Back from Sioux Falls on Friday night -- my flight landed right before 10pm, so I didn't get home until nearly midnight.   Trip was good, ate a lot of good food, and hung out with the people that we work with on a daily basis, but never see.  It was productive, and well worth the trip to get accomplished in 3 days, what it would have taken several weeks of 1 hour conference calls to get done.
Hilights of the week were: "slick track" go-karting on Tuesday morning (1 free ride per person, compliments of the boss) -- most of the department went.   It's exactly what it sounds like, slick tires on a slick track - and the department have been doing this regularly for years, once or a few times a year - so they're gotten to be a ruthless crew.   It was a ton of fun, I ended up taking two head-on collisions, and got pretty good at offensive driving/bumping.   James spent the majority of the time with his car backwards on the track.   He said the car wouldn't turn properly.

The "Sioux Falls" is a pretty small waterfall, where they have a history lesson laser-show nightly.   It was interesting, history of the discovery and founding of the town, lewis and clark, etc.   Probably wouldn't do it again, but it was interesting once.

Back at home:
I gained 4 lbs in SF last week, mostly because I was weak at following my diet, when we were eating Italian, and Steak houses, and the like all the time.
We've been working with Ryan on taking charge of his routines.  Specifically, we've got his toothbrushing routine down.   He goes into the bathroom, climbs his steps, turns on the light and gets the toothbrush (we put on the toothpaste, and do the real brushing) - he 'brushes', rinses, and puts away the brush, and then dries his hands and turns off the light.    It's so neat to watch him learn stuff.

While I was gone, he learned lots of new words, including "Beach", which he told me about on the phone one night.   Cute!   "Where are we going next week?" -- "to the Beach!".


We actually got to MB today at about 5pm, after a slightly later start than we wanted (at 9am), but we still did ok for time.   The portable DVD player helped, but he still didn't really have attention for more than one or one and a half movies.

We got in just in time for dinner - so, of course, we went to Friendly's, and Ryan got his Cone Head Sunday.   First the eyes and nose, then the cherry, then ice cream and the cone.   He was a mess, but he loved it.

We're all set, and ready for a fun week!

Tags: sbd, vacation, work

Looks like my group at work will be taking over ownership/management of our co-location systems down at Internap.  So, in preparation for that transition, we went down there with the former owner so we could get our badges made to get in, and ate at The Vortex while we were in the neighborhood.   Yummy Vortex burger.    I should have been more dilligent about seeing if they had wheat buns or anything of the like, but instead chose just to avoid the chili cheese tots or french fries, and enjoyed my burger fully.   See if I pay for that tomorrow...

Not really looking forward to owning the colo systems, but on the other hand, it adds necessity to our positions here, so it should give us some longevity.  That should be good.

Tags: work

I just got my flight itinerary for my upcoming trip to the mothership in Sioux Falls -- I'll be leaving at the crack of dawn on June 2, and won't get back in to ATL until about 10pm.    Bunch of crap.   I know they're trying to maximize my time in the office there, but jeez - lets take the 2 crappiest flights ever.   Part of what makes it sucky as that I have to change planes in Minneapolis with an hour between flights each time.   Eh, I've never been through MSP, so that should be a new experience.   
At least I'm not going alone this time.   And then right after that is vacation!   So, I'll have a couple of days to mow the lawn and get packed, then driving off to MB on Monday morning.

Got my mower belt yesteday, not without trial.   Went to Sears, looked at the 25 belts on the wall - all of them said "see reference chart for sizing" on the package.   I couldn't find said chart - not noticing the little parts computer that was a few feet down on the wall...   So, I went seeking help.  At the employee station in the hardware section, there were 2 Sears employees standing there, talking to a customer.   One was in sales floor attire, the other in warehouse attire.  I figured he was just out of position, but still waited patiently near the other customer.   Warehouse guy's cell phone rang, he looked at me, then answered the phone and walked back toward the warehouse.   Sales guy kept talking to customer.   Customer paid for his purchases, and then they proceded to start a new conversation about lawn equipment.   I went away to seek someone else to help me.   After not finding anyone remotely near hardware, I returned to stand next to Customer.   Sales guy glanced at me a few times, but never acknowledged that I was there.   After a while, I realized that they were just shooting the shit, and he wasn't actually trying to help or sell anything to this customer.   I thought about getting a little rude and rambunctious, but then figured he would just not help me find what I needed, so I just waited.   After about 10 minutes (total), another Sales floor guy came around, was polite and helpful, found me what I needed and showed me where to find the answers next time, gave me a lot of helpful pointers about my mower's parts, and checked me out.   All the while, Sales guy #1 just kept chatting with Customer, and they conveniently broke up their conversation right as I was checking out.   Then he just stood there with his thumb in his bum like nothing else in the world was going in around him.   I held my tounge again as I walked past him to leave the store.
I really don't understand people sometimes.

