So there's not a lot of time at the moment to write much since I'm in a waiting pattern before heading to the restaurant for dinner. It's called the Village Tavern and is so close to the office here that it is pointless to head back to the hotel first. I had a look at the menu before leaving Tulsa, and it's all very hoity toity in its selections, so finding something for a plain and dry guy won't be easy since they fluff up pretty much every dish.
The meeting was a day long of jabber, as the rest of the days will be as well. There isn't a whole lot to report from the meeting since we have the "Vegas Rule" in these meetings, meaning that "what is spoken in this room stays in this room." We don't spread it around or let it out, since we can talk about anything and the HR rep just closes her ears to it. Hence, the day was amusing and informative, but there isn't much to say about it.
I'll chatter more about it all later once I get back from dinner, but I figured I'd drop something now while I had a couple moments, just so the Queen and the Princesses had something to look at. I do miss you all over there, and I'll probably give you a call later. I'm an hour ahead, so I should be able to get with you before bedtime. Love you.
Tuesday, June 16, 2009
Monday, June 15, 2009
Alpharetta Day 1
So it's that time of year again, although earlier than last year. And this year, I have a computer to actually keep in touch with, so I can post what's going on at least daily.
The morning started early, as you might expect. The flight was scheduled to leave at 1015, which means get there around 815 or 830 to get all checked in and settled before boarding at 945. Unlike last year's, this year I didn't have a direct connect flight. Instead, it jumped through Dallas and onto Atlanta from there. The first flight was really really short. The itenerary says an hour and ten minutes, but they include the entire from taxi out to taxi in. I was hoping to watch most of a movie, but all told, I got maybe 30 minutes of view time out of that 70 minutes, if that. Yeah, leave it to me to complain that the flight was too short for me.
Anyway, something interesting on that flight was that I think I was sitting over or near the landing gear. Now, if you've been on a plane, you know when the landing gear goes up and down. It's that load clunk noise that makes you think the bottom has fallen out of the airplane. When the landing gear went down this time though, I heard the loud rush of air outside as the plane was descending. That was a bit wild.
I would also like to add that this flight did not have the standard stewardess intro where they show off the seat belts and try on the oxygen mask. No, we got to watch a video showing that. That was different. We also had a celebrity pilot. Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was the captain on my first flight.
When we hit Dallas (I was traveling with 4 others from my office in Tulsa), we had time to get something to eat before heading onto the connecting flight at 1245 (read, 1215 to board). I did not have a lot of cash to bring for food and such, so when I saw a McDonald's in the airport, I figured I'd get off cheap there if I hit the dollar menu and got a water to drink. Hm... Well, the McDouble from my local dollar menu was 1.39 there and the "small fries" is actually a medium because they don't have small. ?! The medium fries cost more than the sandwich and they hit me for 3.77 for a McDouble, medium fries and a water. I glanced at the prices of the value meals and figured I did pay less for my overpriced burger.
On the second flight, I had a little bit of a problem. You see, the overhead bins are sized to be about as deep as the maximum carryon size or the height of a rolling suitcase. This also happens to be the width of three seats...or thereabouts by my observations. Well, apparently, when there are only two seats on one side of the plane, the overhead bins are resized accordingly, though they should theoretically hold two of these rolling cases end to end, and that would work...if there was one overhead bin per seat set. In fact, it works out to maybe one per one and a half rows.
What does all this mean? Well, they wisely set up the boarding in seating groups, starting at the back of the plane and working their way to the front. I was in seat 8B, exactly one row in on the coach section. This means out of six groups, I was in group six. This also meant that everyone else who wasn't sitting in my row has taken the space in my row's overhead bin. My suitcase was in the overhead bin on row 26. It took me a little while to disembark.
And how about the prices of food on the plane? Wow, do they not want to sell that stuff or what? Seriously. I think they had Grandma's chocolate chip cookies (that you buy at Wal-Mart for 50 cents) for $3, and a bag of Cheese nips (also 50 cents at Wal-Mart) for $4! Yeah, no one else saw anyone buy cookies either. But we did have our second celebrity pilot. The first officer was our second president, John Adams. Still flying after over two hundred years...of being dead. He didn't say much...
