2 Bit Hacker

I’m off to San Jose, CA till Thursday to attend the NANOG conference with my boss. Should be a fun trip, my first NANOG and my first time out that far west. If anyone out there wants to try and meet up while I’m out there, drop me an e-mail.

Also, my eee PC is cool. Using it in the terminal to write this.

Spent last weekend out in Ohio for my grandparents’ 60th anniversary. Drove out there with my mom on Friday, took just about 12 hours to make the drive going out I-90. The anniversary party was on Saturday. I had a pretty good time. It’s been a while since I’ve seen a lot of my family, so it was good to see people again, though I went in to my anti-social mode with all the people around. My Nikon was acting up again, so I don’t have any pictures, which kindof sucks.

On Sunday, Jason and I had planned to meet up in Dayton at the National USAF Museum. Unfortunately, Jason’s fuel pump died just outside of Indianapolis. I decided to drive out there to see him anyway. We ended up going into Indy to grab some food, then we went to a Fry’s, since we don’t have any of those up here.

Overall, not a bad trip. A lot of driving in a short period though. Ended up putting a little over 2000 miles on the Prius, so I’ll be taking it in for its 5k service this weekend. Don’t think I’ll be doing anymore road trips for a bit. I think I’ll be flying next time.

So, I’m in Ashburn, VA doing some work in our colo down here. Drove down on Sunday, took a different route to NJ than usual, using I-84 and avoiding I-95 which worked out pretty well and took I-78 out to Harrisburg, PA before turning south on Route 15 to get into VA. Not a bad drive altogether.

We got most of the work done today, just need to finish things up tomorrow and should be on our way home on Wednesday. Wish I could babble about the datacenter, but I’m not sure how much of it is covered by the NDA.

As some of you know, Delia and I have been on a road trip since Friday. It’s mainly a trip for me to try and find gainful employment, since I haven’t been having much luck in the NH area. Yesterday I interviewed at “RNet”:http://www.rnetinc.net/, the ISP that “Jason”:http://www.livejournal.com/users/jtn/ works for. I thought the interview went pretty well, but we’ll see how it goes. One of the interviewers seemed somewhat concerned about Jason and I being friends and working together, but I don’t think it ever caused a problem at JLC or Net-Temps. Delia seems to like the Bloomington area, and has already interviewed with a massage place in the area.

Tomorrow we’re planning to head north to my dad’s house for a few days before heading home. I hope to meet with someone concerning a system administration job at a school in Saline, MI. It’s pretty close to where my dad lives, and the job looks pretty interesting from the description.

Other than that, not a lot going on. It’s been cool seeing Jason and Stacey again and hanging out and getting Delia away from WoW for a bit. Unfortunately, my trip coincided with Matt’s trip to NH, so I completely missed seeing him, which sucks.

Although, if I move out here, it would be a shorter drive to visit Houston…

Well, I finally managed to snag the laptop away from Delia long enough to update again. Day 2 was mostly spent finishing the drive from Rochester to Michigan. I got a little lost trying to find my dad’s house, but we got here eventually. My dad wasn’t doing too well, but he was social for a little while, and got to meet Delia and such. I got the last of my birthday gifts, a tea mug from England and a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR250, for the HTPC. I can hardly wait to get home and install it.

Day 3 was mostly spent in the hospital, waiting during my dad’s surgery. It sounds like everything went fairly well, though they’re still not sure if it was cancerous. I guess they’re going to run some tests on the stuff the removed, and they’ll know more at the end of the week. We visited with him for a bit afterwards. I had received warnings that he was going to look horrible, but I didn’t think he was looking all that bad. He seemed pretty tired, so we left after a bit.

That evening we went into Ann Arbor looking for a BookCrossing book at a cafe, but were unable to locate it. Then Delia played some DDR at a local arcade and we hit a Borders, where I grabbed a book on house buying. Apparently Ann Arbor was the location of the very first Borders book store, which is kindof cool. We then went back toward my dad’s house, and went into a Meijer, so Delia could experience the less evil version of Wal-Mart.

Today the plan is to go visit my dad again, then head up to Toronto to meet Delia’s sister, and probably do some touristy things. Hopefully I’ll find a place to hop online again to make another update.

Sitting in a hotel room in Rochester, NY with free Internet access, so I figured I’d do an update. Yesterday was the start of Summer Vacation 2004 (SV2k4!) Kindof followed Doug and Delia out to Vershire, VT for the wedding of Doug’s roommates, Michael and Michelle (probably spelled wrong, ah well.) It was a renaissance themed wedding, and Delia managed to get me to dress appropriately. Once I find a CF reader, I’ll work on getting the pictures posted.

After that we started the long drive to Michigan. We were going to stop in Syracuse, but all the hotels were booked. After checking a couple of exits, Delia had the bright idea of calling and finding a room while we were on the highway, which led us to Rochester. It’s kindof ironic, since we were thinking of trying to visit Dave when he went back to school here, but we ended up being here a week and a half before he’s heading back.

So today, Day 2, we’re finishing the drive out to see my dad. We’re heading through Canada, which is always a nice, boring, flat drive. This is the first time I’ve made this trip with someone else, it makes it a lot easier. I’m looking forward to seeing my dad again, and I’m happy that Delia’s coming along to meet him, but I’m nervous about his operation tomorrow. I’m sure everything’s going to go well, but I’m still nervous about it anyway.

Well, I spent the past few days up at my mom’s house in Maine celebrating Thanksgiving. I drove up on Wednedays, and came back on Saturday. Mom prepared a great Thanksgiving dinner, including juicy turkey, mashed potatoes, lima beans, stuffing, and the like. It was all great. The turkey was a free government turkey, which my mom got from the place she was working. We had some doubts about how it would turn out, but it ended up being one of the best turkey’s I’ve had.

Pretty much the entire time I was up there, Ralph tried to find a moose for me to take a picture of. I’m led to believe the moose are equipped with some sort of camera detecting radar system, as they all managed to hide for the 2 days we were looking. About the closest I came was seeing a deer on the way back on a highway off-ramp. Ah well, maybe next time.

Speaking of pictures, I took another bunch of the cabin while I was up there, and got the uploaded to my gallery.

Overall I had a good time, it was relaxing to get away from the apartment and work for a few days and not really have anything to do. I’ve got a ton of leftovers that I was sent home with in the fridge. Those should last me about a week, I think. Now I just need to start planning my next trip out to Indiana and Michigan later this month.