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Ah, connectivity….

We got back yesterday from New Orleans (vacation + Mike’s cousin’s wedding) to find total connectivity loss - phones dead, dsl down. What a pain. SBC crept in while we were at MoMo and fixed voice though it took the usual modem rebooting dance to get online this am. Things continue to flicker, something about Sunday’s downpour and a cut wire.

New Orleans was great - my first time there. I could live there - it’s nice to have US city I could say that about again. The vibe was excellent, decaying south meets the industrial north. And, yes, as someone asked - humidity is ok with me, I’m a native New Yorker (upstate).

Multimedia moblogging was not in line with the escape I needed, but I did take lots of pictures with my Treo. Flickr’s email interface made me laugh - I can’t believe so many people use it and love it if that’s what you have to do!! These devices are fun, but it’s so hard to get them to play well together. Even this am, my Treo was in infinite loop reboot after a synch when the stupid settings moved back the old photos I deleted off the Treo (which I didn’t have enough memory for which is why they got deleted). I will have to explore to see if I can set up an asynchronous synch for media to just push Treo pictures to the desktop. A devastating hard reboot only adds to my morning’s misery as I must redo all my customization again. But at least you get N’Awlins pictures.

We ate, we drank, but the town itself was the best part. I found myself proto-househunting in the French Quarter. Dumaine Street had particular charms, as you can see one entryway below.

Outside of the immediate tourist areas, the people were varied and interesting, like the architecture. It compared well to San Francisco - there was no begging, and, yet like SF, I got the sense that it was a city people lived in.

On the industrial side - there was such great decreptitude everywhere. I find that somehow inspiring. Where I live, in Menlo Park, is simply gorgeous - polished and rustic in the charming wooded cottage way. Here you had the sense of real life - like Oakland with ferns taking root in the cracks in the wall. I'm not sure which I liked best - the French Quarter, the Warehouse District (below), or the decrepit once-grand houses off the beaten track in the Garden District.

The city was at its best during our “adult night” - on our own during the rehersal dinner we hit some great places. First we hit Rasputin’s, a vodka bar - where they had a great ambience, good Canadian vodka (Pearl was our favorite), and spectacularly gourmet zakuskas (the small bites Russians have as chasers with their vodka, but this was caviar and not simple cut veggies) — though they didn’t have the wonderful herbal vodka, Tverskaya, from the Russian town in which I lived ten odd years ago. Next we hit the boutique hotel International House (think of an alternative W), which was playing a favorite Boards of Canada tune (Happy Cycling) when we walked in, and continued to play great alternative dub style music. It’s my choice for our stay next time, even more since our bartender’s recommendation for dinner turned out so well. We went out to Frenchman’s St - the local’s Bourbon St - to Marisol, which was fabulous and emminently reasonable. I pine for their chilled cucumber and buttermilk soup - and the chef’s amuse-bouche charcuterie and final samplers of homemade candies made it epicurian like few meals I’ve had. Yum. And definitely check out the jazz clubs on Frenchman’s.

So fun was had by all, and as long as connectivity persists (issues remain), I’ll be here back to work. And the headclearing vacation worked - I’m ready to do real work now and land my next thing(s). And that will in the area of information exchange - tools, services, and products to help move our stuff (tags, posts, photos, calendars, data, music, etc) so that it’s available at the point of need. Things to collect and repurpose information - mining and extracting in some cases, and in others simply provisioning - so that we can make all these fun and useful applications work better across our insane, info-overloaded, mobile lives.