Viva Sevilla!

The virtual vagabonds are back. My partner and I are wintering in Seville, Spain this year. Check out our new digs here.

It looks great, but it ain't cheap: €1,500 all-in. Mind you, that includes heat, hydro, water, high-speed Internet (6Mbps), local landline phone and satellite TV. Good luck finding a hotel room that cheap.

It’s a very narrow four-floor town house with two bedrooms and a den/office with fold-out couch.

The picture shows the second floor (kitchen/living room) with our private elevator. We think it just gets us from the ground floor to the second floor, but we’ll find out.

Once again, I'll carry my office in a suitcase – laptop, smartphone, VoIP gear. I’ll be working at my regular job (I’m a freelance tech journalist) most of the time I’m there.

Check in on us from time to time, see how we’re doing.

PC phone home

Early in our time here, I wrote glowingly about the success of our overseas telephone solution – a VoIP (voice over Internet protcol) service from Primus Canada that consistently delivered crystal clear calls over the high-speed Internet connection in our Siracusa apartment. It’s time for an update. I’m still impressed by how well it works, but we did run into one little problem.

Because of a “known issue” with the Linksys phone adapter Primus provides – which plugs into the network router here to make the connection over the Internet to Primus’s switching centre back in Canada – some numbers dialed on the phone plugged into the adapter don’t register. I kept getting a recorded message saying I needed to dial a long distance code (i.e. the ‘1’ before the area code), when in fact I had dialed it.

This little glitch became so irritating I started relying more on Skype, which had no problem dialing numbers correctly from the same handset. Primus, however, eventually came up with an even better solution. It provided me with a softphone.

A softphone is a piece of software that runs on a headset-equipped PC, turning it into a phone. Skype is a softphone too. But the Primus softphone has a few advantages. It allows me to use the Primus Hosted PBX service I’m testing, which provides voice mail, call routing and four-digit dialing to other extensions in my virtual office system. It lets me import my Outlook contacts and dial by name. And it lets me record calls, which I do when interviewing, by simply clicking a button in the softphone interface.

Call quality has been almost as good as when using a regular phone plugged into the adapter. Occasionally, voices sound a bit machine-like or tin-cannish, but never to the point of unintelligibility. Recordings are perfect. With the adapter and a regular phone, I had to use a little digital recorder connected to the phone line, and then transfer the recording to the computer.

The real beauty of the softphone is that you can make or take calls anywhere you have a good Internet connection and it looks to the person at the other end as if you’re sitting in your office. (Well, almost anywhere. Some hotspots block VoIP calls.)

All the news that fits

The loss of my my main laptop (see previous post) has had a couple of negative impacts. I’m now sharing a computer with the VP Finance. She wants it as much as possible whenever I’m not working – fair enough. That has made it more difficult to blog, though. It also means I’m relying more on the e-book readers I wrote about earlier.

At breakfast, our habit was to sit at the dining table, reading the newspaper on our separate laptops – The Globe & Mail for me, The Globe and the local London (Canada) rag for the VP Finance. Now she gets the shared machine at breakfast, and I’ve been making do with an e-book reader.

The trouble is, I have yet to find an easy way to get content in readable form from the Web to the reader. After multiple failed attempts at semi-automating the process, I’m resigned to a fairly labour-intensive manual process. The VP Finance claims I spend as much time creating my e- newspaper as I do reading it, but she’s exaggerating – slightly.

Here’s the process for anyone who wants to try it. It requires Microsoft Word and the free Mobipocket Creator (available here) which creates e-books that work on the CyBook Gen3, but not on the more feature-rich, robust – and more proprietary – Sony Reader Digital Book. It should be possible to create PDF books that work on either, but I can’t figure out how to format PDF e-books using Adobe Acrobat Professional so text is large enough to read. (Another project!)

First, I go to the Globe site and click on the Print Edition link near the top. This brings up a page with links to stories featured in that day’s paper. I click on each in turn, select just the text of the story – which usually also includes some graphics and links – and copy it to the Windows clipboard. Then I flip over to Word, paste it into a new document, delete the graphics and links and insert a page break at the end of the story. I do that for every story I want to read – as few as a half-a-dozen on a slow news day, up to a dozen on Saturdays. I get into a rhythm and it doesn’t take as long as it sounds.

Once I’ve pasted all the stories I want into the word processing docucment, I use Word's automated feature for creating a table of contents – or TOC as Microsoft insists on calling it – that will allow me to navigate directly to the story I want on the e-book reader. (Word searches for bolded text and assumes it’s a chapter heading.)

From the Mobipocket Creator home page, I choose 'MS Word document' from the ‘Import from existing file’ menu. It takes a few more clicks to actually create the Mobipocket format (.PRC) e-book, but the process is automated and very quick. Finally, I connect the e-book reader to the laptop by its USB cable and copy my electronic version of the newspaper over. When I turn on the device, the newspaper now appears in the main menu.

Yes, it’s slightly daffy, but it works. I’ve actually been reading more good journalism as a result. I also download all I can from the New Yorker, The Atlantic and Economist sites. (Some of what’s in the print editions of these periodicals isn’t available online unless you’re a subscriber.)

To go back to an earlier post, why can’t newspaper publishers produce ready-formatted versions that will work on an e-book reader. I’d pay for it – though not as much as I do at home for the entire print edition – and I wouldn’t even mind if they inserted ads. This way I’m not looking at any ads, and they don’t get any subscription revenue from me.

I’m actually thinking of cancelling my subscription to The Globe when I get home. But I’m guessing my news-junky VP Finance will veto that idea.

After the crash

Three days after the big explosion and I’m still dusting off. (My Dell XPS1330 laptop failed 3,000 miles from home – see previous post.)

I’m back in business, using the older laptop we brought for the VP Finance. The saving grace was online backup – services that let you send your files over the Internet to be stored on a secure computer at the provider’s data centre. At home, I back up to a drive on my home office network. It was too big to bring, plus it doesn’t protect you so well if the house burns down. So I had started using online backup as well even before we left.

Now I can confirm: it works. (Phew!)

I’m using two services – Fabrik Ultimate Backup from SimpleTech Inc. and Mozy from Decho Corp. Each gives me 2GB of online storage for free, for a total of 4GB. The price, as they say, is right. There are other online backup services out there that offer free software and storage capacity as well. (To find them, google “online backup” free.)

