Finally, the laptop is here.  This is a good thing for the filing cabinet in my office, which received a few more dents on Friday in my frustration at the computer salesman saying "it'll be with you Friday" and being somewhat nonplussed when I pointed out that it was already Friday.  Ho hum.

It's not a massively exciting computer, but it can be taken out in the rain without fizzling into uselessness, and this is the main thing.  Jane left me setting it up today and I spent a happy couple of hours (yes, I really am that sad) fiddling with various disks getting it to run ArcGIS, which is a piece of pretty hefty mapping software that we're going to be using for some of the field mapping and analysis.

We went out this afternoon for a quick test run.  Again, I was really impressed with the accuracy of the little GPS box we've got which connects to the laptop via bluetooth.  And Jane got the excitement of watching the arrow move around the map as we walked.  Lucky Jane.
 


Jane's got a meeting set up with a friend of Cosmic (i.e. James, the other researcher on this), who has done some cool photographic projects on Eastside.  All part of the process of getting into the community networks down there.  It finally starts to feel like we're actually going to get somewhere with the project.  Which, inevitably, means that
something else will go horribly wrong now...