Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Install Done

I think I'm coming home tomorrow. I'm afraid to say for sure until I'm actually back in Chattanooga.

On Saturday, I ended up going kayaking on Lake Arthur in Moraine State Park. The main problem is that the weather was so nice that everyone else was out on the lake as well. It's tough to get anywhere when you're fighting three different wakes at the same time. Still fun, though, and we'll see if any of the pictures I took develop alright.

The good weather didn't last; it started raining on Sunday, and has remained overcast since then. I drove down to Pittsburgh for a rousing afternoon of getting lost, spending a couple of hours at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and Art, and finding a pretty nice sushi restaurant. The saying is true that there are only two seasons up here: winter, and construction.

Nothing much has happened since; I've put in a couple more twelve-hour days, and everything is finally done. After nine days up here, I'm ready to come home.

Saturday, August 18, 2007

Saturday in Slippery Rock

I'm done with work for the day, and am sitting on the porch of the North Country Brewing Company. I just finished lunch, and I'm wondering what the hell has happened to the weather. It's beautiful, 66 degrees and sunny, which is a staggering contrast to how it's been for the past three weeks. Everyone up here indicates that this is NOT normal, but they seem to be enjoying it all the same.

For my part, I'm in a bind as to what to do next. I've compiled a list of things to see in Pittsburgh, and I'm not sure where to start; I really should do some laundry first, having only packed for five days, and being on day six. Ew. But that would waste more of this day.

Did I mention that I did NOT bring my camera with me? I'm kicking myself now, that's for sure. But who could have predicted that I'd be up here for five days more than I anticipated? And who expected weather like this?

I haven't decided if I want to go down to Pittsburgh. I'm going to have to go somewhere other than here if I want to find a cheap camera, that's for certain.

More as the day progresses.

Thursday, August 16, 2007

Catching Up, Part Two

Well, so much for updating this every night this week. Tuesday was my birthday, so I took the night off, and the next day, my laptop died. More on that later. So now I continue with:

Where The Hell I've Been

I've only spent two days in the office this month. The rest of the time, I've been in Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania. It's a little town about an hour north of Pittsburgh, and is home to the North Country Brewing Company, and Slippery Rock University (which has about three times the population of the town around it). This area is like a small enclave devoted to the late 1980s. The blue jeans are artistically ripped, hairspray has never been more popular, and the wild mullet still roams free. Slippery Rock, being a college town, is rather more trendy, but you don't have to go far outside town to see what I mean.

We're installing a brand-new, high-tech, never-installed-or-field-tested-before card system. I had help the first two weeks I was up here; this week, it's just been me. Crunch time is here, the system is supposed to go live next week, and I'm not done. On the plus side, everything I've installed has worked; it's just that there's so much of it to do. No pressure. Setting these readers up requires network configuration through my laptop (Yay! I finally get to use those networking classes!), and when it snow-crashed and died yesterday, I was in a bit of a bind. But I was able to borrow one from the IT department and keep rolling; it could have been much worse. [1]

The weather up here has been variable. The first two weeks were oppressively hot and muggy; early this week it was quite pleasant, and now it's straying back toward hot and muggy. It's a bad sign when you're in a basement laundry room with no ventilation, saying "At least we're not outside!"

One thing I didn't know about Slippery Rock is that it's the closest town to where the SCA holds Pennsic War. [2] As you drive up I-79, if you look to the left as you're heading north, you see this incredible little city of tents and pavilions, and if your timing is right, you see prefab castle walls and towers and a siege going on. If I could have fit my armor into my luggage, I might have run off to join them.

There are no pictures from this trip. No time to take them, no weather good enough to justify it, and no place notable enough. The entire area is quite pretty, but it's rather blandly bucolic. Lots of corn.

What The Hell I've Been Doing

Frankly, not much. Back in June and July, I tried a couple of short kayaking classes, one on Chickamauga Creek, one on the Tennessee River, and I really enjoyed it. [3] I haven't had the time or the energy since, though; hopefully that'll change come fall (and before it gets too cold). Been relentlessly smiting evil in City of Heroes. Still making it to aikido class, except when I'm not in town; it's been a long month without a chance for any more exercise than lugging around my (very heavy) laptop bag.

Went to a one-day weapon seminar at the dojo last weekend; the weapon of choice was escrima sticks. I can at least say that I'm not the most uncoordinated person there. But the combination of not keeping a death grip on your sticks, keeping both hands moving, turning your body--woops, loosen up on those sticks again--and keeping your feet moving all at the same time was very difficult. But it was also a lot of fun, blisters and all. The episode of Human Weapon about escrima was probably the best one of the series so far [4], so I was primed to give it a try. I got whacked on the knuckles a couple of times, but I think everyone else did as well.

What The Hell Is Coming Up

Well, there's no telling when I might have to come back up here to do some more work on this installation; I will almost certainly be having to do so later this year as new dorms are built. Dragon*Con is at the end of the month; I'll be attending, camera and booze in hand. I currently plan to take a short vacation in Destin with friends in the middle of September. And after that...well, we'll see; I may have big news on the travel front in the next week or so.

