Work and Beer, in that Order

Today I managed to successfully survive my first week of work as Implementations Specialist. I feel like everything is going pretty well and I am learning a lot. The main purpose of my position is to go to a company and install hardware and a particular software called Legend. Legend controls all different aspects of a truck dealership's business, such as printing invoices and keeping track of inventory. It is completely text based, and looks pretty much like old school DOS to someone that doesn't know any better (myself included at the moment). It runs on an operating system called Open VMS, which is pretty interesting I think. Banks, the Paris metro system, and some places in the pentagon use Open VMS because it is incredibly stable. The wikipedia article that I linked to notes that "System up-times of a decade or more have been reported." That is pretty hardcore when you think about how many times a day you might have to restart windows because its being screwy.

Ok, enough with the technical stuff. Today I wandered around downtown Carlinville during my lunch break. They have a pretty typical small town square, with the capitol building or the courthouse or whatever in the center. An interesting difference in this particular town square is how the street is set up. The corners of the inner square are rounded off, so there aren't any stop signs or anything. It is difficult for me to even put into words, but it all amounts to what reminds me of a NASCAR race track.

A friend of mine that works for a Budweiser distributor brought me a new beer from Anheuser-Busch called Red Bridge Sorghum Beer. I don't have any snooty beer expert words to describe its flavor, so I'll just say that it tastes good enough to me. Its main selling point is that it is made from sorghum, while most beers are commonly made from barley or wheat. Apparently there is a condition called Coeliac disease that makes people intolerant of a substance contained in the common beer brewing grains. As a result these people usually drink things other than beer to avoid complications. This is an effort to recapture this small niche market. Pretty cool, but it all sounds mostly like marketing nonsense to me. Well, until next time.