Made it!

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At about 1:30 am Manila time I finally made it into the hotel, which means that I traveled for nearly exactly 24 hours to make it here.  Exhausting!  It was interesting at the main Manila airport (Where the service goes the extra SMILE!) where it was line after line that seemed fairly pointless.  Medical, then immigration, then finally customs.  Before customs I waited a good ten minutes to turn $40 int a solid 1860 Pesos, of which my taxi ride from the airport (another 1o minute line) cost 240.  Arriving at the airport, they insisted on calling Kristin’s room to make sure she was really expecting me, gave me a key and I had finally arrived.  Whew!  Too bad the key they gave me broke Kristin’s keys, but I suppose it couldn’t be perfect.  It is awesome to be with Kristin again!  🙂

On the plane I was super annoyed with an older lady who took my Window seat.  She practically refused to move, finally saying “well, I don’t want to be sandwiched between two men!”   I just kept reiterating that she was in my seat.  As a stewardess came over to see what was up just as I said, “fine.”  She asked me if I was sure that was OK, I just nodded and sat down, not wanting to push it anymore.  The lady got the patented MN passive aggressive treatment from then on as I pretended she wasn’t there.  But when I looked at her, sleeping with her head against the bulkhead, which was the only reason I had wanted a window seat, I knew she had come out ahead.  Sigh.  I didn’t even get out the noise canceling earphones, which actually served as awesome earplugs on the first leg.  I read a little, watched the movie without sound (its amazing how much more of the set details and acting you can absorb that way) and mentally willed the time to go faster.  It felt as long as the first flight.

I think it is time to go wander around having successfully retrieved three roles of toilet paper which they are unexpectedly stingy with in a $110 a night hotel.  Called the front desk and talked to two different maids in the hallway and put that in the stash.  I have the “please clean our room” tag out, so hopefully we’ll get at least one more as I have stashed the rest away 🙂

–Nat

Trip to Manila, flight leg #1

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It’s hard to believe that I left at ~10 am and showed up here about 15 hours later with about 12 hours of flight time.  I must have fallen asleep everytime they got ready to trundle out the drink cart, because I got one diet coke on the entire flight.  I managed to get all three meals, though but I would have been way better off missing one of them and getting a couple more diet sodas.  Thanks to Dan for showing me the empty waterbottle trick  (bring empty waterbottles and fill them at the drinking fountains post security checkpoint) when we went to Dugway, it would have been much more irritating had I not had my own bottled water to fall back on.

I had the great fortune of having a window seat and an adjacent empty seat.  Since the 747 configuration featured 3 seats in the outside rows, that meant the lady on the aisle and myself shared the middle seat as a place to store our stuff.  I was quick to steal the extra mini-pillow, too, and I think I probably slept about four hours during the flight.  Strangely, the first movie shown was “The Time Travelers Wife.”  This was strange because I was listening to the audio book at the same time.  From what I saw of the movie, you should read the book.  Next up was “Land of Lost” with Will Ferrell – an airplane is a perfect venue for that movie, for sure.  Not good, but mildly amusing and you don’t feel bad if you miss some of it.  I managed to listen to about three more hours of that audio book and read sixty pages of the new Stephen King novel Under the Dome which is starting out well.

Dad, I made sure to choose the beef for the inflight meal.  It at least resembled beef 😉

–Nat

Working Downtown

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Today marks the one week anniversary of starting my new job at Lawson Software in pleasant down town St. Paul.  At some point, I’ll have to write about that in greater detail.  For now, I am reveling in the downtown work experience.

For those unfamiliar where I used to work, the BAE Systems “plant” in Fridley was just that.  It is a massive 2million square foot manufacturing building whose closest neighbor is huge rail yard and the only food within walking distance was the Aramark caf in the building.  At one point, I believe there were more than 10,000 workers at this building and it was considered out of town.  In my time there, the number had dwindled down to something like 1,000, resulting in a ghost-town-like creepy feeling.  No windows were present in the part of the building where I served my tenure.

Anyway, the vibe here is much different.  Downtown St. Paul seems pretty nice with plenty of shops within walking distance.  Where I work, the Lawson Building, is full and bustling with something like five restaurants and a convenience store inside of it.  I am up on the 10th floor and the set of windows near my cube overlooks a park, the St. Paul Library, the Museum, and finally the river.  Today I wanted a quick lunch so that I would have time to walk to the Waldenbooks down the block – I was down to Chipotle and back to my desk in about five minutes.  I was Zune shopping recently and I managed to find a seller in downtown St. Paul so we just met over lunch to do our business which was very convenient.

Is it all wonderful?  Our commute lengthened by about eight miles (worth 10-15 minutes) one way and parking is expensive (~$6.50 per day.)  The parking situation also makes it tough to justify driving anywhere during the day as that would incur more parking fees.  It is hard to meet non-St. Paul colleagues for lunch because of this, and running home over a lunch time is no longer feasible.  We plan on making extensive use of the bus system to reduce the cost but that really hinders our flexibility just that much more.

In the end, I am excited to be downtown.  It feels different because it is different and I think that in the near term it will be much better.

Now to figure out how to pick up a half eaten Chipotle burrito without spilling it all over my desk…

–Nat

Farmer for a day…

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Every once in a great while my Dad calls me up and asks for help.  This weekend was one of those times, I didn’t get there as quick as I should have but I made it for a few hours Saturday and the entire time the COOP was open on Sunday.

