Pooped

I just started a new exercise routine. Actually, it's more like I just started a lifestyle revolution. I guess if a revolution fails to take hold, it goes down in history books as a revolt, huh? We'll see how this goes. I'm holding out hope for revolution, but that won't be clear for a while yet. I'm revolting against the steady increase in the size of my butt. I've gone up two pants sizes since I started this job three years ago. At this rate, long before I would be eligible to retire, I will not be able to do my job because I won't be able to travel by commercial airliner. I'm not about a number on the scale, and I'm not dieting myself dangerously thin, I'm just trying to get my body back to the proportions it has when I'm being active and mindful of my diet. Lately, I've been doing neither of those things.

Anyway, I'm taking a triathlon training class. And "class" makes it kinda sound like we sit around with clipboards and learn how to train for triathlons. But it's more like hiring a personal trainer with 9 strangers and all agreeing that you'll work out together for the next 2 months. Some of these strangers are FAST, y'all! I'm the pokey little puppy at the back of the class. One of my very dear friends is also in the class, and she and I together comprise "Group 2" in most of the workouts. All the skinny fast kids who've done this before are "Group 1."

So far, though, I haven't had a single asthma attack. My coach gave me a great piece of advice tonight, and I think it's going to make this my favorite sport of all time, ever: Any problem you encounter in a workout or a race can be solved by slowing down. So, if anything ever goes awry, like my lungs seize up and I start sounding like a hurdy-gurdy, I just slow down. Even stop for a minute. I won't ever be the fastest girl on the course that way, but frankly, that's never been my goal. I just want to finish one of these things. I want to be able to work out without having an asthma attack every fucking time. So far, at least, this "slow down to fix your problems" sport sounds like the sort of thing that will accommodate my goal.

I might never be good at this, but if it can keep me from having to upsize my pants again, and I'm having fun, I don't even care. Viva la revolucion!

hop, skip, fly...

i got home last night at 9 or so. i'm leaving tomorrow at 2. this sort of weekend is the only thing i really hate about my job. however, there was no good way to schedule all the things that had to happen in the coming weeks, there was merely a slightly less sucky way and many much more sucky ways. so i chose the slightly less sucky option, and this is it.

good news? i have a dear friend visiting, my dogs are thrilled to see me, tonight i get a mulligan on my dad's birthday dinner, i have terrific job security, and my wife keeps things rolling when i'm out. i have a good life.

it isn't often that travel really surprises me. i've been on two travel engagements a month for the last two years, at least on average, and i've seen most every possible permutation of travel arrangements. there are the airports where you have to climb down the stairs, hike across the tarmac, pick up your own bag, and walk to the rental car. there are the airports that have buses and trains and in which everything is fully automatic. there are hotels with 100 rooms and hotels with five. sometimes my wallet sets off the metal detector, and sometimes the pocket knife i forgot i was carrying fails to set off the metal detector. (don't worry, it's a tiny little swiss army-style thing made mostly of plastic.)

this last trip? i was SURPRISED. not just a little, i capitalized that part to emphasize the level of surprise. my boss-in-law booked my travel for me for this trip because it all came together at the last minute just before i left for vacation. seriously, i sent him my flight preferences at 4:45 on the friday i left for utah. he sent me a link to a hotel he knew of in the area and told me i could stay there if i wanted. i spent about 30 seconds on the webpage verifying that it was indeed a hotel with rooms that contained beds, toilets and showers and wrote him back saying that sounded good to me. so when i landed at john wayne airport in orange county, i drove my rented ford taurus up to long beach and was following the directions of lola, my gps, in the direction of my hotel. it was nautical themed, i remembered that from the website, and it was called Queen Mary. i thought that was funny and ironic, because Queens have a habit of using the phrase "Whatever, Mary," with each other when one is being excessively dramatic.

and then i drove under a freeway sign that indicated the two left lanes went to Queen Mary. this was my first sign that maybe something unusual was going on. ordinary hotels do not get their own dedicated freeway exits, let alone two lanes. after following the signs and lola's instructions, i found myself in front of a gangway labeled Hotel Queen Mary. the gangway led to a CRUISE SHIP. apparently, somewhere in the 60's, transatlantic cruising become a money-losing business. jets were popular and affordable and about 36 times faster than cruise ships. so the Cunard Line sold off their stock of transatlantic boats, and their luxurious art deco jewel - the RMS Queen Mary - was purchased by the city of Long Beach, CA for a couple of millions of dollars.

so there i was, on a floating hotel that was once a luxury cruise ship, and then a hospital ship, and a troop carrier. apparently it figured quite heavily as a floating office in WWII. and because of its days as a hospital ship, it's also quite haunted. i never saw any ghosts while i was there, i guess i'm just not sensitive enough.

woe.