After we landed in Atlanta, we grabbed the checked luggage for those that checked and headed out to get the rental. Since there are five of us, we were getting a van. Now, I asked about getting some corvettes (it would take three, and I would drive the third one myself if I had to) or maybe a Hummer, but in the end, we got the van (of course). Now, it's a nice little Honda Odyssey, so it's not like we got a Bum-V (Butt Ugly Mini Van...yeah, I made that up on the spot while we were talking about the vehicle), but it also isn't the coolest rig on the lot.
Now what I'd really like at this point is for my network cable to stay plugged in. I grabbed a cable from home before I left, but what I failed to notice is that this cable is missing the tabs to keep it plugged in. So it doesn't lock in place. This means that it unplugs itself if I type for too long and shake the laptop slightly here and there. It's a pretty stable laptop, so it isn't shaking much. But I've had to fix it three times while typing this post. This means that the Skype session with the Queen later will be really interesting.
Anyway, while heading out in the bum-v, we only got lost once (as I understand it...I was watching a movie and killing my iPod's battery). And it was only once because the person riding shotgun pulled out her iPhone and got the GPS going to get us where we needed to go.
We got to Alpharetta somewhere in the vicinity of one person's hotel. For some reason 4 of us are in one hotel and 1 loner is in another. She knew we were close to her hotel, so we had dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. I had a burger. I also learned that I'm not alone in my picky, plain and dry palette. Someone else in our group oreder one plain and dry. Not only that, he says the phrase hoity toity in reference to food with lots of "decoration" on it. When I said it, he was surprised. I wasn't aware it wasn't a common phrase.
Leaving the restaurant, we needed to find person 1's hotel, so we drove the wrong way out of the mall area where the Ruby Tuesday's was, and did a u-turn in a parking before heading back out. Following the GPS, they found the La Quinta Inn...it was the parking lot we'd u-turned in only moments before. We had entered it from the back. D'oh...
We got her unloaded and headed over to our place of residence until Thursday. The story gets shorter from here. We checked and I got the internet working, Skype installed, and here I am.
The only final comment is in regards to logging into the hotel's net connection. This was funny. Everything I'd read said the connection was free in the rooms. Even the flyer next to the modem here says it's free. When you sign in, it implies that there is a cost to use...although it doesn't say how much. I signed in and all is well for now. We'll see about the one day free thing later. Maybe it refreshes daily or something. The funny part was this: I decided to pull up my virtual box to see how Linux would behave. After all, it was a different amchine logging into the same connection. Linux went right to the net without going through the hotel's splashpage website.
I can think of two explanations for this. Either the connection is driven from the central server that assigns addresses to each room and once I agree to the connection, it was agree for the room regardless of the computer that logs in. Or the connection is assuming that most people will use Windows (or even Mac) and doesn't have a Linux provision.
After considering it, it is probably the former, and loading Linux tomorrow will yield their little splash screen asking me to agree to the terms. They probably reset nightly. If I get the screen to agree to the terms tomorrow, though, I'll it the Linux machine first...just to see.
The morning started early, as you might expect. The flight was scheduled to leave at 1015, which means get there around 815 or 830 to get all checked in and settled before boarding at 945. Unlike last year's, this year I didn't have a direct connect flight. Instead, it jumped through Dallas and onto Atlanta from there. The first flight was really really short. The itenerary says an hour and ten minutes, but they include the entire from taxi out to taxi in. I was hoping to watch most of a movie, but all told, I got maybe 30 minutes of view time out of that 70 minutes, if that. Yeah, leave it to me to complain that the flight was too short for me.
Anyway, something interesting on that flight was that I think I was sitting over or near the landing gear. Now, if you've been on a plane, you know when the landing gear goes up and down. It's that load clunk noise that makes you think the bottom has fallen out of the airplane. When the landing gear went down this time though, I heard the loud rush of air outside as the plane was descending. That was a bit wild.
