Pre X-mas Celebrations

I’ve been hacking away at my to-do list this weekend. Between getting Christmas stuff ready and doing some things with Jessie, it’s been a full couple of days. Here’s the breakdown.

Friday we went to the Ticom Holiday Awards Banquet. We had a nice time, and I got to dress up all fancy in my suit and everything. Jess looked *beautiful* AND she got to go up go stand with all the people who had received Quality Awards. She got one of those because she’s so great and fantastic. Then there was open-bar silliness and the best thing of all, the photobooths were back in effect this year. They snap four pictures of you, and then print out a couple of copies. We took a bunch, and they all came out very nice. Maybe next time I bump into a scanner I’ll get them up on the internet.

Saturday I did some shopping for some...stuff for...people. And then in the evening, we went out to a hockey game. AHL, not NFL, so something like semi-pro, but we went out with some of the derby/hockey girls so Jess got to see her friends again and we got to watch some *fast* hockey. I had a good time, but I gotta say: I really don’t like sports fans. Cheering whenever someone gets smashed up into the wall, booing at the other team, cheering whenever a fight broke out. The ‘home’ team was from Dallas, and the ‘away’ team was from Houston, so there wasn’t even any good reason to have regional attachment. It all seemed very tribal and vaguely unsettling. Good skating, though.

Sunday was put up lights day. Actually, I had something else to do first. I wanted to vacuum, because eventually I’m going to want to put a baby on these floors and I want them to be clean. So I vacuumed the whole house and even moved the cat litter to a more out-of-the-way location so as to minimize tracking litter around on my feet. After that, Jess decided she wanted to put up Christmas lights on the trees, and I didn’t *have* to help, but if you think I’m letting my pregnant wife climb ladders unassisted, you’re crazy. So we got some lights and wrapped up all the trees in front of our house. We would have done the house itself, but most of the front of our house is either stone, two stories tall, or both. So we’ll stick with the trees, for now.

-N

The Desert, and I’m sick

Spending the last week in the middle of the desert did leave some interesting highlights. It was about a 30 minute drive out away from the last vestiges of civilization known as China Lake. It’s a base of some sort, and they shoot a lot of stuff out there because there is so much ‘nothing’ to hit. We actually went out into the dried out remains of China Lake proper, which put us pretty far away from anything. As such, I got pretty good at bringing all my food and a lot of water with me. Normally I’m not a fan of bottled water, but you have to drag it all the way out there somehow, and you end up going through a lot of it during the course of a 100+ degree day.

For the most part, I spent my time sitting in my car. Which was nice, because it was air conditioned. Primarily for the comfort of the equipment, but I got to tag along. We’d get out there pretty late, and stay even later, so I’m not sure which was more tricky. Setting stuff up in 100 degree weather, or taking it down in total darkness. (Bring a flashlight).

The one good thing about being that far away from civilization is that you can see the stars really well. We lit up our worksite with some work lights, a little, but on the drive up Jess got tired and we switched chairs so I could drive. We were out on some highway. No lights for miles, and I haven’t seen the stars that well in years. The milky way was clearly visible, and I really enjoyed that sense that each of those points of light was a star, and that those that weren’t were probably whole galaxies. Very, very pretty.

The reason we didn’t have more light at our work site, however, is that at night, in the desert, the land comes alive. Mostly with bugs. There were dozens of moths flying around the light, bunches of beetles on the ground, and pointing your flashlight up revealed a squadron of bats divebombing the confused moths. I saw a camel spider (see picture, that's two of them) twice, yes they’re pretty huge, and also a couple of scorpions. Yep, real big ones, too. We also caught glimpses of desert rabbits a couple of times on they way home, too. There’s a surprising amount of life out there. I heard stories about coyotes, but never saw one, luckily.

In other news, I’m sick. I started feeling not so great on friday, which was the day Jess and I came home. Nothing like being achy and sore on a plane, that’s for sure. I survived, though, with the help of the PSP to pass the time . This morning, though, I got it real bad. I woke up with a fever of 101, which hasn’t happened in approximately a really, really long time. (Mom will have to give you exact dates. ) It’s come down a lot since then, but it’ll be a while before I feel like doing any jumping jacks, and the doctors say I may never play the piano again.

Hey, my birthday is coming up. 28 soon. I still feel the same age I always have, though. I’m ‘now’ old. Seems like a good philosophy. Less time spent worrying about age.

Also, many exciting games coming out. I plan to go out and get Mercenaries 2 tomorrow when it drops. And Spore comes out the day after my birthday, which is nice.

