I just spent entirely too much time reading stuff on a site called Rocketpack Magazine.

On a related note — whatever happened to the Utopian Dream where everyone would have a personal jet-pack by the year 2000?

I went to an posh office in midtown Manhattan today, to participate in a focus group about Earthlink, my cable Internet service provider (who I’m generally very happy with, by the way). Since I’m not working right now, I could easily spare a couple of hours between 6-8pm for $100, and besides which, I was curious to see how they would facilitate such a meeting.

However, there was some kind of administrative mix-up, because my name wasn’t on the list at the front desk, despite the fact that I confirmed by telephone on more than one occasion. They told me to take a seat and wait anyway, so I helped myself to the free coffee and sat down with a magazine.

Around 6pm, someone came out and called out some names, but my name wasn’t on the list, so I continued waiting in the reception area. 5 minutes later, the receptionist called me over and gave me a $100 bill, and said they wouldn’t need me after all!

So, I was paid a ton to sit around in a waiting area drinking coffee and reading a magazine for 15 minutes. I think that has to count as the easiest $100 I ever made.

So I finally decided to use one of the standard Blogger templates, rather than the painstakingly hand-crafted (and not-especially-well-designed) one that made my Blog look like it was part of my main website, both because I couldn’t get the comments thing to work properly, and because I’ve finally acknowledged that light text on a black background really isn’t as easy to read.

I just activated Blogger’s comments feature, which should allow people to rant back at me should they feel the urge. This test post should have a comment link below…

This is obviously not the most effective forum for a message to direct mail marketers, but I feel the need to vent:

I will NEVER pay an annual fee for a credit card, no matter how many free goddamn airmiles you give me!

Finally, I’ve sorted through over 500 images from my recent trip to South America and compiled some online albums, which (for a while, at least) can be accessed from the links (n.b. links fixed 2004-10-11 — sorry!) below:

• Chile
  

• Argentina
  

• Uruguay
  

• Brazil
  

• Colombia
  

• Peru Part 1 (Lima, Iquitos and the Amazon, Arequipa and Colca Canyon)
  

• Peru Part 2 (Cusco, Machu Picchu and the Sacred Valley of the Incas)
  

These albums will be up for a month or two, after which a much smaller selection will make it into my permanent online photo album.

Well I’ve only been back home for slightly over 24 hours, and I’m off on a plane again later today! It turns out that my friend Andrew is leaving the Washington D.C. metro area at the end of the month to return to Australia, and this is the only convenient weekend for a send-off party, so I’m off to Arlington VA later this afternoon.

In other news, I contacted Canon about my broken PowerShot SD100 digital camera, and they offered to either repair it for between $150 – $300, or to upgrade it with a refurbished PowerShot SD110 for $150. Bit of a no-brainer really, although I could have done without another $150 outlay!

I’m back home in my apartment in Brooklyn again, where everything is exactly how I left it (in something of a rush) 6 weeks ago — I’m always relieved to find that my house hasn’t burnt down when I come back from a long trip!

The journey home took all day, but was relatively uneventful after I boarded the plane at Lima; I had about 30 minutes between planes at San Jose airport in Costa Rica, so I bought some organic coffee to bring home.

I eventually landed at JFK around 1am EDT, and whizzed through immigration and customs in record time — I was in the taxi queue less than 30 minutes later, and was home just after 2am.

Now I have to go through all of the mail, bills and junkmail (about 6 inches thick of it!) that accumulated while I was away, and get my “real” life back into some semblance of order!

I arrived in Lima a little after 8am, after a mercifully short and uneventful flight on TANS Peru, and had checked in at TACA for the 3:00pm return flight to JFK soon afterwards, so decided to head into Lima centro for a few hours.

I jumped into a taxi, and headed into the town centre for a desayuno americano (American breakfast) at De Cesar cafe, after which I took a tour around the San Francisco Monastery and Catacombs Museum (getting in free with my ICOM card, which was handy as I was running short on Peruvian soles). The monastery tour was pretty good; there were only two of us on the English-speaking tour, myself and a rather taciturn Belgian who had just arrived in Peru the previous day. The highlights were the art collection (various religiously-themed series from the schools of well-known European artists such as Rubens and Van Dyck), and the extensive and labarynthine catacombs, where the bones of tens of thousands of bodies are on display, sorted by type.

After the museum tour, I wandered around Plaza Mayor for a bit, taking photos of all the riot police and water cannon tanks that were congregated there in anticipation of some imminent social unrest.

After aimlessly wandering around a little more, I stopped for lunch at the Cordano Cafe, which had a very old-fashioned and traditional feel. When I entered the restaurant it was practically deserted and very quiet, but minutes later it was inundated by a big (and noisy!) party of high school children. A group of girls at the table nearest to me immediately struck up a conversation, and started asking me questions about where I was from, my time in Peru etc. Their English was very good, and we had a lively discussion on all kinds of topics — I think they had an exercise to interview a visitor about their impressions of Lima. My lunch was not very good, but it was a lot of fun being interviewed!

Then, almost as suddenly as they’d arrived, the school party left and the restaurant became empty and quiet again. Then a guy came in and started chatting to me about Premiership football as part of the pretext for begging for money, but I was running very short on Soles, so I paid my bill and grabbed a taxi back to the airport.

I’m at Cuzco airport on the way home, after another early start and not very much sleep, since I was out until after midnight with a group of folks from various European countries last night…

Fortunately so far everything seems to be going smoothly; my travel agent Nicos (who has been very reliable throughout) was waiting for me with my tickets in the hotel lobby this morning at 5:30am, and brought me to the airport in plenty of time, where I checked in for an on-time TANS flight to Lima and met up again for a coffee with Dimitri, who is also heading back to Lima.

Now I just have a whole day of sitting on planes until I get back to New York.