Thursday, May 18, 2000

Spent most of the morning working on my ALS outline, so that I have more substance underneath and can provide a better short write-up about it.

Had breakfast for lunch while spending an hour downloading the latest development kernel (I lost track of patches and decided that a complete new tree would be best).

The room inspection by the SSH never happened. That's OK, we have not done any damage, so we don't have anything to fix.

Now that we have our train tickets to Paris, I tried using the Ibis web site to book a hotel in Paris for the time we will be there. It kept saying that my request couldn't be completed, so I finally gave up and called the reservation line in the Netherlands to see if they could help me. It seemed cheaper than trying to call the hotel in Paris directly, and the Dutch tend to speak very good English whereas my French is limited to reading very simple stuff. When I did that, I found out why the web site seemed to be malfunctioning -- it's hard to book a hotel in Paris for Saturday night. We wanted a hotel in the 10th arrondissement (district), the only one he found in Paris proper was in the 15th arrondissement, roughly opposite where we come in to Paris. Oh, well, we get to know the Metro right off rather than getting to drop our bags off first. No big deal. It sounds like if we find we hate our hotel, we can move to a different hotel for the second and third nights.

Bought a few more presents tonight on our way to and from dinner. At at a Turkish place called Topkapi. I can't spell the full names of the food we ate correctly without Turkish font and encoding (ISO 8859-9), but Kim had pasta and I had kabab. And as I nearly always do when eating food of even vaguely Mediterranean origin, I had baklava for desert. This time it was the most artistic presentation of baklava I have ever had, with ice cream, whipped cream, a drizzle of cherry syrup over one bit of whipped cream and a fresh mint leaf in another, peach slices, grapes, and even kiwi.