journal for 2002-10-04
friday in exile (first of three)
Today we did a good bit of scrambling around. In the morning, we rushed to get a document ready for sign-off produced for the new sales system. In the afternoon, we rushed to get to lunch before our reservations and back before our meeting. In the evening, we rushed to prevent China from landing its space transports on our asteroids. Now, I’m taking it slow and trying to get ready for sleeping.
work
The work at work is remaining bearable, although I expect that next week, as the real work begins, it will get more annoying. I’m hoping to intersperse enough non-ERP work to keep sane. Hopefully, I can get this stupid training system update done—the update isn’t stupid, really. I’m just a little disconnected from it. The four or five projects on which I do the most active work (apart from the all-binary production database) have now been committed to CVS, and it’s working very well. I’ve put it to use already, and if I manage to get any coding done this weekend, it will be because of the CVS. Awesome!
On an aside, I resent the fact that I have to set my hardware clock to local time. I dual-boot to Win32, which (naturally) can’t handle the reasonable convention of just correctly linking /etc/timezone. Ridiculous!
the daily food report
Breakfast: at the hotel, again.
Lunch: Rahm made reservations for us to go to a place called the Priory. It was way out in the styx, or so it seemed. We had to navigate several 1.25-lane roads while passing trucks, occasionally at fifty miles per hour. Driving here is just nuts. The lunch was pretty great. For about six pounds, lunch included an appetizer and an entre. I had a bowl of tasty vegetable soup and a “golden trout,” served whole. I haven’t had fish served whole in years, and it was really good.
Dinner: I was actually quite hungry by dinnertime, which was odd, since I’d eaten a pretty big lunch. We had Burger King, because TGIF, which we tried first, was just too crowded to even park. I had a bacon double and fries. I got a fanta, which is my usual beverage at fast food here, because it’s hard to get in the States.
play
We picked up Empire Earth: Art of Conquest. My opinion is that, basically, it’s crap. The biggest obvious change is the new epoch, Space. It sucks. There are a few marginally neat units, but the whole concept of space itself blows. It’s like water, but you can’t fly over it, and space ships can’t fly over land. They should’ve waited for EE2. What EE really could use is a better system of religion. The priest and prophet units are woefully limited.
I commented, today, that a RTS based on Alpha Centauri would rule. It would!
more welsh television commentary
Today, just before I wrote this, I got off the phone with Gloria and started my final shutdown routine. I flipped a few channels, and Channel Five (at dial position nine) was showing softcore! Now, there are butts and boobs at noon in television commercials, here, and I knew there was probably some mildly blue stuff, but this was definitely softcore. I’m defining softcore as porn in which (a) there is no graphic penetration, (b) the sex scenes have new age music, not porn groove, and (c) the actors aren’t very sweaty. This wasn’t just like 9 1/2 Weeks edited for TV. There was wang. Wang. On the television.
What is wrong with these people? Boobie-viewing might be good for health, but wang-viewing can’t be. Anyway, I turned off before I had a chance to be affected either way. There’s an interesting documentary on the history of the piano, now, on BBC 2. I think I’ll try to fall asleep to that.