MY MOTHERBOARD ATE MY RAM!!!!

on friday. *sob* happybox is dead.

i was trying to run a long, computationally heavy process on my home PC (which i had dubbed happybox) because my work computer was occupied with deadline-based work. i thought it was taking too long, so i popped into task manager to see how much RAM it was using, and discovered it was using much less than i expected. weird. i checked to make sure i had the right target total in my head and the computer only reported 1GB available. now... i could've SWORN i put 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM in the case, but y'know it's been a couple of years and i have no head for these sorts of hardware details. it's why i've never been a good gearhead. you can't describe a car as having "one of those 2.something litre V-whatever thingies" and expect to be taken seriously. so the total ram available was half what i expected, which meant it was time to troubleshoot.

so i shut 'er down, cracked open the case, looked into happybox and found 2 x 1GB sticks hanging out of the motherboard. right, then. that meant either one stick was not seated properly (and had never been?) or i had some bad ram. so i put rose to work on it, because i was frantically trying to finish that aforementioned deadline work. she swapped the sticks to other slots, but it still only reported 1GB, which meant that either one pair of slots (a channel) or one stick of RAM was bad, but we didn't know which. we tried swapping the sticks into opposite channels to narrow it down, and then the computer wouldn't boot. this meant the RAM in the primary slot was bad, and i assumed that because of this it wasn't reading the (nominally good) RAM in the secondary slot.

i didn't think it through because if i had, i'd have recognized at this point that my bad slot had fried the RAM in it and putting more RAM in the computer would be a waste of money. instead, i went to Fry's and bought more RAM. but when i got home, reason took hold of my brain before i even unwrapped the new stuff... which meant i tried to ID the bad slot before putting the new RAM in, just in case it was what had fried the old stick. either that first round of swapping sticks into opposing channels or something in this later troubleshooting step exposed my poor old good ram to a bad slot on the motherboard. i'll never really know. all i know for sure is that i have at least one bad slot on my motherboard, and by "bad slot" i mean "vicious ram-eating slot." it munched down 2 1GB sticks of ram on friday, and i'll be darned if i'm feeding it any more.

so, in light of this woe and tragedy, i'm buying myself a mac. because if i'm going to use MacOS, it's not going to be windows' bloated, big-brother-like version of MacOS (aka: Vista) it's going to be the real gosh-darned thing. and, well, mac runs wow in addition to VMWare, so all the fun stuff i want runs natively and anything i absolutely must have windows for, i can have on a Virtual Machine. color me silver. :)

rock on, boss...

my boss kinda rocks. actually, he rocks a lot. we recently had an exchange where i told him i was considering transferring off his team to a job that entailed less travel. i ended up staying where i am, because i like my job better than i'd have liked the other one, but it put him on notice. and that was good. so he said he'd take some steps to get me less travel and more variety.

i guess i still don't think that talking about things is really going to change them, because i expected my life to carry on just as it has and eventually by mid-summer i'd see the results of a gradual shift in my assignments. not so. he just told the people who've been borrowing my time that they have advanced all the time they're going to get until the end of june with what they have on my calendar now. color me thrilled and pleasantly surprised.

and to keep this post from being a complete snoozer for those of you who don't care what i do to earn my filthy lucre, i'll share that the carolina pizza & pasta works makes a TASTY shrimp etouffe in honor of the impending Mardi Gras holiday. ayeee! and they make GREAT crab cakes, too. *wink*

i'm a nooyawkuh.

i spent last week in the vicinity of philadelphia for work. i was teaching a class at the corporate mothership and it was nice to get to walk around and shake hands with people i only know via e-mail. there used to be a lot of confusion about me and another woman with my name who worked in that office. she would occasionally get my travel itineraries or expense checks, i would get help requests that were directed to her, sometimes my flight schedules would return me "home" to the philly airport. she recently left the company, so the confusion is much reduced, but i still took the opportunity to introduce myself in person to the folks who keep my work rolling along.

then, rose came up to spend the weekend with me. she has a dear friend who lives near philly, the one we visited at halloween. i had been staying with him all week instead of in a hotel near the office, so she came up and joined me.

friday night we spent painting the kitchen. rose has an amazing and fantastic skill (which is for rent, if you make appropriate arrangements with me...) at home renovation: she can "cut-in" paint freehand. that's right... NO BLUE TAPE required. she just stands on top of a ladder with her tongue sticking out one corner of her mouth, paintbrush in one hand, paint cup in the other, and makes PERFECTLY straight lines along the wall/ceiling boundary. i'm pretty good at stringing up painter's tape and working the edge, but by the time i can get a room taped, rose can already be done cutting in so it's ready for paint rollers. i'm seriously in awe. so the homeowner rolled paint on the walls, rose cut the walls in ahead of him, and i? i did the perfect job for a very patient, slightly anal retentive engineer in a kitchen renovation being run by artist-types: i removed all the nasty old pink contact paper from the cabinets. it was foul. and you'd think after all these years the glue would've lost some of its hold, right? not so. apparently, those 50's contact paper manufacturers had not yet glommed onto the disposable world mentality. that stuff was stuck on so tightly, i started theorizing that it'd formed a symbiotic life form with the wood paneling of the cabinets. i fantasized that i was peeling up entire civilizations of some very sticky higher life form, cutting them into strips with a razor and harvesting them so they could go to the landfill, convert more of our household garbage, and someday take over the world! muahahahahahahaha!!! or maybe it was just really late at night and something in the sushi was getting to me.