The free capacity isn’t enough to back up everything but it is just enough to back up my current documents, audio recordings of interviews and a gargantuan (over 1.5GB) Outlook file. I’m now considering paying $200 for two years of unlimited storage from Mozy.

The beauty with these two providers is that they apparently use the same technology. It’s a different client for each service, but the software is identical, so only one program to learn. It’s very easy to set up and use in most respects. It was a little difficult to figure out how to tell it which types of files (which file name extensions) to include in backups. Still, it works – not perfectly, it must be said, but it works.

The software does backups in the background whenever the computer is not being used. The trouble is, our computers are rarely not in use and when they’re not, they go into sleep mode. Sometimes the backup programs work while the computer is sleeping, sometimes not.

I gave Fabrik the more challenging assignment of backing up my Outlook file. It’s challenging because the Outlook file is always open. Many backup programs and services can’t back up files at all if they’re open. This one can, but sometimes it seems to give up trying, probably because the file is so big. I’ll discover – by mousing over the little Fabrik icon in the system tray – that it hasn’t completed a successful backup in a few days.

This apparently happened just before the disaster. As a result, I lost all the Sent Items, Tasks and Calendar items for the four days before the crash when it wasn’t backing up. The Inbox contents were still sitting on my ISP’s mail server.

It took a few hours to restore the Outlook file. This seemed excessive, but I was just grateful to have it back. Because the computer on which the Fabrik software was originally loaded was dead, I had to go to the service provider’s portal site, log in to my account with username and password, and then select the files I wanted to restore. (There are easier ways to restore if you just want to revert to an earlier version of a file or you accidentally deleted a few.)

When they were ready to download, the provider sent me an e-mail. I followed the link in the message and clicked on the download link on the destination page.

There were programs I had to download and install on the new (old) laptop I’m now using. That took time. There were, as expected, some things I forgot or didn’t have capacity to back up regularly – Internet favourites, the little program I use to create a button bar across the top of my screen, the macro program I use to create little applets to perform often-used series of commands, etc. But nothing vital or impossible to reconstruct.

Bottom line: I have what I need to carry on working and communicating. Praise the Internet.

Disaster strikes

What's the worst that could happen to a virtual vagabond in Sicily?

Well, you could be collateral damage in a Mafia vendetta, I suppose, but that seems a remote possibility here in quiet Siracusa, where there is apparently little mob action. (The epicentre is Palermo, of course.) You could get very sick or hit by a car, but the local medical system is reputedly good and we have insurance.

You could lose your Internet service. Now there's a scary thought. But the service is local, the supplier, Telecom Italia, reputable. And if it ever did go out, a call to our ever accommodating landlord Giorgio would I'm sure have it back working in no time.

Nope, the worst would be a broken computer, which is what I have. My 9-month-old Dell XPS 1330, one of Dell's top-of-the-line super-light notebooks, died yesterday. It had been in ailing health for a couple of days.

A Dell tech support agent on the phone from Canada took about two minutes to determine, based on the fairly unequivocal symptoms, that it was well and truly kaput and would have to go into the depot for a transplant, probably the motherboard. But no problem, this would all be covered under warranty.

Then it took about four minutes on hold to determine that, no, Dell could not pick up from Italy and deliver back here. So there you have it. Shit out of luck, until I'm back in Canada next month.

It could be a lot worse. We do have a second computer on the trip, an older Dell Inspiron 640m that the VP Finance has been using. We're now sharing it. I do have the most vital data backed up online. I can recover, am in the process now - very slow as it turns out.

The backup copy of my enormous Outlook file - the holy of holies - is a few days out of date thanks to the vagaries of the Fabrik Ultimate Backup service I'm using and my own lack of vigilance. But all the e-mails were saved on the Rogers/Yahoo mail server, so I expect to be able to reconstruct my calendar and avoid missing scheduled teleconferences. And I expect to be able to recover all the Word documents in which I store notes for articles I'm writing and digital recordings of interviews. Touch wood.

Still, it is a major set-back. I'm sure to have forgotten to back up some data that I will need, or at least miss. Did I back up my Internet favourites, for example? Can't remember. While I won't lose any photos - backed up locally on a portable drive and on the camera card - I may lose hundreds of edited versions of images if the hard drive on the XPS 1330 doesn't make it through the surgery back home.

The Dell Inspiron is also slow and prone to lock-ups and crashing. The VP Finance on any given day can spend several hours on the computer, which she won't be able to do now. It could be a lot better too.

Aperto!

As an antidote to the last post (of a few minutes ago), here are some recent pics showing glorious reasons for being here in Sicilia in February anyway. (First two are Ragusa, an hour west of Siracusa, and the last two are Ortygia.)

Chiuso!

Much about travelling in southern Europe in the off-season is wonderful. The weather in this neck of the woods has with few execptions been great – it’s heading for a sunny 60° F today - and accommodation prices are always lower in the winter. That makes what we’re doing both worthwhile and feasible.

But not everything is hunky-dory. We have run into one snag: Chiuso! It means closed in Italian and far too many attractions in Sicily are chiuso, often per restauro – for restoration – or just because it’s the off season.

We ran into this first right here in Ortygia, the island enclave of Siracusa where we’re living. La Galleria Regionale di Palazzo Bellomo houses one of the premiere art collections on the island in an impressively forbidding 14th century palace about ten minutes away by foot. Chiuso.

The VP Finance and I, both art junkies, saved it for our second week here and wandered over in great anticipation one drizzly afternoon. Closed up tighter than a drum, no hours shown on the door. This was not our first experience with European galleries and museums being shut down when we visited (alas, far from it) so we expected the worst.

It was confirmed by a sign in the window of a gift shop on the other side of the street (Italian only). When we went into the tourist office later to enquire, the bored young woman behind the counter said brightly, “Chiuso!” – as if talking to six-year-olds (which of course we are in Italian).

Since then, “chiuso,” said with a happy upward inflection, has been our running joke. In Palermo, more than one of the churches we wanted to visit was chiuso. So was the city’s major art gallery – reputedly even better than Palazzo Bellomo (chiuso).

This week we hit the nadir of chiuso. We had been saving up the supposedly superb Museo Archeologico Regionale Paolo Orsi here in Siracusa for a rainy Sunday. But this week, la nostra cara amica Shelley, an aficionada of classical antiquity, was visiting from Canada.

Shelley went off on her own one day to do the archaeological park (which we had already visited) and, as rain was threatening, also the nearby museum. She came back with a black cloud over her head. The museum, naturally, was chiuso! Per restauro.

