog the machine down (it is old, afterall). So, I decided to check to see if it had 256megs of RAM, or if it still only had 128megs of RAM.

It had 64megs of RAM.

!

Backdating...

2003-12-09T17:09:36Z

I'll be backdating (or at least trying to) a number of entries for the Paris trip very soon.

They're mostly my comments, although some things (like Place names, especially) have been edited by Laurie. In addition, there are some of Laurie's comments embedded inline. This is for enjoyment purposes only.

Sorry if it's confusing...

Word spellings?

2003-12-09T16:32:20Z

Like many people these days, I use Google to try to find the spelling of hard to spell words. Well, I spent way too much time recently trying to figure out the spelling of "hagen das" ice cream. All of the bad spellings were to be found on Google, with reference to the ice cream maker, too.

In the end, I finally found their website as I got closer and closer to the real spelling:

"Häagen-Dasz"

A little experiment...

2003-12-08T23:43:02Z

I've been doing an experiment with one of my credit cards. You know how some people are starting to write "See ID" on the back rather than signing so it can only be used with a photo ID?

Well, I decided not to write anything. In fact, it's completely blank. Well, I used it for about a month before anyone noticed and asked for my ID. But that's it. Just a quick glance at the ID.

What's worse, still only a couple places have asked. Most don't even notice it's not actually valid.

So, I used it a couple of times in France, too. No one noticed at all here.

Oh well, so much for security. -- I should sign it before someone else does.

Cool, the detect music thing actually works when I'm using Winamp... ;)

Fun fun

2003-11-10T20:52:09Z

Well, I've been doing some journaling on my Zaurus since it's easier than on the laptop while in meetings. The first day of meetings appeared to go very well.

It was followed up by traditional Korean BBQ with the people we met with as well as their boss, whom only introduced himself briefly at the start of the meetings. Apparently Y and R and the BBQ the night before (Sunday night) but I stayed in as I was still too ill to go out or even thing about eating.

Well, not this time. This time, R was with us but couldn't eat, unfortunately. He was about as ill as I was -- but unfortunately had to be along.

The food was good. Meat cooked over a wood BBQ in the middle of the table with various sauces and toppings, mostly marinated in Korean style. I was actually fairly surprised at the food: it was much blander than I thought. The spices were spicy but not "Where's the water!" spicy. That suited me well, being at the end of an illness.

Additionally, they ordered some beer and some traditional Korean drink. They were all surprised when I wanted to try the traditional drink. R was like "don't worry, he can really put them back." I don't know what he was thinking. Either way, I had a bunch of it with them. No where near what Y and the head guy had; maybe 5-6 shots. I was told it was about 20-25% alcohol. It had very little smell and equally, very little tastes. After asking, it's either grain alcohol mixed with water, or the equivalent of Korean Tequila (that's what everyone seems to call their local drink). Either way, I've been drinking as much water as I can hold down to make sure I'm all good for tomorrow morning (well, this morning -- it's 5:48am -- Y, R, and myself are meeting at 8am). It seems to be working. Each bottle of this stuff apparently costs about $1 and can get a couple of people quite drunk. The table of 8, with 5 drinking, must have gone through 7-8 of them -- mostly at Y's end.

The hotel we're in isn't pretty nice. We got small little beds because there's a Chinese delegate in town that's taking our rooms. Like many hotels, the card key goes in a thing by the door. Unlike outside Korea, these all seem to be just little drop pockets, not something firm the card slides in to. Well, unlike the Marriott, this one seems to keep losing the fact that the card is in and I have to go over and drop it again to get the lights to come on. Doh!

But they, at least it has a net connection!

More to come...

At the airport...

2003-11-07T19:14:07Z

and off to Korea. Lots of travel this month; we're going to Paris at the end of the month, too. But that's a vacation. This is a work trip.

