Day 1: The Journey Begins

And I'm off. Leg 1 of the DC-London-Desutchland tour. On Southwest Airlines. I'm really not a big fan, but it's not a very crowded flight. I'm going to try to get a lot of sleep here since I didn't last night and this morning. I stayed up pretty late last night. Then I woke up pretty early this morning to pack, get into work early, and build the documentation for 5.1. This took forever since somebody made a really bad decision on a change in PCScript processing that really would have screwed up our existing customers. Only nobody realized this until I got half way through documenting it and thought, hey wait a second, this is going to screw everyone up. So we had to backtrack, figure out how it needed to work, undocument, redocument, and rebuild the documentation. Good thing I came in early, and good thing they told me about this before they went ahead and released 5.1.

Then I had to race home, where Jonathon was waiting to take me to the airport. I just barely got to the airport 25 minutes before my flight, but luckily there were no lines. And the plane's very empty. Right now I'm just glad to have a little down time. Not that I've been working too hard, but there just hasn't been a lot of room for reflection.

It occurred to me that I've spent a lot of time this week talking about Curtis and Ultimate and stuff, but I haven't said anything about other events. Granted, these "other" events were few and far between. I spent a lot of time figuring out (finally) how to transfer some of the video I've been taking to my PC, so that I have blank tapes for the trip. This was a lot harder than it should have been. There are a lot of things I like about Windows Movie Maker, but it sure is buggy. Of course, compared to the other Video Eidting software I have, at least it works. My big problem has to do with sound. When I first tried to transfer things, I saved everything as DV, and from there edited out some stuff and resaved to WMV. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line the sound gets all distorted on about half my tapes. I still haven't figured out why. I think it has something to do with how I record it on the tape (12 bits vs. 16 bits). And I still haven't figured out how to fix it. At least I have three tapes for Europe, though.

And, of course, I spent a lot of time playing with my PDA. I installed all sorts of software and MP3s and stuff. I like it a lot. Had some troubles synchronizing, but only when I throw my laptop into the mix. I get some duplicate contacts and calendar events. I think I've fixed the problem though. I downloaded a lot of ebooks and got maps for Europe. I'm a little disappointed on the GPS stuff. There's this PocketStreets program I bought that has great maps (it shows bus stops and restaurants and post offices and all sorts of things), but is slow to update the GPS and doesn't have any way to program routes or get directions. Then there's the Pharos Mpas, that came with the GPS system. Those give great directions, but are kind of sucky when it comes to the maps (just the streets, and it's hard to navigate them unless you've asked for a route). I'm sure there's a better solution, but I'm done spending money. I'm also a little disappointed with the location of the headphone jack. It intereferes with my GPS unit, so it's going to be impossible to listen to MP3s and use the GPS system at the same time. Other complaints include the 802.11 card not being strong enough to pick up a signal upstairs in my house, and the handwriting recognition not being able to figure out my 'y's and 'x's and '4's (Guess I have to learn to write differently). On the flip side, I'm having fun playing Zelda and other Nintendo games. And, of course, SimCity.

In other news, Katie contacted me earlier this week about doing an internship with Corda. She needs to do one for her class, and she can't find any that are paying, so she's volunteered to do a non-paying internship for us. Which is fine by me, since there's plenty of stuff to do. Like converting all of the screenshots to a better format or building an index. The only down side is it's only for the Spring term, which ends late June.

Finally, there's the Lakers-Spurs series to keep my mind occupied. Chris and I have been watching that. Looks like it's finally the Spurs turn. They destroyed the Lakers on Monday and Wednesday. Was hardly even fun to watch. Well, I take that back. Watching Chris watch the Lakers get devastated is loads of fun. They're playing right now, too. While I'm stuck on a plane. Guess I'll find out the score soon enough.

Update: Chris and Katie and Bryan picked me up from the airport in Baltimore. They were a little late. But the game was still going. Spurs didn't do so hot, and Chris let me know it :(. Got home. Played Chess with Bryan on my PDA (I just love showing off new toys). And now I'm going to sleep at about 2:30 in the morning.

Posted May 09, 2003 (12:21 PM) | Comments (1)