So that’s the two major attractions in the city closed down. The third? Probably Il Castello Maniace, the 13th century castle at the southern end of Ortygia. Though a construction site for much of the time we’ve been here, it is apparently open on a limited basis – just never when we’re there.

It occurred to me we could perhaps avoid disappointment by consulting Web sites for the attractions we wanted to visit, which would warn us of closures. Good idea, but no.

The English-language Web page for the archaeological museum in Siracusa, at the site of the government department responsible for this stuff, mentions in small print, under Notes, and in Italian, that the reopening, scheduled for November 2008, was delayed. Google translates the explanation as, "for issues related to the work of regeneration." This would be exciting, worth the wait, if it were a museum with Egyptian mummies, but everything in this museum is stone.

One possible explanation for the epidemic of restauro in Ortygia: our landlord Giorgio told us that in early April – right after we leave – the city is hosting the G-8 (G-otto in Italian – I thought he was talking about the 14th century Florentine painter) conference on the environment.

I don’t want to think it, but I’m guessing that when the big wigs are here, everything will suddenly be aperto.

Boat City

As noted elsewhere, our routine is to go walkies in the late afternoon to catch the good photo light. The last couple of days, Ortygia's many boats have been catching my eye.

Some in not such good shape.

My name is Gerry, I am a book-a-holic

On the long train journey back to Siracusa from Palermo on Saturday, my VP Finance for the first time used one of the two e-book readers I brought to Italy. (An e-book reader is a book-size electronic device that displays text in very high resolution. See earlier post.)

The next day, after she finished the book – a mystery I had bought at Christmas and loaded on the Bookeen Cybook Gen3 for her – I asked about the experience. “I don’t know what I can tell you,” she said. “I read a book. It wasn’t irritating.”

That may sound like damning with faint praise but is actually high praise. She had long resisted the notion of e-books. When I first started reading on a first-generation Toshiba Pocket PC six years ago, she tried it briefly and turned up her nose – you had to push the page-turn button every few seconds because the PDA screen could display such a small amount of text.

But the new e-book readers like the Sony (see pic) and Bookeen models I brought to test solve the problems she saw with reading on a PDA - they’re easier on the eyes and you don’t have to turn the page as often.

An e-book reader can be a godsend to book-a-holics like us when travelling (or at least away from home) for a long period. You can’t bring too many paper books with you on a plane or you’ll end up going overweight on your baggage and paying through the nose – especially now with reduced baggage allowances. That said, we brought 15 or so between us. We could order from Amazon or Chapters (Canadian) and have them delivered to Italy, but shipping overseas would drive up the price.

You can buy English-language books here in Siracusa. I picked up a rather worn copy of Umberto Eco’s Baudolino in English translation for €1.50 at a place that was selling second-hand books to raise money for charity. But selection is poor and prices for new books generally high. We saw one travel book in a local shop priced at almost double what we paid on Amazon before leaving.

E-books from sites such as eBooks.com and Books on Board typically cost less than the paper version – I paid $7.95 (U.S.) for the mystery novel – and you can fit hundreds on a reader. But while selection is growing all the time, you can’t get everything published. You can’t borrow e-books from an e-library either, and you can only share the ones you buy with up to two other devices.

One solution: download the text of books that are out of copyright from sites such as The Online Books Page, format them for the reader using free software such as Mobipocket Creator and upload them to the device. Free books. In a future post, I’ll describe the fairly simple e-book creation process.

End of the affair

Oops. My love affair with Italian trains (see previous post) has ended – badly. I will still make the case for public transit in general, but in Sicily, we have discovered, the train is not the way to go for most trips.

To get back to Siracusa, from Palermo where we had been on a mini-vacation while our apartment here was rented out to someone else, we had to take a train from Palermo to Messina – a major city at the northeast corner of the island from which the ferries go to the mainland – and then change for a train that goes along the east coast through Catania and back to Siracusa.

Total travel time, usually: over six hours. Travel time by car or bus: under three hours. Part of the train travel time is the lay-over in Messina, but not much of it.

The trip started badly when the cabin we chose turned out not to have any heat, or very little – it was freezing for most of the three hours to Messina. Maybe there was no heat on the train at all, we don’t know. We arrived in Messina to discover that the train bound for Siracusa, which was coming from Rome across the Straits of Messina on a ferry, was late – an hour and ten minutes late!

Meanwhile, Giorgio, our very kind landlord, had offered to pick us up at the station in his car, at 10:30 when the train was scheduled to arrive. I had to text him to say it would be more like 11:30, on Saturday night.

The public areas of the Messina station were unheated. The temperature outside was probably around 5 degrees Celsius. Ours was not the only train over an hour late, so there were a fair few people shivering while they waited. (The pic shows the VP Finance waiting in another cold train station, the one in Agrigento: note grafitti.) The topper: the washrooms were locked up, apparently being renovated. This is a station with ten platforms, the major ingress point for trains from the mainland, in a city of a few hundred thousand, and there was one set of washrooms, closed for renovation.

About 15 minutes before the revised train time, we wandered over to the platform. The train was there – we had heard no announcement of its arrival. We climbed on, found our cabin – reserved seats on this train – and shooed the family of squatters (30-something mother, two children under 12, a dog running loose and a cat in a cage.) We had barely settled in when the train pulled away. A good five minutes before the new posted departure time. Ay caramba!

All’s well that ends well. We’re back “home” in our Siracusa apartment, and it’s a gloriously sunny, if cool, day.

On the buses

Back in “the last century,” as we saw the 20th referred to recently, when the VP Finance and I were new whelped as a couple, we travelled all over Europe by train and took public transit everywhere, or walked – or, shudders, hitch-hiked. In more recent years, we have generally rented a car, or on a couple of occasions, leased a new one from a French car maker on one of their special plans for tourists.

This was for a few reasons. Renting cars and buying gas for them in Europe grew cheaper, and the idea of driving in a foreign country – even in England and Ireland where they foolishly drive on the wrong side – less intimidating. Also, of course, driving gives you flexibility and the option to go places where it would be inconvenient or impossible to go on public transit.

At the same time, public transit, a fantastic bargain in the 70s and 80s (of the last century), became more expensive. But that trend seems to have reversed itself here in Sicily. Car rental is relatively expensive (€30 a day is cheap, and it can go as high as €70, with no special deals for a week.) And trains are relatively inexpensive. Yesterday, we took the train from Palermo (where we’re vacationing this week) to Agrigento for the Greek ruins. It’s a two-hour ride and cost us less than €17 each, return. In Canada, a two-hour return trip costs more like $70. So we’ve gone back to our earlier mode of touring by public transit.

