On our Mideast - Eastern Europe trip, (and indeed since summer 2000) we carried two notebooks. However both were out of order for about seven weeks because both of the power adaptors went berserk. Needless to say when the first went bad, it did not seem too urgent because we had the other notebook, but panic set in when that one failed too. We at last unexpectedly got them fixed in Edirne, Turkey, by a wonderful craftsman who wanted to charge only $8; Gerry gave him $25. Unfortunately, after Israel, not only could we not use our own computers for doing e-mail but we couldn't save any e-mail. Our practice in China and Asia was to copy e-mail to a floppy at the Icafe and save it on our own computers, but because of the breakdowns we don't have a copy of most of our e-mail for April, May, and parts of June.

Even before and after the computing blackout Gerry didn't do anything with Java or anything else technical. It was demanding enough to do the daily processing of his digital photos, and he didn't even do all of that.  Now that we are back, in the next month or so, there is lots of photo work catching up to do: identifying photos and adding labels to them. Gerry really enjoys being able to take so many picture without much out of pocket expense. His camera is only 1 megapixel; he'd like to go to about 7 meg. To do that everything has got to get a factor of 4-5 bigger/cheaper: storage cards, hard drives, computer processors. But it will happen. The machine which he now uses was top of the line two years ago at 700 Mhz; now notebooks are available at 2.2 GHz. (Funny, Gerry says, in my elementary particle physics work we used to use GeV at a time when hardly anybody else had heard of Giga.)

Gerry has another, related project: while gone he shot about 30 hours of digital video. He'd like to edit it and put it on DVD. This week he priced the system that he would need and had to gulp a bit. Maybe he'll just have to wait another year for prices to fall.