My bites didn't seem to bother me yesterday at work, though they were fairly bad and swollen yesterday morning, then they got swolled and aggrivated again last night before bed.   I had originally planned to make a doc's appointment for this morning, but today when I woke up, there's no signs of them except a coupe of small spots - I figure it won't do any good to show the doctor my problem if it's not actually happening...   So, maybe it's just getting better...   I'll have to keep an eye out, and if they swell up again, try to go in to see the doc so I can show him.

Lastly, aside from needing benadryl to sleep at all last night, Ryan decided that he just wasn't going to sleep more than an hour at a time.   Katie had gone to her leadership group at church last night, so I put Ryan to bed.   At 7:45p, he broke down into tears, sobbing and squalling.  I attributed it to the lack of a nap, and decided to put him to bed.  We did Bedtime Routine without much incident, but then he went back into hysterics right as I put him in the bed.   I left, and 5 minutes later, he was out cold.  It was a little after 8.   Right at 9, he woke up sobbing inconsoleably again.   I went and tried for 15 minutes, nothing worked, so I took a break, let him yell.   Finally got him back to calm around 9:30 after an abriged "Teething medication treatment" (some Tylenol, and teething tablets) and some gas drops - right before Katie got home, and then he broke out sobbing again.   This was basically the pattern all night long, sleep for a little, sob for a long time.  I know Katie was pretty frazzled, I was too knocked out to really know a lot about what was happening, but he was loud enough to wake me up a little bit.   I think she eventually dosed him with the rest of the arsenal of teething remedies, but I don't know if it was the issue or not, but he DID seem to sleep for at least a couple of consecutive hours after that - and then my alarm went off.
Damn I -teeth, I don't know if they're the issue, but I know all 4 of his are not completely in yet, so I'll blame them for now.

Tags: health, rants, ryan, work

No posts for April sofar...   So - this is what I missed, I think.

On April 1st, our car got attacked again -- Katie was pulling out of the pediatrician's office parking lot, and was deceived by someone signaling that they were turning, but was not -- so she got hit in the front left fender.   technically our fault, no big deal, nobody was hurt, everyone was going pretty slow, and we have insurance and stuff.   So, I filed 2 claims with the insurance people on 4/2, and had it sent over to Bradley's to have the work done.  Hopefully I'll get that back soon.   We went and bought a new car seat (same Britax that we already had) and threw out the old one (kind of, it's in a trash box in the garage) since you're not supposed to use an car seat after any kind of accident.  Insurance said they'd buy us anything we wanted as long as it was comperable to the old one, so - we got the same one since we like it a lot.

Amazon finally sent me all my refunds.   I'm so lost in the process, that I'm almost sure they sent me $300 too much back, but - I might just be miscalculating.   Those people were so confused by their convoluted process that I'm surprised I actually GOT the refunds.    They sent me 3 checks (in pounds, naturally) - which my bank evidently doesn't have any CLEAR process how to handle.   They have to mail the check to the corp office, who "verifies the funds with the foreign bank" and then deposits the money.  Process takes 7-14 days.  No big deal.   The checks came weeks apart - check 1 took about 10 days to post, check 2 is outstanding 14 days today and still hasn't posted - I guess I need to call about that, check 3 posted 24 hours after I took it in.   Thinking that was wierd, I called the bank, and the lady just couldn't explain the process to me, so I gave up.  

We finally caught up on Chuck and Life from the DVR, but now NBC's talking about not renewing both of them, which makes us sad.  I think those are our favorite shows on TV right now.   We've started catching up on Heroes, and are still way behind on House...

Crossed Max Payne off my list of movies -- it was pretty much the steaming pile of poo that I expected.

