A Change In Scenery

A later blog this week, because as I write this, my computer is a couple of thousand miles away to the east. I, however, am in Las Vegas, where I have flown in to surprise my family while they’re on their trip. And they were somewhat surprised! So now, it’s very much a traditional Pointer holiday, at least until Monday afternoon when I fly back home. Also, a quick stop to an out-of-the-way liquor shop which appears to have the last stocks of last year’s Wild Turkey 70th Anniversary edition left in the country (seemingly a complete case of it, too).

The odd thing when talking about being in Vegas is that everybody expects me to spend the 48 hours on the Strip, but our family’s visits to the city have evolved to the point that we hardly ever go there when we’re in town. Which sometimes leads to us wandering around a very large set of fields in 35ºC heat trying to find food trucks, but it does let us see more of the place than a lot of visitors do.

(Some things are traditional though. I got propositioned twice by ‘adult entertainers’ in the first 24 hours of being here, and my family found a way to watch football matches in the morning)

Once again, I brought the iPad with a view of using some quiet time to hack on an embedding idea I have; and once again, it has fallen flat. I don’t know what’s at fault, but even with a keyboard and a mouse, Google Colab is pretty much unusable in Safari, locking up the screen on a simple small copy/paste and scrolling sometimes working, but most of the time being a janky mess that causes a reload of the tab randomly. So I guess, back to just scribbling on papers with the Pencil; which admittedly, it does do very well. But sometimes, I want to go beyond scribbling to playing with ideas, but I don’t want to lug my laptop around.