The morning after the Workflow Learning Symposium, I hopped a plane to Fort Myers, Florida, to spend a few days with an old friend, my superior officer at Headquarters, U.S. Army Europe, in Heidelberg in the late 60's.

Our meal at Parrot Key yesterday was heaven on earth. Fresh oysters, conch chowder, and soft-shell crab.

I spent most of Wednesday on Sanibel Island, an awesome spot for collecting shells. Hurricane damage was evident (trees knocked down, debris on the side of the road, one beach still closed), but if anything, the storms improved the shelling, for a path one to two feet wide up and down the endless beach was solid shells.

Most of the people on the beach were stooped over, looking for shells. This is known locally as the "Sanibel stoop."

Beachcombing is my ultimate stress-reducer. No hurry. Make your own rules. Find natural beauty free for the taking. Frees the mind. I plucked treasures from the sand for hours. The "perfect shells" and rarities were long gone. ("You can't reserve the beach," said the docent at the Shell Museum.) I decided to assemble a collection of imperfect shells.

Seabirds acted as if we were not there.

Last night I arrived back in Berkeley. My computer woes (See "Kill Bill," previously) have kept me off the net for a week. Expect a blizzard of posts for a few days. My head is bursting with ideas I want to put on the web because they're crowding out other things I have in mind. First up, however, is to restore this PC back to its roots. In an hour, I hope to be booting up a fresh computer. Sometimes Windows gets so confused that the only alternative is to take it back to an embryonic state.

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It worked! I'm back to pre-SR2 Windows XP.