Category: Diary (Page 26 of 38)

Earlier this month we finally got the cat door installed in the wall that we had been planning for so long. The question is – will the cats get used to it, or will they continue to wake us up at night demanding to use the human door?

Tony from Harrison Garage Doors came by this morning and checked out the funny noises the door was making whenever we opened it. Turned out that a loose chain was dragging on the door when it opened. That coupled with sticky paint between the door segments was causing the loud crack! sound first time we opened it every day. It’s a lot quieter now, and Tony says that a little WD40 rubbed between the segments will probably stop the sticking.

Last night Mars was at its closest to Earth, so I dragged the ‘scope out the back to see whether it had changed since last time I looked. Interestingly, yes it had. With the 9mm eyepeice and moon filter I could clearly make out a dark region, along with bright polar regions. Pretty cool.

On one of our previous visits to Barnes & Noble I persuaded Eric to get _Ender’s Game_, by Orson Scott Card. Well, he’s hooked.

He staggered down to breakfast this morning saying “I stayed up way too late reading that book. It’s all your fault”. Instead of working out (as he usually does in the morning) he tried to sleep in to catch up.

It’s so funny. Now we have an hour for labs we’ve already finished, he’s in the classroom with his feet up and his nose deep into the intricacies of Locke and Demosthenes…

He’s a Fantasy fanatic, more so that SciFi, but he hasn’t read C.S.Lewis’ Narnia series. I showed them to him in B&N – some nice editions there – and we agreed that when his son Jordan was just a bit older, Eric would read them to him.

I told him that if he was interested in reading Tolkien again (in preparation for the movie, which he’s keen on seeing of course) but hadn’t read Narnia, then he was really missing out on one of the founding masters of the genre.

Speaking of which, B&N had a copy of MacDonald’s _Princess & The Goblin_ in their Classics section in the younger readers department.

*

The class finished early today, we got our certificates and collected our books and stuff, and bid farewell to our classmates, and drove out to find something to do for the afternoon. In Eric’s and my case, this was to buy a dozen bagels from the local New York Bagel Bakery, and then find a place to eat a late lunch. We decided to try the Cajun cafe up by the freeway, and it was excellent. I should really be more adventurous when I find myself in a Cajun restaurant, but this time I played safe and got a jambalaya.

As I write this I am on National flight 357 to Vegas, and frankly, I’m really looking forward to getting home again. My nose is dripping, my sinuses are all clogged, and I’m not looking forward to the descent.

We’ve discovered which sessions our instructor is skipping in order to account for the missing day. Just our luck, it’s the ones we were most interested in, on scripting and business services. Now we understand why we have been “allowed” to skip ahead on labs – it’s to give us time to work on these modules independently of the instructor. I think we can still get help from them during lab time, but he won’t be giving the corresponding lectures.

Eric’s given up on the ball park thing. I think it wasn’t going to be “the walk in the park” that he thought.

We might see _Pearl Harbour_ tonight, or maybe the next night, depending on how I’m feeling.

Last night I started getting sleepy at 9:00pm so I just turned out the light and fell right asleep. Woke up at 11:30, 4:00, 5:30, and 6:15, but fell right asleep again. It’s muggy in the room, and the air-con is loud or ineffective. Bah. Still, I have figured out that if you’re alone in a kingsize bed, you can pull the covers back diagonally and then just slide across from pillow to pillow until the right comfort level is attained.

We got to the Siebel class on time this morning, but apparently it doesn’t start until 10:15 because *some* people are still catching up on the labs from last week.

Physically I’m not feeling so good. Throat very sore, I almost feel a headache coming on. Doesn’t look good but am coping. Will get through this somehow. Even Eric says I don’t sound so good.

I’m thinking of dragging Eric to the Sushi/Grill tonight, specially if they have soup.

*

As it turned out we ate greek after searching for tepan yaki in vain (A clue: The Isshan Sushi & Grill thought we meant “Teriyaki” <sigh>) at a place called the Veranda Greek Cafe and Eric tried something called Metaxis that basically knocked him out (see: Thrashed_him_at_pool below).

We had a good talk about each time we’ve been in the ER. (He wins. He should be dead.)

