Dallas, 11:55 PM: If I ever felt like people didn’t want to talk to be and I wasn’t one of the popular people at UTD, today obliterated that image. In fact, I became so popular, people were lining up to talk to me. I think I now also know why people say that popularity isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be because I was interviewing people non-stop for 5.5 hours. During a 4 hour career expo. You do the math.
Tomorrow my day starts late but also ends late. I’m eating lunch with Monica (my ex-game professor) around noon, and then I have a meeting with Dr. Page, a presentation to a class, and then two general information presentations open to anyone (the first for grad students, the second for undergrads). Luckily it won’t be 5.5 hours of non-stop talking though, so my throat should feel a whole lot better at the end of the day tomorrow than it does right now.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 11:38 PM: So I have this great category system, right? A system where I can mark posts as being made while on “trips”, and then it’s really easy to pull up all of said posts. Well, if I don’t actually mark them, then that whole system becomes fairly useless. That happened once with my postings from two weekends ago as well as last night (both fixed now, so don’t bother searching for what I’m talking about). Considering I’ve never run into that issue before, I think it must just be a Dallas thing screwing with my mind.
Everything today went fine (although Rondell got to experience not knowing what streets to avoid in rush hour traffic just like I’ve been dealing with in Seattle), and tomorrow I don’t need to be a UTD until 10:30. The career fair runs from 11-3, and then Rondell and I have one mini-presentation to give in a class at 5:30. So, while a full day, it should have enough breaks and everything in it to not make it feel so tedious.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Dallas, 1:25 AM (9/29): I meant to post before I left Seattle today in case my flight was delayed (which given my track record was almost inevitable), but I thankfully didn’t need it. The one oddity to today was that I basically spent exactly 8 hours between when I left my apartment and walking into my house tonight, but only about 3:20 of that was actual flight time. Strange, but as long as I’m here and able to post without breaking my streak, I guess it isn’t that big of a problem.
Tomorrow my plan is to go see Mr. McDonald and then go bother people at HP up until I have to be at SMU. The thing officially starts at 6:00, so my plan is to get there around 5:30 or so to make sure I can park and find the right building. Andrew has this part much easier since he doesn’t have to reference a map in order to make sure that he’s walking into the correct building.
Dallas, Personal - Seattle
Last night I watched Mission Impossible 3 for (I think) only the second time since I got the DVD, and tonight I’m going to turn on Prince Caspian which is in a very similar boat. Unless a movie is one of my favorites it just doesn’t get watched that much, so having everything available at the touch of a remote control makes watching these lesser viewed movies that much easier. It also makes my collection much easier to browse and look through in order to find these lesser watched movies rather than going through stacks and stacks of DVDs.
Tomorrow I’ll be going into work at my normal time and then leaving directly after a 1:00 meeting. On the calendar it says it should go from 1:00-2:00, but I wouldn’t be that surprised to see it over at 1:30 or so. What little I have to “pack” is all laid out so that I can see everything and be sure not to forget anything important, but in reality, I have to take absolutely nothing with me. Compared to these Dallas trips, going to Vegas over Thanksgiving is going to require an insane amount of stuff to be taken with me.
Personal - Seattle
The reviews on Surrogates could have been worse, and likewise, I could have enjoyed it more. However, the inverse relationship definitely continues as far as my enjoyment goes. The main thing that I felt held the movie back was pacing, especially at the beginning. The movie was one of those that was sort of aiming for a “message” mixed in with the action, but unfortunately the balance just wasn’t quite right. It sits right on the edge of my DVD purchasing line right now, but I’ll likely just leave it in the rent column. My score: 7/10.
I have less than 48 hours until I’ll be on a plane again, so I’ll probably do what little packing I need to do sometime tomorrow. Basically, we’re just talking about a few Microsoft related shirts, as I have all the other clothes I need down in Dallas. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say it was like I’ve been living out of two places this month…
Personal - Seattle
With quite a bit of free time this weekend, I was debating which game to tackle as a complement to Aion (since we all know I probably wouldn’t only be playing it). I started playing through the Tools of Destruction a couple weeks ago, but the more I thought about it (and looked at my massive amount of unplayed games), I decided that I really should start something new rather than replaying an old one. Therefore, I started Assassin’s Creed on the 360, and I have to admit, I didn’t completely understand the whole backstory of the game before playing it. I wasn’t really aware of the futuristic component to it, so it’s just a very interesting premise on top of the more prevalent story.
