Working from home, I take many meetings. During the meetings, it was apparent I was having networking issues. Calls dropping and people saying my picture was very pixelated. Other participant’s video seemed fine to me, however. During my regular work, I didn’t have many issues. After much sleuthing, I figured out the issue: My work laptop’s internal antenna wasn’t adequate to send the signal through all the walls to the router.

When I started this blog in 2013, I wasn’t really planning to. A friend convinced me to keep a place of technical musings and such. Sure why not. Over the years, it grew to include photos and other non-technical posts, such as Matt’s movies you may have missed or my GTD process. While I enjoy writing these posts, they do take some time. However, writing posts hasn’t take as much time as site maintenance.

A few years ago, I became aware that British Columbia had several old ghost towns, many of which emerged around the turn of the 20th century in relation to various industries such as mining, lumber, or the railway. One such place that captured my attention was the Valley of the Ghosts, which is centered around the ghost town of Sandon, located near Nelson. Last August, I felt like taking a road trip.

One of the quirks of staying in Thailand for extended periods is doing “Border Runs”. Thailand has visas on arrival for people from many countries. This visa is good for 30 days. During that 30 days, you can apply to extend your visa another 30 days. This entails presenting documentation of who you are, where you are staying, pictures of you, bank statements, and 1900 Baht (~80$ CAD) to a customs officer after lining up before the office opens and then sitting in a room for a long while.

Before heading off to South East Asia, I spent the Winter Holidays in Vancouver with friends and family. Pretty much as soon as I arrived, I fell ill. Perhaps it was the road weariness catching up with me as well. Before I left, I had the pleasure of dropping my family off at the airport for their trip to the UK. It was fun to be on the other side of the interaction for a change.

This final leg of my 2017 travel was focused on Spain and Italy. As I mentioned in my previous post, I left Ljubljana for Venice. It was mid-November at this point and I was exhausted. The pace had been very aggressive and didn’t leave much room for down time. I knew it would be tough, but I was surprised as to how much it had taken out of me mentally. This was even more apparent reviewing my photos.

After returning from Malaysia at the end of September, I embarked on a whirlwind of Germany, Austria, Hungary, Slovenia, Slovakia, Luxembourg, and Lichtenstein, after travelling through Paris, Bruges to Berlin with a friend. The leg of travel was mainly through Germany and looked like this: Berlin → Cologne → Bonn → Frankfurt → Luxembourg (Luxembourg) → Heidelberg → Baden-Baden → Stuttgart → Nuremberg → Munich → Neuschwanstein Castle → Lichtenstein → Salzburg → Vienna → Bratislava → Budapest → Ljubljana