the car, it does nothing

That's not strictly true. It does everything except start, but that is sort of a car's raison d'etre.

I left the dojo and stopped at the motorcycle dealership down the street to drool on motorcycles, and when I came out, the ignition wouldn't turn over. The battery's fine, all the electrical stuff works, no blown fuses, and even pressing the dead-switch in the clutch by hand, it wouldn't turn over. That indicates that either something related to the starter motor died catastrophically with no warning, or the dead-switch broke. I'd actually incline to the latter, but I won't know until Monday anyway.

Anna and I tried out Skype last night, and it worked really well, so I'll give that a shot for Chile. The video chat works extremely well (at least over American broadband), so I recommend it if you feel like, um, trying video chat. We'll see how well it works in a Chilean internet cafe, if at all.

Along those lines, tonight I bought an Asus Eee 1005HA netbook for the trip. I was all set to buy an HP Mini-110, but changed my mind capriciously when a friend pointed me to the Asus. I may return the Asus for the HP, or for the Eee with a matte screen instead of glossy (actually, I'm considering changing the order: I usually loathe glossy screens). Either way, I should have the thing set up in plenty of time for departure.