This last week had a variety of fuin travel adventures. I will briefly catalog them.
And that was my adventure this week. Woo!
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Anyway, he was a tiny cute little thing. About the size of a dime. He would turn his head and look at you he would climb around. If you got too close, he would hop away… For a couple days, he hung around the general vicinity of the tanks, and would occationally get back in the tanks. After that, I couldn’t find him any more. He hopped away somewhere, now a free frog, no longer needing to be confined to the tanks in which he was a tadpole. Legolas, out in the real world. Good luck Legolas, against all the things out there that can eat or otherwise hurt frogs the size of a dime. Meanwhile, at least one other tadpole is growing legs. It so far hasn’t climbed out of the water, but it will soon, I can tell. Last I looked, its back feet were ready, but the arms still hadn’t seperated. But they were close. I expect it to probably start crawling out while I am away on my trip. There may be more. But those are the ones I have seen for sure. The rest are still very much tadpoles, swimming around like crazy, but no legs yet. I’ll be keeping watch!
Anyway, this brings us to my friend Matt and what is his fault. The Shuttle Discovery (seen here as it appeared the closest we got on the tour) is due to launch tomorrow at 19:51 UTC. But Matt scheduled a meeting in Connecticut for Thursday morning. Which means that at 19:51 UTC tomorrow, I’ll be on my way to Orlando to catch a plane to Connecticut. Actually, if I’m on time, I should just be parking at the airport about then. If I was at home, or even at work, I could just step outside and have a pretty good view. (Not as good a view as driving up to the space center, but still…) While there is a chance I might if I’m lucky happen to be someplace where I can see something, most likely not. Thus, unless there are a couple days worth of weather or other delays, I am going to miss my first shuttle launch since I moved down here. Boo! Hissss! This is all your fault Matt! (Just kidding Matt, business is business… I understand. Sniff! And of course, unless something happens to this one, there should be a next one a few months down the line, and I’ll see that one. And perhaps we’ll go somewhere that we can see it fly over while heading for a landing next week… of course, that is scheduled for the middle of the day on a Monday, so maybe not.) Current STS-114 status can of course be seen at Spaceflight Now updated in pretty much real time as things happen. I have the day off today. (And Monday and Tuesday) because my mother is visiting. So I was walking along talking to her out on the lanai. We were talking about something that was going wrong with the pool skimmer thing. I realize that I still have my ear thing in my ear from a phone call I’d had a few minutes earlier, so I decide to take it off and put it in my pocket. I hear a splash. I look to see if it is another frog jumping in the pool. It takes my eyes a few seconds to find it, then my mind a few more to comprehend what has happened. My Treo 650 is in the pool, at the bottom of the deep end. It had fallen off my belt clip when I’d removed the headset. A half second later, as my mom continues to talk, not realizing anything has changed, I dive into the pool, fully clothed and shod. I get the Treo, bring it up, immediately remove the battery, and now it is drying by the side of the pool. They say in these sorts of situations the only hope (and it is slim) is to let it completely and totally dry out both inside and out before applying any power to it. So it is sitting in the sun trying to dry out. In a minute I will take it apart like the site says and try my best to dry the inside. It was underwater for maybe 10 to 15 seconds. And no, Treos are not even remotely water proof, I broke one with sweat alone before. So I do not expect it to ever turn on again. Although it is worth letting it dry and trying it before throwing it in the trash. And this is exactly why I now pay an extra $4 a month or whatnot for phone insurance. If it is indeed dead, I will be able to replace it for around a $50 deductible rather than the full retail price of a Treo 650. But still, this sucks.
A few hours ago, I gave the introduction for my mother at an awards ceremony where she was given one of two annual awards given to distinguished women clergy in her denomination. (I blogged about her winning it here.) In the picture are myself, my mother, Rev. John Thomas (the president of the UCC demonination) and Barbara Brown Zikmund (the other 2005 winner). Here is the introduction I gave:
It had been a while since I had last done public speaking other than in small groups. A conference I presented at back in 2000 I believe. I was much more nervous this time. Last time was me talking about some general principles of content management with regards to organizing an intranet. This time I was talking about my mother, and it was personal. And it was in front of about 500 women clergy. Or something like that. I was preceeded by a speech from Rev. Dr. Yvonne V. Delk who is quite the orator I must say. Really got the croud going! I was a tad nervous. I was a bit shaky, and stumbled over a word or two, didn’t make proper eye contact with the audience, etc. And a couple times I had to pause for breath to keep from getting too choked up. (Cause I was talking about my mom after all!) And I think toward the end I spoke a little faster than I intended. But never the less, I got a lot of comments congratulation me on my comments and thanking me and saying they were very well done. Including from my mom, which was of course most important. They are probably being nice to a degree. I know I wasn’t as polished as the professional speakers, but hey, I don’t do it for a living! I do like it though. Making speeches is fun! Even short 3 minute ones! And I was indeed especially honored to be able to introduce my mother. I’m very glad she asked me.
