Day Four in Schenectady. Today went well. So far we are really happy with this job. Nothing has seriously gone wrong yet (other than not having internet access the first night.) We had lunch at Anthony’s again and they asked me if I could work with them next Tuesday. So, I will be working over there after work on Tuesday. They paid for our lunches, which were awesome again. Since we are really short of funds right now, getting free meals is pretty valuable. Because we are in a state of heightened terrorism alert and because we are working in a chemical plant, we have to go through more extreme security measures now. The plant is at Code Orange and we have to be sure to log in and out of the plant everytime we come and go. It isn’t too inconvenient but it is noticeable.
I talked to Eric this evening and he has been working on teaching himself PHP programming. I went out to his test web site and took a look at the programs that he has loaded up there. He said that he is enjoying it. We will see, maybe we will have another programmer 🙂
John had never heard “For Me To Poop On” before so we had to download it from here and listen to it in the hotel room. He was laughing pretty hard at that. We also fired up SGL Radio to see how things were going on the server. It is so weird to be in a hotel room and be able to listen to the radio playing off of your desk in your bedroom.
Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day but we don’t think that we will be able to get back to Ithaca in time to be able to make it to dinner:( I wanted to but because of the weather, I am unable to guarantee that I will be home before 10:00 pm or so and that is awfully late to be going out for dinner. So I am hoping that Dominica will let me wait until Saturday to take her out. I was looking at some of the site this evening and noticed that there was a typo in the Bios section so that no one has ever been able to check out Loopy’s web site. I went to the site and corrected it so you can all go to his site now. I am sure that that will help with the overall hits on Loopy’s site. We will have to see how me being away for most of the month will affect our hits on SGL. John is a semi-regular reader and he is away from his computer all this time so that is hurting us a little bit. But after such an amazing showing last month, it would be nice to see at least 80 hits a day.
There is a new patch out for Trillian today. You can download it for free from www.Trillian.cc. This is a patch for AIM users. Trillian is a free instant messaging client that allows you to IM using AOL’s AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ and IRC all at the same time. Very handy for those of us with friends everywhere. I am on AIM (itsallaboutscott), Yahoo! (scottalanmiller) and MSN ([email protected]). So you should all add me and IM me.
It is beginning to look like the IT spending freeze that has been killing us might be over. Analysts have been saying that IT spending can’t stop forever and companies have been holding onto their IT funds waiting for the economy to pick back up (which it won’t do until the IT spending continues again.) Well, we are starting to see that these companies are starting to spend again. This job is the first clue. Three of us working at good rates for three weeks. How long has it been since that happened. On top of that, we have each been called about multiple jobs this week. John has two interviews this weekend, Loopy has been contacted about three jobs and has an interview on Monday and I have been contacted about three jobs and I have an interview on Saturday! They told us that the Dell work would pick up shortly into the new year and it appears to have done so. Maybe this year won’t be so bad yet. I am not holding my breathe yet, but things are definitely looking a whole lot better.
I did a little work on the web site this evening and I reworked the Bios page to work a little bit better. That page used to be loaded with huge graphics that took forever to download. Now the page is really bare but it loads fast and has working links. Better than what it was before.
The official quote of the week from the PC Tech in Schenectady is “Everybody dance, in the Walmart in my pants.” You will have to ask Loopy about that one.