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.