For the second time in as many months the wireless internet in a Chicago hotel is less than advertised. In my sum total of a half-dozen hours attempting to use wireless internet at two different hotels in Chicago it has been down at least an hour. A pricey outage when they charge $300 a month for th eservice.

On the ohter hand the updated Treo is bringing this post from the Embassy Suites which does not see fit to have internet in their meeting rooms.

Its been three weeks since I have posted an update. I spent two of those weeks on "block leave". This was leave that we were all highly encouraged to take in light of the fact that our trip to the desert is not far away.

I spent my first week of block leave in Colorado. I had a great time. I saw many old friends and made a couple of new ones. Among other activities, I played with Chara and Roma, went mountain biking (see attached picture) and, of course, hit the bars in Old Town. My only regret about the week is that I did not get to see everyone I would have liked to have reconnected with in Colorado. Oh well, I will probably be back sometime in 2007.

I spent the second week of block leave in Tennessee. My friend Jay, who I have known since law school came out to visit. We spent our time driving between Chattanooga, Nashville, and Clarksville looking for the best bars and clubs and restaurants. Jay did a respectable job of keeping up with this soldier considering he's a bit out practice - what with being married and all.

I've been back in Clarksville for about a week now. It is always very hard for me to come back to Army life after taking leave. There is nothing like spending a few weeks as a carefree civilian to make me miss parts of the life I gave up when I enlisted way back in November, 2003. Now that I have been back a few days, however, I am getting into the routine again and dont really mind being here. I just wish I was flying.

Several happenings this week that impact Indian Springs. One is the establishment of a National Center of Excellence on unmanned aerial and ground vehicles at Creech Air Force Base (formerly Indian Springs Auxiliary Air Field).

Four legal notices for Indian Springs appeared in this week's paper as well. Three involve permits for the transfer of water by the Southern Nevada Water Authority. The fourth, also published July 12th, is a request by Indian Springs Sewage Co., Inc. to discontinue providing sewage service to the community. Read more about Indian Springs this week

Recent frustrations with the #c92620">slow Treo 650 have led me to start looking for others with the same problem. There don't seem to be many. The biggest problem seems to be in switching from anything to the phone application. With the Sprint Treo 650 it can take 5-30 seconds to switch from a Palm application to the phone. So far the experimenting has been minimal with only removing the extra 1GB SD card (no difference) and having done the upgrade a couple of months ago.

Update: It looks like there is another update to the operating system for the Treo 650. So far this is one of the very annoying parts of convergence. I'll now spend another hour or so downloading, backing up and installing software so my cell phone will work. Not the most productive use of my time.