October 31, 2002: Happy Halloween

Pretty busy day today. I started off working for Dell over at Cayuga Med Center first thing in the morning. The work was fine but like so many little tech jobs, something dumb wasn’t wrong and there wasn’t really anything for me to do. So, I stayed there for an hour and a half and headed from there down to Horseheads were Eric and I like to meet at the Original Italian Pizzeria which has some excellent New York Style pizza for cheap. We ended up running really early for our scheduled meeting so we spent a long time sitting at the restaurant. The meeting went well and the day seemed to move pretty quickly with all of the little things going on.

Happy Halloween everyone. Snow is starting to fall today. Winter is finally upon us.

October 30, 2002

Site maintenance today. September has been moved to the archives rounding off another quarter. Summer sure did fly by this year. And now we are already seeing some snow.

Very slow day today. Tomorrow is halloween so don’t forget to pick up some candy and to get all dressed up.

I finally got called back about that senate job that I was supposed to do over a month ago that got cancelled after I showed up at the job site. We are back on in two weeks (yup, it took Compaq two months to figure out how to do the job!

October 29, 2002

I am pretty tired today. I worked overnight for Deutsche Telekom (T-Mobile in the States) from 8:30pm till 8:30am, came home, showered and changed into my suit, met Eric, headed to Cortland Memorial Hospital (who stood us up) returned home – all without getting to go to bed. I did get a chance to get some sleep while I was on the job last night but I am still pretty exhausted today. I am really looking forward to getting into bed tonight.

Loopy became the first one of us to be able to defeat the computer on hardest last night. Now the race is on to see who will do it next. Eric played against me again today and lost again. He doesn’t have a lot of experience playing against real people and that really affects him.

Vito’s, one of my favorite eateries in Ithaca, closed recently. Last night, Loopy, Min and I headed down there in the hopes of getting dinner but what we found was a new Thai and Loatian Restaurant. The new place looks nice but it will have a hard time competing with Vito’s reputation.

Ok, since I started writing the day’s updates, I played a game of AoE2 and have beaten the computer as well. Dominica has moved up from moderate to hard. She is taking the game a lot more seriously now. Min tried a newer game of the same genre as AoE2 called Stronghold. She has a demo of it that came with some other game that she owns. We tried playing it a little bit but the game just didn’t have the gripping power of AoE2. The people management gets too annoying and the gameplay suffers. Some of the graphics in Stronghold were really cool though.

Little Canadian FlagMiranda is coming down this weekend to visit. I will probably only her for a day before I take off for Washington. Eric and I are heading down to DC on Monday and will be working there all this week.

I am thinking about attempting the Linux+ exam from CompTIA this Friday. I would really like to get that test out of the way and not have to worry about it anymore. I have already passed a couple of practice tests so I think that I am ready. I have read two books as well. If I manage to pass the Linux+, I don’t know what I will be looking to get certified on after that. There are so many certifications that it is really difficult to chose them appropriately. I also need to buckle down and finish up the last of the paperwork for my last semester at ESC.

Little Canadian FlagOur Canadian Contingency should be happy when they notice all of the recent little Maple Leafs appearing all over the site. That is what happens when Miranda is coming to visit, Min and I just vacationed in Ottawa and Josh and I plan to go to Toronto soon.

Well, the financial situation is finally real… Loopy had to sell the awesome house movie projector. We are all very sad. We will have the projector for about one more week before it is finally packed up and shipped off. We will all really miss it. Hopefully we will be able to get another one really soon.

October 28, 2002: Back in Ithaca

Today is a very busy day. I have to recover from having been away for two whole days and not having had the chance to check my email or to be in phone contact with anyone. Eric and I have two meeting already this week and that makes it even more hectic. On top of that, I am working a contract position this evening up in Syracuse for T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom out of Germany. I will be working there all through the night before meeting Eric and heading to our meeting in Cortland first thing in the morning.

Today I am taking care of little things and working to get all of the copies of my resume up to date everywhere. I found some copies that were a year and a half out of date which is an eternity in the IT business. There are so many sites on which to keep a copy of your resume – it is really daunting. I use around 30 sites in all. A few I use all of the time like Monster, CareerBuilder, Dice, ComputerJobs, HotJobs and the first four of those account for 90% of all calls that I get. But you don’t want to miss a big opportunity just because you weren’t listed on the right site. So I take the time to keep resumes updated on all of them. One of the sites, BrassRing.com, that I was updating still had my address listed as Gaslight Village Apartments! I forgot that we ever lived there. That was the original Llama house here in Ithaca.

I did run into Mike Hritcko online today who used to work with Andy and I through CTG over at IBM a couple of years ago. He is no longer at IBM and is looking for work again like everyone else.

October 27, 2002: Ottawa

Little Canadian FlagDominica and I got up, accidentally, very early this morning. I actually woke up on my own at 4:30 am. That might be an okay time for Eric but it sure isn’t for me. I was up and dressed and showered and everything long before the in-room breakfast was delivered. The hotel was really nice; we stayed at the Chateau Laurier in Ottawa which is now a Fairmost Property but used to be part of the old Canadian railway hotels that exists all along the old trans-Canadian train routes.

Yesterday, Min and I went to the Museum of Civilization across the river in Hull Gatineau, Quebec. That was a really neat museum; it is no wonder that it is the most popular museum in all of Canada. We spent most of the afternoon there. The drive up to Ottawa only took us four hours. We were surprised how little driving it took to get there. That included stopping at the border. The weather was awesome – you could see Ottawa across the river with Parliment and the federal buildings sitting right on the waterfront shrouded in fog. It was amazing.

After leaving the museum, we headed over and checked into the hotel and then we stopped by the lounge for tea. Unfortunely, they were out of tea so we just grabbed some appetizers and then we headed out to explore the ByWard Market. We ate dinner at this really cool litte Italian place in the market where we ordered way too much food and couldn’t possibly have eaten it all.

Today we went shopping for some shoes first thing in the morning because Min broke hers yesterday while we were walking around town. Her sole just split so we needed to get her something that she could walk in. We tried the Hudson Bay Company but they didn’t open till late so we did some book shopping. While Dominica got shoes I got books. She got two new pairs of shoes and I got books on World Wine tours, a history of the Celts, the Huns and the Goths and the Art of War abridged. Five books in all. Some really good stuff.

After shopping we went to the Ottawa Science and Technology Museum which, as it turns out, is a not very good museum that my parents took me to when I was very young. I remember having gone there after we were part way through it. Very little has changed since I was first there many, many years ago. The exhibits were not very exciting and many had totally inaccurate information and were completely out of date.