The Cat's Nuts

It’s over the hump day, so that’s pretty damn nice. It’s 4:15 on over the hump day, and that’s even nicer. The douche bag from the client side STILL hasn’t gotten me the damn information that I need to do my job, that isn’t nice. I’m so frustrated, I don’t know what to do. All the reporting testing that I’ve been doing is not worth crap because three quarters of it doesn’t even give me the correct answer… Oh well. My project manager knows whats up, so there’s not really much for me to do.

Tonight they are having a brewery tour at Sweetwater brewery, and I want to go, but I think that it starts at 5:00, and there's no way for me to get off from work that early... I have to look into it some more, but I just don't think that it'll happen. I may just end up going out to dinner like I always do.

I don't really have much to say, seeing as how I don't do a whole lot with my days when I am traveling. Oh, I stared up my photo challenge to myself. I'm planning on taking a different self portrait of myself every day for a year. I'm two days in... so wish me luck. All those pictures can be found on my Flickr page if anyone is interested.

Anyway... back to work.

Posted by Michael at 04:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Brad, I expect that you will master this feat before I come down there again....

Posted by Michael at 07:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nice little vindication of my efforts at work today. I am supposed to be doing some data validation on these reports that were created. For the past week, I have been asking one of the report developers at the client to send me a list of what the data sources are for the data that is in the reports. I haven’t gotten a reply and he doesn’t pick of the phone. It is getting to the point that I am falling behind in my work because of it. So my boss who has been working on this project for awhile, came over to see if he could figure it out with me. We worked through it for 20 minutes and were unable to figure it out. Whew… Now he’s going to go and escalate the request. It’s good to see that my request for escalation was actually necessary.

I over slept this morning… didn’t go and work out. What a lazy bum I am. Today, if everything goes well, I hope to be out of here around 5:45 so that I can go running outside. It’s simply beautiful down here in Atlanta. Not really a luxury that I have in New York. Somehow, with this latest delay, I’m thinking that I may not get out of here until 8:00. It sucks that I can’t just take this work back to the hotel with me because I need to be hooked into the client’s network. Oh well.

I think that it’s about time that I kick up my blogging a bit more. I’ve been pretty lax with is in the past month, but now that I’m in a groove at work, I should have some more time. I mean hell, what else do I have to do? Sit in the hotel and watch Lifetime movies? I think not.

In addition to blogging more, I am also committed to taking more pictures. I purchased a little Sony camera that I'm going to be toting around with me where ever I go, so that should at least lead me to taking a few more stray photos, which is always a good thing.

Posted by Michael at 09:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So... you get back from working out and are just totally starving. You know there is a Thai place across the way, so you decide...what the hell, I'm going to get some pad thai. So you walk over there, order, wait for it, get it, walk back, get into your room, open it up, take a bite, and then realize that you just finished working out and you are totally thirsty.

On your way to the sink you put the Pad Thai down on the dresser, and get up. That's when it happens. The Pad Thai goes crashing to the semi-clean hotel carpet. What do you do? Do you suck it up and claim the 5 second rule? Or do you go all the way back out and get some more dinner, tossing away the now soiled Pad Thai, knowing that there may be some random dude's pubic hairs embeded into the sticky surface of your noodles?

I know what I did. What would you do?

Posted by Michael at 09:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I got back from Baton Rouge on Thursday night, and damn is it good to be home. I've been on the run with work and "vacation" for two weeks, and I really needed to just get home and chill out. Friday afternoon, Allison came up to visit for the weekend. The weekend is now over, and by the look of the NorEaster that is heading into the area, I have a feeling that I won't be making my early morning flight to Atlanta. Just have to love the NorthEast winters.

This weekend was a pretty nice one. I mean, it wasn't the greatest time ever, but I had a nice time hanging out with Allison. Last night, we ened up going out with Ryan and Kelly... now, I had forgotten how much I dispise Kelly. When it comes down to it, Kelly is not able to go out for a night without causing drama. Last night she got pissy at Ryan for no reason, and inevitably made everyone else's night suck. So Allison and I said fuck it and just packed up our stuff. I just couldn't stand to be around people our age that just behave like highschoolers. I'm just sickening to think that one of my friends deals with that on a regular basis. Ugh..

