18 September 1998: At Another Housewarming Party

Friday, 18 September 1998:

At Another Housewarming Party

I pretty much finished my UGM preparation yesterday before I left for the day, which was my goal since it wasn't quite clear when the servers would come down today to head down to the Monona Terrace, where the meeting is actually occurring. It was nice to get it done, but boy it took a long time.

We had another dress rehearsal for our focus group presentation, and the organizer told me he thought my piece of it was the strongest so far. Cool!

Today I sent out some mail to the folks who will be helping me teach my classes - they'll be actually working the computer we'll have on the big projector (the "driver" for the class), and directly helping the attendees with the hands-on pieces. My "driver" for my first class said he hadn't been aware he was slotted to be at my class. Good thing I sent out that mail!

Finally, I left work around 12:30 to bike home and walk to the Terrace to help with some grunt work of hauling computers around ("lumberjacking" I called it). I figured it would be a nice change of pace from thinking, planning and organizing for my presentation and classes. So I get there a little after 1:00 (I biked today) and I'm told that they're all done with the manual labor for the day, so I can leave! It took them about half as long as they'd planned for, which I'm sure made them (the systems team, who manages all the hardware and a lot of the software configurations) very happy.

So I came back home, petted the cats, ran a quick errand, and went back to work, where my project for the afternoon kept getting tied up in problems and new twists in the subsystem I was working with. I almost finished my data prep to investigate the actual problem, but it was a bear. Maybe if it weren't Friday afternoon after a particularly intense work-week it might have been easier.

Ah, well. It's the weekend now.

Tonight I went to another housewarming party, this time for Darrell, a guy who works at Epic who I've gotten to know since his office lies between where I park and where I program. Nice guy, with a rather twisted sense of humor. The party suffered from the "too loud music" factor, and wasn't quite my kind of crowd (a lot of younger, beer-drinking sorts) but it was fairly fun for a couple of hours.

Getting there was quite a challenge, though. They've torn up a long strip of road right near my apartment to resurface it, so I had to go around that. Then I planned to go down to a major road south of the Beltline (the highway that semi-circles the city), but it turns out that about three miles of that road are completely torn up for resurfacing. A third road I took was partly torn up, and was down from four to two lanes. All-in-all, it ended up taking me 40 rather than 20 minutes to get to Darrell's place. Aargh!

Have I mentioned that I'm presently reading Lois McMaster Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice, the (chronologically) first Miles Vorkosigan novel? These novels are light on ideas content, but Bujold has a way with a turn of phrase, and writers her protagonist so delightfully. In a way, I guess these books are the direct, more sophisticated descendents of old-time space opera novels. They're lightweight, but not quite fluff.

I'm actually running out of readily-available comics to buy and read (all together now: "Too much disposable income!"), so I'm planning to cut down on the comics reading and go back to the SF reading.

On the other hand, the new Batman season has started on Kids WB...

Michael Rawdon (Contact)