In my two previous Winter Olympic experiences, I have spent a lot of time writing on buses. The buses between the ice venues and the mountain venues was somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour so I was able to get a little work done.
That didn't really apply to Tokyo, since most of the buses we were on were not the normal coach buses, but rather they are city buses, so it was a bit tougher to get work done on them. That is the same here in Beijing, as we move around the city on the buses like you would find on city streets. The exception is in the Yanqing district, where there are coach buses that bring us from the train station out to the service area and then up to the mountains are coach buses.
Today, in my quest to get to the mountains a bit earlier than the earlier train would allow, I got on the 7 a.m. cross zone bus, which leaves the media center and makes stops at the aforementioned service area and then goes on to Zhangjiakou further along. Since it was a longer bus ride than I have had this winter, I broke out the computer and worked on formatting some stories submitted for this week's papers. When I finished that I clicked on my web browser to check my personal e-mail and the like and I got no response.
It appeared that Safari just kept quitting on me and I couldn't figure out what was wrong. I still had access to my work e-mail, which was the most important thing, since I had deadlines to meet, but it was incredibly frustrating trying to figure out the problem.
Our company tech guy had sent me a link to download Chrome as an updated browser, but without web access I couldn't do the download. I made an attempt to update my operating system and let it download while I was at the monobob competition. Once it all downloaded, it wouldn't allow me to open it on the hard drive because there wasn't enough room.
After another bus ride back to the media center and more frustration, including a talk with the tech people in the media center who were so baffled that they said I should contact Apple, I was able to delete a few things off the hard drive, enough that I was able to finally get the new operating system to upload. It was pushing it for time, however, as the update kept going and going and it was almost time to leave for the women's hockey game, which was taking place at Wukesong Sports Center, about half an hour from the media center.
I was able to get the 8:40 p.m. bus and got to the arena about five minutes after the game had already started. However, the good news was, that since you are reading this blog, the operating system update allowed me to once again use my web browser and get access to the blog and more. I am pretty sure it would've been a long week-plus without web access on my computer.
Computer problems made me a little late for the US-Finland women's hockey semifinal game.
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