Finishing up my deadline material for work, which is going well. It kinda sucks that the majority of my free time during the week happens during the second half. It makes for some really rushed time. :)
I got both my Skinny Puppy “Track 10” limited edition today (197/400) and my “Too Dark Park” tour poster. It is cool, but I am going to have to leave the poster unframed until I move…
I’ve had alot of busy lately, whether it’s for class, work, or fun. Most of the fun stuff has gotten far too low of a priority, but I don’t see that changing in the next few weeks (with the deadline at work, and the projects for class, and all). It is cool, however, that I am not tied to hours that are set in stone for work though… It is nice to be able to work whenever I find time (even if that means 1 am).
The aforementioned bug from a few days ago turned out to be no big deal. Somewhere in between betas a config file was lost. Most of the testers had the file from a previous beta release, but since I reinstalled everything a few weeks ago, and I started with the latest beta, I didn’t get the file, and therefore my machine was wide open. It has been corrected.
I have to pee.
Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday are my really packed days…. All those days I have class from 1-4, then from 8-10. Add in all the CSH stuff, then meals, and the days can seem really long.
Thursday and Friday, however, are rather light for me. I would like to be working today, but I have alot of homework and project work I need to scrub before I can do work-work. I will say though, it is nice to be taking classes that require real code again…. The last time I had that was last fall.
Ugh. Today blew so badly. Wait, I should backtrack to my last entry….
So, the stuff at NASA continued throughout the week, Thursday night we had a DCS vs. MCS game of Laser Tag, which rocked. I did _really_ well, getting some of the best scores of the two teams (we had some non-SOFIA people playing, we couldn’t get a game all to ourselves).
Friday afternoon, we were done with NASA stuff. I have to say that while this week was enlightening and fun, it was very difficult and tiring to sit through all these presentations, etc.
Before we went back to the hotel, we toured a few more facilities at NASA. We saw “Hangar 1”, which is the gigantic hangar you can see from 101 that was originally built to house US Navy Dirigibles. This structure was immense (you could fit 3 Titanic’s in it with the doors closed). After that we went to see the vertical motion simulator that pilots and astronauts use to simulate flight. It was like a gigantic X-Y plotter.
After our tours, we headed back to the hotel, and I stayed behind while everyone else went to San Francisco. I guess it was a combination of being tired and not feeling touristy. So I took a nap for awhile and eventually contacted Chris. I got a ride out to Cisco and hung out there for awhile (actually getting to meet a few of her co-workers, which was cool). I also got to hear her IP Phone’s funky ringing ability. We left after we got all her Linux problems solved (She didn’t need my help for that, I’ll tell you.. :P).
We headed back to her apartment and watched a movie but ended up falling asleep rather quickly. We woke up Saturday and hung out all day, going out to eat, shop, etc. She returned me to the hotel at 2am Sunday so I could check out and catch my plane. I am really glad I got to spend some time with her; our relationship has been really strained since she moved, and I think that this time we healed a little bit… (At least I did.)
So the DCS team left the hotel at 4:20am to catch our 6:25am(PDT) flight. We made it in time, but we cut it a little close. Boba lost his ticket (which is why we left the hotel at 4:20 instead of 4), and we left him behind to deal with the ticket counter. He never made it on our plane, and I am not quite sure how he made out…
Today was flight-hell. I got back into Rochester at 4pm(EDT), but a whole day of flying really tired me out. I went to the Continental desk to get my ticket back to NJ (7pm), and the lady told me that there was an earlier flight (5:30pm) that I could be put on standby for. She took my bag and I went to the gate. I got on the flight, and ended up in EWR by 7:20pm. That is when the fun began…..
So I get there, am greeted by Mom and Larissa, and we head to the baggage carousel… What fun that became. My bag never appeared, and when I went to claims, they said that my bag was still coming in on the original flight I was scheduled for. I grudgingly agreed to wait for the later flight to come in so I could get my bag.