Speaking of video games, I should tell you about hanging out with Derek. He’s my best man for the (rapidly) upcoming wedding, and I tried to convince him to let me get him his ‘guy in the wedding’ present early, which I’ll leave out for the sake of any other ‘guys in my wedding party’ that might read this. He declined for the moment, so I’ll have to pick it up for him later. Other than that, we ate some sushi, played a lot of Wii games, and petted the neighbor’s cats. Derek has a balcony that is connected via a little, tiny ledge to his neighbor’s balcony. This means that every once in a while, the neighbor kitties walk over and meow for attention. They are obviously brothers, and one is more aggressive than the other. He reminded me of Tigger, except more social. He really liked petting, and I managed to get massive clumps of hair off him using my patented, ‘butt scratch’ technique. They really seemed to like me, even if the aggressive one did get a little nippy at times. I’ve dealt with Tigger, though, so I know what’s up.

Right, so enjoy that news and I’ll let you know when I get some more.

-N

P.S. Oh, and one other thing. That final test on Thursday? It didn't happen. Whole thing got canceled. We did some other little tests, but nothing big like we were planning. And then on Friday, we flew home.

Travelling for Work again

I'm travelling for work again. I just got out yesterday and counting the time I get to charge for travel, I had a 15.5 hour workday yesterday. Not bad.

The weather's hot, the work is often tedius, and the test shifts only happen at night, so we worked till midnight last night and I get to go back in at noon. At least I get to sleep in a bit, which is nice. Also on the upside, I make a rediculous ammount of money for all the work, the people are pretty nice, and the particular slice of the project I'm in charge in is at least a step up in interest from what I did last time. I'm not totally frustrated with the work, yet, but ask me again in a week and a half when I'm done.

Also, I'm out a little early to learn how to run a system. It seems relatively straightforward, and my predecessor has a pretty thorough tutorial, so that's quite helpfull. I get the weekend off so I'm going to drive down to San Diego to hang out with Derek, and then I get to pick up Jess from her bachelorette weekend back in LA and we both drive up here for next week. So at least Jess will be around. That's a definite improvement.

I may write more later. I've got to go get some breakfast, or lunch, or whatever.

-N

Tubing

Yesterday a bunch of us at Ticom skipped off of work and floated down the river on inner tubes. I'm not sure whose idea it was originally, but word got around that we should all meet up at George's house (he's my boss!) for some breakfast and then go out to the Guadalupe river (pronounced Guad-a-loop here in Texas for some reason), bring a whole lot of beers, and float for about 4 hours.

It was a tube-load of fun. We got to hang out with a bunch of people we work with that we haven't gotten to spend a lot of time with before, and everyone had a really great time. Jess did some butterfly races with fellow swimmers and I ran a beer/watermellon delivery service for a while. One of the most exciting episodes happend when we were all swimming around and a few of our tubes got away from us and got swept down some swift-moving water. Too shallow to swim through, but too deep and fast to walk through, I ended up flopping my way down the river, tubeless, bonking up my shins a little bit, but otherwise doing just fine. We caught up with the tubes, though, and all was well.

After the river, we went to a nearby restaurant to get some food, and then our DDs took us home. Hurrah!

Tonight we're going to the Master Pancake Theatre (think MST3K, but live) presentation of Catwoman, one of the worst movies I have ever seen. It should be hilarious.

Also, I'll be working on another kitten movie today. It may come out later, if you're good.

-N

12 Hours

Good grief. Jess and I had a 12 hour workday today. We spent the entire afternoon and on into evening trying to get some tests run out in the 'field' (read: a high school parking lot). We got three data collections working correctly. No, that's not a lot.

Also, it sounds like I might *finally* be traveling for work next week. This is...news? It's not really good or bad. I'm told it's a relatively unpleasant jaunt, though. Grand.

-N

Where's my love...

He he he, that was fun.

So today at work we did a little thing called 'cat-and-mouse'. Ticom Geomatics, the place where Jess and I work, does geolocation. For those of you not in the defence industry...which should be most of you...geolocation is the science of scanning the airwaves for signals, listening to those signals, and then determing *precisely* where they came from. You don't have to understand the science, really, but Ticom has a bunch of antennas set up in various places around Austin and software that connects all of them. That software listens for various signal types and the does *SCIENCE* on them to tell you where it's coming from. Well I'm part of the algorithm development team (the people in charge of the SCIENCE), but I haven't gotten to see how the actual program runs yet.

Well that all changed today. They sent some people out into the world to pretend to be 'bad guys' and had them talk over walky-talkies. We sat in a room at Ticom and ran the software that does the geolocation.

It was neat. We set everything up and the data started flowing in, and as soon as we started getting hits, we were able to narrow down our search and eventually we tracked down where the 'bad guys' were and send a team (a guy in a car) out after them to attempt to make 'visual contact'. And it worked. We sent him to the right spot.

The really neat thing, though, was that we could listen to what they were saying, and there were a couple of times where a familiar voice came over the airwaves. Yep, Jess was out there spinning out code names and encoded phrases and all sorts of stuff so that we could track her down. I told them if they wanted a really good geolocation, I could just call Jess up and ask her where she was. She also said she used codename 'Bear' a couple of times, her nickname for me.

Overall it was educational and interesting, and lots of fun. Also, Jess is adorable.

-N