October 1, 2017: New Laptops and Lots of Coding

DuoLingo Streak: 29 Days

Jeremy and I are in Phoenix today.  It is Sunday.  Officially, our new jobs actually start today, according to our paperwork, even though we’ve been here and been in the office working already.  Today, it is all official.

Jeremy was up at two in the morning and already hard at work coding.  Of course, that sounds super early but when you consider that he is used to getting up very early eastern time, it was just him on his normal internal clock.  I managed to sleep in until six thirty, and then to fall back asleep for another hour.

I got up, showered, and then we went down and got breakfast in the hotel.  The Holiday Inn Express breakfast is quite good. Cinnamon rolls, omelettes, and lots of meat items for Jeremy.  Not a bad setup.

Jeremy worked all morning.  I went out at ten thirty with Sujit and Vijay to go laptop shopping at Costco.  They only have about six models of laptops there, so not a big selection.  But, in reality, the selection that was there was decently applicable to our needs and I was able to work with what they had.  I ended up getting a Dell Inspiron 13.3″ with a seventh generation Intel i7 processor, 8GB of RAM, 256GB SSD, backlit keyboard, and weighing under four pounds.  Jeremy got an HP Envy 15.6″, same proc, same RAM, and an upgraded SSD of the same size.  Both are convertibles, the kind that flip around and can act like a tablet and are touch screens.  Both were the display models, we we got a pretty serious discount on them.

It took a really long time to check out just because Costco had to wipe the laptops to get them ready for us.  Or so they said, but the laptops were not wiped or reimaged when we got them.  So we have no idea what they were doing.  The Costco accounts were still on them and there was no way that we could safely use them for anything without completely reinstalling the operating systems.  Which we planned to do, this does not present any kind of problem.  But for normal consumers, this would have been a major issue.

Back to the hotel I spent a few hours getting the two laptops built with a fresh install of Fedora 26 with Cinnamon desktop while Jeremy continued coding.  By early afternoon we were up and running, ready to work from our new laptops.

We were originally scheduled to have an afternoon meeting but that had to be canceled, not from our end.  So we have the whole rest of the day to get more work done.  We were getting pretty hungry, so around three we went out for a walk and went to Cracker Barrel for a very early dinner. I had the shrimp dinner, Jeremy had a French dip.  We were back at the Holiday Inn Express and and working by five. While we were out they cleaned our room.  Very efficient as they never bugged us about it all day.

It was an intense afternoon of work.  We were both quiet and deeply into our laptops until we headed out to find some late night dinner at nearly ten.  We did not want to walk too far but were unsure what we might find.  We happened upon a Del Taco just a few blocks away.  I had not been to a Del Taco in just about twenty years since there used to be one in Geneseo!

Dinner was decent.  I got the fish tacos and Jeremy got a carne asade burrito.  Del Taco was much as I remembered it.  Hard to believe that they still exist.  I almost never see them and I never hear of anyone eating at one.  The one in Geneseo closed so long ago, most people, including Jeremy who lives right next to where it used to be, have no idea that it used to be there.  The old Del Taco in Geneseo eventually turned into a few different things but eventually the old Starbucks, then the Sea Cow Grill, then a dance club that never actually opened but was built, and is currently a BBQ restaurant.  Not a great location, even though it is right in the middle of things.

We stopped at the gas station and picked up Red Bull.  Then back to the hotel.  Coding continued until one in the morning local time, which is two hours from Dallas time and three hours from New York time.  At one, Jeremy decided to call it a night.  I stayed up a little longer working on my DuoLingo and such.  His internal clock makes him get up earlier due to the jet lag.

I got just loads and loads of SGL caught up today.  This might be my single busiest SGL writing day of all time.  Probably not, that would be pretty dramatic, but it is definitely in the top five.  I must have gotten twenty days written in today.  Not only have I caught up all of April, but now all of May, and a bit of June.  I am getting more and more into the months where I already have a bit written and just need to fill in the gaps between the days that I have.  So things are moving faster and faster.  And September is almost all complete as it is.

We have a ride scheduled to pick us up at eight thirty in the morning and we will be headed into the office at that time.