the next day, we got up and drove to new york city to see Avenue Q on broadway. and by "we got up and drove," i really mean that we all piled into my rent car and i had to do urban battle from behind the wheel of a rented saturn. i survived without too many country-mouse-in-the-big-city moments, and even earned the hoots and applause of all my passengers when i flipped off and honked at some ignorant redneck in a land rover with alabama plates when he cut me off. i got us where we were going, used lola's navigational skills to find us good parking, and did all of that in time to pre-order us some wine for the intermission. w00t!

after the show, we walked down to the empire state building, where we were turned into mice, lured with stale limburger through a maze of passages, elevators, snaked lines, gift shops, hawkers, vampires, and cranky tourists, and finally got out onto the observation deck. it was pretty up there, the view was beautiful, and a bit overwhelming. you know, at one level, in your head that there really are that many people in the city. but until you stand up there and look out at all the twinkling lights, it doesn't really hit you JUST HOW MANY people are in the city. rose showed me all her favorite haunts from her college days, as far as you can see them from the top of the empire state building at night anyway, and then we headed back down for dinner.

we taxi'd to little italy, found a likely-looking spot, and settled in for a truly delicious meal. i had lobster fra diavolo, the red version, and it was served in a bowl approximately the size of a tire. from a semi. f'real. we had to move EVERYTHING on the table just so they could wedge this bowl in before me. the funny thing about shellfish, though, is that it's like 80's hair: lots of hard shell, little actual content. by the time i'd shelled the lobster, the clams, and the mussels i had a manageable-sized meal and didn't feel overstuffed. but i did feel richly and extravagantly treated. so it worked. yum! the fra diavolo red sauce was spicy and tangy and just what i wanted.

i made it home in time to play my geeky game where we wiped out three times attempting an assault on karazhan - a big, difficult dungeon - with a pick-up group of people who weren't really prepared. only a few of us knew what we were doing. it was good learning, but i look forward to trying it again sometime in a group that survives the whole experience. :)

oh, and i got my first official philly cheesesteak. and, yeah, it really is that much better than what you get out here in the hinterlands. i'll have to go back!

Training this week...

in an interesting turn of events, this week i'm a student. and i've been reminded of all sorts of teaching technique things that i think i do well, but will be doubly certain that i do correctly in future. little things like: giving path names two or three times when pointing students to deeply buried files, going slowly in my demonstrations, explaining in plain english...

also, i am reminded of all the horrifying experiences i've had in the past with software that almost, but didn't, work. i feel really badly for the guy whose class fell apart yesterday afternoon, but it was an awful thing to sit through from our end. some of it was his fault, some of it wasn't.

today is a good day, though. by this time yesterday, i wanted to close my laptop in disgust and go play Warcrack. today, i still want to close my laptop and play Warcrack, but without the disgust. i'm just an addict...

signs...

...that you really need to go to a holiday party and behave irresponsibly and indulge with excess until you forget that you have a dayjob, number 1:

Your Friend says, "Hey, let's stop at the store on the way to the party and get something to drink." Whereupon you reply, "Yes, we need to leverage the opportunity to work through the process and procure some supplies." And when your friend's jaw drops to the floor and asks if you did, or did not, just assault her with meaningless buzzwords you reply, "What did I say?"

That's right, kids. If you find yourself inadvertently spewing business buzzwords to your friends, on your weekends, and you DON'T EVEN REALIZE YOU'VE DONE IT, you need to have a large frosty glass of holiday cheer, or a meat mallet to the head. Take whichever you prefer, but take it soon.

Oh, What a Night!

Actually, it was the sunset, not the night, that was spectacular. In that I mean it was literally a spectacle. I am in Cazenovia, NY this week, which is a very small town about a half hour from Syracuse, NY.

One of the things I truly adore about my current gig is that I travel on my own. I have a reasonable degree of control over where and when I eat dinner, which hotel I stay at, who drives the rental car, etc. And this means that if I'm willing to hop in the car and schlep my happy hind end an hour and some change up to Lake Ontario for dinner, I can do so. So I did.

Dinner was nothing outstanding, just a fried fish sandwich, albeit a good one. I found this place called Rudy's just off the campus of SUNY Oswego and I ordered my fried zucchini sticks and fish sandwich and sat out on the picnic tables out back, weighing down my napkins with my beer, watching the sun set into Lake Ontario.

