June 7, 2004: Back to Bowie

Thus begins another two weeks of hotel life. I am back at the Comfort Inn in Bowie, Maryland. This time in room 408. It is a King, non-smoking room but I didn’t get the good view this time. The important thing is having the king room. It is so much more comfortable than the other rooms. My foot seems to be much improved. I think that it is better today than it has been in a long time. I think that I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow but I am not sure, I need to call and find out.

While reading the news this morning (by news I mean the technology news, I seldom bother with world news unless Eric sends me a link to a BBC article) I discovered a neat new video game that is available for Linux, Windows and MacIntosh called, SuperTux. This game is in the same spirit as SuperMario Brothers from the original Nintendo Entertainment System in 1984 but has far better graphics. The game isn’t done yet and isn’t perfect but it is playable and shows a lot of promise. It is a free download so everyone should give it a try. I thought that it was fun.

I slept in late today, I get tired when I drive. Then I got up, fixed the server that had died, AGAIN. Then it was off to the hospital. There is always something to be done. I worked at the hospital all afternoon. Luckily, nothing bad happened and I was able to return home right at the onset of rushhour.

I am back in the hotel after a fancy dinner at McDonald’s next door to the hotel. I plan to be in the hotel all evening to get work done. I find working here really comfortable. It is nice and quiet but I can listen to all of the cars drive by as well.

I forgot to mention the other day that Andy is wearing glasses now! He and Miranda went shopping for them last week. He says that it really is helping his eyesight. But, he has already noticed an increased dependance on them.

I decided that the May archives needed moved out so you can find them in Q2 now. It is so much easier to work on the site when I am only dealing with a single month at a time.

I did some work on some old pages today, bringing them up to current standards of SGL (no, we are not 100% over to ASP.NET yet but we are getting there.) It is amazing to me how long I have been writing on this site. There is just so much stuff on here that I have forgotten about. In ten years it is really going to be amazing to go back and look through all of this stuff and remember how young I used to be! How young we ALL used to be. One thing that really caught me by surpirse is that I have had my head shaved since sometime in 2001! That is a long time. I feel like this is a new hairstyle but I have been doing this for three years! I have been a vegetarian for almost as long. Boy is that weird.

I found my other cell phone battery (mobile battery if anyone British is out there.) It was hiding in a box that I have been carrying back and forth to DC all this time. So, I can now be reached regularly again. No more mobile charging issues. I have plenty of battery to keep one on and one charged now. That is a big relief. It would be rough to be down here with that being my primary form of communication and having it be dead all of the time.

I spent a quiet evening alone in the hotel working on homework and other miscellaneous items. It feels good to get things done. There is a lot that piles up whenever I get busy and it is a daunting task to wade through it all. At least being in the hotel makes it easy to stay on top of SGL. I am so glad that I have this new laptop, it is really letting me live here. And now that the hotel as wireless Internet access in the room, I am super productive. I think that I might leave dad my Verizon wireless card the next time that I come down because I have so much reliable access down here now that it really isn’t the issue that it might have been. I actually just leave my laptop running on the desk all day long and online. That makes life a lot easier. I need to get that new Anti-Virus package from Symantec loaded up on here though. I am running without anything right now because I have been waiting for it which is a big no no. But so far everything has been okay. [Crosses fingers]

I have been exceptionally not hungry today. I didn’t eat anything until I had a late lunch at McDonalds around 4:00. It is midnight as I write this and I am still not hungry. I wasn’t really hungry earlier; it just seemed like I should eat something. So now I am wondering if maybe I am not feeling well. Hmmm… I am not really tired either and one would think that I would be.

We still don’t have the electrical issue on our dock fixed so I don’t have nearly as much work to do in DC as I would have hoped. I can’t believe how much of the stupid, little stuff holds us up all of the time.

Well, there is plenty of work for me to do so I am going to call it a night. I am starting to get a little bit sleepy and I want to be up early enough in the morning to be able to get the free breakfast that comes with the room. It is nothing special (nothing at all) but it is something. Free is always good.

Well, here is a first. I was working on uploading the daily updates when the system died on me. What a pain. It used to always let me work remotely but now it is starting to stop that on a regular basis. It used to be an inconvenience but it is getting out of control. I really wish that I could figure out something about what is going on. This is one of the world’s seriously baffling problems. It is so intermittent and it happens on three different logical connections that have been representing four physical ones. The number of combinations that exist that cause this problem is unbelievable.

Ok, after calling Andy at 1:30 in the morning and having him restart some things, we realized that the actual problem was that the hotel cut me off. What a pain.

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