Sheep Guarding Llama

Today is my last full day in DC for at least a week and a half. John and I have started making the managers call me every twelve hours to check in and so I got my first call this morning at 6:00am. Maybe I should start going to bed earlier and getting up with these convenient wake up calls. I went back to sleep today and slept until Eric needed me to get up because we were having problems with the server in Geneseo again. So I had to try to fix that, which I wasn’t able to do from here, so I had to call Min and get her out of bed to fix it. She wasn’t very happy.

I was expecting to be spending the day in DC today but ended up being in the hotel all day. Luckily, I can do almost anything that I need to do from the hotel. As long as I have a decent computer and a decent Internet connection, it is like I am in the office. Which is good because I can’t be in DC all of the time. And now that Eric doesn’t have a laptop anymore, he is in really rough shape and can’t help me out at all.

Well, today I finally finished the updates to SGL. All of the pages have been updated, for the first time in years, to a consistent look that we have real control over. We can now edit things quickly and have the changes affect every page on the entire site, not just one. With the site having grown to such monsterous proportions, we really need a way to keep it all under control.

The Mozilla Project released the lastest version, 0.7, of the Thunderbird Email Client today. It has been a really busy week over there for them. I am already using it and havent’ noticed anything different from 0.6. It is probably mostly a bug fix release.

I was supposed to be going out to Annapolis this evening but John had a long day and I still have lots to get down out here so I just stayed in at the hotel. I was feeling lazy tonight and since I needed to get to bed early I decided to just order in room service. Since they add in the tip ahead of time and since it is lower than what I normally tip, it is actually a little bit cheaper to have it delivered (isn’t that ridiculous!) But whatever (or w/e as the kiddie bloggers say,) it works for me. I ordered the grilled tuna, the same that I had last night, with the chili tartar sauce but I got a salad instead of french fries. I haven’t had much desire for fries lately. Strange. I used to be able to eat them forever. It is nice to have to option of room service. Min and I were talking earlier about it. Sometimes the convenience is just nice to have. Lots of places will deliver but most places don’t have healthy food and small quantities like room service. Actually, room service is a bit cheaper than ordering a pizza. True, the pizza will feed me tomorrow too, but I am traveling so that doesn’t have the benefits that one would think that it would.

I tried to sleep in this morning but no doing. John had me up by 7:45. I don’t think that I have gotten eight hours of sleep in over a week. And I am not likely to get that this coming weekend either. I got out of bed and headed into the hospital getting there around 10:00. Dave is down from Goshen. He isn’t here to work on the Waste Watcher but we will be spending lots of time on it I am sure.

I spent the whole day at the hospital. We were working on Waste Watcher stuff and we are rolling out our instant messenger for Nicklin Associates so I have been doing that today as well.

After a long day at the office, John and I drove back to Bowie and had a few drinks at the hotel bar (that is diet soda for me since I am on the Lamisil.) I was starving after not having eaten all day so I ordered a grilled tuna sandwich (the only thing for me on the menu) and a salad. I have been doing really well at being on a diet since I have been down here. I have been eating only about 1000 calories a day which is hardly anything for a guy my size. And I have been getting more excercise than usual since I tend to go outside and walk quite a bit more often.

After John headed back Annapolis, I went for a walk over to Borders just to get out for a little bit. I didn’t buy anything though. I actually spent most of the time on the phone.

Today is going to be a crappy day. I got woken up by housekeeping wanting to double check that I didn’t want to be distrurbed. Yeah, thanks for making sure. Then I had to get moving and get my butt into the hospital for the manager’s meeting. Of course, once I was in the car and on my way in I found out that the meeting was cancelled because everyone failed to communicate with each other about it. Imagine that, communications problems. Here is DC! Also on my way in I find out that Eric’s new laptop that he had just gotten from Min on Friday is dead. We can only guess that the power supply at the hospital is bad and it is frying out equipment. Just my luck. Losing the first laptop was only so bad, it was really old and in terrible shape. But this was one of the good ones, one of the fastest ones in the company. It was the one that I had been using for a really long time. Now we are really short on laptops. He is going to drop it off with Andy tonight to see if Andy can figure out what is wrong with it. I don’t want it to get shipped down here because the last one that got shipped down here didn’t fare so well during the trip.