Amanda and Brian announced their pregnancy right before easter, so we're really excited about that.   They're figuring that the baby'll be due in December.   We went out to dinner with them and their families on Saturday night after Easter service (we usually go to the off-peak services around Christmas and Easter since we get so many visitors on Easter Sunday AM service, it gets crowded) - they announced it to their families then, Brian's mom was bawling, it was sweet.   She's had a Willow Creek figurine in her trunk (Pregnany Mommy) for "a long time, waiting for this day" that she was finally able to proudly present to them.   We'd known already for a couple of days, so Katie was semi-prepared to get some candid pictures of their moms getting the news -- it was pretty cool to be a part of that with them.

Then Easter - we had our Moms and my sister over for lunch.   Katie cooked Ham and veggies and devilled eggs and lots of yummy stuff.   This year was pretty fun, Ryan's old enough to understand his easter basket - he got a new firetruck (woo, woo, woo) with lights and sirens - but Ryan really likes making his own noises - a snuggly lamb, Gymboree bubbles (the best bubbles in the world), some new cars and lots of candy.  After lunch, we took Ryan out in the back yard for his first easter egg hunt.   He had a ball!  He did get a little hung up with wanting to OPEN the eggs and eat the candy, rather than finding more, but with a little encouragement, he rounded them all up.  

James and I took a long lunch (just 2 hours) last week and went to see Fast and Furious.   It was about as good as expected, since our expectations weren't high.   I put in on the rung with Tokyo Drift, which I wasn't a big fan of - but I liked the first 2 a lot.  

Went to Jump 4 Joey's on Friday since I was off.   That place is a lot of fun!   It's basically a warehouse that they've converted to a play yard for kids with 7 or 8 big bouncy houses/slides and stuff.   Ryan has a ball in them, and parents are allowed to go with their kids in them (I'm sure crowdedness becomes a factor at some point) but since it was a Friday at 11am, we pretty much had the run of the place.  My abs still hurt.

Saturday we helped Brian paint his upsairs and downstairs hallways and the 2-story staircase hallway.   Manuvering a tall ladder in a staircase to paint way up high...  not fun.    But, over the course of the day we DID end up having fun, though we were exhausted by the end, but I think it turned out pretty nice.   We met up with a couple of other friend of theirs afterwards for dinner and mini-golf at Monster Mini Golf over off Barrett.   It's indoor mini-golf, completely black light lit.   The theme is monsters, of course.  Mostly silly looking ones, but there were a couple that really freaked Ryan out -- notably the one that looked like a normal guy, until it reached up and peeled its face off...   That creeped me out a little too, but Ryan got really clingy after that.   They had good music playing - and Ryan was rocking out with it.   He REALLY likes Aerosmith "Walk this way"...   Too funny.    Arielle and Evan went off to do their own thing after that, but we found out later that night that they got engaged - so that was exciting.

It needs to stop raining on my days off so I can actually cut the lawn, it's starting to get rediculous.   I also want to do some kind of weed treatment - but not really sure what to do yet, trying to get motivated to do research, but I'm just not THAT interested in my lawn - even though I should be.  The Ants invading my kitchen also reminded me that I need to get out the DemonWP and do my spring insect treatment.   That stuff works wonders for a long time, it makes me forget to do it in the spring...

We got a new thermostat that I installed last night - one of those semi fancy $30 5-1-1 programable jobbies, only because I couldn't really justify buying the $100 touchscreen one with the remote, even though it was hotness.   So, we replaced our old manual mercury filled one, and now we need to paint.