It has not been without adventure. To get to Palermo from Catania, the island’s second city, just up the coast from Siracusa where we’re wintering, we had to change trains at a place we’d never heard of in the middle of the island called Caltanissetta. Which we thought a little odd – the two major cities, less than three hours apart by car and it was going to take almost five hours by train with the change? It’s for this reason that most people go by coach.

What the schedule failed to mention was that we actually had to get off the train at another station some way from Caltanissetta, get on a bus and drive on switch-back mountain roads to the station, a suburban stop far from the actual city. The VP Finance was about 5 minutes from going into full car-sick mode, she later told me. The drive was spectacular, though – mountain vistas with towns clinging to peaks, the autostrada built on viaducts tantalizingly visible in the valley below but never used until the last few kilometers.

When we arrived at the station, Caltanissetta Xirbi, the mountain air was decidedly bracing, the waiting room was unheated, there were no servizi (toilets) or shops and the train we thought we would be getting never came (because it was Sunday?) so we had to wait for another, half an hour later. (But it had quite an acceptable toilet – whew!)

So that was the train. Then on Tuesday, after hoofing it around Palermo all morning, walking or standing for four hours straight, we were so foot sore and tired by the time we got back to the apartment that we decided it would be a good idea to learn how to use the local bus system.

One main hub for buses is just around the corner from us, Camporeale, less than ten minutes away. We knew this because our Palermo landlord had given us directions from the train station by bus, which we didn’t use that first night. We ended up buying a carnet of tickets from the little kiosk at the square, enough to last us the week. We caught the 122 bus just as it was leaving and headed downtown for our afternoon event, a visit to the Museo Internazionale dei Marionnette (fascinating but over-priced).

Some bus stops are not well marked, but for the most part, the system is easy enough to figure out and use, and reasonably priced compared to home - €1.20 for 90 minutes of travel. You have to convalidate (time-stamp) your ticket when you get on the first bus by sticking it in a little machine. Some of the machines don’t immediately work – even the locals were having trouble – but other than that, the buses are great.

Yesterday in Agrigento, though, we had another little public transit mishap involving buses. We took a city bus from the train station to the entrance of the Valle dei Templi, where all the Greek ruins are (see pic above). Except the bus didn’t stop when it got to the entrance. It only stops on request, and we didn’t realize we were there until we were past it. Oh, well, I thought, it’ll stop at the other entrance (there are two) or we’ll ride it around again – no problem. Problem.

The bus went on a 50-minute tour of suburban Agrigento (great beach views), stopped for a few minutes at the far end of its loop and stopped again at the garage, where we had to change buses and wait while the drivers caught up on gossip and talked machinas (cars). Then finally we looped back around to the temples – an hour later. This time, I told the driver we wanted to stop there, and he did.

The whole time on the bus, I was absolutely furious with myself for not thinking of this possibility and using my half-baked Italian in the first place to tell the driver where we wanted to get off. The VP Finance found my mutterings and execrations off-putting and told me basically to accentuate the positive and latch on to the affirmative. Bah! Where’s the fun in that?

In the meantime, what started as a glorious, unexpectedly sunny day, was rapidly turning nasty. We had about ten minutes of partial sun after we got into the park with its fabulous 2,500-year-old ruins, then the clouds rolled in. Within 40 minutes it was pelting cold rain – the temperature dropped all day - and we were sheltering in the park’s cafe and paying for an exorbitant lunch.

All of which is not to say we’re rethinking using public transit. Far from it. It’s a great way to go. Honest.

Hot time in the big city

I suspect most people who know our circumstances think we’re basically on vacation over here in Sicily. But no, I really am working – most of the time. This week, though, we are on vacation, in Palermo, the provincial capital.

Virtual Vagabonds isn’t meant to be a travelogue but let me say this about Palermo. It’s dirty, crowded, decaying. There are way, way too many cars – way too many – and even more scooters and mopeds. And they’re all driven by madmen. Many have a superstition about their horns. They believe that if they’re approaching a blind intersection and they toot a few times, this magically prevents them colliding with oncoming traffic, even if both vehicles are going about a million miles an hour along narrow cobbled streets. Or – and this is much more important to us – tooting absolves them of all responsibility for killing unsuspecting Canadian tourists on foot.

But it’s also a fascinating place, vibrant and full of fabulous things. On Monday, our first full day in the city, we went to see the number one tourist attraction, the Cappella Palatina or Palatine Chapel. It was built for Roger II, the 12th century Norman monarch who ruled over a brief golden age of multi-ethnic harmony, abundance and splendour in Sicily. Every surface in the chapel is covered with beautiful decorations, mostly fabulous gilt mosaic work depicting biblical scenes. The mosaics were done by Greek artisans. The intricately carved wood coffered ceiling was created by Arab craftsmen. Norman artists were responsible for overall design.

Once again, we rented an apartment, which we found on the Internet at a rent-by-owner site called Homelidays, the same site we used to find the apartment we took in Venice for a week in the summer.

Even though I’m on vacation, having access to the Internet was important, so I searched at Homelidays for properties that offered Internet service (not that many). The one we chose did, but I made sure to specifically ask the owner, a guy who is off working in Paris and renting out his home while he’s away, if the Internet service was available. He confirmed that it was. It wasn’t.

When we arrived, the owner’s friend, a young businessman who works in the area and looks after vacation rentals for a few friends, explained that the modem (by which he meant the ADSL modem/wireless router) was broken and in being fixed. The owner’s father was going to bring it over the next day. Didn’t happen.

Instead, Maurizio, the friend/caretaker brought his own cellular modem, which he uses to connect when he goes travelling. To me this is going above and beyond the call of duty, especially since the next day, he was off to Catania on business and probably would have like to have the modem. But it was much appreaciated. The modem, which connected over a TelecomItalia HDSPA network (very fast) actually works well, slower than a land line connection, to be sure, but perfectly acceptable. It even worked for Skype.

Then on Tuesday, Maurizio’s pregnant wife, Andrea, an Argentinian language teacher whom we had met the first night we arrived, went out and bought a new modem so we would not be without Internet. She called me on my mobile while we were out sightseeing to arrange dropping it off and, when I explained that we wouldn’t be back for awhile, she agreed to let herself into the apartment and leave the modem along with instructions for connecting and setting it up. Which she did.