My Dad had me come down and haul loads into town, Plainfield in this case. It is one of the easiest, if not most exciting job around.  Basically, it entails:

  1. Driving a tractor and wagons either out to a field or up to a bin to be filled.
  2. Driving them into to town where the whole setup is weighed and the moisture is tested.
  3. Dumping the grain into the COOPs storage.
  4. Getting weighed again and picking up the result slip.
  5. Driving home and doing it all again.

Sounds pretty straight forward.  The trip to Plainfield is only about 5 miles, the catch is that 800 bushels of corn at 56lbs a bushel plus the tractors and wagons weighs a lot.  This limits reasonable speed to about 15mph otherwise the rear wagon starts wandering around – a scary thing given it weighs at least 23,000 lbs.  As you can see from the pictures, once unloaded the tractor can be run with the throttle to the floor in the highest gear – a blazing 20 miles per hour!  It makes the round trip take a little over an hour.

It was a good weekend.

–Nat

Wall Mounting the Dell 23″

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I finally got around to mounting the LCD in the workout area to the wall.  This meant that I could move the center channel speaker back onto the shelf where it belonged, starting the transition away from the current layout that includes the glorious old 21″ Sony Trinitron that I bought in 2003 for the princely sum of ~$562.  Free shipping, of course.  Which was important, give its packaged weight rating of 80lbs.

Anyway, this is my first attempt at a gallery like this WordPress.  I think it turned out pretty good, actually.

–Nat

I’ve been Zuned!

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With the big trip to Manila looming and the lack of a smart phone seriously reducing the level of technology I have been carrying around, I decided to take a peek at Craigslist for either the smaller flash Zunes or an even older 30GB hard drive based model.  I found an ugly yet functional brown 30GB Zune right in downtown St. Paul, I met the guy over lunch and I now have a Zune of my own.  Why a Zune?  Here is my top ten list:

1. It’s not an iPod – no iTunes required.

2. Even the oldest Zunes are feature complete – they keep getting new firmware.  Try that with your iPod.

3.  The Zune Pass.  $15 a month, you get unlimited music from the Zune store PLUS you get to *buy/keep* 10 tracks a month.  You can have this used by up to three Zunes and three PCs simultaneously.

4. Seriously cheap accessories.

5.  It is not an iPod.  I can hook it up to a bunch of different PC’s to sync music to it and evidently from it.  I’ll be testing this out more later.

6. FM + FM tune tagging.  I like listening to the 93x morning show and *if* I get the Zune pass, I like the idea of just snagging a song title on the way into work and having it automatically pull the song down when I get to work.  I’ll be taking the bus to work soon and this should work out nicely.

7.  Pretty big screen for video and a solid amount of storage.

8.  Wireless syncing for leaving it in the car yet having new music put on it.

9.  It was cheap.

10. It comes in Brown.  Best. Idea. Ever.

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

Do you see how well it coordinates with our fall placemats? Priceless!

–Nat

PS:  Not an iPod.  This me showing my nonconformity.   That’s right, by choosing Microsoft.

Deal of the Day

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When I come across a deal I think is good, I am going to start posting it up here…

$30 shipped Cooler Master Case

I almost exclusively use Cooler Master cases now, and while I haven’t used this exact one, I believe I have used this base chassis before.  It works well – and you can’t beat a solid case that comes with two fans for less than $30 with free shipping.  If you have a crappy case or will be doing a new build in the next couple of months, hit this guy up…

–Nat

NATLAN2009.5

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It happened, and I thought it was pretty awesome 🙂

Unfortunately, no pictures were taken.  Doh.

Please leave me some comments if you have any feedback.

Looking at the first weekend of April for the full up NATLAN 2010.  We’ll be looking to get a full 24 people for what is likely to be some great Team Fortress 2 action.  What do you all think about that?  T-shirts and the whole bit 🙂

–Nat

Kindle for PC beta

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Ever wondered about the Amazon Kindle experience?  You’ve likely seen the commercials or see some of the buzz about it online.  It’s the industry leading e-book reader that Amazon debuted about eighteen months ago.  Amazon has just done something really cool to help head off the launch of the Barnes & Noble nook – it is the Kindle for PC beta.

Once you have downloaded and installed the beta, you can shop from the Kindle store and see how that might work if you had a Kindle.  I have to say that I am very impressed – and the amount of free literature is pretty astounding.  There are even newer titles for free, the top 100 seems to be full of them.  I just spent about 10 minutes looking through them and saw some by Patterson and Salvatore that I would like to read – for free.

If the Kindle beta for PC only gets folks to look at the Kindle library, the beta will likely be succesful.  It is hard to spend the time looking unless you have a reason to shop, and going to the Kindle store previously seemed pretty pointless.

Kudos to Amazon for continuing to innovate.

–Nat

Mass Effect = Awesome

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Mass Effect was received with critical acclaim some three years ago or so.  My sister, Liz, gave it to me for Christmas last year.  Knowing that it was an epic title that would take some time to complete I waited until Kristin was gone to start it.  Well, I started the game and played it twice.  The save system that shows that in the two times that I have played it, I have dedicated 16 hours of time.  Most games would already be done, I am maybe a third of the way done.

If you played and enjoyed Knights of the Old Republic, this is your game.  Same game mechanics, huge universe and a great story so far.

It also happens to be $10 on Steam this weekend.  You should pick it up, that way we can commiserate over the time we spent on it 😉

–Nat