The Sole Proprietor is using a company laptop, a ThinkPad 560, one of the original ones, a 120MHz Pentium with a 2G hard drive upgrade. No big deal, it belongs to his section and he has access to it pretty much whenever he wants. Only 24M of RAM, but its nice and its light and it works just fine. He waited until the last day, however, to load the software he needed for the trip. The operating system and what is called the company image were already in place. That includes the OS, all of the patches and upgrades, the registry modifications we use internally, Microsoft Office and a bunch of other stuff, anti-virus and the like. What was missing and what the Sole Proprietor loaded at the last minute were Photoshop, Image Ready, Homesite and CuteFTP.

He had the CD's for the first three and he brought them from home to load at the office. He didn't have the media for CuteFTP (he couldn't find it, although he has it somewhere in his apartment), so he downloaded the demo version over the web and set it up to dial into his ISP when he was on the road. There are many things that can go wrong in this arrangement. You forget something important and although the software was pretty straightforward, he didn't think anything would go wrong with that, you could easily miss some part of the laptop, an accessory, a cable or something equally small and innocuous that you remember on the train or the first time you try to connect. Like this evening. When he tried to connect.

All the parts and pieces were there except one. When you enter a password into the live copy of CuteFTP it saves it as a line of ****** and you don't have to enter it again when you use it. The demo version does not have this capability. The password for his ISP, however, is written down on the inside back cover of a small spiral bound notebook that he carries and he brought that with him, right? Well, almost. He brought one of these notebooks, but not the one with the password. No way to FTP the journal and images to his site.

He wonders if there isn't some part of him way back in his brain that arranges for these things to happen or arranges things to be so hectic in getting out the door that things like these are likely to happen, some part of his being rebelling at getting on a train and visiting the family for the holidays. Nothing sinister here, just some Troglodyte portion of the cerebral cortex that doesn't like any change in habits, some defense mechanism used in the far human past to fend off any decision to get into the longboat and go discover America or pack the tribe's baggage and head over the mountain to find better eats. That kind of thing. Sensible stuff.

Well, he just finished talking with his ISP and they said sure, they'd generate a new one, did he remember his secret password (the password you need to remember to get the password your forgot)? No, but there's a list of passwords he uses for the office file servers, about twelve of them, and his secret "let the ISP know he was really the Sole Prop" password was number three on the list. Life is good again.

He kind of likes the banner photograph. It was taken somewhere in Oregon with the digital camera through a window on the train. The photograph by itself is no big deal with the telephone pole right smack in the middle, but as a banner it works OK. It's hard to tell how good or bad these photographs are on this laptop. The picture of the Jack London Square train station on yesterday's entry seems squished and the clarity and colors don't seem right, but he'll work with these and do better. People shots seem to work best. You can fill the frame on a small picture about 100 x 120 pixels and still see everything. Besides, those are the photographs the Sole Proprietor likes, digital camera or 35mm camera, so it seems to be working all right.