Last time we went to America, we visited Harrah’s in Shreveport, LA and there were people wandering round with huge cups full of coins from the machines. This was just a year and a bit ago. Harrah’s in New Orleans had similar machines but instead of dealing with coins, they accept $5 bills or greater and spit out a small barcoded ticket with the amount of your winnings (or remaining credit) on it. The ticket can then be redeemed at one of the machines around the edge of the room.
Month: March 2005
The Mississippi at night
We got to New Orleans, checked into the hotel and having driven up and down most of the one-way streets, more by accident than anything else, we had a reasonable idea where various places were and how to get there. Given it was getting late we went to the Riverwalk shopping centre looking for something to eat. There’s a huge food court upstairs with all kinds of foods on sale – chinese, pizza, pasta, etc.
Going to New Orleans
Texarkana to New Orleans is roughly a 420 mile journey which should take (according to mapquest.com) 7 and a half hours.
Lori and I left the kids with her family and did the journey on our own. Although quite a lot of the tourist attractions in New Orleans are the kind of thing that they’d like, the journey there is a bit much by car and hotel accommodation for all of us would have been quite expensive.
Weather in Texas
Mention “weather” and “Texas” in the same sentence and everyone seems to imagine hot scorching sun, not a cloud in the sky and high humidity, but it’s not at all like that. It’s more like the weather in the UK – when it’s cold and wet, it’s cold and wet, but when it’s sunny it’s really sunny. The only difference is that when it’s sunny it’s about twice the temperature of the UK and there are a lot more sunny days than cold and wet.
50 State Quarters
I noticed when we first arrived that some of the quarters (quarter of a dollar – single coin) had various states on them. Figured I might try and collect them all – until tonight when I found out just how many there are already out. Seems that approximately every 10 weeks, the U.S Mint is releasing a new state on the quarters. Unfortunately for me, this means that it takes from 1999 – 2009 to produce the whole set!
Immigration and the rental car
We landed about 30m early but this time saving was soon swalled up by the immigration process that I’m sure took significantly longer than the last time we were here. I guess it’s partly to do with the US-VISIT process. This basically involves digitally taking fingerprints of both index fingers and a digital photo for all incoming non-US citizens.
Breakfast.. or not
Despite my prediction yesterday that we’d have a McDonalds breakfast, we didn’t. By the time we’d managed to get all the baggage checked in, we figured we’d better get through the security gates into the main departure lounge as it was getting a little late.
The journey down to Gatwick airport
After an uneventful drive down, we checked into Le Meridian hotel which is right next to the north terminal at London Gatwick airport. Very convenient for the flight tomorrow morning at 10am. We should be able to wake up, pack the cases and walk to the terminal ready to check-in by 8am. Given the prices of some of the meals here in the hotel, I suspect breakfast is going to be a McDonalds breakfast after we’ve checked in.
Comment spam on this blog
Well, it looks like the changes I made a while back aren’t having any impact on the number of comment spams that are being posted here so I’m going to have to try a couple more ideas at some point. For now, I’ll just keep trimming them out of the db so you don’t have to see them.
Importing self-signed certificates into Apple Mail
Apple Mail likes to prompt about self-signed certificates when connecting to imap or pop servers over ssl. Unfortunately this gets rather annoying after a while so here’s how to import the self-signed certificate into your system.
This is based on a hint from Mac OSX hints but it seems they didn’t quite get a couple of the commands right. Notably the certtool line – you import the .der file not the .pem and you have to make sure you include it from the right directory as well.