May Day, Jazz Fest

May Day, last Sunday, I went to New Orleans Jazz Fest for the first time. As I am a Haytian taxi driver here in La Nouvelle I have always worked during this time. It is one of the few times that one can make decent money, albeit while working 14 hours a day.
I went with two 8 year olds and a 5 year old so we did not see a lot, but I went to see Boukman Eksperyans. It was nice to see them after so long, but not nearly as nice as being at Cafe Des Arts in PetionVille.
We saw Dja RaRa as well. They use a snare drum, which was too loud inside a tent. Roxie went up close and watched the dancers.

Is the streetcar Desire? Or Desirée?

I was told by a taxi customer the other day that the street (an actual street) named Desire was originally Desirée. A woman's name. The name of the daughter of the gentleman who lived there. In New Orleans, of course.
The Americans couldn't figure out such a name and changed it to Desire.

Ah, ok. Wikipedia has a link to the story that it is mis-spelled. It's up there.

New Orleans swimming pool

Saturday we found a swimming pool finally. The New Orleans Recreation District has a dysfunctional web site with pdf links instead of web pages. I cannot find directions to any swimming pools there. I did read a newspaper article about pools opening this summer but no one I knew could tell me where one was. On friday Roxie and I had a teacher parent conference at Lusher School. She is having reading problems. Was first grade so demanding when I was six? So I asked Miz Fitz if she knew of a swimming pool. There is one by Audubon Zoo. (Audubon was born in Jeremie, Hayti). By the Audubon Tea House actually. So we drove by late friday after checking out trailer storage in Belle Chase. Yup, it is there. Saturday we went to the pool: Emile et Roxy and myself. It is free! And they let kids use those buoyant noodles. The Arcata pool does not allow them, only Coast Guard approved vests. Had a good time. There was swimming class practicing. The director of the pool was working his youngest, a not yet three year old who was swimming by himself! Kul.

some kinda recycling in New Orleans

This morning around 6:30, while picking up the Times-Picayune and letting Jacques Chien out to pee I saw a renegade garbage truck. Not one of the blue ones from Richards Disposal which comes twice a week and picks up huge trash cans. This was a white one. I waited for it to drive down Lowerline and found that PhoenixRecylingNOLA was painted on the side.

Ok, found the site. It is a full home and business pickup service for glass, plastic, metals and paper. But. It costs $15 a month for once a week pickup. I would fill maybe one milk crate sized recycling thingie a week when in California. Course, I couldn't fill a 30 gallon trash can for a weekly pickup either, while here we get a 55 gallon can which is picked up twice weekly. That service is mandatory, a city contract.

Why is every household given trash pickup service sufficient for a small restaurant, but no recycling service? There are not even any drop off recycling centers and Louisiana has no bottle/can deposit system. There is lots of trash compared to Kalifornya.

Palm Centro, Kul but problems

We are here in New Orleans waiting on word of a rental application we submitted last week. As part of settling in to a new home I got a family cell phone plan with local numbers. In Trinidad we used pay as you go phones from the local GSM/ATT affiliate, Edge Wireless.

I originally wanted to get an ATT plan for national coverage, but the Palm Centro carried only by Sprint was luring me. I had looked at one in Lake Havasu while we were stuck there with a broken truck, but the shop said that they sent their Centros back for some problem. She said that they were hotsync'ing in a loop. That didn't make any sense to me so I put it out of my mind. Hotsyncs only happen when you push the button on the connector cable, no?

So we got two phones in the mail from letstalk.com. I read about Letstalk on some spam post on a bulletin board. That was one spam that worked. Got the Centro and a Sanyo Katana 8500 for Madame. She wanted a belle music phone. That Katana kinda sucks, it is really difficult to find and play the music on yr SD card. Everything is pushed thru the sprint data network. "Vision plans" they call it. Works pretty fast here in N'awlins tho.

So the Centro is pretty nice. Never had a Treo but I've been using a Palm TX for two years and enjoy fiddling with the system, altho it is easy to make it unstable. The stock Centro seemed very stable. It does have three different email programs, which seems very strange. The 'Sprint mobile email' program I set up to get my netscape/aim mail, but it never sync'ed again and I couldn't find any menus or buttons to make it work again. The palm stock email program, variously called Versa Mail or Multi Mail, is there. Then there is Messaging as well as IM. I also installed Agendus Mail which I am used to using on my TX. I installed Agendus 12 from Iambic, an upgrade from the Agendus 11 which I had paid for.

Google maps works very well; I was able to find Rayne Methodist Church and Whole Foods with it. Yesterday I was searching for the Louisiana Office of Motor Vehicles and attempted to use Google maps to search. It kept stalling, then eventually reporting that all sockets in the network were used up. Huh? Never seen that before.

It reset, I tried again and the same situation happened; no sockets and then reset. I thought that MobileWrite or clips might be causing problems. A Treo has no graffiti handwriting recognition, or an area to write in, so a graffiti replacement program of some sort is required. I was using graffiti 1 to replace graffiti 2 on the TX.

About an hour after Google maps started crashing the Centro started trying to run hotsync repeatedly. With no cable plugged in. I pushed home, or phone, but hotsync would immediately run. Eventually it reset/crashed. Hotsync started again within a few minutes. A terminal disease, looks like.

I figured it must be hardware, as hotsync is triggered by connecting two signals within the connector thingie on the bottom. There is a program icon to do this as well, when you are using bluetooth or the network to sync.

After more thought and reading something, I decided to hard reset the unit and start all over again. The 'no sockets' error made me think that the "Sprint Mobile Email" program was trying to get mail but never receiving. The icon for that program is there but I cannot find it within the file system with Filez or 3gx or Resco Explorer. I put the new version of RescoEx in, will have to pay for that program again.

So, hard reset, then re-install minus clips and MultiWrite. I have the graffiti anywhere prog from Splash data in now. It is more expensive but looks quite well done; better features and configuation.

Have to use it a few days to see what happens. The tentative word is that software conflicts can indeed cause a Centro to go into a hotsync infinite loop and crash the phone.