So I spent the afternoon in the office dealing with this, that and the other. It is a bit more difficult getting everything done down here that needs to be done because I really rely on Eric being able to work from Rochester and to look at the cameras and the reports and everything. He thinks that he might be able to borrow a desktop computer from the hospital to get us by for a little while so that might really help if he ends up being able to do that.

I ended up putting in more time that I had intended but was back to the hotel at 5:00.

I worked in the hotel for a while. Around 9:30 I decided that I needed a break so I went out for my evening walk. I thought that I would head over towards that Bowie Town Square that I had seen the other day to prove that it was just a short walk away from the hotel. It only took about twenty minutes to get over to the shopping center. I was disappointed, though, that there wasn’t sidewalk the entire way. For a stretch I had to walk on the grass on the side of a rather large road. That doesn’t make it so appealing to walk that way. I got to the square and walk all around. There are tons of store there that will be really handy for me now that I know they are there like Verizon, Best Buy, Barnes and Nobles and a grocery store. Those are all things that I need from time to time. It was a really pleasant night so I walked for quite a while. On my way back I discovered that there was a sidewalk on the other side of the road and that if I had just walked over there I would only have walked in the grass for a minute. So that is good, now that I know how it works, it will be easier for me to get there. There are lots of restaurants there too so that is really handy.

I called Phil and talked with him for a while and didn’t end up going back up to my hotel room until midnight. I did some more work and headed off to bed. It is going to be a long day tomorrow.

My quest to bring you the busiest month ever in SGL history continues unabated, even after suffering the setback of two days of not being able to upload the dailies, I still press onward.

Spending all of this time in a hotel brings back memories of my days at the Wellesley Inn Rochester South when I used to crash in a hotel room four or five days a week and study while Andy worked his shift and then drove me home. I spent most of 1999 not having a driver’s license and Andy used to drive me to and from work and when our shifts were backup up against each other, as they often were, I would just go to a room and read and prepare to do the job that I do now. Of course, back then I didn’t have the laptop or anything and the hotel wasn’t nearly as nice as this one. So, all in all, I would say that this situation is a million times better. Back then, it was only just before Andy and I left that they even had Internet access in the office and we were never officially allowed to use it. Before we left there, Andy made this hilarious little program that ran in the background of that office computer and would periodically make turkey sounds come from the computer. We have always wondered how long it was before someone figured out how to get rid of that. Or maybe the computer was just thrown away before they ever figured it out. That is the most likely option. What is really funny is that the matching office computer, the one from Rochester North, was given to me and it still sits in my garage in Geneseo. I always forget about it but it is there. It is so old that it is really useless now. It is only like a Pentium 90. Pretty much an antique. Old enough that it can’t do anyone any good. But I can’t bring myself to part with working computers. It seems as though there must be some value to them. But there isn’t, there just isn’t anymore.

I ended up staying up later than I had planned on last night and managed to finish all of the question and answer homework for all of my “Java Programming: From Problem Analysis To Program Design” class. That is the stuff that I really hate doing and really makes me want to avoid it. Now I just have to finish up the rest of the programming projects and I will be done with that class. It will be really nice to get the chance to move on to the next class.

I got woken up this morning by a wrong number but it was a good time for me to get up anyway so I hoped out of bed and it turned out that Min had gone into the office early to read because it is more comfortable there. So she was on my instant messenger looking for me already. The huge SuSE download is still going. I get good speeds during the night so I was hoping that it would wrap up but there was still a ton left to go this morning. I will have to pause it soon to upload the dailies for the last few days or it will never get done and people will think that I am forgetting about them again.

My Internet connection got reset in the middle of the afternoon so I took the opportunity to update the dailies. So everyone should be happy now. I know how critical it is to keep up with these things when I am out of town so much of the time. I am trying my hardest to keep it all moving smoothly. I have been getting tons of homework done today. That is good because I was getting behind and I just have tons and tons to do.