OK, I’m going to bed NOW… I had a margarita and three games of pool with Eric (thrashed him, hooray) and now I’m sleepy.

Got up at 6:30 this morning, all packed up and ready for Lisa to drop me at the airport. Last time we parked and she came in to the terminal with me, but this time we figured that we be more casual about it. Upon entering the terminal I found the queue for the National Airlines check-in counter was so long that it stretched across the terminal floor and out the automatic doors and into the drop-off area! We thought we’d timed things pretty nicely with about an hour and 15 minutes until my flight left, so after observing the queue I abandoned any thought of checking my baggage and went straight to the gate. I was lucky enough to get a window seat, which is good because I can take my laptop out and write this!

I have a little girl sitting in front of me, she has put the seat back and she keeps bouncing up and down and kneeling on the seat looking back at me. This is all very well, but I’m trying to write here!

I have a viciously sore throat. Things do not bode well for the rest of the week.

Later: I’m in room 414.

No trouble getting in, event-less flight. In other news, Eric did ask Avis to change the car from the default, but it isn’t a truck – it’s a Nissan Altima or something, and has a CD player in it <g>. I think he was after the comfort, not the chick-magnet factor. _I_ would have got the Pontiac Grand Am they offered as default – and NOT because of any theoretical chick-magnet factor it has, but simply because I’m familiar with it. Every other time we’ve used the services of Avis Rent-a-car, it’s been Avis Rent-a-Pontiac-Grand-Am.

This evening I rang Josh and Anna for a chat. Turns out Josh was asleep having partied hard last night and then up early to work, he came back and crashed. Anna was awake though, and we had a good talk about nothing at all. She wanted to know if “training course in Dallas” meant “obedience training”.

Eric and I checked out this morning, we’ve got our bags in the car, and we’ll try and leave Siebel around 5, 5:30.

I’m being a bad influence on Eric. He wasn’t planning on eating lunch today, because he’d been very bad last night and eaten a flan for desert at a Mexican Soul Food Restaurant. He blames me for the flan because I’d said we kinda had to order at least one, eat it and toast Lisa, wishing she were here eating it with us.

But: Eric and I just checked out a place we discovered last night: In a nearby shopping center there is a New York Bagel Bakery. Drove out there for lunch and he got a “white” sandwich but I checked out their reuben. Their bagels are very good considering we’re in Dallas. The milk in my latte was “off” though, ugh.

The course is progressing; this morning was all about Siebel Tools and BisObj vs. BizComponent vs. Fields and Tables, etc.

Eric and I are looking at each other and saying, “Where’s the code?!?”

In between times, Eric has those meeting notes/minutes that Mac called requirements, and we’re trying to thrash them into something real. No, we don’t feel guilty trying to get real work done whilst waiting for the rest of the class to finish the labs.

*

Apparently Eric worked out for an extra half hour in the morning to make up for the flan.

I’m going to go to bed soon because Eric and I went to Barnes and Noble after the day’s session, got a few things (Java programming magazines and some Sci-Fi books) and then ate a small dinner at a little Italian restaurant, then came back to the hotel bar and persuaded the bartender to give us the balls and cues for the pool table in return for ordering a couple of margaritas. Eric and I had a long talk about work (mostly me about life during my time at Cornerstone) and after three games I was beginning to think he was Mitchell so I figured it was time to come up to bed.

The rhythm of the day sets in. It seems that every lunchtime I’m able to go to a booth in the Siebel building and log in, in relative privacy. I could probably make long distance calls here too… won’t risk it though.

Anyway, today is all about installing. So we’re installing, and installing, and installing…. I’m not sure that we’re learning anything except how to follow a script.

The course is going to help us, naturally, and even Eric is interested now that he’s edited a korn shell script <laugh>.

I’m really not immersed at all. Much of this stuff is just horrible, especially when one of the students asked one of the Siebel instructors what “instantiate” meant. It’s another language, and you can tell they get a whole heap of flak for it, because they apologize in advance, saying things like, “and now we’re getting into the technical stuff, so keep those Siebel goggles on tight, don’t let any air in around the sides. This is where programmers and developer types want to ask “Why?” and discuss other ways of doing things, and that really isn’t what we’re trying to accomplish, so keep those goggles on…” I swear, this is verbatum!

