One bourbon, one scotch, and one mav

It’s been a while since I updated but today’s events were so outrageous as to require in-depth description beyond what my twitter feed could possibly describe.

Today was the big day that Ryan and I, being the first two to hurriedly jump on the bandwagon, got to go to the Microsoft Heroes Happen Here (or {here}) server 2008 launch event. These events are usually a bunch of silly BS followed up with a minimal amount of free shit. It’s a good excuse to get our employer to pay us for a day of work when instead all we really did was go somewhere and listen to somebody talk up the training material for Server 2008.

(Admittedly, this guy was way funnier than the training material, but we’ll get to that.)

Ryan was feeling pretty shitty (he had his wisdom teeth out last Friday, and that’s a real bitch) so I drove. We took the STi equipped with my new Internet tires (not nearly as noisy, or as bumpy, but it’s the STi, so it’s not like a comfort ride) to Boise. We got to the Boise Centre without event. We went into the building, Ryan went to the reg desk and I went to the can. When I finally got to the reg desk, Ryan said something about us being in the right place because my name was all over. I curiously mumbled “Huh?” and then realized my name was literally all over - on every computer and a few other places, signs that said “The winner of today’s sweepstakes is [mav!]”

Short version: I won an Xbox 360 Elite and some other shit. I don’t know what the games are because when I walked up to the desk & filled out the form I didn’t even know games were on the table. They said it’d be mailed to me but didn’t bother to tell me how long that would take. Hard to complain, really. I don’t know whether I’m gonna keep it or sell it. Anybody interested? Let me know.

We also got a neato Microsoft lunchbox containing snacks - really damn good ones. Contents of mine: one bottle fruit juice, grape; one bottle water; one Hershey bar with almonds; one granola bar; one muffin, cream cheese; one apple; one orange. It was really neato. They also gave us a software package containing a bunch of development shit I couldn’t care less about, a trial version of Server 2008, and a full fuckin’ version of Vista Ultimate. No kidding.

Plus we got to see Hyper-V and watch our presentation guy make some really, really obvious mistakes.

All in all, I’d say it was a damned good day.

Hm.

I don’t think I really give a shit. So fuck it.

but I sure as fuck know what I want to do (play.)

Tarmac is so fucking overrated. It’s all about screaming down muddy tracks at terrifying speeds, pushing that edge between control and chaos just a little further. Poke that bear, guys, if only for the millions of poor bastards like me that desperately wish they could be holding the stick.

Today was our last day of training, and it was a half-day. Got out of there around 12:30 or so. I took the portable DVD player and a few other things over to Kinkos so I could ship them home, as they won’t fit in my bag with all my other shit. I haven’t been in a Kinkos since Fedex bought them, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It ended up being the world’s largest clusterfuck. I wanted them to pack the damn thing for me, so I didn’t have to buy all the packing materials and try and put it together in the trunk of my fucking rental.

It was seriously like watching a bunch of retards try and pound a square peg through a round hole. It was terrifying. I had to wait something like twenty minutes while the doofus manning the counter packed a printer. Yeah, no kidding. Then another lady came over to help me, and I was hoping she might be a little brighter.

Nope.

They were all really nice people, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve never seen so many people work so hard at doing such an assy job. I’ll never go to a Kinkos again. I just hope my shit gets to my house in one place.

After a quick drop by the ol’ hotel I decided I would go down to Dealey Plaza and check out the museum. I fell squarely into the same fucking trap that I fell into when Pat and I went to the Hoover Dam - we figured people would find history boring.

One of these days I’ll figure this shit out.

There were a FUCKLOAD of people there. I walked around the plaza, stood on the grassy knoll, took some pictures of the dedication plaque thingy, tried not to get in anybody else’s photo (which was really amazingly hard) and then went to the museum. They basically turned the entire 6th and 7th floors of the book depository into JFK museum. It’s a pretty cool tour. They have this self-paced audio walkthrough thingy and it’s obvious the people running it put a great deal of work and thought into it.

Still, somehow it weirds me out to think that there are so many people doing things like buying JFK coffee mugs at the 6th Floor museum. Maybe it’s just the anticonsumer in me, but it seems like we should be doing more than putting the man’s face on mugs and posters and shit.

Any rate, I’m off to Twin tomorrow morning and I am really, really, really looking forward to getting home. It was an interesting trip but I’m definitely not cut out for anyplace this ludicrously large. It gets overwhelming pretty quickly.

