Tuesday, January 30, 2007

Craigslist and Atari Surgery

I've got another trip coming up this weekend. This time its going to be to Atlanta. Hopefully this time I'll have a chance to do something other than hang out in a computer closet.

My latest interest is buying and selling things on craigslist. You should definitely check it out if you haven't already. Its pretty much a big online garage sale, and I love garage sales! There are pages for most cities of a decent size, and if your town doesn't have one, then you aren't cool. I'll do my best to remember everyone when I'm rich from selling crap to strangers. On another note, check out the personals section. You'll be delighted to see how many really creepy people live in your area.

I've been messing with my atari the last couple of days. One of the controller ports was acting weird, so I've been trying to fix it. I opened it up and have been operating on its insides with a soldering gun. So far I think I've done more damage to it than good, but its a learning experience either way.

Whats even more fun than driving 45 minutes to and from work everyday? If you guessed fight to stay awake while you wait 15 minutes for a really long train to go by in the middle of nowhere, then you were right!

Saturday, January 27, 2007

Jtown

My first business trip turned out to be all work and no play. Not even a single cheese-buying opportunity presented itself. Although I didn't get to do much sightseeing, I was able to have dinner my friends Zeke and Angela who just happen to live pretty close by. That was nice, we were good friends in school and I haven't been able to see them much since.

I spent this weekend in Jacksonville, IL. It was nice to be back and see everyone. It is currently pledging season, and I also wanted to see how that was progressing and meet all the new guys. I'm pretty hardcore about Phi Alpha, and I plan to stay involved as much as I can. Unfortunately it seems that I wont be able to attend the designated Alumni Night because of work, so that might've been my only chance to attend any activities.

Friday, January 19, 2007

Wisconsin is Cold


Now I'm on my first business trip, upgrading a server at a Peterbilt dealership in Pewaukee, WI. Since everyone was headed north from Carlinville anyway, they just picked me up at my house in Springfield, which was awesome because I got to sleep a couple more hours. So in case anyone was wondering, it is in fact pretty freakin cold in Wisconsin. I haven't had much free time so far, but I think theres still a good chance I'll have time today or tomorrow to do something fun. I'm staying at a Holiday Inn on the company's dime, and all of my meals are covered. Other than that, though, working on the weekend after working all week is even a little less fun that it sounds.

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Goin' to Wisconsin

Pretty much just boring work stuff has been happening during the last week, so I haven't had a whole lot to write about. Two coworkers and I are driving up to Wisconsin to do an upgrade of a company's servers this weekend. So, that's exciting. This will be my first trip where we actually do something, so I'm hoping I get to learn some cool stuff. I'll be out of town from this Friday till Tuesday or so depending on how things go. My friend Sam's birthday party extravaganza is going to be this weekend, so I am totally going to miss out on all of that. That's kind of a bummer, but there's not too much that I can do about it. On the upside, I have a couple of friends from school that I haven't seen in a while that live near where this job is, so hopefully I will have some free time to hang out with them. So, I will actually have something to write about tomorrow. Until then.

Monday, January 08, 2007

Server Fun

I've been at a my job about a month now, and I'm pretty much settled into the routine. Today we've been messing with a server and trying to get it set up. We try to do as much of the work in house beforehand. Then, when we finally take it to a customer's site, we don't have to mess with it as much. These are the sort of beastly computers with a rack full of hard-drives and I'm sure other amazing stats that you wouldn't normally see. This system in particular has got two RAIDs with a good 20 hard-drives, and the fans on the back of the racks remind me of something that belongs on an aircraft. Its looking like I've got a few trips coming up in the near future. Possibilities include truck dealerships in Michigan, Wisconsin, New York, and Atlanta, Georgia. Several factors decide when we will actually go do something on-site, so things have been getting cancelled and moved around pretty constantly. I'm looking forward to going somewhere a bit more exciting than Collinsville, and it looks like that is going to happen one way or another sometime soon. As you can you see from the picture, the dress code at the office is very casual. When we are on-site though, we have to get all purdy.

I just picked up a copy of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. I saw it in a bookstore during one of my lunchtime wanderings around Carlinville. I've heard it talked about maybe a million times, so I figured its about time I actually sit down and read it. It really bothers me when I hear references that I don't understand, so this will end all of that. I've read that it and the Bible are the most commonly misunderstood books written, so we'll see how it goes.

Oh I just got my new business cards too. Nothing says professional like a card with my name printed on it. If you're really lucky I may just give you one.

Thursday, January 04, 2007

First Trip

Yesterday was an exciting day of work. I got to go on my first trip to a truck dealership. I had to get up at like 5 o'clock yesterday, but it wasn't so bad. The dealerships that we serve are located all over North and South America, but this particular dealer's main branch just happened to be in Collinsville, IL. So I got to drive a van down there and check things out. This was just a preliminary trip, so we didn't actually make any changes or do any work over there yet. They are a new customer, so we pretty much just went to talk to them about what we were going to do when we returned, and make sure that they were going to have everything ready for us. It was a really good trip even though it wasn't anywhere cool, though. I was really happy to finally see one of the places that our customers are located, it helped to tie everything that I've been doing so far together.

Monday, January 01, 2007

New Years

So I ended up skipping out on the Chicago New Years party scene. I felt bad for ditching the gang but I just didn't feel like it was for me. I ended up going to hang out with my friend Seago in St. Louis instead. We went to a party hosted by an old friend of his. It was an interesting time. For some reason there was like a four year old kid running around at this party. Funny thing was I think I was way more entertained by his antics than by anything else. Maybe he was just there to entertain the guests. Seago also seems to have discovered the best whiskey on the earth. It's called Drambuie. Apparently it classifies as a liqueur, which makes sense because it pretty much tastes like candy. A bit pricey, though, so I doubt I'll be putting it on tap anytime soon.