Joe stopped over today around noon. We hung out for a bit, and eventually got to working on a paper that he's got due for school. I helped him out with it, but I forced him to write the majority of it. I helped out with the conclusion and such, but I felt that it's necessary for him to gain the writing skills.... As things go further, I've gotta step away more. In the midst of our writing session, I started to talk to him about his finances and what he needs to do to put himself in a better financial situation. Currently he's just got a lot of debt and little income and he's getting totally stressed about his job. We talked for about an hour about all the ways that he could put himself in a better financial situation. I think that I was able to get through to him about it, so we're going to sit down tomorrow and talk about it some more, which was at his request, so even better. Hopefully he'll be able to make some good moves and put himself into a better spot.

Last week, I was at Mardi Gras. Now, for all those saying like "what happens in Vegas (or New Orleans for that matter) stays in Vegas..." I can happily say that I don't have any need to preface any stories with that phrase. Brad and I, while consuming a healthy portion of beer, we remained in control for the entirety of the trip. Other than me getting pissed at Brad for sleeping until late into the morning on Fat Tuesday, the trip was good and enjoyable. I ended up purchasing a camera while I was down there, so I'm sure as time goes on, I'll be posting videos, seeing as how my camera has that functionality.

Anyway... My fingers are cold from sitting up in my room. I think it's about time that I head downstairs.

Posted by Michael at 05:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today, when Brad was taking a shower, Dana was going to take his car and go to work. Well... she didn't quite make it there at first.

Silly female drivers :)

Posted by Michael at 07:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just arrived in Baton Rouge after 24 hours of hellish traveling. I got into my parents house last night around Midnight, and after having some dinner and packing my stuff, I finally went to bed around 1:00am. As if that weren't bad enough because I had been up at 6 yesterday, but in order to get to the airport to catch my 9:00am flight I had to be up at 4:30...needless to say, I am a little tired.

Its going to be good to see Brad, shoot the shit and just hang out for a few days. We are eventually going to make it down to Mardi Gras, but I think we are going to hang out in Baton Rouge for the first two days or so.

I am currently in the air over Louisiana and its just amazing how much infrastructure there is for oil production, and what's more amazing is how many of the huge tanks are open and empty, just rusting away. I was just reading an Article in Wired about how they are starting to use the old dried up off-shore oil wells as base stations for wind turbines. Apparently, there are thousands of them, and they serve no use, so its a win-win situation.

Anyway, we just landed, so I have to get off the plane now.

Posted by Michael at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Once again, I have suffered the wrath of the Airport Gods. I purposely scheduled a 5:00 flight home so that I would arrive Westtown in enough time to pack and get a decent number of hours of sleep before I had to get up and drive down to LaGuardia for my flight to Baton Rouge tomorrow. When I got to the airport, I quickly found that my flight was delayed…badly. My 5:00 flight was now an 8:30 flight… which would bring my into Philly around 10:30, and who knows what time I would get to NY. Luckily, I was able to get on an 8:00 flight that goes straight to Newburgh, so that was a little bit of luck there.

So yesterday was Valentine’s Day, and I got to hang out alone. It was rather depressing, but I was in remarkably good spirits not withstanding. After a grueling day driving 2.5 hours out to Birmingham Alabama and back (for work), I quickly stopped into my hotel room and bolted out to Taco Mac, a great little (actually it’s huge) beer bar near the hotel. I was sitting there, drinking my beers, minding my own business, when the guy next to me struck up a conversation. For anyone that knows my father, you’ll know that he can strike up a conversation with anyone anywhere… it’s just a gift that he has. It was actually fairly embarrassing growing up when he would start talking with random strangers, but anyway… I didn’t get that gift, so usually, when I am alone, I stay alone, but that was not the case last night.

