Day Two in Washington, DC. I got out of the office at 2:00am last night (i.e. this morning) and drove out to Annapolis to stay at the Comfort Inn at Bay Dale. So, in case anyone needs me, that is where I am most likely staying. I got a restless night of sleep and then drove into the office around 10:30 this morning. On the way out to Annapolis last night, I finished listening to “Krakatoa” on CD. It was a bit drawn out (twelve hours) but there was a ton of really interesting things in there. Simon Winchester really covered all of his bases on the subject. I am very eager to “read” some of his other books. At the end of the CDs there was an excerpt from Winchester’s first big book, “The Professor and the Madman” and that sounds like it might be a really good listen as well. Winchester really knows how to pick some rare and obscure topics but makes them really interesting. Now I am back to listening to Douglas Adams’ “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 2. I will have that finished up, most likely, before I start driving back to New York.
It is really hot and humid in DC today. Weather.com says that it is 83 but feels like 84 here in DC and 84 feels like 85 in Annapolis but I think that that is low. There is no air moving today and it feels really hot.
Ok, so the other day I was looking for some information on the web and stumbled across this page all about Groundhogs. It is a really funny site and it even has videos to watch.
In addition to having fallen behind recently with LoTMs, I also forgot to update the LoTM page itself with the last couple of entries. This has now been taken care of. I knew that I was going to have a lot of time sitting at my desk this week to write the updates.
I looked up a couple of entries in Mirriam-Webster today. And the two big finding are that AUNT is pronounced correctly linke ANT and NOTHER is an actual word, as in “a whole nother way of looking at it.” I always that that NOTHER was some word that I had made up because it sounded like people said that.
I am very tired today. I hope to get a chance to relax some after the main part of the day is past. I might even get to watch a movie in the office. That would be a nice change.
I had to do some work on my resume today. I haven’t been selling myself for technical work outside of NTI for a few months now and I decided that I wanted to streamline my resume a little bit. For some time now, my resume has been four full pages, which is a bit much to wade through. So I worked it down to three pages. It is still a pain to look through but there is a lot of stuff that I have to convey and it really doesn’t seem to be reasonable to try to get it any smaller at this point. I think that it is a bit more readable now. It is rough when you are a contractor because you do tons of jobs that are only one or two days long or maybe a week at most. Once you do a large number of those, you end up with a really long resume if you list them all. And if you don’t list them all, then you are leaving off valuable and current work experience.
I am having a terrible time trying to get the laptop working on the truck down here. None of the peripherals that attach to it are able to keep working. We are using a printer that breaks down all of the time, a wireless system that for some reason looses the ability to communicate and a signature pad that used to work fine but does nothing at all now. I put in a call to the sig pad manufacturer and they agreed that it sounded like the pad itself was no longer working so the are rushing a replacement pad out to us right away. That is good. I am glad that it wasn’t some software problem that we were having.
I worked in the office until around 10:00pm then I drove back out to the hotel. I would have stayed later but we had a small fire on the truck and it wasn’t going to be running again for a while so I decided that some sleep would be the best thing for me.
I got back to the hotel and finished watching Jackie Chan’s Project A 2 that Eric and I had started watching last week but hadn’t made it very far through. It was ok. One of the earlier “middle period” Chan films. Maggie Cheung is always good. Then I started watching the very long movie Patton that is an all time classic that I have somehow managed to never see. I only made it about half an hour into the three hour film, though, before I needed to go to bed.