Books - I finished the New Testament, which was really exciting to go through.  I wasn't going though studying, just reading the words and the stories.   The Gospels are really interesting to read back-to back, comparing how the authors told many of the same stories, but from different perspectives.   Acts is fantastic, it starts slow, but the story is amazing.  After that it goes into Paul's letters to the Romans, Corinthians, Collosians, etc - and Paul kinda drones a bit.   Those books make for good study material.   Katie wants to read Revalation with me, so I skipped that for now.   Started the Old Testament now.   It's really amazing the stuff that I /thought/ I understood, but really just never heard.   Genesis is so much more than JUST the Creation - it accounts for thousands of man-years and lots of stories.   Exodus is more of the same.  At some point, not sure if it's Exodus or Leviticus, God describes in great detail building the Ark of the Covenant, its coverings, the tabernacle, and lots of other stuff.   That kinda drones unless you happen to be skething what they're describing - that could be an intersting place to go back and study a little, or at least look at more research.  Leviticus is pretty dry -- it's laws.   A lot of them.   Hundreds of them.   Not Covenant Law style like on the tablets - but they're laws about clean/unclean animals, sacrificial offerings, how offerings are made, what offerings to make in what cases, different kinds of offerings, how to make oneself "clean" after handling something "unclean", etc.   So, I'm currently in the first chapters of Numbers...   Numbers - is, well, numbers - sofar.   It's an account of a census that Moses took in the land, just how many people are in the tribes.   It's brutal to wade through this part... 

Tags: books, fix it, lawn, movies, ryan, the list, work

Not a lot going on this week.   Ryan's on antibiotics for his strep and ear infection for a few more days.   Katie went to the doc on Thursday, and got a negative strep screening, despite a sore throat.   Now I'm getting the sore throat, but only at night and early in the morning.   Lots of juice and Emergen'C for me to try and knock out whatever's in there.

Work was kinda crazy this week, our facilities director was down cleaning up the call center building and preparing it to be closed down and start showing to sublease tenants.   The amount of crap that was in there was amazing.   Looks like we're going to give away a lot of old computers to employees, and (thank goodness) she's going to have professional movers come pack up and move the 60 some odd other computers that are going up to the corporate office.   Now begins the process of documenting all of the stuff that I'm going to have trashed/destroyed, and the stuff to be donated so we can write it all off the books.   There should be some cool stuff that I might be able to get from there.

I'm feeling tense at work - I hate not knowing what the future is of my office.   People have made comments that they don't expect my office to stay open past the end of the year, but at the same time, they've filled up every cube, corner, and office with bodies.   There's even a closet that's now an office...    Either way, I've got my resume out there a small handful of places, but I'm just not comfortable with the resume itself.   I need to get Katie or someone to make it pretty and stuff; I've never been good at making a resume.   Of course, the other possibility is that I DO find another job, and then they lay people off...   I guess you can't really live for what 'might' happen, eh?   Live for today?  ...

I've finally decided to build my RAID 5 server, since I realize that I pretty much have everything I need already, just missing a couple of things. So, I'll be rounding that stuff up soon, and I'll have to reformat my hodgepodge server from XP to 2003, and then move the data off the various drives in it over to the new array.

Also decided to take another shot at using Linux.   I've setup Ubuntu 8.10 on my personal laptop, and everything including wireless works out of the box.   I've been using that for a couple of days now, and am liking it a lot - it's giving me a chance to brush up on my Linux skill (which was limited to CLI only, and very limited at that before anyway).   Thought about using that as my RAID server platform, but I'm not thinking I'll be comfortable enough for that by the time I'm ready to build.

Movie off The List:

Underworld - I guess I never get tired of Vampire movies; looking forward to watching the sequel, but - the third one?   We'll see.

Tags: family, geek, the list, work

Ryan's having fevers off and on for the last few days, and being grumpy in the night -- we think its that his canines coming in...   Stupid teething.
Both my mom and my mother-in-law's computers putzed out last week, so I spent parts of my 5-day weekend fixing/replacing stuff in those - but I think I finally have both back in working order.   Now I just need to get them back to their respective homes.

We went and saw the Shopahilic movie on Sunday for Valentine's (Yes, a day late - we didn't want to hassle with the crowds on Saturday)...  It was cute, and I actually found it funny at times too.