Both trips are 5 nights -- but gone 6 nights -- long flights are always over night. *sigh*

We'll get to hang in Seoul for a day (Sunday) before heading off to Busan. Not sure what we'll do; RR has been reading about some stuff we can do. Sounds like there's a lot of good tech shopping. Mmmmmmm ---- gadgets! ;)

Given this is a pre-sales trip with lots of meetings, I doubt I'll have much net access. Oh well. Hopefully the meetings aren't 20 hours a day. Some people seem to think that that would be better than 8 hours a day... *sigh* that just makes me tired.

I didn't start packing until 1030pm last night. I was _amazingly_ tired. I had been poking at Laurie to go see the matrix. But she kept saying she was tired. Well, she was, of course, as she is quite jet lagged still. But I didn't think I was. Then a heard a beep. It was the car behind me -- I had "dozed" at a stop light -- DOH! This was still before 5pm. So I set my cell phone alarm -- and it does this 4 time snooze thing, too. So, I set it for an hour -- after an hour passes for the next 20 mins the alarm kept going off. Then I snoozed more -- then woke up and set it again -- and then again it was going off in an obnoxious way. Well, finally I got up and packed. I still feel like I'm forgetting something. I think I've just been traveling so much I've got it all streamlined. Maybe...

Laurie!

2003-10-31T16:34:21Z

Finally I've heard from Laurie. It's been a week since I talked with her last. She had left a very short message a couple of nights ago. "Hi honey, it's Laurie!" That was it. :o Of course, I found out she did this from a pay phone of sorts -- and the call wasn't charged or anything (it just cut her short). Last night she had to call collect.

Well, I talked with her for a little bit last night. Sounds like she's having fun but is more than ready to come home. I'm more than ready for her to come home, too. I had to tell her, though, that I was leaving for Korea less than 5 full days after she returns. :(

We'll be heading away together (yay!!) for Thanksgiving. We both got the first 3 days of December off. She doesn't know yet, though. I'll have to tell her before we go, though, including where because she's much better at some of the planning stuff. I'd probably just stick us in a Starwood hotel for 5 days (for free). (Thinking about it, she'll get a prewarning of something if she reads this... so I can't say where just yet! Heh.)

On Office Coffee

2003-10-23T15:08:11Z

So many people complain about the coffee in their office. Most people are under the impression that it's the particular beans or roast. In many cases, I'm sure that's it. However, most people drink fairly generic roast but still complain about the office coffee.

I've come to the conclusion that it has nothing to do with the beans themselves. I haven't made regular coffee at our office for a while now. We try to get the best coffee from our supplier that's not too expensive (some form of Kona blend). The coffee itself isn't that bad (although most people that make it here use about a third to a half of the amount of coffee that "should" be used).

However, this morning I decided to make a pot. First, I pull out the filter thing. Surprisingly, it wasn't full of yesterday's grind. But it was caked with coffee grime. Yuck. Spent a few minutes scrubbing at that to get it clean. Then I dumped the old coffee from the pot and looked in. It's one of those glass types, so it's fairly easy to clean and when clean it's very shiny. Well, it was still coated with some form of coffee ooze. We're not just talking stains. We're talking thick, ooie gooie ooze. Absolutely disgusting and I'm sure it mixes with the coffee every time they make it -- and then grows. YUCK!!

So, I spent a while getting that all clean; the stains wipe right off the glass --- the ooze I let soak out.

Made half a pot and it tastes just fine!

The key to good coffee (which, incidentally, is mentioned in the coffee/caffeine FAQ): Keep everything clean! It's the oil buildup that makes bad coffee. Washing every drip run is a must!

Yippeee!

2003-10-23T06:26:40Z

Laurie called me from South Africa. Sounds like she is having a blast. She's currently staying at place called Phantom Forest. It sounds like it's a wonderful eco lodge type place. She described as being at least as good as the best Ryokan's we stayed at in Japan. And given that it sounds like it costs almost is much, it should be nicer since everything else there is much cheaper (thus, in relative terms, it's more expensive -- or something like that).

She absolutely loved the shark diving and described them as pretty and beautiful.

She's now off to a bunch of camping and such where she doesn't think there will be a phone. I may not get to talk to her until she's on her way back. :(

It doesn't sound like things are as bad as they are made out to be. That's just like how Brazil was. Hopefully all still goes well, though.