The conversation opened up with a modest conversation about the college basketball games that were going on, and quickly, after I mentioned my disdain for basketball, morphed into a in depth discussion of the coach changes in Miami (Dolphins NFL Team) and how that was going to effect their QB and RB situation. He happened to be a huge Miami fan, so that was nice considering how there aren’t very many of them in NYC. After we exhausted that, I don’t really know how we were able to do it, but we moved our discussion to President Bush, how terrible he was, and the “War on Terror”. After taking my terrorism class at Columbia during my last semester, I have felt that I have a pretty good idea about the motivating factors that play a role in the Islamic Extremist mindset, and how that is played out in the political arena of the United States….well, this guy, not only was he also familiar, dude knew more names of terrorists and Islamic leaders than I could shake a stick at. One thing that caught my off guard was his distaste for Baptists… at one point we were talking about how in 10 years or less, terrorists will probably launch a nuclear attack, and I agreed, and said that our best way to combat that was to improve out boarder controls and security screen processes… and he says to me “Would you trust a Baptists with a nuclear weapon?! No! It’s just like that… you wouldn’t trust a Muslim with one either!” I didn’t really know what he meant by that, but I attempted to stand up for Islam, but it was no use. Overall, he believed that if the US were ever attacked with a nuclear weapon, then it was our obligation to slaughter every Muslim in the world…. I didn’t really know what to say to that, so I just switched the topic… Other than his wacky extreme view on Islamic genocide, it was a good conversation.

Today was the end of the second week of working in Atlanta, and things are going pretty well. My project manager is a really cool guy, and just happens to drive a 2002 BMW M3, which is just a beautiful blue color… ugh. Needless to say, he and I shoot the shit about cars and driving fairly often, so that’s good. Today I had to do some data verification on these reports that we built. In order to do so, I had to check the data in the reports against the data in the database, using SQL queries… unfortunately, my SQL skills are a little sub par and it was an exercise in futility. Eventually I loaded our database up in Access and was able to build the pseudo queries through there, but it was a little frustrating to not be able to solve the issues that I was having. It’s times like that that I wonder if I am in the right profession. I mean, there is just so much to learn and so much to get used to. It’s just overwhelming at times. Then, I think back to how much I HAVE learned and how far I’ve already come in the 8 months that I have been working there, and it’s reassuring that in time, I’ll be more comfortable with things. It’s reassuring to say the least.

Anyway, I don’t have much else to say, so I’ll end it here. Wish me luck during the next 24 hours of travel hell. Ugh…

Posted by Michael at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

More than once, I have typed out an entire blog entry and then at the accidental keystroke, the browser goes back a page, or gets closed on accident, and bam, all my writing for the day goes away. Now, seeing as how there is so much wit and comedic genious that pours into the heart and soul of every sentence that I write, by the time I get to the end of a post, I am usually spent, and must retire to my room for a small cat nap. To combat this every present danger, I have devised a masterful strategy….Microsoft Word. Yes, I usually type my blog into Word and then copy and paste it into the MovableType configuration panel. Well, sometimes, when I am lazy, like two days ago, I don’t bother, and I just hope for the best. Well, the best didn’t happen and sure enough, I lost a huge ass entry. Ugh. I didn’t have the will to write it all out, so I’ll give you a breif rundown.

Last Friday I went down to the city to see Laura, and we had a nice time. Got some food, went to the bar, hung out, had some conversation and generally had a nice time of it. NYC parking garages are terrible terrilble places. I had my car parked in one, and when I came back to get the car, it was parked right near the exit. I was glad that it was right there and not burried in the lot. So I pay my outragous overnight parking fee of $28 and the guy proceedes to explain to me that he “can’t find my keys.” He walks over to my car and squeezes into the space between my car and a beautiful blue Lexus that was parked next to it. He swings open my door, smashing it into the Lexus. I just swung my head to look at Laura, jaw splayed open in disbelief… “Did you just fucking see that?” “Yep”

After the guy realizes that the keys weren’t in the car, he went into the lost and found drawer and finally found a then. Irritated, I got in my car and eventually made it home. Later on that weekend, I ended up washing my car when the temperature allowed for it, and sure enough, all along the side of the car were little dings of paint from all the other cars that had hit me. Now… I know what you are thinking…those had to be there already…and I have to agree with you, that they may have been there, but not as bad as they are. Hopefully, when spring rolls around and I take the time to detail my car, polish it, buff it all up, and wax it, all those little things will go away. I figure it’ll take a whole weekend day to get the car looking nice, but hell, why not?