When you're from the gulf coast, moonrise over the water is a fact of your life. Sunrise on the beach is a beautiful thing, and is generally the nicest time of day. But you never get to see the sun drop into the water when you live on the gulf coast. It doesn't work that way. In fact, the fact that the sun rises over the water can be so deeply ingrained in one who was raised on the Gulf Coast that she could roust her sister out of bed at a ridiculously dark hour to drive to Santa Monica beach only to watch the sun rise over the condos across the street. Not that that's ever happened to me, but it could. ;)

All of which is to say that on the rare occasion that I am able to catch a gorgeous sunset over the water, I very much strive to catch and enjoy it. The waves crashed, the seagulls begged, the sun set, I drank my beer, and I enjoyed it deep beneath the level of my skin and my mind and all the way into my feeling soul. 3 hours in the car is rarely spent on a more worthwhile pursuit.

a-sante-sana-a-squashed-banana!

do you remember that scene from "The Lion King" in which Rafiki (the crazed old babboon advisor) gives Simba some ridiculously cryptic advice and then skitters off across the plain, chanting nonsense about squashed bananas to himself? Simba looks dumbfounded and a bit sour-faced afterwards.

no?

well, i re-enacted it. sort of. mostly, i made a squashed banana and a sour face.

in my defense, let me open by saying that i have no recollection whatsoever of putting a banana into my briefcase. i've been on the road a lot lately, and i've also had my sister's ex-service dog living with me. either of those could be the ultimate reasons for the stray fruit. it's possible that someone handed me a banana, either my girlfriend as i was dashing off to the airport, or one of those nice people who keeps the continental breakfast stocked up and clean at my hotel. it could've even been one of my students. any of those people also could've simply put the banana on top of my bag and then the unattended banana could've fallen into the bottom of the bag.

my sister's ex-service dog (who has been visiting my house since hers was invaded by a screaming baby) likes to pick things up and bring them to people. part of her training, you know, to be useful and bring you your dropped cell phone or keys or wallet or whatever. she's very good at it, and your articles arrive at your feet drool-free and with no extraneous tooth-marks. this is much more than i can say for my own black lab, who only brings me things when she wants them thrown back out so they can be retrieved. molly mauls everything she gets her slobbering jowls around. and lest you think you could outsmart her by using something clearly bigger than her head, like a basketball, let me assure you that she's popped her share of basketballs. poof. not bigger than her head anymore, and much more satisfying as a chew toy that way.

so somehow a banana ended up in the bottom of my bag. and apparently, it stayed in reasonably healthy and unharmed state for some time there while i had a travel respite. i was home for almost three whole weeks attending distance learning classes and filing expense reports and other hateful forms of paper-based torture. so back out on the road i went... and i noticed an odd smell when i was on the shuttle from my parking lot to the terminal. it was kinda like kettle corn, sweet and salty. when it got stronger, it was more sour. i thought it was an odd smell for a shuttle bus to have. then i got to the admiral's club to have a drink and dinner and wait for my (delayed) flight to board. and i smelled that smell again, but stronger, it seemed. i thought i must've gotten something on my shoes or my hands or something. so i washed up and checked my clothes for odd spills. finding nonesuch, i thought that was the end of it. then, when i was sitting on the plane i went to put my computer back into my bag and i smelled that odd smell again, but strongly. it was now unmistakably coming from my bag. it was sweet-ish, but also kinda sour, like vinegar.

and then i did something extraordinarily stupid and one which i caution you never to try. i put my hand down in my bag to find out what was making it smell like that. my fingers squished into the banana... or what was left of it. i pulled it out of my bag, which was also stupid, but i couldn't very well leave it in there, could i? i made a dumbfounded face, a brief visual inspection ensued, and i quickly identified it as fermented squashed banana. the lady next to me made a sour face and nearly blew sprite out her nose. she seemed to be laughing, but i'm going to go with "laughing at" rather than "laughing with" here. i quickly found an airsick bag and disposed of the former fruit.

on landing, i got to my hotel and removed the rest of the squashed banana from my bag. alas, there was no way to clean the bag with the materials and facilities available to me in the hotel. which is really alright, because after a year's use, the bag was starting to wear out. so i chucked it. i went to work the next day with my (recently washed) gear shoved into the plastic laundry bag that hotels always have hanging in the closet. that afternoon, i stopped by my friendly neighborhood office supply store and bought myself a new bag. i like it better than the old one, too. it's comfier in the shoulder straps, and it spreads the bulk out so it's easier to fit underneath the seat in front of me.

in response to the question "what do you do, and why do you like it so much?"

i'm an "applications engineer" or a "solutions architect" depending on who you ask and what day it is and whether or not the wind is coming from the north with a hint of snow on that day.