OK, I’m not so good with the photo stitching software and setting the camera right for doing the panorama in the first place, so there are a couple odd effects, but hey, you get the idea. It was way too big to fit in one shot, so I had to take a bunch and do my best sticking them together. In real lif it was perfectly round like they are supposed to be, and the sky didn’t have odd angular variations in the light levels. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this close to a whole 180 degrees of rainbow at one time, let alone of a double rainbow like this one. This was the view behind our house and to the right a little. It was really pretty. I’m glad Brandy yelled for me to come see.
This picture is 3 days old now. The tadpoles are doing fine, and growing rapidly. Well… most of them are. Some of them are eating each other. The big ones kind of gang up on the smaller ones, and then, well, CHOMP. So we’ve lost a couple that way. From the sites I’ve been reading, this is fairly normal. As they get larger, they also start excreeting a chemical to inhibit growth in the others. Again, normal. We still have probably a hundred or so though. Maybe more. Most seem to be thriving. It is just a handful that got slow and started getting eaten. Oops. As I promised on a comment over at Reb’s Place I will give an accounting of my day Friday. It was a boring day. not much happened. All times mentioned are of course UTC. 00:00 – 02:00 : Brandy had made dinner as usual, and we were eating it as the day began. I think it might have been chicken related. We ate and watched some Jeopardy. And the local news. Not live of course on either. We do have Tivo and all. The news was actually from just an hour or two previously. The Jeopardy we watched was about a month old. Somewhere in the middle of Jeopardy, Brandy’s phone rang, and we paused the TV. Amy had already been put to bed about half an hour earlier. Once Brandy was on the phone and the TV was paused, I was alseep within seconds. 02:00 – 10:00 : And then I was asleep. I woke up twice. One around 3 when I moved from the family room to the bedroom. And again around 7 when Princely woke me up to let me know he really wanted to go out. 10:00 – 11:30 : The alarm to actually wake up went off at 10. I usually hit snooze until 10:30 or 10:40 at this time of year, but this time I accidentally hit the off button instead, and the clock is broken, so I can’t actually reset the alarm to any time other than 10, so I had to actually get up. I was not pleased about that. But I began the morning process, which is basically watching some local news and some BBC news, making sure Brandy is up too (she usually actually gets out of bed first), and then stumbling out of bed to do all the usual normal things like using the bathroom, showering, getting dressed, and of course emailing myself a set of six or seven vital statistics taken on myself each morning for the purpose of later graphing. While I am doing all that, Brandy gets herself ready, makes sure Amy is started getting ready, and then leaves for work. Then I finish wrangling Amy into the car, and we head out. 11:30 – 12:00 : First stop is delivering Amy at summer day camp. She really likes camp. I’m not sure exactly what all they do, but they keep her busy and active, and happy… and those are good things. 12:00 – 12:30 : Work begins at 12 with a daily status meeting. My status today, I intend to work on some documentation I’ve been working on this week and get it finished. Otherwise, I have some meetings and such. 12:30 – 13:00 : Back to my desk after the meeting. I’m never quite ready to go full speed first thing in the morning. I am barely awake. So half an hour for coffee and making my daily check of websites. Some are related to the field of my work, some are not. But it serves the needed purpose of getting me to the point I can actually think. 13:00 – 14:00 : Second meeting of the day. It is actually about how our tech team will be packaging releases in the future. I am not a direct participant, I am there essentially as an FYI, so I keep my knowledge up on things like this. 14:00 – 14:30 : Back to my desk, I start getting the things together I need for the documentation I am supposed to be writing. I get up the application I am documenting. I get the part of the document I’d already finished. I set up a few things I need to do what I need to do. 14:30 – 16:00 : Then I realize some stats I have been trying to do weekly, I had started earlier in the week but not finished. I am trying to on a regular basis gather statistics on some things relevant to our business, and then issue reports on important changes, and start charting trends. So, I put aside the document I am trying to finish today, and instead do all the stats and put out my weekly report. 16:00 – 16:30 : Quick conference call with a client to discuss progress on how they want to proceed with a certain part of their project. I’m on this one as an FYI again. 16:30 – 17:30 : I was supposed to have lunch with someone from work, but at the last minute they got called into something else. So I went out to Atlanta Bread with a book, and read for a bit while I ate my sandwich. 