In more immediate plans, look for my review of the latest Harry Potter film in the next couple of days, among other reviews.

[1] I was kind of hoping the office would tell me to go buy a new one. No such luck; they overnighted a spare to me.

[2] A war between the East and Middle Kingdoms. Loser gets Pittsburgh.

[3] Sandra was there as well, coincidentally, so at least I had someone available to laugh at me. Very important.

[4] An interesting show in some respects. I'll detail my thoughts on it in a later post.

Monday, August 13, 2007

Catching Up

I last updated this blog on July 10th; it's been over a month since I posted anything. Therefore, today I play catch-up, starting with:

Where The Hell I've Been

It was back in June, actually, that I traveled to Batesville, IN, for a hastily-planned, disastrously-executed vending install at a local prison. There were contractual obligations at play that resulted in my planning the trip one day and driving out the very next; you know as well as I do that details get missed, sometimes vital ones. I ended up staying there an extra day to try to get things sorted out. It was a mess by any standards, and it has only recently smoothed out.

On the plus side, I was near Cincinnati, and had a chance to practice at their excellent aikido dojo. I also drove around in Big Bone Lick State Park. I had remembered seeing the sign years ago, on a road trip with Ben, but I could not remember where it was until I saw the signs again. My pleasure in the name is entirely juvenile; this should not come as a surprise, given how long I laughed about a German town called Assmannshausen.

I did NOT, however, get a chance to visit the Creation Museum, the brainchild of Ken Ham and the Answers in Genesis corporation. I feel torn about this, because on the one hand, I would be giving my money to people whose attitudes and views are, ironically, neanderthal; on the other hand, when else will I have the chance to take pictures of an animatronic T-Rex eating coconuts?

The museum, Ham, and AiG have been thoroughly eviscerated elsewhere, so I don't really need to go into details; a Google search will tell you all you need to know about this lot. The Museum itself is a shrine to dogma, intolerance, and willful ignorance about any kind of reason or science; really kind of a Retard Parthenon, if you will. The notion they put forth that they are performing any kind of scientific research makes my gorge rise. Adjusting the facts to fit the conclusions is a classic scientific blunder; to make that the centerpiece of your program seems to be a poor way to go about things (if you are actually interested in science, anyways). These people are cancerously stupid, and I think I lost IQ points just being near them.

Enough about them. Oh, and I got a speeding ticket in Kentucky. That sucked.

While on my way north, I saw signs for Cumberland Falls; I had devoted the whole day just to making that seven-hour drive, so I decided to make a quick detour. It's a surprisingly large waterfall (even though we hadn't had much rain at the time) not too far north of the Tennessee border and about 20 miles off to the west of I-75. Given how popular a park it is, I'm surprised I'd never heard of it before.

A couple of weeks later, I got another stamp on my passport when I flew up to Toronto and drove north from there to Huntsville, Ontario to do an install at a laundromat there. It was my first real experience with installing individual readers in washers and dryers, and was actually rather interesting, if you don't worry about the oppressive heat, close quarters, and the ever-present risk of horrible electrocution. It turns out that some co-workers of mine are rather cavalier in their attitude toward electricity, and we had a couple of light shows and welded connectors before turning the breakers off became standard practice again.

Huntsville, ON
, is a resort town near Algonquin Provincial Park; in some respects it reminds me of the relationship between Gatlinburg and the Great Smokey Mountain National Park, though Huntsville isn't quite so commercialized. The first night we were there, a huge thunderstorm came through; the next day, the laundromat was filled to capacity with summer-campers coming in to dry their clothes. That same thunderstorm inspired me to convince the estimable Spyro that we should take a quick detour up to the park to check out Ragged Falls.

Technically part of the Oxtongue River park, it might as well be part of Algonquin, being right at the southwestern edge. The storm that had come through the night before had everything roaring, and we hiked the short trail that led up to the top of the falls. The view was fantastic; it's the sort of park that I wouldn't mind visited for a week or so, paddling on the rivers and lakes and doing some hiking. I don't think I'll try it in winter, though.

Toward the end of July, I made two short day-trips up to Cookeville, TN, to install a couple of readers at a school there. The catch, in this case, was that the readers are brand-new units of a type I'd never installed before. I can only hope that things improve with experience, because even getting a handful of readers set up was an extended exercise in frustration. In all fairness, some delays were the natural result of so many different people being involved; that always slows things down. That whole saying about many hands making light work is only true if there's actual labor going on. In any sort of planning or organizational phase, more hands means more confusion and more delays.

But, for my third (and fourth and fifth, technically) waterfall of this post, I visited Burgess Falls, which is located between Cookeville and Sparta, TN. It was another spur of the moment trip; in this case, the huge thunderstorm was still going on when I left the interstate, and only let up to a drizzle when I arrived at the park. Burgess Falls State Park actually consists of three waterfalls on the Falling Water River, of which Burgess Falls itself is the highest (the picture on the Wikipedia page can only have been taken some year in which we had a reasonable amount of rainfall). I got my hiking in that day, about a mile each way to and from the waterfall.

Enough for this evening. Time to get some rest before braving a new set of perils tomorrow. I'll be updating this all week.