Tomorrow I’ll probably go to my close movie theater to see Surrogates since Andrew gave a thumbs down to The Informant. Honestly, I probably wouldn’t have gone to see the latter tomorrow anyway, but his feedback will push it off of the outer edge of my radar until it at least becomes a rental. Surrogates only has a 39% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, so according to my algorithm, there’s a higher than average chance I’ll walk out having liked it.
Personal - Seattle
Netbooks seem to be falling more and more in line with my desired performance:price ratio now that Ion ones are starting to appear (like the new HP Mini 311, even if it is a little larger than I was initally looking at). Unfortunately the Atom chips being used still suck at decoding HD Flash video, so I have to balance my desire of possibly waiting for more powerful CPUs to come along at the same price point (and likely with lower battery life) in order to pass up watching Hulu and other internet streaming video. Adobe could make the problem go away by just fixing Flash, but since that isn’t bound to happen anytime soon, I really just need to focus on what I’d be using it for. Realistically, that downside probably wouldn’t affect me all that much.
Rondell asked me to make up a 15-20 minute presentation to be a part of a couple larger presentations that we’re doing next Thursday, so I know how my free time will be spent tomorrow and Monday. This is actually a very good thing since otherwise I’d probably be resorting to activities of no productivity value at all. Knowing about this yesterday would have been nice so that I wouldn’t have been so bored for the first part of the week, but hey, I’ll take anything I can get at this point.
Personal - Seattle
Even though I might only be at level 8 in Aion, it’s pretty safe for me to say that at least for the near future, I can see myself being entertained by the game. In two more levels I finally get out of the starting zone and advance out into the “real” part of the game (including all of the new mechanics that come with that), so we’ll see if that transition is a positive or negative thing for me. Ideally, of course, I love the additions and fall madly in love with the game until the next WoW expansion hits. Realistically, I’ll probably get bored of it in a month or two and switch back over to WoW for a little while (or the draw of WoW will be too tempting to resist, but the net effect is the same).
One item I need to look into purchasing is a nice set of noise canceling headphones. My Zune earbuds actually work decently because they go down in the ear canal and have a rubber part that expands to block out quite a bit of outside noise, but I think something more “real”, especially for use beyond listening to music, is in order for all of my flights. I actually get to go almost a full two months without being on a plane between my trip next week and Thanksgiving; the next time that will come around will be early March and totally dependent on what (and when) we do for a “spring break” trip.
Personal - Seattle
While my trip to Dallas this past weekend might have been a surprise that I’ve had planned since the beginning of August, I actually have another trip back to Dallas for almost all of next week. It too was secret up until yesterday morning, but I wasn’t going to try to pull two surprise trips in a two week span on my mom. She didn’t exactly believe me at first when I said I would see her again in a week, but considering how much fabrication had to be done in order to pull the first trip off, that’s somewhat understandable.
My next trip is actually one for recruiting purposes at UTD, just like it was said that I’d be involved with around the time I was hired. UTD’s career fair is next Wednesday, so Microsoft is going to have a booth set up there as well as doing some presentations on Thursday night. Since the trip plan would be to fly in Tuesday and fly out Friday, I just expanded that to be Monday night until Sunday since it wouldn’t mean missing any additional work. I may not get to have a rental car for the full time, but both of my parents have already said that I can use theirs for whatever I need. That will be extremely helpful since I plan on going down to visit Jess and Crayton at Baylor on Saturday since I’ll have no other plans to speak of.
Personal - Seattle
Considering my body pretty much thinks it’s midnight right now and I woke up at 5:00 this morning, I’m not going to try to stay up and watch Castle tonight. Shocking, I know, but I should be able to find the time at some point during the day tomorrow to catch up. If not, I always have tomorrow evening since I don’t think anything TV worthy is on.
Back to my original point, I’m going to sleep early tonight in order to hopefully catch up on some of my missed sleep from last night. I think I maybe got 30 minutes or so on the plane trip, but if it weren’t for the magic of caffeine during the day today, I might have found my desk to be quite a comfortable pillow. As it turns out, I think my real pillow is much more comfortable.
Personal - Seattle