I would also like to add that this flight did not have the standard stewardess intro where they show off the seat belts and try on the oxygen mask. No, we got to watch a video showing that. That was different. We also had a celebrity pilot. Jazz saxophonist Charlie Parker was the captain on my first flight.
When we hit Dallas (I was traveling with 4 others from my office in Tulsa), we had time to get something to eat before heading onto the connecting flight at 1245 (read, 1215 to board). I did not have a lot of cash to bring for food and such, so when I saw a McDonald's in the airport, I figured I'd get off cheap there if I hit the dollar menu and got a water to drink. Hm... Well, the McDouble from my local dollar menu was 1.39 there and the "small fries" is actually a medium because they don't have small. ?! The medium fries cost more than the sandwich and they hit me for 3.77 for a McDouble, medium fries and a water. I glanced at the prices of the value meals and figured I did pay less for my overpriced burger.
On the second flight, I had a little bit of a problem. You see, the overhead bins are sized to be about as deep as the maximum carryon size or the height of a rolling suitcase. This also happens to be the width of three seats...or thereabouts by my observations. Well, apparently, when there are only two seats on one side of the plane, the overhead bins are resized accordingly, though they should theoretically hold two of these rolling cases end to end, and that would work...if there was one overhead bin per seat set. In fact, it works out to maybe one per one and a half rows.
What does all this mean? Well, they wisely set up the boarding in seating groups, starting at the back of the plane and working their way to the front. I was in seat 8B, exactly one row in on the coach section. This means out of six groups, I was in group six. This also meant that everyone else who wasn't sitting in my row has taken the space in my row's overhead bin. My suitcase was in the overhead bin on row 26. It took me a little while to disembark.
And how about the prices of food on the plane? Wow, do they not want to sell that stuff or what? Seriously. I think they had Grandma's chocolate chip cookies (that you buy at Wal-Mart for 50 cents) for $3, and a bag of Cheese nips (also 50 cents at Wal-Mart) for $4! Yeah, no one else saw anyone buy cookies either. But we did have our second celebrity pilot. The first officer was our second president, John Adams. Still flying after over two hundred years...of being dead. He didn't say much...
After we landed in Atlanta, we grabbed the checked luggage for those that checked and headed out to get the rental. Since there are five of us, we were getting a van. Now, I asked about getting some corvettes (it would take three, and I would drive the third one myself if I had to) or maybe a Hummer, but in the end, we got the van (of course). Now, it's a nice little Honda Odyssey, so it's not like we got a Bum-V (Butt Ugly Mini Van...yeah, I made that up on the spot while we were talking about the vehicle), but it also isn't the coolest rig on the lot.
Now what I'd really like at this point is for my network cable to stay plugged in. I grabbed a cable from home before I left, but what I failed to notice is that this cable is missing the tabs to keep it plugged in. So it doesn't lock in place. This means that it unplugs itself if I type for too long and shake the laptop slightly here and there. It's a pretty stable laptop, so it isn't shaking much. But I've had to fix it three times while typing this post. This means that the Skype session with the Queen later will be really interesting.
Anyway, while heading out in the bum-v, we only got lost once (as I understand it...I was watching a movie and killing my iPod's battery). And it was only once because the person riding shotgun pulled out her iPhone and got the GPS going to get us where we needed to go.
We got to Alpharetta somewhere in the vicinity of one person's hotel. For some reason 4 of us are in one hotel and 1 loner is in another. She knew we were close to her hotel, so we had dinner at Ruby Tuesday's. I had a burger. I also learned that I'm not alone in my picky, plain and dry palette. Someone else in our group oreder one plain and dry. Not only that, he says the phrase hoity toity in reference to food with lots of "decoration" on it. When I said it, he was surprised. I wasn't aware it wasn't a common phrase.
Leaving the restaurant, we needed to find person 1's hotel, so we drove the wrong way out of the mall area where the Ruby Tuesday's was, and did a u-turn in a parking before heading back out. Following the GPS, they found the La Quinta Inn...it was the parking lot we'd u-turned in only moments before. We had entered it from the back. D'oh...