After an initial problem with the mailserver settings in my laptop configuration, all systems are go!

I set the wakeup call for 6:00 but strangely I woke up at 5:49. I don’t know why this happens, but my body clock seems to kick in when it really matters. I should trust it more, but whenever I do, it fails me. I think that it’s the physical/psychological act of setting an alarm that also sets the body clock.

After a leasurely shower I got dressed and went downstairs and found some breakfast at the Au Bon Pain area in the lobby, read the paper and my Sci-Fi book until Eric showed up half an hour later.

We decided to drive over to Siebel early in case we got lost. Not much chance of that, but 5 minutes later we were driving around in circles around the building saying “now, which building is Siebel? What’s the building number? Where are we supposed to be?” and Eric got his laptop bag out and looked up the building number, and floor number.

OK, so it was good to be early, but then we waited for an hour as Siebel personnel woke up and came into work. The class started at 9:00.

There’s about 20 people in the class, from all over the states. Two women.

There’s no room for laptops on the desks – we each have a workstation with an IBM 19inch monitor, it goes up to 1600×1200 @ 85Hz, very nice, very nice indeed as Derek would say.

Mr Hendrix the instructor made a point of saying that because we were missing a day, we would have longer days, possibly even as late as 6:00pm. That isn’t going to work for me and Eric, my plane on Friday is at 7:25 and even the people at Avis suggested allowing an extra hour for the return of the rental car alone.

The course is going ok so far. It’s funny to hear the instructor apologise for the Siebel-esque language and terms, saying up front that even though some aspects of the product were odd and we might like to ask “why?!?!”, he wasn’t going to answer those types of questions unless we took him out to dinner. Seeing as he is not at all appealing, I suspect that this won’t happen.

We did have an initial session on Siebel Terminology, and from that baseline we’re just expected to accept it and Move On.

We’re now halfway through day 1 and it is going to slow for me. I’ve been finishing the labs in a quarter of the time, and speed ahead in the lab book.

I confess that so far I rather like the Siebel application, in part I guess because of the high-end hardware we’re using (600MHz, 512MB RAM) and the fact that everything is local, and the machines have all been ghosted and therefore are “clean, new” windows installations. ( The instructor can actually re-ghost all the other workstations from an icon on his desktop – pretty cool).

We’ll see – we’re supposed to cover installation, administration and configuration later this week. So far it’s all been “learning to navigate in Siebel”.

Also, it hasn’t crashed or anything, the sample data is pretty comprehensive so you get a feel of working with a real app – and the step by step labs don’t let you get confused or lost. If I tried to do something interesting and independent I’m sure Siebel would turn on me and I’d be stuck.

They do have laptop stations with data ports in other parts of the floor. So I’m set up here in the lunchroom. Officially its lunch break, everyone else has gone out to find the deli somewhere in the building (It’s a big black building with IBM as well as Siebel resident here, so the on-site food is pretty good, apparently) but I’m still full from breakfast.

The afternoon got a bit wearing, jetlag kicked in and I found it very hard to concentrate. We seemed to spend the entire afternoon on why record visibility is so complex in the Call Center app. Seems there are four different user attributes that control which records you can see. Of course I don’t give a shit about record visibility. I’m sure we’ll be tested on it later though.

There is a big box of course materials including three spiral-bound books of slides and notes, and another spiral-bound book of labs, with worked solutions. Real easy to follow, trouble is is that it isn’t the stuff we really want to know… CD’s, copy of SiebelBookshelf 6.0.1 and some other web-based courses on CD.

At the course today, the instructor pointed out that because we were out in the wops, there was a brochure about a nearby town where there were lots of interesting restaurants to check out. After the course was over, Eric and I went back to the hotel, and then drove out to this place and cruised up and down the street (effect ruined by the fact that it was the middle of rush hour) looking for a micro-brewery or similar. Found several, all closed. Is Monday night!

Finally settled on a place called Mongolian Grill, which was more like tepanyaki, but really fun.  You grab a bowl, go to the table of ingredients (like Iron Chef) and fill the bowl, then add oil and spices and stuff, and take it to the central grill station where they cook your selection for you, with sticks like giant chopsticks.