It took a little more effort than it should have to get it set up but that was mostly my stupidity. Now we’re live on the Net, wirelessly, both of us.

All of the backing-and-forthing on this, incidentally, was conducted in English, almost fluent in Maurizio’s case, not quite so good in his wife’s case, but infinitely better than our Italian.

The broken modem debacle is one of the few blips we’ve encountered in a decade of renting apartments and cottages over the Internet. It turned out well in the end, and showed how kind people doing this (renting to travellers via the Internet) can be. We hardly ever travel any other way. I'm sure there are jerks that rent properties to foreign travellers, somewhere, but we haven’t met any yet.

Ortygia the not so beautiful

We’ve been here over four weeks now, we’ve settled into routines. One of them is going for a walk around 3:30 or 4:00, a welcome interruption to the work day, when the light is often good for photography.

For the first few weeks, we were gobstruck by the beautiful – pretty – aspects of Ortygia, the medieval island enclave of Siracusa where we’re living. And it is very pretty in many ways – the sea, the baroque architecture, the boats, the light. And I’ve taken lots of postcard photos.

But Ortygia is no heaven. For one thing, it’s a city under construction. Generations of Ortygians abandoned the place for the “new” city on the mainland, across 100-meter-long bridges. The old buildings mouldered.

More recently, enterprising folk and the city itself have been renovating historic structures, in part to help foster the tourist industry. But slowly. We are constantly wandering by buildings that are absoltuely gorgeous but abandoned and in terrible need of work, and others that are wrapped in scaffolding, undergoing a much-needed make-over.

Ortygia has also unfortunately been touched by the modern, especially along the sea wall and near the bridges. We are absolutely mystified by a current construction project over near the marina. It appears to be a totally unnecessary blight. Giant, unidentifiable concrete block structures are blotting out the water view from a lovely little park under the shadow of the sea wall.

It stinks of the corruption that we understand from all we read is rampant in Italy. We must ask our landlord, Giorgio, about this project to find out what it’s all about. Why would you destroy this lovely part of the city, as they are surely doing?

And then there is the breakwater and raised promenade on the other side of the downtown – on what we call the wild side, the Ionian Sea. It too smacks of a municipal project sullied by corruption. The elegant-looking park benches on the promenade, for example, are made of steel – which has rusted badly. If you sat on them you’d end up with brown stains on your clothes. What idiot thought of that idea? Or let it pass.

The VP finance, given the chance, would also rail against the grafitti (which I rather like) – no conincidence perhaps that it’s an Italian word – which is everywhere, especially on the new modern structures.

Anyway, to view some of the less picturesque side of Ortygia, see my latest post at Flickr.

Broke, then baroque

On Saturday, the VP Finance and I road a bus to Noto, a hill town about 35 km from Siracusa. The attraction: fabulous baroque architecture – palaces, churches, squares, all built by renowned architects of the day as part of reconstruction after the devastating earthquake of 1693 that flattened most towns in southeastern Sicily.

It’s the kind of side trip that perfectly exemplifies the way we want to travel. That is, live and work in one reasonably interesting place (Siracusa) long enough to get past the purely touristic experience, but take little jaunts, like this one to Noto, for the day or overnight, to sight see. (Next week we head to Palermo, three hours away by train, for a full week.)

As a prototype for future excursions, the trip to Noto was generally a success. The VP Finance sometimes gets car sick, especially in motor coaches, but she was fine, even though there were some switch-back roads. We took the bus because the train dumps you 25 minutes from the historic centre, whereas the bus puts you down exactly where you want to start sight seeing.

The day was supposed to be warm and sunny in Siracusa. Noto was only partly sunny and decidedly cooler, presumably because of the altitude. We arrived at about noon and the place was lively. The kids had just got of school (we think it’s half-day Saturdays here.) Teenagers were lounging on the steps of the gorgeous 18th century Duomo, taking in the sun and goofing off. Pensioners were sitting on the benches in the squares.

But by the time we came out of the Duomo – lovely in its way but disappointingly un-gaudy – Noto seemed deserted. This was a little after one. Sicilian lunch hour (three hours actually) has a way of emptying streets. We had the place pretty much to ourselves.

Lunch at Al Buco, recommended in Frommer’s Sicily was disappointing – veal from an elderly calf, oleaginous roast potatoes, uninspired salad. In fairness, we probably ordered the wrong things – meat instead of fish, potatoes instead of pasta. The rest of the day, we happily clambered up and down the hilly streets and ambled back and forth along the main drag, Corso Vittorio Emanuele, snapping pictures of the stunning buildings.

When we were ready to leave, we discovered that buses back to Siracusa were nowhere near as frequent as we had imagined. We had to wait over an hour and a half. Part of the time we spent on a bench in the pretty little Giardini Publicci, watching the kids play and munching beer nuts bought from a peddlar in the park.

More pictures here.

A modest proposal

Newspaper owners need to wake up and smell the pancetta. For six or 12 months before the big economic toilet flush, industry news was full of doom and gloom about declining readership and advertising, all the fault of the big bad Internet. Now that we’re in recession, is it likely to get better? Don't think so.

The response from newspaper publishers: much hand wringing, little creativity. So I’m offering, gratis, a suggestion. Are you listening, press barons?

Adopt an e-reader such as Sony’s Reader Digital Book, Amazon’s Kindle or Bookeen’s Cybook (shown here), or even have one custom built, and start publishing electronically. Oh, I know, the newspapers are all publishing electronically on the Web, but who wants to read an entire newspaper on a computer?

E-readers are book-size devices that use a radical new screen technology that behaves more like paper than LCDs or CRTs. The screen doesn’t emit light (so is easier on the eyes) and is significantly higher resolution than LCDs (so easier to read). And the devices are portable – you can take them to the john.

Why should newspapers do this?

The selfish reason: if they play their cards right, it might help them save their dwindling subscription readership – and the advertising it attracts. The less selfish reason: it would be a boon for the environment.

The print newspaper industry takes a terrible toll on the environment – starting with the very dirty pulp and paper industry, then the transportation of raw materials, the mammoth energy-sucking printing presses that produce newspapers, and finally, the transportation of finished product. All of that comes at a big cost to the newspapers, both economical and environmental.