Today started poorly. The nine-dollar buffet was a fucking colossal mess and the service was horrhendous. When you have to practically beg for silverware so you can eat your meal that’s really, really bad. Don’t ever stay at the Courtyard Las Colinas. It’s less impressive than the Riviera.

I drove by a guy in a blue 04 STi pulling into the Microsoft parking garage. Goddamn do I ever miss my car. The first thing I’m going to do when I get home is drive around the block a few times.

Training today was pretty cool. We’ve been stepping through this bigass lab a little bit at a time, taking a (virtualized) network of 30 or so systems segregated into different sites and upgrading Exchange to 2007 on it. We set up mailbox clusters today, which was pretty neat.

The more I talk to these guys in my class, the more I know I need to find the right job, and it sure as hell isn’t in mainstream IT. I just don’t have the wherewithal for it. Long hours, idiotic administrators, poor wages, weeks or months of travel to remote sites for a company you couldn’t give a shit about and who couldn’t give a shit about you. It’s bothersome. I need to find a small(ish) company that I can give a damn about and that can give a damn about me and work for them. It’s also quite clear to me that there’s no chance my current employer will ever assist me in pursuing what I actually want to do. They aren’t wired to do it. It’s understandable, as it’s not in their best interest for me to get Linux training. It doesn’t directly benefit their customers. Or at least, not from a manager’s point of view, so it won’t happen. I’d be phenomenally surprised if they would even reimburse me for the RHCE. Still, this training makes me want to get it more now than ever, and I’m going to start on it when I get home. I doubt I’ll get it on my first try, but it can’t hurt to at least try it.

Oh, and one of the dipshits in my class decided to come to class with a cold. I started taking Airborne immediately after class on Monday but even the magic fizzy shit couldn’t help me. I now have a cold. Since it’ll probably be getting really bad right about the time I’m going home I would imagine the trip home will be peaceful and uneventful. Or excruciating. Probably the last thing. Thanks, dickface.

The highlight of my day was being taken over to the Microsoft store. The Company Store has quite a rep among nerdkind, and if I had been in Redmond it is likely that it would have lived up to it. But I’m not, and it didn’t. I was hoping to pick up some t-shirts and whatnot for the crew back home but all they had was a few polos in skinny-ass sizes and one t-shirt in 3xl. It was really pathetic. Their software prices were fantastic, though. I stared at the Vista Ultimate box for about ten minutes trying to figure out whether I should buy one or not. Seeing a full-version box for significantly less than OEM was quite compelling. In the end, though, I decided to spend that money on a copy of Mac Office 08. It’s the one Microsoft product I really wanted that I can’t get through MSDN, and it was comparable in price (way, way, way less than retail. Way.)

They did have a SHITLOAD of Xbox gear for pretty damn good prices - although not the same ridiculous discount as the software, for obvious reasons. They had several games. I was seriously considering buying a 360 outright if they had one for a decent price, but they didn’t. Good for my wallet, bad for my soul I guess.

Oh, and you should have seen the Microsoft PR/training/whatever lady who took us to the store react when I walked up to the counter with a box with “Mac” on the front of it. I tried very slyly to do the “It’s for my mom,” wink wink nudge nudge thing. But since I don’t have a sly bone in my body I don’t think it came out right. I’m very bad at that sort of thing. Should have said damn right it’s for a Mac. It’s for my fuckin’ Mac. The one that’s in my car. In the Microsoft visitors lot. Hell, I haven’t been keeping an eye on it, for all I know it’s busy fuckin’ your Windows laptop in the asshole in cleaning closet 13A on the second floor right now.

But I didn’t.

And I still got the new flashy Mac Office with the new flashy media shit for pennies on the dollar, so there. It’s quite nice. I played with it at the Apple store.

You know, the place where you buy Macs.

Which was, in fact, the first store I went to here.

I’m really the worst IT guy ever.

Killing time here.

Training today was quite useful. I learned a whole lot of stuff I didn’t know before, and very few things that are actually useful on a day-to-day basis. The training is very cool, and the guys doing the teaching are very smart and obviously very well versed in the setup and migration of Exchange. Only problem is, we don’t really do either of those things. So either the other sites are gonna start pawning way, way more stuff off on us (which looks EXTREMELY likely) or this was just a pleasant jaunt to central Texas

Curious.

I’m definitely not the big city type. There’s lots of nice people here, but it’s also such a fucking hassle to do anything, go anywhere, etc. I’m really looking forward to getting home.

I stopped by the Casual Male shop today and picked up some shirts. Got a few nice ones for cheap. It’s actually way cheaper than their catalog, go figure.