Yesterday I flew back down to Atlanta, and will be here until Thursday. At that time, I’m going to be going back up to NY for the night, and then flying down to Louisiana. I’m pretty stoked about the trip. I have to talk to Brad about it some more and actually find out when I am going to be there and such, but I’m really looking forward to it. My Mother of course gave me the “you better be careful…” and I plan on it, so that was a moot point. Anyway, the countdown begins.

This Wednesday, my team and I are going to be driving out to Birmingham, Alabama for a meeting with the IT folks. That drive out there is a whopping 2 hours each way, so that is going to be a little bit of a pain, but I’ll deal. Once again I was given a fairly nice rental car. This time I got a Dodge Magnum. It’s a quick little car, and the most insane part about it was that when I got into it, the odometer read : “4”. Yeah, the thing was brand new. Makes me feel guilty about hard accelerations and quick braking, but that’s okay, I’m not all that concerned, I mean after all, the car is going to have a hard life as a rental, might as well get used to it . Yes, I am aware that that’s fucked up logic, but whatever. Anyway, it’s about time that I head into work. I’ll probably end up sitting around the lobby waiting for my boss to sign me in, but that’s okay. Not like I have much better things to do in my hotel room.

Posted by Michael at 07:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So the week is about over and things are going fairly well. Work is progressing along, Atlanta has some pretty decent weather and I have gone an entire week without spending a dime, which is always nice. I finally paid Laura for all the various things that we split in the apartment and paid off what was left of the huge loan that she gave to me awhile back, so again…more good stuff. Now I just need to get my taxes in, collect my work bonus and use this next paycheck that I get to pay off the little bit of credit card debt that I have and I’ll be all set.

For my rental car this week, I was once again given a Dodge Charger. Every time I get the keys to it, I think that it’s going to be an awesome experience, and every time, I’m a little disappointed. I mean damn.. it has around 250hp, you would think the thing can move…then you realize that you are practically driving your grandfather’s huge ass Buick. No get up and go…nothing. Now….were it the SRT, with their sweet ass Hemi V8… now that would be pushing around 425hp… I think that might be a bit more fun. Oh well, it’s still fun to drive something so different than my little RSX.

Something that I have realized in the past few months, is that my blog has gotten away from being commentary on my life and the things that I see and has moved more into a step by step description of my life. I don’t really know how I feel about it. On one hand, it’s nice to have a journalesqe view of my life so I can go back and reflect on things, but on the other hand, I don’t think it’s all that interesting for anyone to read other than myself and my close friends, and even for them, it can’t be all that interesting. Am I making a pact with myself to write more interesting content? Nope. Honestly I don’t care. I’ve given up on trying to gain readership and blog followers. I write my blog all by myself and write it all for myself, so why the hell should I try to write political and social commentary when I will have no interest in reading that in the future? Good point, eh?

Speaking of writing about worthless shit, I’m happy to now find out that on Monday mornings and Thursday evenings, there are direct flights from Stewart Airport to Atlanta, which will make my commuting much more pleasant. Although I have to wait until around 8:00pm to catch my flight out, it’s not that big of a deal, but it would be nice if it were around 6:00 so that I could jet out of work (no pun intended) a little earlier. Oh well, it’s probably a good thing that I don’t have that, keeps me honest.

This weekend, in liu of being there for Valentines day, I promised Laura that I would come into the city to hang out for a day or two. I think that I’m going to go down there on Friday evening, hang out on Saturday during the day and go home in the early evening. Want to make sure that I get a few good nights of sleep, because the damn hotel bed has been less than comfortable. I have been having bad dreams and waking up scared that the alarm isn’t going to wake me up. Not to mention that, weather permitting, I’d like to go for a bike ride.