With an e-reader edition, newspapers could eliminate all of it, sending the complete contents of the paper to subscribers over the Internet, either directly to an e-reader (the Amazon Kindle can connect over Wi-Fi) or to a connected computer for later transfer to an e-reader over a USB cable or Bluetooth connection.

E-readers retail today for between $300 and $400. If newspapers started buying them by the tens or hundreds of thousands to distribute first to environmentally-minded premium subscribers and later to all subscribers, I’ll bet the unit price would drop below $100.

So, let’s see: $100 times the number of subscribers, versus the cost of producing and delivering print editions day in, day out, forever and ever. And what a great premium to attract new subscribers. The e-reader can also be used to read e-books.

Why am I writing about this here, now? Because one of the big frustrations living virtually in Italy is having to read The Globe & Mail online on a laptop screen. It’s cumbersome – all that clicking on links and waiting for pages to display – and hard on the eyes. Especially for me – my laptop has a 13-inch screen.

I’ll leave it for another post to talk about my glorious failed attempts to suck the Globe off the Web and put it on an e-reader in readable format. Much frustration.

San Sebastiano redux

How often, when travelling, have you scanned the calendar of local events, only to discover the great art exhibit you would have liked to see closed two weeks ago, or the concert you’d enjoy is happening the day after you leave?

One of the great things about the kind of slow travel we’re doing – staying in one place for a good long spell – is that you’re more likely to be there when something interesting happens. Like the San Sebastiano celebrations in Siracusa the past week and a half.

We had read (in American writer Theresa Maggio's excellent The Stone Boudoir) about a similar event in Catania, just up the coast. In that city’s annual Sant’Agathe celebrations, sweaty young men troop an effigy of the saint through the streets to the sea on their shoulders, shouting out in their adoration of her. It’s a major ordeal for the carriers that lasts all night and a spectacle that apparently draws tens of thousands.

The San Sebastiano procession is on a more modest scale, but also features the trooping of an effigy, with young men shouldering a catafalque bearing the gaudy statue of a saint. San Seb somehow saved the city from plague in the 15th century – we’re not quite sure how – and was later martyred. The effigy is anatomically correct and complete with arrows stuck in him and blood trickling down his bare torso, over his gold lame loin cloth.

The first night event (see earlier post) was a rain out. But last night, they brought Saint Seb out for another meander through the streets before replacing him in his niche until next year. This time it was a clear, if cool, evening and a few hundred Siracusanos turned out to follow the procession, most dressed as if for a blizzard.

When we arrived at the Piazzo Duomo, we could see the effigy, hoisted high, in the brightly lit doorway of the little church at the end of the square. It resides there during the festival. Outside, two bands were fidgeting, and priests and altar boys were lined up ready to march.

As the saint came out of the church to the chorused shouts of the carriers, fireworks exploded above the buildings behind them and the bands struck up. (At one point, they were playing ‘Ta-ra-ra-boompteeay’, which didn’t seem quite right.)

We have no idea how heavy the effigy is but it looks to be about the size of a small car, or at least a riding lawn mower. It sits on a base, which rests on two great long poles, which rest in turn on the shoulders of the carriers. There were 20 or 30 them, mostly young men, but some middleaged, all wearing dark suits and little medieval-looking maroon velvet beanies.

They would carry the saint 10 or 15 feet, shouting at intervals, “Sebasti – a – a – a – no! Sebasti – a – a – a – no!” Then they’d stop to rest. After a few minutes, a young woman would ring a little hand bell, and off they’d stagger again. (The VP Finance speculates, and I’m sure she’s right, that women were not part of the celebration in times past. There you go – progress.) All in all, it’s quite a spectacle. Okay, a bizarre spectacle.

We followed across the Piazza, me snapping furiously and no doubt annoying people with my honking great flash unit. One guy exclaimed the Italian equivalent of, ‘Argh!’ (or possibly something more profane) when I accidentally flashed him square in the eyes from about three feet away. Oops. When the procession started down a narrow street, we sheared off and headed for home. Not everybody’s idea of a fun night out, perhaps, but memorable.

Kayak polo anyone?

I'm starting to fall in love with the little Flip Video Ultra digital camcorder I have on loan from Pure Digital Technologies Inc.

Tonight, the VP Finance and I walked over to the train station in new Syracuse to buy tickets for a Sunday outing. (We're in Ortygia, the old - as in, medieval - town, on an island joined to the rest of the city by three bridges.) As usual, I tucked the Flip camera in my jacket pocket as we left.

We had earlier noticed a net, that looked as if it was for some game, on a little raft thingy floating in the harbour near the main bridge where some of the fishing boats moor. Tonight as we approached, I saw a ball float up into the air over the bridge parapet, and when we got close enough we found them playing a game. We're not sure what to call it. Kayak polo?

I shot some of the action using the Flip camera. So take a look. Has anybody ever heard of this game? Or is it a uniquely Italian or even Sicilian thing?

What is it the one guy is shouting? Sounds like 'Pepperoni!' Somebody's nickname, maybe.

So. Another Friday night here in Siracusa. I'm blogging and the VP Finance is sitting across the room watching Grey's Anatomy on her laptop. (We used Slingbox - see earlier post - to set up a recording of the show on our PVR back home. Now she's streaming that recording over the Net to her laptop.) Omigod, we're livin' la dolce vita digitale here in Italy! Aren't we exciting?

Happy belated San Sebastiano Day

The other night, the VP Finance and I trooped over to the Piazza Duomo in the pouring rain to take in the spectacle of the relics of San Sebastiano, patron saint of Siracusa, being carted through the streets in a gaudy carved box. We were disappointed...

Created during rain delays, using the Flip Video Ultra camera and Windows Movie Maker.

Happy belated Obama Day

Somebody asked if Obamamania had hit Italy. My one regret about the experience so far is that I couldn’t tell you. Our language skills aren’t up to watching Italian TV or reading newspapers, or hanging out in bars chatting up the locals, so we don’t.

However, I can tell you that Obamamania came to Via Mirabella, Siracusa. Even I, the political cynic, wanted to hear what the new president would say. So we hooked up the laptop to the TV in the livingroom (see post below) and surfed to the CTV (Canadian television network) Web site. CTV was offering a special live stream of the proceedings. We put it in full-screen mode and the video and audio quality were amazingly good – a little soft focus, occasional blips in the motion, blurring in fast motion such as when the crowd waved their flags, but perfectly watchable, and every word was audible. The screen grab above gives you an idea of what we saw.

