Christmas

I would like to wish everyone a little bit of a belated Merry Christmas.  Hopefully Santa was good to you all and you got to spend time with friends and family.

I took the two days we got off to drive up and see a good friend and her husband.  It was farther North which means the temperature was even lower than it is here.  Already unprepared for cold weather here, I am distinctly unprepared for weather that is lower than it is here.  Because I’ve been in hotels for the past few months, I haven’t really had the opportunity to understand the concept of paying money for heating a house.  When I realized why the house was so cold, I asked for every blanket they owned and layered those on top of me.  I got to a total of nine before I began to be bearably warm and I now know I would not be able to survive in a colder climate.

I got to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie and I have to say it was really good!  The characters were cast very well for the 4 Holmes novels and 56 short stories that make up the Holmesian canon; Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr did an amazing job.  One of my friends went and saw Avatar again back home and asked if I would do the same given the chance.  Avatar was one of those once-only movies.  Holmes is one of those movies I would gladly go see again given the opportunity.  It was that kind of movie.

The air is really dry here which has led to two things.  1) I have GOT to invest in some Chap Stick; my lips are really dry and cracked and bleeding.  2) The road to work is quite literally strewn with tumbleweed.  They are doing construction on the road to the office and they detour us via a dirt road that is basically through the mountains.  This road must be conducive to efficient tumbleweed production because there is ALWAYS tumbleweed all over the road.  I drive over them for laughs and giggles, but I feel bad for the little coupes that drive the road and have to diligently avoid them.  Suckers; buy a more practical car.

I’ve been editing a document for work.  Every time I send the document back for review of my changes, I’ve managed to cut out five to ten pages.  Every time I get the document back, it has grown in length about twelve pages.  It started at 62, I got it down to 56.  I got it back with 78 and promptly cut it down to 70.  The most recent revision I got back is 80 pages long.  I don’t like this trend.

Tech Support

Today I managed to work on three separate computers spread across the country helping their owners fix them and get them in tip-top shape.  That ate up a bulk of my day after report writing and research.  I did manage to squeeze in some reading and running as well in between waking up and starting work which made for a relaxing day.

I was trying to figure out why I was so darn tired after my run on Friday because I had run on a track and I didn’t think the altitude was going to make that big a difference.  It was the first time I ran on this track which is made of really fine gravel so I thought maybe that had some impact on my time; but I’ve run on gravel before.  It wasn’t until today that I realized why.  That track, which I thought was a quarter-mile track, is actually half a mile long.  That means my simple little four-mile jaunt was actually eight-miles.  It was a good thing I didn’t wear a watch, but the time difference when I got back and took a shower makes a lot more sense now.  I would like to thank Google Earth for allowing me to figure out that conundrum.

We finally got our work emails set up this week which was a great accomplishment for us.  The building we are working in is really far away from everything else and starts at what appears to be the beginning of the forgotten land.  We can’t get anyone to pay attention to us or come out and look at the computers.  They have been off the network so long they got dropped off the domain and the only way to get them added back is to have someone come and physically touch them.  They don’t give us privileges on the systems either or we would just do it ourselves.  It would be nice for the system admins to realize and appreciate the fact that we know just about as much as them for a lot of issues and in some cases we know more than they do.  It would cut down on their workload, that’s for sure.

VOQ

It’s official, the Internet here is borderline unusable.  On a good moment, I may get up to 110 kbps but it’s completely normal to get 56 kbps or slower.  That’s what dialup users got back in the day of AOL and I think it’s not humane to put a person up in a room without high speed Internet of some sorts.  I don’t know what organization looks out for the health, sanity and convenience of travelers, but I have half a mind to tell them about this.  Is there a PETA for hotel rooms?  After all, we have to live here, we should have access to YouTube and streaming music whenever we want; that’s not too much to ask, is it?  My iTunes Season Pass of Bones tried to download the other day and it took 17 hours to download one episode.  That is not acceptable.

The place we are working here does not have good cell phone signal for Sprint.  Thankfully the BlackBerries we have are Nextel and seem to work just fine for now.  The data connection on them is nothing to write home about (iDEN doesn’t have any sort of throughput to be proud of), but it allows me to make calls and send text messages when I need to.  If you pair that with my Google Voice number, it lets people get ahold of me no matter where I am.

Speaking of Google Voice, I had to take my work number from back home off the list of numbers to call.  It turns out one of my buddies moved into my desk at work temporarily because it’s better than his and he doesn’t like getting calls all day for me.  I didn’t think I got that many phone calls so I asked him how many is ‘a lot’ (his words).  Apparently there are some people out there who think 34 calls in one day is too many.  I think that’s just a part of getting your job done.

I’ve been slowly updating my flickr pictures on the picture tab, so take a gander at some of those if you are interested in seeing what my friends and I have been up to.  Enjoy and keep your eyes peeled for more of those as time goes on!

Before I left to come here for this TDY, one of my buddies pointed out that I tend to push my glasses up by putting a finger on the bridge of my glasses.  Basically, if you think of exactly how the world’s biggest nerd would push up his glasses, that’s me.  I’ve noticed I do it at inopportune moments now that it’s been pointed out to me; usually it directly follows me saying or doing something that would make even a college professor sigh.  I’m not helping my case at all.

Birthday

First and foremost, today is my sister’s birthday. I would like to congratulate her on being born.

I finally took it upon myself to break my lease. I haven’t been in my apartment but two or three hours in the past three months and I’ve got four more months left before I’ll be around the area again to be staying there. I figured out that it wasn’t worth it to pay for an apartment, water, electricity and cable Internet when I wasn’t ever even there to use it. That’s going to make quite a big difference in my bank account each month! It does mean I’ll have to repeat the rental hunt again when I’m ready, but I figure that’s well worth the cost.

I got a new phone (this is the first time in a while) and I have to say I really like it. It’s based on the Android platform (an open-source telephone operating system by Google) and so far things are going really well. It is really kind of a geek phone which ends up being perfect for me. It also had the added bonus of being something I can fiddle with in my spare time.

We were looking up FIOS for our area hoping we would be able to get something that doesn’t work as terribly as Time Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Cable Internet. Unfortunately, the neighborhood doesn’t have the initial fiber that is essential to get 50Mb/sec goodness. It doesn’t seem like the rollout is happening any too quickly in our area which means we’re still having some buffering issues on hulu when all of us are using the same connection. I’m amazed that in the year 2009 (almost 2010) we haven’t gotten to the point of ubiquitous network connectivity at speeds that are faster than the measly 3, 7 or 15 Mb/s we have right now. For all the technological innovation, I would think we could have come up with something better.