I was also looking for a smallish place to get a decent takeout burger around here and I found one: Burger Street. It’s a local burger joint of some kind, apparently there’s a fuckload of them around here but they’re pretty much a DFW thing. Their website appears to be broken but they make a goddamn good takeout burger. Like better than In & Out. I’m really, really glad I stopped there.

I’m over the halfway point. Really looking forward to going home, having some beers and watching the Bastards play.

Today was pretty boring.

Training is about a dozen or so millimeters away from being completely over my head. I comprehend what’s going on with the class, mostly, but it’s purely academic; having never seen any of the clustering stuff, servers with dedicated roles, etc I feel like I’m somehow missing stuff. Like somebody who took High School French trying to read The Count of Monte Cristo in its original French. You think that you’re getting everything but somehow things feel like some sort of substance is missing.

I splurged on a portable DVD player. That pretty much shot my spending money for this trip so I won’t be doing much of anything else. At least I can watch Stargate.

Obama’s holding a rally tomorrow morning. Dammit.

Quesadillas from Taco Cabana don’t look nearly as good as they do on TV but despite that they do taste pretty damn good. Their guacamole is kickin’ rad.

I need something to fill out this post; I also need to vent a bit, and to that end I have one final message to a very special person I met today, that I’d like to entitle “To the Stupid Cunt Who Took My Driving Personally:”
Dear Vapid Whore,

My apologies for cutting you off. Since I had my signal on I figured that you’d get that I needed to move over a lane. It is my fault for assuming you might not be a total fucking bitch and would give me some extra room. I know it was a snug fit, but doing that laaaame fake-o “writing down my license plate” thing that my dad used to do when somebody pissed him off was a bit over the top. I thought that sort of thing went out with the 80’s, but I guess bitchy old people are keepin’ that dream alive. Reaganomics!

I’m sure Irving P.D. will be breaking down my door any minute. After all, a rental car driving poorly in Dallas traffic is highly unsual. There can’t be very many. Once they’re done locking up all the confused out-of-towners, perhaps they can set up a jaywalking sting. And then the Stealin’ Cable Task Force.

Instead, I’d suggest you concentrate on a different idea I’d like to call “not being a colossal fucking bitch.” Given the speed at which you flew by me after we made that turn I’d say you could definitely use some work in that area. I have faith in you. Or, perhaps we’ll all get lucky and you’ll plow head-on into a freeway divider at 100mph and then we won’t have to be so eternally disappointed in you.

Go waste your life somewhere else you fucking cow,
Mav

I went to the Apple Store this morning. Pretty easy to get to, even with the traffic. According to the freeway there was one particular road that was backed up something like an hour because of a wrecked fuel truck but other than that it seems fairly sane.

I got to the Apple Store wicked fucking early and they only had one guy working the genius bar, so I waited. The new Nanos are really, really, really freaking small and I’m thinking about going back and getting one, but I’m still debating the iPhone too, and I don’t really need both. So I got neither. Supposedly they’re gonna have a $100 discount coming down the pipe pretty quick so I can’t make up my mind if I want to wait or not. I think wait. I still need to get the service end squared away so I think that would be prudent to do first.

The store itself is really neat. There are no visible sale stations or point of sale terminals, and the systems that the Geniuses use are Macbook Pros that pull out from under the bar. It’s really quite slick. The design aesthetic is very clean and minimalistic, which is really appealing.

Anyway, the resident Genius took a look at my Macbook and wrote up a case so I can call in with my serial number and they will get me set up for shipping/repair when I get back. If I didn’t rely on the damn thing so much it would be a lot easier.

The Northpark Center is a galactically huge shopping mall. Not Mall of America huge but huge enough. It’s also dead fucking quiet at 9AM. Seems a lot of places don’t open until 10. There are more people in the Magic Valley Mall at 9am I think. While I was wandering around I noticed something interesting: The Dell Store!

I was basically the first person in, since they didn’t open till 10 and I walked out of the Apple store and up the stairs and right into the Dell store. The folks there noticed my shirt and after that everybody was really friendly. I got to see the all the new XPS notebooks, even the ludicrous one that is in two pieces and the even more ridiculous one with the Logitech keyboard shit built in. I got to play CoD 4 on the bigass XPS tower with a 30″ attached and it is really wicked rad. I said how nice it was to actually get to see some of this gear since I work on servers all day and never get to play with this stuff, and they said that sounded really familiar. They even gave me a handful of Dell chocolate bars they had left over from their Valentines Day sale. I’ll be bringing those home for the L3 team.