The lead-up to the speech – the only thing I was interested in – was boring and, dare I say it, a little cheesey. But the speech, while not of the lift-you-off-your-feet variety, hit exactly the right note of seriousness and exhortation. IMHO.

Boob tube addiction, take 2

Here’s how we watch TV in Sicily when the sun goes down (which is very early – we don’t avoid that part of the winter experience).

First, I move my laptop over to the shelving unit housing the home theatre. I doubt many vacation rentals come with such nice television set-ups. It includes a 32-inch Philips LCD flat panel and Philips 5:1 home theatre surround sound system with DVD player.

Because any DVDs we brought from home wouldn’t play on the DVD player (different format, regional locking), it’s pretty much useless to us. But before we left, I ripped a whole bunch of DVDs from the local library to a portable drive (see earlier post).

I plug an HDMI (digital high-definition) cable from the TV into a port on the laptop and an analog cable from the home theatre sound system to the audio-out port on the laptop. (The HDMI cable, which I brought from home, should carry the audio as well as video, but doesn’t – because of a bug in the software I’m using, I think. Hence the analog audio connection.) Giorgio, our landlord, lent us an adapter that lets me plug the left and right audio channels to the home theatre system into the laptop’s speaker port. Finally, I plug the portable drive into a USB port on the laptop. All set.

We use Corel WinDVD9, software that can play DVDs in the laptop’s DVD drive, but also DVD files stored on a hard drive. (I didn’t compress the video using anything like DiVx – these are raw video files straight off the disc.) Using WinDVD9, I browse to the folder on the portable drive with the ripped videos, choose the sub-folder containing the programming I want – and WinDVD9 begins to play the video.

My laptop, a Dell XPS M1330, actually comes with a tiny remote control that hides away in the Express Card slot. It gives me basic Play, Pause, Stop, Skip and volume control functions. And that’s it. Picture quality is superb – DVD quality. Audio quality is also excellent, though sometimes we have to adjust levels in a few different places to get enough volume.

Occasionally we’ll get incoming e-mail notices from Outlook popping up on the screen. Otherwise it’s flawless.

Before sunset: pink palazzo

Boo YouTube

I said I would blog about the experience of using prerecorded TV from home at our apartment in Siracusa – and I will. But first, still on the subject of video, a bitch session about YouTube.

I shot a video tour of the apartment to send friends and family back home, using the Flip Video Ultra camera I’ve mentioned before. Making the movie was fun and easy. Posting it to YouTube as a private video, only to be viewed by designated friends, ultimately defeated me.

First, I edited the clips together and added titles using the FlipShare software that comes with the camera. That took a couple of minutes. Then I opened the resulting file in Adobe Premiere Elements 7, the dumbed-down consumer version of Adobe’s professional video editing software.

In Premiere, I added narration. It’s very, very easy to do: you click Add Narration, make sure your microphone is set up properly – I used the built-in mic in my laptop – and hit Record. As you record, the video plays. I did it in one take, which no doubt viewers of the video will tell you is all too obvious.

Adding background music was almost as easy, though I had to relearn how you mix sound in Premiere to ensure the music doesn’t drown out the narration. In fact, the whole process took a little longer than expected because I hadn’t used Premiere for a few years and had to get back up to speed.

I’m a YouTube newbie, but I thought it was the logical place to post the final product, which was almost five minutes long and 50 MB in the first version I rendered. YouTube has a generous file size limit of 1GB and length limit of 10 minutes. I would have posted at Flickr, which I use for stills, but it limits video length to 90 seconds.

In fairness, YouTube is set up for people who want to post videos for the world to see. I couldn’t do that because I don’t really have my landlord’s permission to expose his property to every break and enter artist in Italy. But it is theoretically possible to post videos that only designated friends can view.

Also in fairness, I’m impatient and don’t much like to read instructions. Still, YouTube makes it absurdly difficult to figure out how to post private videos and add authorized viewers. It also appears that viewers must join YouTube to be able to see the videos. After a few hours, off and on, of trying to make it work, I gave up and posted to my Facebook page instead.

YouTube. Bah. Humbug.

Sailboats in the sunset

The boob tube addiction

One problem we considered when planning our sojourn in Italy was, how to feed the TV habit? Not that either of us is a hardcore addict, but we do like to watch an hour or so of television in the evening – almost always something recorded on the PVR.

Our Italian isn't good enough to watch local TV and there was no reason to think we'd get any English-language TV from the cable service at the apartment we rented. (We were right about that.) So what was the solution?

I've already talked about a possible Internet-based solution, Slingbox, which streams TV from your home service over the Internet to your computer. While the quality of video is okay for watching the news, say, it's probably not good enough to watch an entire episode of House or a movie.

Another possibility is watching programs streamed from Web sites of TV networks or aggregators such as hulu.com. There is actually quite a bit available, but that solution is fraught with other, copyright-related problems that I'll discuss in a future post.

So what did we do? Before we left, we borrowed DVDs from our local public library - movies and recorded TV seres - and ripped them to an impossibly tiny but capacious hard drive using a program called AnyDVD from Slysoft. The hard drive is the FreeAgent Go from Seagate, small enough to fit in a shirt pocket. It is currently holding 50 or 60 hours of high-quality video.

Here's a shot of the modified home theatre set-up in our apartment, showing the laptop, FreeAgent Go and components that were already here. In future posts, I'll talk about the ripping process and our experience watching recorded material over here, but before closing, I want to say a word about legality and ethics.

In the U.S., rightly or wrongly, it is illegal to rip DVDs. Which means that the software for doing it is illegal too. (This is why software providers like Slysoft, which is based in Barbados, tend to be offshore.)

In Canada, according to legal experts I consulted a few years ago when researching the question for a story I was writing, it is perfectly legal to copy copyrighted material for personal use. You just can't distribute it. That's under current law. New iron-fisted, American-style legislaton is probably coming that will make DVD ripping just as illegal in Canada.

What about ethics? It's not as if we're doing anything more with the programs we ripped than we would if we had just borrowed them from the library and viewed them at home. We're not distributing them. In most cases, we'll watch them once and delete them from the hard drive. Having them recorded simply means we can watch at our leisure, whereas the library has a one-week loan period. But that loan period isn't imposed for any reason of copyright, only because DVDs are in such high demand.

Some days it's tough to work

Created using Flip Video Ultra from Pure Digital Technologies Inc., one of the splendid tech toys I'll be testing while in Sicily.