Last weekend I ended up going for a 20 mile bike ride. It was a pretty good ride, nothing special, but DAMN was it cold. When it’s like 20 degrees out, and you are huffing and puffing your way all around the countryside, you don’t realize how thirsty you are, but then, on your last hill it hits you and you just can’t make it. Yes, that happen to me. I felt like a total douch walking my bike up a hill on the road. I felt like I was 10 years old again. Oh well. I’ll be a little more prepared this time I think. At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Anyway, it’s around noon, and I think that it’s about time I go and get some lunch. I think that I’m going to treat myself to a nice lunch today, and skimp out on dinner, seeing as how I’ll be sitting in the Atlanta airport anyway.

Posted by Michael at 11:56 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

So I have finally arrived in Hot-lanta...which will be known as Atlanta from now on....for the first of 5 weeks of a business trip. I'm staying in a hotel in the Buckhead section of town, which from what I gather is one of the nicest and expensive areas to live. On my way to the office in the morning, I drive down this road that has "executive" homes for sale. Needless to say, they are fucking huge and set in beautiful wooded lots. Tonight, I am going to go out to a beer bar that's 10 miles or so from the hotel. It sucks that I am going to drink AND have to be the designated driver... oh well. I'll keep it to three with dinner and I'll be good to go.

On the 16th, I'm going to be flying down to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. I'm pretty excited about it. I'm acutally going to visit with Brad who lives in Baton Rouge, but we're going to hit up N'Orleans for a few nights. I'm going to keep myself in check, but I'm sure that we'll have a good time no matter what. Hell, it'll be Brad and I hanging out, when is that not a good time?

Speaking of Brad and I hanging out, we just started talking about it, but I think that we're going to plan a late summer trip over to Europe. I have no idea where we are going to go, but I think that we're going to attempt to see some of the Eastern European countries. I hear that Prague is nice. We're going to plan a bit more of that when I go down to visit. Exciting times.

Tomorrow I am going to be going out to dinner with two co-workers that are in the Atlanta office, so that'll be nice to get out and see the town. Additionally, I spoke to Jason, a co-worker that lives here in Atlanta, and told him that in a few weeks I was going to have to stay for a weekend, and he offered to give a tour of the city, or at least the nightlife around his place. That'll be nice to see the area.

Anyway, it's 5:45ish, and I think that I'm safe to head out for the day. I've been working my butt off at work, and I have another two weeks of lots of work to go, so I think it's about time I head out and go workout at the hotel, then head over to the beer bar.

Posted by Michael at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Monday night, I was talking to my brother about when he was planning on moving his stuff from his place outside of Boston, over to Brighton, inside Boston. He explained to me that he was going to be moving all day Wednesday. I, thinking of the Extreme Beer Festival that was being held on the 8th (me thinking that it was this weekend) agreed to come up on Wednesday and stay through until Saturday night for the beer festival. Little did I realize that the beer fest is NEXT weekend. Ugh. What a moron. I guess that'll teach me to recognize the date and plan accordingly. Oh well. No harm done, I did help out my brother moving and with the setup of his room, so I suppose that's a good thing.

Tomorrow, Friday, the guys that Scott now lives with are throwing a party at their house. They are planning the usual stuff, like getting a keg, so I suspect that there are going to be quite a few people in the house. Should be interesting if nothing else. Thus far this week, Scott and I haven't really done anything other than just hang out, bike to his shop and take some pictures, but hopefully tonight will reverse that trend and we'll have a good time.

Work has been as expected. Not a whole lot going on. I spoke to the project manager from the project that I'm going to be starting next week, and told him that I was optimistic about what was going to happen down there in the coming weeks. Apparently, he was led to believe that over the past year, there weren't any documents that went with the database that we're going to be working on, but that's a total farse. As soon as he told the client that they had a Business Intelligence resource that was going to be coming down to work on documentation, all sorts of things started flowing out of their IT department. Kind of funny, kind of irritating. I guess people will do what they have to do to protect their jobs.

Last night there was a spinning class that was being held at Scott's bike store right off of Commonwealth Ave in Boston. I was asked to go and take some pictures of the group and of the store in hopes that we can get some good images for their website. Hopefully I'll be able to salvage a few that I think are crap and that I'll be able to get a few more good ones today.

other than that, things are pretty quiet around here, so I'm going to go and play a little playstation and relax.

Posted by Michael at 11:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)