Digital Meanderings
Meanderings of a coder

I’ve been trying new software for my Treo 650 and For the second time in three days my Treo 650 has decided to perform a continuous cycle of powering on and soft resets.
Stupid thing.

The first time the software I was installing was Pocket Tunes. After I performed a hard reset, thereby losing all my data, I resynced up with my PC and Pocket Tunes worked fine. Unfortunatly the sync takes about an hour over my Bluetooth connection.

This time I was attempting to install ListPro. The Windows application is very simple and intuitive, both are very nice features of a list tracking application. Hopefully the Palm application works as easily.

In other news, I’ve been watching the movie Closer over and over again. It’s a fantastic movie and it has so many tiny things go on that most people don’t catch until the third or fourth time. Might I recommend that you pay attention to the text of the name placard at the end of the movie?

Next week I’m off to Florida for a few days. My boss and I are going to be meeting with FPL about installing SSIS in the Duane Arnold power plant the company has just acquired. Should be a fun trip as long as no hurricanes come our way.

Well it’s been a long time since I’ve updated my blog, so I guess it’s time that remedy the situation.

Let’s start back in July. My boss was on a whirlwind tour of United States nuclear facilities and I was the most knowledgeable person around so I got handed the helm of the project for the interim.

In order to get the new version of SSIS ready for production at PPL I was working sixty-plus hour weeks. This is what my fellow office mates like to call “trial by fire” and my certainly was flame-tempered. During this time I also had to work on issues for our new clients in Texas who were scheduled to go production on 08/31.

On the 30th of July I set out on a much needed vacation and to make it better it was with that someone special. I didn’t pay attention to the time, day or date. That’s a startling revelation for those who know me. After visiting a horrible zoo in Cincinatti and a great aquarium in Kentucky I headed home.

On August 8th I returned to work. And oh what a return I made! That first day back I worked for about twelve hours and I continued this for much of the week. That is until Thursday when I got a conference call with our clients from Texas, boy were they unhappy! How unhappy you may ask? So unhappy in fact that I was on a plane to Texas in less than twenty-four hours.

My flight for Texas was for 6am leaving from Philadelphia. The airport is a two and a half hour drive from my apartment so, in order to catch my flight, I would have had to leave at 1:30-2:00am. Realizing that I’m not able to fall asleep before 11pm I decided to stay awake. All nighters are lots of fun people! Although I worked a full day before hand and then pulled an all nighter, I had to be sharp for our afternoon meeting with our clients at CapGemini and TXU.

So five days early I began what should have been my three week stint in Texas to get their issues resolved and get them ready for production.

That first week was a long one. My boss and I worked long hours getting the application ready. Not only did we run into application issues, we had to play Server Administrators and DBA’s.

After the week was over 95% of the issues were resolved and the road ahead led to production or so I thought.

During the next week I worked at resolving the rest of the issues. Most of these were reporting issues, nothing that should have interfered with our schedule. Unfortunatly politics decided to rear its ugly face. Politics and cold feet doomed the project to delay. After two weeks and many hours the decision was made to hold off production until after their fall outage. Not neccessarily a bad choice, just an aggravating one.

On 09/01 I headed home.

I arrived at Philadelphia airport at 10:30pm. It took me an hour to get my luggage, get my car and to be on my way home. Unfortunately fate decided that I was not to be sleeping in my own bed that night. On I-76, a.k.a. the “Sure-Kill Expressway”, I got stuck in a traffic jam for 2.5hours putting the time at around 2am.

After a day of travelling I was beat, so I decided to search for a hotel. Since I was around a major metropolitan area it was quite surprising how hard it was to find a hotel.
The first one I encountered was a Hampton Inn. I walked into the lobby and waited for the clerk to get off of her cell phone. After a few minutes she informed me the room was $144/night + tax. I nearly fainted but I was so tired that I accepted the room. Now, most normal people would expect a fabulous room for that price, well that is not what I found. Don’t get me wrong, the room was neat and clean but definatly not of the caliber suggested by the price.

I slept the night at the hotel, checked out, and made my way home. This was not to be the end of my journey. I drove to my apartment, emptied out my suitcase and headed to New York City/Stamford, CT for the weekend.

After my wonderful weekend, I took two days off from work. Today was my first day back. Fun stuff.

Below is a picture I took from outside my hotel in Granbury, TX.