17:30 – 19:30 : After lunch, this was the time to work on my document. And I kept getting started, but never made much progress. I was always getting distracted. I would make a little progress, then stall. The day before I had gotten on a role and written close to eight pages in one shot. This time I had trouble making headway into just a few paragraphs. I had promised that the document would be done and ready to distribute on Monday, so each minute I delayed, meant more work I was going to have over the weekend. Even so, progress was alusive. 19:30 – 20:30 : Then it was time for the weekly sales meeting. Toward the end I got to present some of the stuff I’d been working on earlier in the week with regard to strategies for identifying and dealing with some of our active clients in terms of retaining and upselling them. That was fun. 20:30 – 21:00 : By the time I got back to my desk after that meeting, the day was almost over. Normally, days where I work go until 22. But Amy’s camp closes at 22. That is the after care part of it too. And I am the one with Amy pick up duty most of the time. In no traffic, the drive from work to Amy’s camp would take 15 minutes or so. But at this time of day, there is a two block portion of the route that takes over 20 minutes by itself. Pushing the time to about 30 minutes on a good traffic day, and up to 45 when you are not lucky. So I try to leave work soon after 21, just to be sure I am never late for picking her up. Cause who knows what they do then. I am guessing that they probably chop up all the kids who haven’t been picked up and feed them to the alligators or something. So I must be on time. 21:00 – 22:00 : So, off to get Amy. I got her with about 10 minutes to spare before alligator feeding time, then we rushed home. 22:00 – 23:00 : I had rushed home because earlier in the day, Brandy had emailed to say that her company’s CEO would be on CNBC during the 22-23 hour. So I rushed home and got the Tivo recording. Then Brandy got home. We needed pool supplies, so after Brandy put some things in the oven to start cooking, we all got in the car and headed to the pool store. Which was closed. So we went home. 23:00 – 00:00 : While Brandy finished getting dinner ready, we put the recorded CNBC show (Cramer’s Mad Money) on the TV. Brandy thought he was a nut. He is. But I find him funny. Anyway, we watched the whole show, but Brandy’s CEO was not on it. Turns out he was on 24 hours earlier. The people at Brandy’s company just hadn’t set out the notice saying “everybody tune in tonight!” until everybody had gone home the day before. So everybody missed it. And thus, the day ended. OK. There is my day. Rebecca had assumed my description of the day would very detailed include an exact timestamp of every time I went to the restroom over the course of the day. I regret to say that I let her down. I’ll have to do that some other time perhaps. Wow! I have been checking the link to Greg Haverkamp’s havercamp.com site every couple of days for it seems like forever. He hadn’t updated it in a long long time though, so I didn’t check every day any more. Only those times when I had the time to actually check ALL of the sites on the left hand side of my homepage. Anyway, today I check, and Greg has gone and bloggified his site! Maybe I’ll have to check more often! It is now called Otherwise Occupied. Here is a sample:
Of course, at least the top part of my blogroll is defined by who sends me the most email. I am sticll counting October 2004 email, so that hasn’t been updated in awhile though. I suspect that when it does get updated, Greg will fall off that list. If he is good enough though, I may put him in that second list. We shall see! About half an hour ago, I was in my office happily working on a document for work. Suddenly, I head something like a car alarm. Right outside. After about a minute, I decided to go investigate. It was not a car alarm. It was the horn of MY car. My car does not have an alarm. The horn was on like someone was leaning on it. Nobody was. So I tried turning on the car. No change. I tried honking the car. No change. I started running around trying to find the fusebox to pull a fuse. Nothing was labeled. I tried to find the wire going into the horn to see if it was easy to pull out. It was not. The car kept screaming out in anger for about 20 minutes. Slowly decreasing in volume. Just as I had AAA on the phone to send a truck out to make my damn horn shut up, it stopped. The horn now does not work at all. The rest of the car still seems to be working fine though. Well, at least as fine as it was yesterday. It is an old car and shows it these days. Poor Saturn. |
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After I first saw the tadpole with legs, I would check in occationally. The next night, he was no longer in the tank. He was climbing up the walls next to the tank. The tail was gone. He was all frog. I called him Legolas. Leg. Get it? Ha!
This weekend, one of the things we did since my mom was in town was go and do the whole 