We got her unloaded and headed over to our place of residence until Thursday. The story gets shorter from here. We checked and I got the internet working, Skype installed, and here I am.
The only final comment is in regards to logging into the hotel's net connection. This was funny. Everything I'd read said the connection was free in the rooms. Even the flyer next to the modem here says it's free. When you sign in, it implies that there is a cost to use...although it doesn't say how much. I signed in and all is well for now. We'll see about the one day free thing later. Maybe it refreshes daily or something. The funny part was this: I decided to pull up my virtual box to see how Linux would behave. After all, it was a different amchine logging into the same connection. Linux went right to the net without going through the hotel's splashpage website.
I can think of two explanations for this. Either the connection is driven from the central server that assigns addresses to each room and once I agree to the connection, it was agree for the room regardless of the computer that logs in. Or the connection is assuming that most people will use Windows (or even Mac) and doesn't have a Linux provision.
After considering it, it is probably the former, and loading Linux tomorrow will yield their little splash screen asking me to agree to the terms. They probably reset nightly. If I get the screen to agree to the terms tomorrow, though, I'll it the Linux machine first...just to see.
Monday, June 8, 2009
Linux and Solaris
So I've been doing some research into different operating systems, since Windows seems to be generally annoying from an architectural standpoint, and I figured that since I was using a virtual machine anyway, I'd check out several OS's. It's been kinda fun while being a tad annoying at times. I've run across some that require an advanced computer degree to install, and others that are fairly easy.
One thing with non-Windows OS's is that where in Windows, the Graphical User Interface (GUI) is the primary access point for the operating system, in other OS's, the access point is a command line interface, and the GUI is run on top of the basic OS. Hence, when I installed a couple of Linux systems, they were using a desktop environment called Gnome. When I installed Solaris, an OS also based on Unix by Sun Microsystems, it also used Gnome for the desktop GUI. Hence, on both systems, I ended up looking at exactly the same screen and options...and neither one of them were interested in my blasted video card.
To digress to the video card problem, I have an NVIDIA GeForce 6200 which came packaged with my PC when I bought it, and while Windows seems to get along with it just fine, I've had nothing but trouble in getting Linux to acknowledge its existence. Solaris permitted me to change the screen resolution, at least, but Unbuntu locked me into a max resolution of 800 x 600, and while Debian has me at a large-enough-to-use resolution, I have scrollbars on the outside of my Virtual Machine that I have to get to if I want to see the bottom of the screen. It's annoying.
Anyway, I decided to see what people thought of Solaris versus Linux in terms of use, and the universal answer from those geeky enough to know both of them turned out to be "it depends on what you want to do with them." What does that mean for me? Not a whole lot, to be honest. So I went to my next source: the library. I searched in the extensive database of available reading material in the Tulsa City-County Library System to see what I could get on both Linux and Solaris.
My first victim was Linux which returned pages and pages of books on not only the OS itself, but the variations of it like Fedora, Red Hat, Ubuntu, and the many versions of each. That was cool, so I requested some books on the basic OS, and one on Ubuntu since it seems to be fairly popular. Time to see what I could find on Solaris. Typed it in.
Nothing. Not a single book in the entire library references this OS. As much of an internet hound as I can be sometimes, I still prefer a hard copy of material to read, since scrolling through pages while you're actually trying to do something on the machine is no fun. I also can't afford to be printing out all that material, even if I could find it online.
That pretty well clenched. Linux it would be since there's no info on Solaris. Linux has a greater community support structure online as well as being almost 100% open sourced, whcih means those with the know how can update and tweak it as needed. Solaris has an open sourced version, but it's still a proprietary OS owned by Sun, just like Windows is owned by Microsoft.
The last thing on the current OS run I learned this morning. Windows has a version of their next OS, currently referred to as Windows 7, online and licensed to try out for nothing until June of 2010. My Virtual box might just need another entry...
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