i spend most of my time teaching engineering modeling software to engineers. i like this for three reasons: primarily - i get to teach and that's probably my favorite activity of all time, unless my students are functionally illiterate! secondarily - i'm doing enginerd stuff with my brain that keeps me interested and challenged. tertiarily - i'm toying with modeling software, which i've always loved. any sort of lab experiment in which i get to recreate something that happens in the real world is my real joy.

the rest of my time i spend doing sales demos of and consulting for the software that i teach. demos are fun for me because i was always too extroverted to fit in with the other engineers. seriously, my excessive gregariousness was once described as a "character flaw" and was always a job liability for me. now, i put that flaw to good use earning myself a commission. (my sister's favorite joke: how do you know when you're dealing with an extroverted engineer? she talks to your shoes instead of her own!) consulting is fun because usually the reason people hire me as a consultant is that they don't know how to model something complicated. essentially, i end up teaching them how to use the software to do the hard and/or complicated stuff. and that's really fun for me, because i not only get to troubleshoot, but then i get to teach my solution to the clients.

it's the best possible set of tasks for me, and the fact that i'm responsible for upwards of 9 different software titles and each of those runs on at least two, if not four graphical platforms just makes it better. boredom comes easy to me and it's the kiss of death for my performance, but with this much variety in my workload, i haven't managed to get bored at this job yet.

sunday morning sidewalk

my sister and her boyfriend stayed over last night. aside from the fact that that entailed a massive housecleaning effort yesterday, it's great to have company. i needed the kick in the butt to make me crack out the vacuum and do the stairs, anyway. so, on this sunday morning, i'm kicked back in my living room sipping my mocha with my dog at my feet and blogging. for reasons unexplainable, i've slept well into the PM for the last two days. this morning, at 7:30 AM (!!!) i woke up and was unable to go back to sleep. i ran off to einstein's and procured breakfast for the masses, and i'm still sitting here waiting for the ungrateful louts to roll out of bed an hour and a half later.

on the upside, i did get to watch my computer clock roll through 05/06/07 08:09:10 this morning. nerdy, huh?

okay, maybe the sleeping in wasn't entirely for reasons unexplainable. i just got back from my place-of-employ's annual conference on the left coast. the most inexplicable part of that is that i never once ate sushi while i was out there. not even at the airport! food was provided at almost every meal by my employer, and it was tasty, and i had precious little time to go in search of dinner between all the various socials that went along with the conference. i must declare that the most fun was probably at the canuckistani social on tuesday. i still owe paul a couple of beers. somehow, he got stuck with the tab for my scotch, and i was drinking good scotch that night. hey, it's not my fault the bar was so well stocked. i finally got to try lagavulin, which really IS laphroiag's politer younger brother. and they had both talisker and oban, two of my all-time faves. if i'd been able to hold another drop while still maintaining vertical positioning, i would've gone for the dalwhinnie and made the night a grand slam. as it was, i retired at just the right time, because i was wearing my enormous hair down and loose, and it had gotten so large and wild that it was about to achieve sentience and crawl up to the room for some shut-eye without me.

the albuquerque airport

a friend of mine suggested recently that when i'm traveling, i should make notes about any particularly interesting or weird or good or bad things i encounter. that way, it'll be recorded for posterity and she can look it up here someday if she should travel to one of these locations. so here are my notes on the interesting features of the albuquerque airport:

the bathrooms there were built fairly close in time to the development of the efficient self-flushing toilets. in fact, they were probably built after the first generation of self-flushing toilets (which worked very poorly) and before the current generation. as a result, the toilets have all their plumbing tucked into the wall as self-flushers do, but you still have to flush them yourself. for this purpose, there is a large black button on the wall right where the sensor would be, if these things had been installed a year later. no problem, right? wrong.

it seems that user humans have so adapted to the self-flushing toilets that at some point, they stopped noticing that these toilets had buttons and no infrared sensors to go with them. to fix the problem of people walking away from their bowls with the job undone, the management of the albuquerque airport undoubtedly had many choices. they went with the simple and cheapest one. they installed stickers above the buttons on the wall that read, quite simply "Please Flush". and to make sure you didn't miss the message (i think this is the smartest part of the arrangement) they added an extra sticker on the door of the stall, right at sitting-eye-level, that says the same thing.

it worked. i flushed.

and in other news, i still hate southwest airlines' cattle call boarding. i like that i can check in online 24 hours in advance and ensure my status as a member of Group A, but i still hate the process. i want a guaranteed seat assignment, damnit! they're considering letting people pay a little extra for a guaranteed seat, and if they do, i'll be the first to sign up for the service. giant amazons need aisle seating. somewhere near the front. with a little bin space. it's not too much to ask, don't ya think? far better would be riding out to gigs on my valk, but that takes more than twice as much travel time, and i don't always have it. wish i did, though. the weather in gallup was gorgeous. of course, the sinus infection would've made riding much less fun than the usual. i can't imagine the how heinous it would feel to sneeze inside my helmet at 70 miles an hour. ugh.

