June 13, 2004

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.

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