Then I went to training. I feel like I don’t know enough about Exchange to be here. Our trainer is an awesome guy, and he’s obviously really smart. There are some other folks from Microsoft that will be lecturing here also, we met them too and they seem very similar. First rate people so far. I hope I’m not galactically disappointing. They keep talking about clustering and seperation of roles and stuff I’ve never ever seen in practice, let alone worked on. Even at Pete’s our Exchange server was only one system that did everything. The only really comforting part about it was to find someone else in the class that came from the same background I did (i.e. “Everything I know about Exchange I learned from Small Business Server.”) I guess we’ll both either get something out of it or we’ll all suck together.

After training I drove around a bit more and came back to my hotel room, thinking I would watch some Stargate. Wrooooong. The DVD combo drive I got for my other portable is pooping itself and I can’t watch any movies on it. Dammit. That’s pretty much the only reason I brought it, at this point.

It’s really disconcerting to drive in a hilly town with a car that has really soft, squishy suspension. I’m so used to the STi that it seems unnatural. Pulling negative Gs when going over a little bump weirds me out.

Also, here’s a really short list of reasons why you should never stay at the Irving/Las Colinas Marriott Courtyard.

• The elevator is very, very broken. Like there’s an electrical box with a bunch of wires hanging out where the buttons should be. I get the impression it’s been that way for a while, and it doesn’t look like there’s been any attempt to repair it so far. I’m surprised there isn’t some sort of ADA-related issue with this.
• The breakfast buffet that was free at the Residence Inn in RR costs ten bucks.
• Although I had less square footage at the Residence the room had far more amenities and was far more functional. For example, a mini kitchen complete with pots, pans, stovetop and fridge.
• The Internet access is so fucking slow I’m seriously considering trying to make the godawful pairing function on my phone work again. It might actually be faster…
• The walls are so thin I can listen to the guy next door making phone calls. I don’t want to know about his life. Really.
• There’s no Discovery Channel. Seriously, that’s all I fucking watch.

Should I ever be cast down here again, I’ll make sure to stay elsewhere. The Residence Inn is quite literally half a block away. Had I know I would have stayed there.

Curiously, I wrote this entry on paper. there’s something wonderful and visceral about ink on paper that you just don’t get on the computer. I’m beginning to think Phil Pullman got it right.

I’m sitting here in my hotel room in Irving, TX being really bored. So bored, in fact, that I’m watching Attack of the Clones on HBO Family and realizing what a terribly bad writer George Lucas is. (The Robot Devil would say “You can’t have your characters just say how they feel! That makes me feel angry!”)

My rental car is a Ford Fusion. I’m trying to come up with a clever name that properly portrays how fucking preposterous the engine in this car is - it’s even worse than the Camry I drove in Austin. It seems like the transmission only has two gears - way too low and so high the poor engine doesn’t have enough torque to spin it. I miss my car.

I’m definitely not cut out for life in a big city. Everything seems so disconnected and impersonal. But all things aside, it was really fun to explore Irving today. When I got here, it was early enough that my room was not ready, so I spent about 2 hours finding the Microsoft campus, finding somewhere to buy Ethernet cable (Wal-Mart ahoy!) and getting Whataburger. Seems fairly easy to get around in, just busy. It’ll probably be a lot busier tomorrow.

Local news said Obama’s team mentioned he would be in DFW somewhere on Wednesday, and in Austin on Thursday for a debate with Clinton. It’s too bad I won’t get to go. Soooo close. Guess I should have gone to see him speak in Boise.

So I guess the rest of the week will be spent largely being bored and trying to get something out of the training. I’ll try and get some pictures up tomorrow, if nothing else I’ll have to get some pictures of my room because it’s really really nice. Not as nice as the room I had in Round Rock, but pretty damn close.

Until next time, fuckers.

I wasn’t a big fan of DFW when I was at Quakecon. But I’m going back. Found out Friday morning. We don’t get many training opportunities, so the working theory is if we don’t use the ones we get we won’t get more. So I, being the Sacrificial Single Guy, get to go to Irving, TX for a week and learn about Exchange.

I can’t tell you how uninterested I am in this. I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, but I just don’t see the point in going to a training that’s gonna have very little to do with my actual job. Plus there’s the fact that Exchange is stupid. The only thing I can see this training being beneficial for is so that people at other sites can pawn shit off on me, because supposedly I “know shit about Exchange.”

Plus, now I’m at the back of the line and stand zero chance of getting training I actually am interested in.

Rich full oyster. Fuck. Seriously, I’m beginning to think the Underachiever’s Manifesto is absolutely correct.