I miss her. This is the longest she's been gone now and there's still a week and a half left!

Work and a Movie

2003-10-21T08:03:27Z

Hey, isn't that supposed to be Dinner and a Movie? Oh well.

Hrm, now that I think about it, I actually had dinner out with my dad and his wife. We ate at a Thai place I haven't been to: Orchid Thai, in Santa Cruz. It was actually pretty good.

I spent the day working on fixing various aspects of works blogging stuff. I figured I might blog about it. Heh. Lots of php and perl mixed in with testing a it all with a variety of phones. Of course, it just helped prove that the quality of camera phones sucks. Even the new ones. They always come out blurry or with horizontal lines or something. It's really pretty pathetic. Rumours abound of megapixel camera phones coming down the line. There might even be some available in Japan by now. But when the resolutions went from 352x288 (CIF) to 640x480(VGA) the quality didn't improve. Will we have megapixel images that just exaggerate how bad the cameras are? I hope not, but I'm expecting the worst. I wonder how the camera on the Sharp GX20 is, given it has a 240x320 screen (most phones only have around 120x160). But it's quite expensive on ebay. And I'd rather get an Archos AV320 -- or maybe the AC340 since Fry's stocks them. ;)

I'm sure this will make no sense in the morning since I'm rambling at 1am. I got up at 6am. And worked all day. Of course, now I'm even more behind on my primary task -- which I haven't touched in over 2.5 work days given all day meetings, document reading, and now today’s prep for our sales guys at CTIA in Vegas.

I should probably get sleep now -- I'm expecting stuff to come up tomorrow from the demos and such. Oh well -- maybe we'll get lucky.

eBay is fun

2003-10-08T17:13:20Z

I used to think the buy it now feature was great, for buying and selling. However, I now realize that it's only good for buying. When selling, you can't be certain that your buy it now price is actually higher than people are willing to pay (assuming you're trying to make some money here).

Case in point:

I was selling a parallel port cdrom drive. No parallel cable. Only the drive and AC adapter. I started it at 50 cents (or maybe even 25). I figured it wouldn't go for more than about 10 bucks. If I'd done the buy it now option, I probably would have put 15 bucks (if that) and would have paid more to list it. However, it ended up selling for $49. Why? I have no idea... but someone wanted it.

Of course, the other direction happens, too. But that seems far less common than getting more than what you expected -- or at least what it's worth.

What's something worth, though? Well, ebay is the definition of capitalism and supply&demand markets. So, something is worth what people pay for it.

Case in point:

Palm Zire, new. They sell new for $99. On ebay, they sell for 40-50. So, the question is, if you list it at a penny, what will it sell for? A quick search on sold items showed nothing for over about 50 bucks; buy it now's of 60 weren't selling. It also showed many listed at 40 that didn't sell. So why, then, did most sell for 40-50 if ones listed at 40 didn't sell? Simple: the hook. List at a penny (or a buck, as I did) and people bid -- and it gets up to the value it's worth -- 40-50. In this case, mine sold for 51.

It's a very interesting economy. There's a big topic of study in optimizing lowest buying prices and highest selling prices -- of which I try to do both. ;)

Camera phones

2003-10-02T20:06:08Z

Ok. It's official. The camera part of them simply sucks. And is has nothing to do with the resolution. The quality is quite simply terrible.

October...

2003-09-29T05:13:49Z

Fall. Halloween. Cooler weather to rain (usually).

But this year? Also lonely.

Laurie's going to be gone all of October (well, except the first couple of days, but she's not back until into 3 days). Since she's leaving Saturday it's starting to get into the foreground of my thinking. She'll be back mere weeks before the holiday season really gets into full swing.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It does give me an entire month while she's gone to shop around and find stuff for her. Maybe I'll actually have something for her this year that's a surprise. ;) That just means I'm going to have to make some decisions about what I want to get her... rather than just trying to find something without her knowing. I have a couple of things in mind, but at least two of them completely break our holiday budget this year. Uh oh.... :o

Oh well, at least it'll give me something to do besides worry while she's in South Africa and I have no way to get in touch.....