For lunch and dinner today I had leftover pizza from last night. Luckily it is the type of pizza that is very good cold. And there is just a bit too much for three whole meals. So it works out rather well. It is far too expensive to have pizza delivered if you can’t stretch it out to at least three meals. I walked over to Target to get myself out and about for a bit and picked up a couple more movies because I don’t have anything left here to watch.

If anyone is bored this summer and looking for something exciting to do, take a look at Canada’s Stratford Festival. I have been wanting to get back up there for years and it just never works out. This year they aren’t doing any of my favorite shows so I am not even going to try. I am always hopeful that they will do All’s Well That Ends Well which is my favorite Shakespearian play. Eric and I went up to see it in 1989 or so.

For those of you who stay current on the latest web browsers (which you should because this generally gives you the best web surging experience), the Mozilla team has just announced the Release Candidate for Firefox 1! You can download you own copy of Firefox 0.9 RC and try it out. I am switching over to it today. I try my best to keep up with the latest browsers.

I did a bunch of work updating the Funnies section to get it up to ASPX and a matching look to the rest of the site. It has been a long time since I have gone through a lot of that stuff and there is some really funny stuff in there. I was dying. Maybe I am the only person who finds that stuff so hysterical but I often find myself crying when I am reading a lot of that stuff.

Well, I did nothing this evening but stay in the hotel and do homework. Man there is a lot of homework to be done. I did watch Herbie Goes Bananas while I was doing it. I believe that that is the last of the “Love Bug” movies. It has Charles Martin Smith in it, you might know him from American Grafitti and The Untouchables. It also has Elyssa Davalos who looked familiar to me but it took me a while to figure out why. She is from MacGyver! This was the only real movie that she did before doing MacGyver. Pretty funny.

I worked until 2:00am and then I figured that I should get some sleep. There is a radiation safety training meeting tomorrow and it is my one chance this entire trip to get all of the account managers in one place at one time so I need to be there. I decided that I should take one last look at the reports before going to bed to see how things were going at the hospital. That is when I realized that no one had been scanning waste for the last four hours. So I took a look at the security cameras and people were really there working. I wasn’t able to get a hold of anyone so it was into the office for me! Just what I wanted to do at two o’clock in the morning. I had already pulled the covers back to slip into bed too. I was not happy. It is a good thing that it takes a while to drive to the hospital because I was rather upset when I left the hotel.

I ended up working at the hotel for a while and didn’t return to Bowie until 4:00am. On my way home I decided that I was going to try getting back to my hotel from MD50’s exit 11 instead of my regular exit 13. The other night when I was out walking, I had noticed that MD197 intercepted the road that comes into the back of the hotel so I figured that since that was the road at exit 11, it must be easy and probably quicker to get back to the hotel that way. The big deal is that it lets me slip out of the back of the hotel without going through all of the traffic up front. Now, to preface this story I have to tell you about a trip that Min and I made some time ago. I can’t remember how long ago this was but recently Min and I were trying to figure this out. One time while on a trip, Min and I stumbled upon a shopping centre that we both thought was just the coolest place. It was done to be like a European village open air shopping centre. Tons of nice stores and restaurants in an outdoor setting as opposed to the regular mall or plaza centres that we are used to. It is hard to describe, but it was really, really nice. Just a few weeks ago (two months max) Min and I were sitting around trying to remember where it was that we had found this place. But neither of us could figure it out at all. Well, I found it. It is right there on exit 11 on MD197. In fact, it is so close to the hotel that it is closer than the area that I went walking to the other night. It is practically right against the back of the hotel. It is a long walk, but now that I know how to get there, I will go there a lot since it is sidewalked the entire way there and there are no big roads to cross. It is the perfect spot for me to walk to at night. And now that I know that it is there and extremely accessible, it opens up a world of possibilities for shopping and eating. Most importantly, there is a Barnes and Nobles in there. But there is a ton of other stuff too. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t a movie theatre too. Min will be very happy to know that I have finally found this place and that it is so close to the hotel. Sometime this summer she is going to be coming down here and we will get to go.