i'm not quite dead yet...

sorry for the long gap since last publishing. for those three of you who've been checking in on me, umm... HI! thanks for checking in on me!

for the rest of you, i figure you'll catch this update sometime next year when you're cleaning out dead bookmarks from your favorites folder. ummm... HI! don't delete me! i still write!

so, rather than try to catch you up on all my missed details, i'll fill in with the fact that i've had "blogger's curse". that is, i'm too busy living my life to have time to write about it. and i've been entirely too busy to craft interesting and witty things about it. i'd rather not write than write bad boring "this is what i ate and that was the temperature and my health was fair today" sorts of posts. plus, my work waylaid me.

so this week, i'm in gallup, nm. i'm sick as hell. everyone i know and love got a sinus infection early last week. so i followed suit by getting one late last week. which meant that i had two days of antibiotics in me before i had to get on a plane for new mexico. ordinarily, that's plenty of time for antibiotics to start doing their magic thing. you can probably tell from the fact that i cleverly prefixed that last sentence with the word "ordinarily" that something out of the ordinary is about to happen, can't you? yeah, my antibiotics didn't even start kicking in until today, tuesday. that means i've taught 16 hours of class with the distinct sensation that one of the clovis, nm aliens had taken up residence in my sinus passages and was trying to claw his way out through my lungs. yum!

aside from the sick feeling, however, all is well here. this is an unusual class in that there are double the usual number of students. i wasn't going to try to push them all through a single class, but scheduling and budgets being always like a good miniskirt (short and tight), there was some pressure to do it this way. the only way i could pull off something like this, however, was to have an aide. and i've never taught a class with an aide before, so i had no idea what to expect. furthermore, the aide i was offered is a salesdroid. ummm... like, hell no. but after my initial fears were aired, it turned out that this particular salesdroid was a helldesk tech for three years on this software. so, umm... yeah, she knows how to use it. not only that, she also knows exactly what parts of the software the lusers are going to trip themselves up on. i am thrilled with her assistance. she's got a great, patient manner with the students and (of course) total mastery of the topic. yea! it's making for a good experience. one more day to go, but it's been all good so far. plus, she's been good fun to trave with. we're in a single rental car and had a two hour drive out here from the airport on sunday, so i'm glad that she's good company.

i'm looking forward to getting home and sleeping for two days and getting a pedicure. then i'll be headed off to los angeles for a conference and hopefully some good debauchery with an old friend from high school. let's hear it for debauchery!

oh, and just for the record... i hate flying southwest. i hate the cattle call boarding procedure. it makes me nuts. but since southwest could get me home to dallas on wednesday night, and all the other airlines couldn't get me home until thursday morning, i'm flying southwest. bleh.

Stupid, stupid, stupid...

The horoscope dude is treading on dangerous ground today.

You tend to be more aware of your own feelings when the Moon is back in your sign, but this can be a mixed blessing. You might be rather uncomfortable in your own skin, as your moods change so fast that you cannot figure out how you feel. You prefer to have one emotion and deal with it, instead of having to manage your instability. Keep in mind that this dilemma is what makes you human.

Didn't anyone ever tell him that if he said stuff like this to a woman suffering from PMS she might very well kill him with an incorporeal icicle of instability? I'd like to kick him in the shins, personally. Either that, or kick myself in the shins just because then I'd be able to maintain a steady anger instead of the weird mix I've got going now.

I'm home sweet home this week after a fantastic week out on the road. I took the motorcycle down to San Antonio last week. It's partly because the weather's finally nice enough for that sort of thing and partly because I need to get my butt in shape (literally!) for a loooooong, looooong ride out to San Francisco this summer. I was down there for work, but my schedule was flexible enough for me to do a little riding on the weekend and to take prettier back-road routes on several legs of the trip. I'll post maps of the routes as I get a chance this week. Also, since I'm still employed after my annual review, I'll probably get around to finally writing up the construction of the MDU (mobile dog unit) and post pictures. Lofty goals, but if I don't kill anyone with an icicle this week, I just might get it done.

plug and play?

excerpted from a work e-mail containing some instructions for tricking windows into thinking it has a printer when it doesn't. this, of course, does you no good for printing things, but it enables you to send things to the printer in a software demo without getting nasty error messages on your screen.

2) From the Control Panel, Go to> Printers and Faxes

3) Select> Add a Printer

4) At the Welcome Screen, select> Next

5) Select "Local Printer" (the default) and UN-Check> "Automatically detect and install my plug and pray printer"

6) Select Next

note the emphasized word in step 5. that's my emphasis, of course. i don't know if my boss sent me that to be clever or if it was just a typo, but it put my keyboard at risk of a coffee shower this morning. i laughed so hard that i had to come share it with you.