That flight was scheduled to arrive at 8:25pm, which came and passed. I tried to ask people for help several times, to no avail, and the screens told me that the plane was “ON TIME” and scheduled to arrive at 8:25pm (of course, it was already 9:45pm at this point, so it was obviously inaccurate).
I then went on a wild goose chase around the airport trying to find out information about when the flight was going to arrive. I was ultimately found out that the plane hadn’t even left Rochester due to bad weather, and that my bag was stranded there.
I went to the Baggage Claim again to ask if they could ship my bag to me once it arrived. The kind woman there (who was able to deal with me, and as you can imagine, I couldn’t have been that fun to deal with), told me that my bag had been in Newark all along, and showed me to my bag, sitting in a big pile. Apparently my bag came up separate from the rest, and no one bothered to tell me that the 8 times I asked about it. Bastards.
I am tired, jetlagged, and frustrated. Thank god my dad has a Cable Modem now so I don’t have to deal with no bandwidth in addition to all this. :)
Greetings from cisco. I am visiting Chris after our meeting at NASA today, and we are going to grab some chow in a little bit (once we stop hacking on her kernel).
We visited the Kuiper Airborne Observatory today, which is the plane that SOFIA is replacing. The plane is decommissioned, but they rolled it out for us to see today (which probably cost $10,000). While we were in the hangar, we got to see the 747 that carries the Space Shuttle around. That plane was getting new landing gear.
As I said, my updates are sporadic lately, I am returning to Rochester on Sunday, but 3 hours later I am flying home to New Jersey for a week. Should be some good decompression time, because this week has definately hosted some frustration for all parties involved.
It’s going to be a long night….
My machine BSOD’ed twice today, and it has something to do with my IDE drive…. I will have to figure it out after I get back from California….
I finally finished up my presentation, and I am currently tying up a few loose ends before my trip tomorrow. My presentation ended up not being as bad as I imagined, but I have to brush up on some other technologies that I might be quizzed on when I give it. Luckily I don’t have to go to bat until Tuesday.
I am all moved out, as some of you guys know… It is good in a way, because moving sucks, but now I am kinda a vagrant right now…. My PC is set up here at work so I could finish up my presentation (and so it had a place to live).
It now looks like I might be travelling back to NJ after I get back to Rochacha. It will be good to get home, I haven’t been back since the very beginning of summer.
So that’s it for now… I will try to update when I can on my trip…
I am simultaneously packing, ripping mp3’s, and preparing for the dry-run of my presentation tomorrow… I moved the first batch of crap over to CSH today; I am hiding stuff there until I can get my dorm room key in about a week… :P
I will probably not get to bed for an hour or two, I need to round some edges I found on that presentation, and I am still pretty wired, so…
Oh yeah, when I turn 35, I am running for president.
I pretty much finished my presentation, but I realize it is going to require some tweaking… Now once I get home from work today I can focus on the next task at hand… packing
Talk about a load of blow. There is one thing I hate more than moving, and that’s moving often. Including this time, I have moved 4 times in the past year. Luckily, this will all end once I graduate…
Time to go ‘wake up’ and get to work….
Working from home again, still working on the California presentation. I am curious if my co-workers (and more importantly, my boss) are truly cool with working from home. It was communicated to me early on that telecommuting was OK, but it is still a touchy subject for me.
I am still quite sore from the whole jetski thing; I really look like an old man when I walk around now. We went out to Weggies late last night and I felt like a complete putz.
I think I am going to write another CD review later today, but we will see. :)
I am in pain. I guess being a human shock-absorber for a jetski takes its toll on the human body. :)
I am writing this with the latest BeOS LiveJournal client. While it doesn’t support Mood/Music stuff yet, it is pretty rad otherwise. Looks much better than the prior client.
Stayed home from work today to crank on the presentation that we are dry-running on Friday. It’s coming along fairly well, but the trick is always to try and predict the questions people will ask… So I have been thinking alot about that. I am also fleshing out some of the design that was still up in the air… Hopefully it won’t completely be shot full of holes. :)