June 8, 2004

I got a lot of work done on the site last night. I am slowly getting the entire thing up to speed. I also made some changes to how the site works so let me know if there are some glitchy pages out there yet. One of the biggest things is that I managed to shrink the file sizes of many of the pages. Many of them by very large margins. This helps increase the download speed of the pages to make using the site more enjoyable. I put about three hours into working on the site during the night so I hope that everyone appreciates it. For anyone who read yesterday prior to me posting this update, you should have noticed that the dailies were stuck in a narrow column. That is because I was halfway through the changes. Everything worked just fine so I left it as it was just for the day. I figured that maybe it would even make someone pay a little extra attention.

I need to really keep up with the site while I am down here because living in the hotel and going into the office on odd shifts and sleeping at all different times really causes me to lose track of the days. I took a short nap this morning around 5:30 and then actually went to bed at 8:00. I got up at noon and now plan to be up for at least a while. At 7:30 I ran down and got my free breakfast. It isn’t much. They have yogurt and some bread products but nothing to knock your socks off. But, it is free and nothing is bad.

I worked in the hotel all afternoon. Dominica has her instant messaging working now so she is able to talk to me while she is at Lifestyle Properties working. That makes it a lot better being in seperate places all of the time. I decided that I have a lot of printing that needs done so I am hijacking Eric’s new printer that is on its way to him and using it here until I return home. I got Dominica hooked on playing SuperTux at work today. I thought that it was pretty well done. I hope that they make more stuff like that. That would make me happy.

I headed over to McDonalds for a late lunch or early dinner around 4:30. I have been eating there way too much because they recognized me coming in the door and knew exactly what I wanted, the number nine with lettuce and an extra fillet-o-fish sandwich, also with lettuce. They even knew my method of payment. After lunch I walked over to Borders to see if they had a book that Min and I had found a few days ago on building an arcade machine at home. They didn’t have it but they did have another book that I needed so it was worth the trip. After getting back I took a shower and headed out to the hospital center to get some real work done.

I spent about three hours at the hospital and managed to get the camera fixed that has been causing us probles for a couple of weeks now. Little victories. I also nabbed the HP Laserjet 5L printer. Hee hee. Why have a portable printer in your hotel when you can have a full blown workgroup laser printer! Aren’t I obnoxious. I have to rearrange the lamps and stuff in the hotel room just to be able to put it somewhere. It is actually a pretty practical printer for me to be using for most of the stuff that I will be doing here.

I got back to the hotel around 10:00. I made the very cool discovery that the McDonald’s next door is open 24 hours a day! Now how cool is that. They take credit cards and they never close. Now if I just had a Super Walmart instead of the little one that is here and a good diner, life would be almost perfect (if Min could come down here and didn’t have to work all this time in NY.)

Now that I have a printer in the hotel room, I am busy printing out the new Waste Watcher manuals that we are going to be handing out in DC. It is good to always have something fun to do. I am guessing that the manuals will eventually be around 100 pages long and I am currently making eight copies of them. Of course, no sooner did I get two pages printed than the printer died on me. Hmm.. Isn’t that just always how it is? Who knows how long they have been using this in the office without a problem. But I get one in the first ten minutes.

Well, around 1:20am I decided that I was feeling up to a walk and I wanted to see how this 24hr deal at McDonalds worked. So I put on my shoes and headed out. It turns out that McD’s is only open 24hr on the weekends and that I had missed my window for today. All for the best, I am sure, now I will spend less, eat less and save my appetite for the free breakfast that is just five hours away. I decided that I was still in the mood for to walk so off I went to explore Bowie on foot. I ended up walking for more than an hour. It has been a while since I volunteered to go get excercise without their being a golf club involved (or a golf cart for that matter.) The night was relatively cool but humid. Nice for walking. I should have worn shorts and not jeans but I will know better for next time. I really should bring something with me that I can use to excercise down here. I have nothing. It is rough being in a hotel because even walking anywhere is a little awkward. It isn’t like I ever come up against stairs or needing to walk into the other room or anything. I just sit at the desk, lie on the bed or walk all the way over to the bathroom. All in all, it is a rather sedintary life.

When I got home I tried to get online and was shut off because of passing the day marker so I need to get a new password from the front desk. It is annoying that they do this because there are so many reasons why I might get cut offline (server in Geneseo has its usual problem, DSL in NY goes down, password in MD expires, wireless network goes down, etc.) There is just too much opportunity to panic.

I continued working, not being sleepy yet. It occures to me (many strange things occur to me when I am alone for days on end) that I would never have believed, when I was a child, that I would grow up and live in a hotel. What a strange life it is. I decided that I was getting tired around 3:00am so I set a wake up call to get me up for breakfast and I called down to get the code to get back online so I can post today’s update. I am trying very hard to get the post done everyday.

The girl working at the front desk is definitely sleeping everynight when I call down and isn’t very happy that I am calling. I don’t understand why they cut me off in the middle of the night, though. It seems like 11:30, just after checkout would be the most logical time. With the system that they are currently using, everyone who uses it check in one day and has to call down first thing in the morning again. If they did it midday, then you would get a lot more spread out calls, I would think. And no one would have to call and wake anyone up unless they were just coming in really late. Anyway, I am back online now and posting. Goodnight everyone.

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