Why me?!?!

y'know... i'm about to whine and complain. if you hate it when i do that, you might want to skip this post.

when the year started out, i was asked to sign up for a slate of classes that i would teach and/or attend to learn stuff so i could teach it later on. two of the locations i was really excited about visiting were chicago, il and walnut creek, ca. both of them for substantially the same reasons: because i've got friends there and the cities themselves do not suck like, say... newark. (for those not familiar, walnut creek is a suburb of san francisco. i had to look it up the first time, myself.) so the walnut creek one got shifted to houston. alright, i could understand that given that the other dude who would fill in the schedule lives in cali. it doesn't make sense to fly him to texas and fly me to cali, and i've got friends i could visit in houston, too. i can't scuba in houston, because i have no interest in participating in extraneous limb generation research, but it wouldn't be a total loss if i rode the bike down there. and since i wear a helmet and protective gear, i stand pretty good odds of returning with exactly the same number of limbs i left home with.

well, now my chicago class is being cancelled, too. instead of chi-town, i'm headed to Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada. yeah, go take yourself a second to look that up on Google Earth or mapquest or your research vehicle of choice.

what's happening in regina? do any of you know anything about the place? because i don't. i'm trying to keep my usual optimistic spin on it, but all i can say at this point is that it rhymes with "vagina" and i'm not sure whether that's a plus or a minus at this point.

comments?

so tired...

hey, i bet you thought i had turned into a clogger, didnt' you?

well, i haven't. i've just been at home sweet home enjoying my fabulously purple living room and my dining room table and my recently-painted office. that, and working my tail off.

some other boring stuff has been going on, too, like researching used fish tanks on craigslist. it turns out that joey is going to get very large. in fact, he's going to grow to about a foot in length, if i manage to keep him fed. he's also going to want some company of his own kind soon, so he can quit schooling with my Flying Fox. so i'm trying to do a better research job on this new tank and build a semi-functional ecosystem that will require little maintenance. if any of you have ever seen me get single-minded about research you know just how much tunnel-vision a quest like this entails.

this week, i'm in phoenix. and let me just say that my travel people are FIRED. first off, i wrote a very nice note with my travel request specifying that although i'd indicated i was flying in on sunday and out on sunday, i was checking out of my hotel on friday because i'd be spending the weekend of 2/3-2/4 in the phoenix area with friends. my first itinerary came back and had me booked into a hotel for ONLY the weekend. and i didn't have a rental car until friday, either. i ask you, gentle readers, did they think i was going to sleep under a bridge and hitch all week while i was teaching a class for the company? and then use a rent car and hotel that they'd booked for me for two days of lounging over the weekend? furthermore, they booked me into a completely shitty hotel. i requested one of two nice chains at which i have frequent-flyer status. instead, i'm in the red roof inn. and let me tell you what the red roof inn, phoenix, az does NOT have:
1) Irons
2) Ironing boards
3) Coffee pots
4) Room service that could bring me coffee
5) Internet connections
6) Bath towels in sufficient sizes/quantities to dry a giant amazon after her daily shower
7) Coffee pots

I may have mentioned the coffee more than once. I'm a little miffed about it. I don't function well without caffeine. Why, in the name of all that is holy, would you want to work in a hotel with decaffeinated guests?!?! I don't even like my own self before my morning coffee, I know nobody else wants to talk to me. Crack-smokin' hotel managers.

I only have the internet connectivity due to the remarkable goodwill and overly-trusting nature of someone named connie. she set up an unsecured wireless network that i can receive if i sit in the superbly uncomfortable chair at the desk in my room. i can't get it from the comfy chair or the bed, however, so this post is about to be cut short by the tingling numbness in my left cheek.

the weather's been pretty nice, at least compared to the sleet and snow they've had in dallas this week. and the food's been outstanding. i recommend Tomaso's Italian on Camelback if you ever find yourself in Phoenix. and get your caesar salad WITH the anchovies. it's da bomb.

fresnosnow

note that in the title, i've cleverly morphed the name of my current location with the newsy item "no snow". thus, you may assume that i'm relatively much happier than i was last week in wyoming. yea! no snow here! when i mentioned my bliss over this fact to my class, one of the students said that it HAD snowed here recently - in 2000. :) yup. i love cities where they recall the last snowfall merely by the year in which it occurred. that's heavenly.

i would like it noted, for the record, that i have a new standard for rapid reproduction in the animal kingdom. it is not, gentle readers, as you would surmise from pop culture reference, the rabbit. it is, contrarily, the snail. do you think, honestly, that i could fit one more comma-delimited aside into this paragraph?