The SuSE download still isn’t done but it is getting close. I am going to try to post this update anyway, though, because I don’t want to be falling behind again and I don’t think that I will be getting up very early in the morning. I did manage to update the entire Funnies section. It is about time. Many of those pages had the really old look to them and didn’t play nicely with the rest of the page. Let me know if anyone has any problems with them now. Also the Bios button has been changed to the Anne’s Bio button since she is now the only one who has a real Bio page on here and there is so much traffic of people looking for her that it just made the most sense for now. I am hoping that while Min is out of town that she will have some time (once we figure out how to get her a laptop again) to work on her own personal webpage and I hope to get Min and my webpage updated and being used again at some point while I am down here. Have a good night, everyone.

It is a lonely Saturday in the hotel. John and Michelle had wanted me to get up early this morning and go out to the Eastern Shore with them but I had to work late and didn’t want to get up early this morning and then not get my work done either. I am swamped with work so I appreciate the time to myself in the hotel more than usual. There is always work for me to do but there is a bit more than usual these days. Between keeping everything running smoothly for Waste Watcher, getting documentation and procedures written down, printing out manuals, downloading SuSE 9.1, dealing with budgets and schedules and going to college, I am BUSY. And there is a wedding in less than a week too!

Min is at Lifestyles today and can talk to me from the laptop so I chat with her periodically throughout the day.

I grabbed my usual McDonalds lunch in the middle of the afternoon. If I manage to go in between normal meal times, the lines aren’t so horrible. Although all of Maryland is busy on a beautiful Saturday like today. The whole state is packed full of people passing through to get over to the coast and the bay. It is that perfect early summer weather today. Warm but with a light breeze. Just cool enough to be comfortable. I am glad that I am close enough to be able to walk to food. It is really nice to get a little walk in everyday.

I managed to not leave the hotel all day except to get lunch. That sounds kind of pathetic but I really appreciate the chance to get a day “off” now and then. I got tons of work done today. I finished watching Who’s the Boss Season I and then watched The Cowboy Way and Stealing Harvard. The only thing that I hadn’t seen before was Stealing Harvard but it had Tom Green in it so how good could it be. He is one of the worst actors that there has ever been. Not as bad as Hallie Joel Osment, but still, really, really bad. I don’t know why I thought that Jason Lee could manage to pull a Tom Green movie out of the trash. Lee is one of the greatest actors ever, IMHO, but no one can recover from playing opposite Green – not even the great Jason Lee. Oh well. It was from the Walmart bargain bin anyway. It is watchable, nothing special. But if you are in the mood for Lee and Dennis Farina, definitely head on over to Big Trouble which is a million times better.

I did a lot of homework and ordered out pizza from a local place for dinner. I figured out that I could position the pizza between the office chair and the air conditioner to get sort of a refridgerator effect going on. Hopefully it will manage to keep it cold. If I die from something weird, check the pizza on the chair by the window!!

SuSE Linux has been downloading all day. It is a huge download, the biggest product that I am aware of that is available for download. Actually, I think that it might be the largest single product that I am aware of whether for download or whatever. I am using this great open source FTP client called Filezilla to do the downloading. I have been looking for something that would make it easy for me to do big FTP downloads on Windows. On Linux, everything supports robust FTP but on Windows you really have to hunt to find something decent. This is a nice program that really seems to make a difference. It has worked great for me. I have found a number of competing products but they were all commercial and it doesn’t seem like the type of product that you should be paying for but getting something like SuSE without having something like Filezilla would be next to impossible (okay, I could run FTP from the command line but what an incredible pain in my keister!)

In case anyone is trying to read the site today, I have still not been able to upload the pages because of the SuSE download that is still in progress. I will get the dailies up as soon as possible. Not that anyone cares because they will have been posted by the time anyone reads this.

Just a reminder because it has been a so long since I last mentioned it… AGD Interactive has amazing, modern, Windows ports / recreations of King’s Quest I and King’s Quest II and soon Quest for Glory II. These were amazing games in their heyday and the AGD versions totally blow the originals away. So anyone who is interested in a good adventure game and even better yet, a free one, should head on over there and download one today.

Well, I stayed up pretty late working on my Java homework. It is off to bed now for me. Have a goodnight, everyone.