Work's been increasingly busy, which is good.  We had a scare (self inflicted) when we heard that some SVP's were coming to Atlanta Weds and Thursday.  Seems like the last few times they've come down they left behind a few pink slips.   So -- I got panic'd last night, and started looking for a job again.   Made my Monster profile, and a few others.  Sent in a few resumes...   Makes me nervous - I have never really had to look for a job in my field before.   I had a foot in at my current workplace, and all my growth/promotion has been internal - so I just haven't been put through that ringer yet.   I got a cold call this morning from a recruiter that found my Monster profile.   I didn't have time to call him back from work today, and then forgot later.   Not good, I guess.   I think I know what job he's calling about, and it's neither up my alley, nor is it even paying what I've even making now.   So, I'll try to give that dude a call tomorrow.   I think as a manager that's always getting cold calls from recruiters pushing to get people hired, I have a personal annoyance with them.  I guess I need to get past that. 
Anyway, sidetracked...   It was a false alarm, they were in town for a big sales meeting with our whole sales force.  Guess flying 3 down here was cheaper than sending 7 up there.   The job hunting ball is rolling now - it's probably time anyway.  I'm getting tired of not knowing if they're going to close my office.   I realize another company is just as risky, so I figure at this point in time I can afford to be picky, and hold out for something that's worth the risk to take.

Started reading The Stand on Wednesday or Thursday or something last week.   I'm back in an old school Stephen King trend.  Got The Green Mile queued up after that, but it will probably take me a while to finish the 1200 whatever page tome.   Though, it's quickly sucking me in, so maybe it won't be too long...

Tags: books, date night, geek, ryan, work

Got some good news today at work; my group won't get getting changed in the immediate future.

We bought a couple of wireless night-vision surveillance cameras to use as a video baby monitor -- $65 for 2 that connect to the TV seems like a better deal to me than 1 that I can tote around in my pocket for $120. So, we mounted one tonight in Ryan's room so we can see him sleep (or not sleep) -- we will mount the other one in his room to see the play floor area later on.
As an aside -- if you want to get wireless cameras, I'd steer away from the 2.4 GHz models if you have WiFi or a 2.4GHz cordless phone in your house. Since I only have 2 cameras, I still had an open channel on my access point to use without interference, but I just don't see how you could ever buy and of these 4 camera 2.4GHz setups -- as soon as I turned on the first camera yesterday it drowned out our WiFi. There are 900MHz models out there; hindsight...

Movie off the list:
Magnum Force -- Corny acting and wonky effects seemd to be just what was done at the time, but it adds a classic flair to it. I liked Dirty Harry better, the story was just more interesting.

Tags: ryan, the list, work

On Saturday a few of our neighbors were outside with all their kids playing in the cul-de-sac. When I went out to get the mail, they invited us to bring Ryan out to play -- us being the unsocial neighbors that we are, we've lived here 3 years and don't really know our neighbors or their kids at all...   We brought Ryan out, and he was immediately fascinated with the big kids on their new bikes, and the tricicle of a little girl that's about 6 months older than he.   We don't have a trike or anything for him yet -- he has ride-on toys and a fisher Price car that he likes to play in outside, but no bigwheel.   Our neighbor actually gave Ryan a bigwheel that her son had outgrown.   Pretty cool, Ryan was super excited, even though he's not really big enough to pedal.   We hung out out there for a while, they have some pretty cool kids.

Sunday we went to my sister's church out in Buford, as she and her boyfriend Nick were getting baptized!  It was really awesome, and I'm glad we could be there with them.  Lots of our family was there - my mom, Lala, Uncle Steve and Aunt Jane, Laura and Stephanie, and of course Katie, Ryan and myself.   We joined Amanda and Nick and his family for lunch, and then headed home.   Driving to Buford is FAR, jeez.   The church is over near the Mall of GA -- it was a really nice service and the music and the pastor were great; but it's so BIG, it had literally a stadium setup.   The crowd was chaotic, and the parking lot sucked.   it took us 20 minutes just to get out of the parking lot, and then it's an hour and a half back to our house.   Regardless, I wouldn't have missed it.

Was off on Monday, so we did some shopping.   Target and Walmart in the same day is too exhausting for me.

I finally bought my Harry Potter bookset that I've wanted for a while.   Gonna take a week or so to get here from the UK - but they just don't sell this edition here.

Today was my deadline for input on a sucky task at work.

Work was actually semi busy today - was diving back into some VMWare stuff that I've let fall by the wayside due to no budget at work.   I still have no budget, but I have a few weeks to play with some extra licenses that I have before I have to surrender my hardware to the mothership.   Their tech support is awesome - but I had to wait an hour on hold for nearly an hour to get there.   Course, they had my issue fixed in about 20 minutes, where the tier 1 outsource to India just wanted to point me to the online documentation and get me off the phone before his 10 minute quota was up.   so - an hour and a half later, I had everything working, which was cool.