Eric dropped me back at the hotel and went off to see The Mummy Returns at the nearby picture theater.

The trip to Dallas was uneventful, and although it was weird travelling without Lisa, I managed to get through it without disaster. No chance to do any writing, I was in an aisle seat and the two crazy people next to me had to keep getting up.

There was a bit of a worry at the Dallas/Fort Worth terminal, as I couldn’t find the Avis desk to pick up the rental car.

After I while I figured out that I needed to catch a shuttle to the rental car depot. The airport is big, with 4 terminals connected by mini-trams. The shuttle drove for about 10 minutes before it arrived at the depot. 

No problem signing for the car – a Daewoo Leganza (abreviated on the keychain fob as DWOOLEGZ) – and full of confidence I checked the Avis map and the Yahoo directions I’d printed out, and drove out of the car park.

15 minutes later I was hopelessly lost, travelling south on a freeway to nowhere. I knew the hotel was north of the airport, but for the life of me I couldn’t find the right roads and intersections. Eventually I gave up on following the Yahoo instructions and looked at the Avis map, and found an alternate route. I must have misjudged the scale of the map, or something, because I always seemed to have travelled further on the map than I had thought.

Finally got to the hotel, checked in, and then had a rest before checking out Eric’s itinerary to see what time I was supposed to pick him up from the airport, as he was arriving several hours after me and from a different city. 

I drove off to the airport, and upon entering the loop road that circles the 4 terminals, I realised that I was missing several peices of information: What Airline was Eric flying? I guessed at SouthWest (for some reason, probably “stupidity”) and drove around looking for a sign that said which terminal serviced SouthWest. Turns out none of them. American flies to Terminals A, B, and C; Delta is Terminal D, and all others seem to get in at Terminal B. I eventually park at terminal B and run in to look for information. Nothing. Eventually I ask at the National Airlines counter a) because they’re not busy, and b) because I flew on their airline this morning so technically I am a customer deserving of assistence. I ask the woman behind the counter, “I have friend I’m supposed to be meeting, I think on Southwest, where to I meet him?”

“Southwest doesn’t fly to this airport. They use Left Field(?!?!)”. 

Oh, that would be real good. His flight is due in 15 minutes and it would be typical if he told me the wrong airport. I just assumed he would be flying in to the same airport as me. I asked if she could confirm that Southwest was in fact the right airline? I gave her the flight number and the source city, and a few minutes later (seemed like half an hour!) she came back and said, “Southwest do not have a flight of that number, that’s all I can tell you. You can go through the checkpoint and check the monitors to see which airline has that flight number?”

I decide to do this, but quickly realise that with 4 terminals to check, and each gate cluster with its own exclusive list of arrivals, it was a hopeless task.

Poor Eric! I’d promised to meet him.

I dashed back through the checkpoint to the car, feeling like four different kinds of idiot, and drove back to the hotel as fast as was legal (+/- 10%).  (I can now confirm that if you take the correct route, the hotel is 10 minutes away from the airport.)

I get into my room, and this time get out my notes and check the airline. It’s American! Problem still not solved, I have 5 minutes until his plane lands, and I still don’t know if it is Terminal A, B, or C – American docks at all of the them! (I guess DFW is American’s hub.)

I get out the yellow pages and look for a flight information number for American. I find one. It’s in Spanish! I look for another number, call it, and find out the terminal, gate, and estimated arrival time for Eric’s flight. Halleluia, they’re running 15 minutes late.

Back in the car, zoom off back to the airport, park at Terminal C, run into the terminal. I appear to be at Gate C5. Eric is supposed to get in at C39, all the way at the other end of the terminal!

I walk fast, and eventually meet Eric walking the other way, looking for me. It turns out that they were stuck on the tarmac for 30 minutes because a faulty plane was docked at their gate, and he hadn’t been waiting long, but he did think to call Lisa on his cellphone to see if she knew where I was. This of course would make Lisa worry on my behalf, so he called her back and said it was ok, I’d turned up.

That evening we ate at a TexMex restaurant called “On the Border”, and I ordered a Margarita because I needed to mellow out after that traumatic day.