Settling In

Setting up an office away from the office is not just about the technology. There are all kinds of other considerations, some anticipated, some not.

For example, at home I have a big 20-inch monitor on my desk, adjusted to the right height, a proper ergonomic task chair, a full-size keyboard and mouse. Here I have my laptop with its 13-inch screen and a little travel mouse (albeit a very good one: Microsoft's Mobile Memory Mouse 8000 - a wireless mouse with a dongle that doubles as a 1GB flash drive). My office furniture: the Ikea utility table our landlord kindly lent us and a chair from the apartment's diningroom. Would it be a problem?

On Monday, I was a little sore at the end of the work day, but that may have just been a hangover from humping bags while in transit. I also commandeered a small cushion from the livingroom which turned out to be perfect for providing lumbar support. That helped. Yesterday, I felt fine.

And then there is the business of re-establishing routines or creating new ones. At home, I get up at 7 - plus or minus 45 minutes. After breakfast and exercise, I work through until 5:30 or 6 with a half hour break for lunch. Here it doesn't make sense to quit that early because the people I do business with don't even start work until 3 p.m. my time - and the left-coasters not until 6 p.m.

So I'm taking it bit easier in the morning, going out shopping with the V.P. Finance - we went to the great open air market today - blogging, etc. And then working through until more like 7 or 7:30. So far so good.

When I first arrived, I was concerned about exercise, which is vital to my routine - my caffeine in the morning, and my prozac too. Could I do my lying-down stretches and strength exercises on a hard tile Italian floor? Could I run on the uneven and slippery-when-wet cobbled streets?

Non è un problema. I improvised a yoga mat with a folded blanket on the hemp carpet in the livingroom. And this morning - beautifully sunny and about 60 degrees - I went for a glorious run all along the sea wall around the island of Ortigia, with waves crashing and salt spray cooling me.

Yeah, I think I can adapt to this.

The wind from Africa

The Sirocco came in during the night. The sky was a weird orange colour most of the day - sand from the Sahara, according to our landlord Giorgio. It stormed and blew and pelted rain while I worked.

My VP Finance went out for a walk in some of the worst of it, down to the sea wall (mad dogs and - Canadians?) She was almost swept out to sea by her account, waves crashing across the roadway. Then in the late afternoon, the rain stopped, the sun tried to come out for awhile and we went for a walk. This is one of the pictures. For more, check here.

First day of telework

Today I set up my office away from the office, in the spare bedroom of our apartment in Siracusa - although it's pretty much a moveable feast, consisting only of phone, computer and desk.

The communications, after a few false starts, came together yesterday. I brought from home an RTX Dualphone - a cordless phone system that lets me make and take both Skype and landline calls on the same phone set. The "landline" in this case is another IP phone service, Hosted PBX from Primus, a Canadian company.

The RTX base station plugs into the network router. The cordless handset sits in a charging dock that can be up to 50 meters away. The Primus adapter also plugs into the router and then into the RTX base station.

This morning, I temporarily lost the Skype service after taking out the power in the apartment by plugging in a plug the wrong way around and shorting a circuit. (No problem, we found the fuse panel right away and flipped the breaker to turn it back on.) But when the RTX unit came back up, it couldn't immediately get an IP address from the router. I had to reboot the router. Now it works again.

We tried out the Primus service last night in two calls. Fantastic. It was like talking to someone on the other side of town - no noticeable latency, very good audio quality. Our daughter, who is looking after the house, has the use of a Primus IP phone set up in my office. She can, and did, dial four digits - in other words, as if from one extension on a PBX to another - to reach us here in Siracusa.

Last night, Giorgio, our landlord, brought over a small Ikea table, which I set up initially in the main bedroom in a little alcove. But that bedroom is at the front of the house and it turned out to be a little noisy - people talking, motorbikes gunning their engines, impatient motorists honking - even though it's a tiny, narrow street.

On the whole, a good first day. Everything is working as it should, including, miraculously, me.

Hockey Morning in Sicily

Best laid plans (and blogs, I suspect) are often derailed by the Christmas holidays. I fully intended to post a series detailing technological preparations for our three-month sojourn in Sicilia. Somehow the time got away.

And now here we are in Siracusa! (Oh well.)

This morning, our first in the apartment - we arrived yesterday evening - I was up early with only a few hours sleep, still fretting about the sudden unexplained loss of Internet access the night before. Without the Internet, I'm sunk. A prolonged outage so early in our stay did not augur well.

The DSL service, from Telecom Italia, which our landlady assured us was very reliable, looked great for the first ten minutes when we connected on returning from a late dinner out. Then it was gone, right in the middle of a Skype conversation with our daughter. I went to bed worried.

This morning, a half hour after a first unsuccessful attempt at connecting, the Internet just as suddenly came back.

It is very fast. Pinella, our landlady, had said it was 8 megabits per second (Mbps) service. I don't know about that, but it is nimble.

How nimble? One of the things I wanted to test here was remotely accessing a SlingBox, a little gizmo from Sling Media that you plug into a TV set top box and a home network. It lets you stream video from your home TV service over the Internet - which you can then receive anywhere you have Internet access.

The SlingPlayer software on my laptop connected almost immediately to the SlingBox Solo back in London. (I had set it all up before leaving.) The software shows an image of your TV's remote control beside the video window - you click buttons with a mouse rather than physically pushing them.

When I used this virtual remote to bring up the electronic program guide, the first thing my eyes lit on was Hockey Night in Canada Replay on a CBC station. It was 1:30 on Sunday morning back home. Who knew CBC rebroadcast hockey games late at night?

I changed the channel to the CBC station and, dad nab it, there were my benighted Maple Leafs skating against the hated Philly Flyers. I had connected the laptop to the 32-inch flat panel in the apartment (with an HDMI cable I'd brought from home), so I was watching on TV, full screen mode.

My expectation of SlingBox was uwatchably bad video - jerky, blurry, constantly stopping and restarting. But this was actually half decent: not great, but watchable. Just. Motion was smooth. There was no stopping for "rebuffeing" then starting again.

It was a little blurry and from time to time, the image would get "blocky" - blocks of colour where there should be smooth contours. But I could see the puck, most of the time. And the audio was good.

The SlingPlayer software reported streaming bit rates in the 400-to-500-kilobits-per-second range, which for you non-geeks is pretty remarkable.

The downside? I was determined to wean myself of the Hockey Night in Canada habit while in Italy.