seriously, yos. i refer you to my previous post on the snail issue as regards my fishtank here. well, apparently, i never did post about the snails the first time. i've just searched through all my archives for a record of a post on the bonus snails when they were discovered, and such has not been found. since i mentioned them, however, they have been multiplying at an ALARMING pace. i've now got so many snails that they're literally clogging the filter. some of the wee ones got sucked into the filter and just lived in there for a while. they come out every night to feast on my driftwood and poop. snail poop doesn't sound like it would be a significant problem, but when they reproduce faster than rabbits, it really is. and, unlike rabbits, there are few natural hazards in the fish tank environment that these little poopers have to survive. i had no idea what to do about the little menaces! they don't need partners to reproduce all the time. for those of you in shocked disbelief, see here where wiki informs you (as it did me) of this True Fact (TM, pat pend). i did a little research, and discovered that some fish will eat them. so i went out and got a couple of those. unfortunately, one of them croaked. i blame the snail poop for polluting the water. anyway, the snails are reproducing at a rate which has no simile or metaphor. they're way faster than rabbits, i assure you. hopefully, the one remaining snail-eating fish will help with the snail decimation project.

i'll keep you posted, because i know you're dying to know.

i HATE snow.

just in case i've never mentioned it, i hate snow. i don't hate snow angels, i only hate snowballs when i'm in a bad mood, and i actually adore it as a medium for skiing. furthermore, it makes for a nice decorative feel on an otherwise bland landscape. so, why do i hate snow? i'll tell you...

i hate snow because you've gotta scrape the shit off your windshield. that means that while your coffee is sitting warm and dry in a cupholder inside your car, YOU are standing out in the weather that produced the snow (i.e.: cold, wet weather) with a ridiculous plastic tool in your hand, scraping the icy shell off your car so that you can see out to drive. the main reason i tolerate snowballs is that i can, with reasonable precaution, avoid most of them. if i'm in the mood for them, however, i can indulge. NOT SO WITH WINDSHIELD SCRAPING. good mood or bad, running late or on time (and let's not kid ourselves about how often i am the latter), healthy or ill... snow has to be scraped off the windshield.

seriously, yo. i'm in Gillette, WY, the self-proclaimed Energy Capital of the Nation, on account of their cold-bed methane mining operations. couldn't they convert just a little bit of that methane into a giant blowdrier, just like is used to give you a spotless finish at the car wash, but with a little heat added? you just roll your car through the dryer and voila! the ice is melted away and the water blown off so it doesn't re-freeze when you park your car for a day at work. i think those should be installed on all hotels in Gillette, WY, and i mean forthwith.

rotten travel day, whiner post

today:

• i woke up on time, but after only 3 hours of sleep, i'm not sure whether that's a plus or a minus.
  
• i forgot to pack shoes that go with the socks i packed for my business trip. or i forgot to pack socks to go with the shoes i packed. see the above item for possible explanations not utilizing the term "airhead"
  
• i found TWO dead fish in my tank. one i kinda expected. he was sickly yesterday. the other one surprised me and indicates that i've got a LOT of work to do on my tank when i get home.
  
• i got caught in two traffic snarls and some construction trying to drop off my dog at my sister's house. yea metroplex!
  
• i got a speeding ticket on my way to the airport. harrumph. is it a plus that irving police are so concerned with getting you off to the airport after they ticket you that they have electronic signature pads and portable ticket printers, just like the UPS guy?
  
• my customary parking lot was full and i know from experience that i can't exit the airport to try the "remote" lot without paying the $2 passthru toll. plus, i was running late and didn't have time for that. see all of the above items for explanation not utilizing language i don't want to type out in front of my mother. (hi, mom!)
  
• i wound up parking on the roof of the infield parking zone for $17/day and parked at the wrong end of the building. i am NOT an airhead!
  
• by the time i'd found parking and walked all the way to the opposite end of the terminal, i'd missed the check-in window for my flight
  

on the plus side, i did manage to get to my destination without too terribly much trouble after that. i had a delightful walk across the frozen tarmac in denver that only involved a small amount of ice. the flight was on a prop-driven plane from denver to gillette, but i like roller-coasters and i have a strong stomach. plus, i didn't eat much today so there wasn't anything to feel nauseous about. although i flew standby, i got good seats on both my planes and (here's the important part) my luggage made it with me. in fact, when i got here, i was at the rent car counter getting my paperwork done while waiting for luggage to arrive. the crowd picked the "belt" clean so fast that the luggage guy actually found me and brought me my bag while i was standing at the counter. i have "belt" in quotes, not because i don't know how to use them, but because calling the luggage claim thing here a "belt" in the sense you're used to from places like denver, chicago, or dallas is a semantic stretch of india-rubber proportions. it's more like a metallic ramp that they back a truck up to and toss your stuff on so that it slides down onto the floor.

in other good news, since it gets too cold and dark here to fly out after 4 pm, i'll be flying out on saturday morning after my class at 6:30 am. the upside to a small airport is that you don't have to arrive two hours early to check in for your flight. the plane only holds maybe 20 souls, counting the crew. and believe me, they're only running one flight at a time.