Started Reading The Shining this morning.

Crossed off the movie list:
Lethal Weapon 4 -- They should have skipped the pansification of Riggs angle a long time ago.   This was just corny.
 

Tags: books, ryan, the list, work

Got my W-2, did our taxes last night.   Looks like I let the government borrow less money this year than last year - so my refund's a little smaller than I expected, but that's not that bigga deal.   It's all filed since I've gotten everything that I was waiting on now, and it's about time that federal e-files were free for everyone (I think) -- it was free this year anyway.   So I just had to pay to file GA -- when are they going to get on the free bandwagon?

Today's my day off this week, marking the beginning of a 4-day weekend, since Monday's my day next week.   No big plans - going to Gymboree at noon.

Work was busier this week, so that's good.   Got some tough decisions to make at work soon...   that's bad.

Finished reading the 8th book in The Southern Vampire Mysteries series by Charlaine Harris - the books that the HBO Series True Blood is based upon.   I watched the first season this past Fall, then started reading the books around the time that Katie started hearing about it from a friend -- so we read that series over the course of about a month, maybe a little less.   Katie's more critical about the differences in the TV Show than the books, but I kinda like the differences - it makes me look forward to a show that I don't completely know what to expect since I've read the books.   Book 9 comes out in May.  I hate waiting for new books in a series.
I can't decide now what to read in the meantime.  Katie thinks I should read the first Twilight book.   I have The Shining that I also want to read, and the Lord of the Rings Trilogy.  I really enjoy novels in a series - but just don't know what's out there.

Tags: books, taxes, work

Friday:
Since our call center is closing - and we are subleasing the facility where that lives, I no longer have that server room to use after about March. So, we're consolidating everything into the smaller, original server room from before we were bought out last February. So, this has forced me to have to move 2 400lb data cabinets (empty) from one facility, across the road, to the other. Even on wheels, that wasn't fun.

After work we went over to Brian's house to help him mount his TV on the wall.   That wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be, but it still took us a little while.  After we put Ryan to bed, we played "Dirty Minds" - which is fun, but unfortunately the manufacturers of the game (like a lot of newer "Board" games) just did not build in a lot of replayability into the game.   Once you've heard the dirty clue, the answer tends to stick in your mind, so if you play again you'll know the answer.  So, once you have used up all the clues, you can't really play anymore.  You can play Monopoly forever.  It's timeless.  Dirty minds has probably - I'm guessing 200 words (divided among 4 player books).

Saturday:
Wow!   Our whole household slept until 11:30am.   I never sleep in - my internal clock wakes me up at 6 every day - which is stupid, since i have to wake up at 5 for work.  I guess it feels it's a fail safe. What's wierder is that Ryan slept in too.  Guess it was because we were out at Brian and Amanda's until after midnight - so we got home pretty late.  So, that was cool.

Went to visit Super-Lala for dinner.  Just about any dinner with my family(my mom's side) becomes a fiasco, since they cannot have a small dinner affair.  They complain about not getting to visit Ryan very often, but then create such a busy environment when we come over - that it just never works.  What was a dinner with just Katie, Ryan and I, my Mom and my sister - became also my aunts, uncles, and all of their kids.  Fortunately, one set already had plans, and didn't show up.  The other said they didn't have any plans, so they DID show up, only to tell us that they DID in fact have plans, and that they woudn't be staying.  Fine - no big deal, but if you don't want to come because you have plans - you don't need to come, nobody gets offended.  It was my cousin's 13th b-day, so they were taking her and one of her friends out to dinner, and then to a movie.   With a stop by Grandma's.  With the friend.  Wierd?

Super-Lala's house isn't really baby-friendly, Ryan managed to get two pretty good licks to his noggin while we were there.   Good thing he's hard headed like his dad :)

Knocked off The List:
Street Kings and Lethal Weapon 2

Tags: family, the list, work

They're running a new water main down our street at work, so consequently we're worried about them cutting our private point-to-point fiber we have between my office and our call center across the road.  We had it marked, and talked to the foreman on the trenching job - he assured us he'd look out for it, but we're still worried.

They got to our spot in the road yesterday afternoon or early this morning...   We got worried when he wanted to see us this afternoon...   He thought he'd cut our line - we weren't down, so we knew he didn't - but he still seemed to just want to talk to us around a hole in the sidewalk, in the cold wind, staring at /someone's/ cut line.   He didn't seem too concerned about it -- he said he'd called Comcast, since he believed it was theirs, but was still uver-worried that it was the dark fiber of ours that he'd cut.

After about 30 minutes of assuring him that we were fine, he seemed to become more interested in talking to the property owner who had showed up with AT&T - so we slipped away.

We had noticed that he DID find our line, and successfully cut around it, so we should be safe.


Knocked off The List today:
Lethal Weapon

queueing up the other 3, and the Alien quad.

Tags: the list, work

So, I just returned from my first business trip...   1 overnight to Destin, FL.

Long story short:
Our installer that was at this property in Destin flew down on Monday, and didn't call in to HQ, or answer his phone, for 2 days.   So Wednesday afternoon, the manager over the Engineering team came to my Advanced Engineering group hoping to find someone who was available to go to find out what the hell was going on.   I was the only one available - so I went.   No big deal.

Interesting trip -- short flight from Hartsfield abord a 50 passenger CRJ200 to Okaloosa Regional Airport - just north of Fort Walton Beach.   Tiny little regional airport - 5 or 6 gates.   Shares a runway with Eglin AFB...   Like the guy sitting next to me said "Don't too often see [F-16's] on the Runway next to your flight in" -- sure enough, there's about 15 or 20 hangars armed with F-16's just off the runway.


Got in, got my rental car - a Chevy Malibu Maxx.   I wasn't that excited about the car, until I drove it.   It had quite a peppy V6 that really zipped right along - made the 40 minute drive from the airport fun.

Once I got to the property, I learned that my counterpart had not been very productive - evidently doing not much more than smoking, and vanishing.   My first mission was recon - find and observe DillWad's condition.   The front desk personel at our hotel, which was about 200 yards down the street, pointed me to DillWad's room.   I knowked, got no answer, so I politely persuaded the maid to let me into his room.
The bastard was passed out on the couch, looking fairly hungover.   I yelled at him til he woke up, and was looking pretty disoriented.    Disgusted, I told him to meet me at the other property when he was ready to work.
While I waited for him, I smoothed everyone's feathers about the situation, and got to work.   He eventually came over - asked me unintelligible questions, and I told him he needed to go catch his flight.   He then disappeared for the remainder of Thursday, the GM commented that it looked like DillWad was staggering and looking lost, and wasn't comprehending anything that was said to him.   Everyone at the property, which thank God isn't open for business yet, so it's just a bunch of managers and contractors, commented on how he was drunk and hungover the whole time he was there -- didn't look good for us as a company, but I think we're on good terms now.

I reported in, and was told to finish the task, and stay away from Dillwad, as he was going to be terminated as soon as he resurfaced.


Not having the needed 4 days and working the maximum of about 12 hours while I was there, I only got the project about 90% completed - the last 10% are going to be time consuming, so I will be going back with a helper for 2.5 days next week - to finish what I didn't get to today, and fix This mess that he made - note that this is how NOT to wire a data rack:



Dillwad showed up this morning, and stole all of his company gear, dispite me trying to disuade him from doing it - I didn't try very hard, and a few things i'm sure weren't ours - got in a car, and left, without saying much to me at all.   His flight left at 3pm YESTERDAY.   My boss still had yet to have heard from him, and at this point didn't care.   The rental car he had was in his name - so we're not sure, if at all, that he ever got home, unless he drove the car home.

Flight home was abord a 172 passenger MD-88, so that was fairly normal...

Next week promises to be very busy for me -- I fly out on Tuesday and come back late Thursday afternoon.   Lots of pressure to get it all done - here's my chance to prove my worth for that raise I want, or something.

I've decided a couple of things -- I've gotten very soft in my desk job; this was hard work at a high pace - This hard work crap is for the birds.   Though, I swear I lost 2 pounds just in running up and down stairs...
Secondly, even though it's hard, I've decided that I wouldn't mind traveling a LITTLE bit.   None of that 90% of the year stuff that the full time installers do, but I could do repairs and emergency fill in's a few days a month - the road work is interesting.

Tags: travel, work
Current Location: Home, at last.