Road Trip - Day Two

Sub-Title: ...and they let me back in the US anyway.

Today started out fine with an average free breakfast consisting of a bagel, a hard boiled egg and coffee. The coffee wasn't half bad and I was able to take it all on the road with me instead of waiting around eating.

On the way through Michigan we (well I) decided to stop in Battle Creek to try and find the Kellogg's factory. They used to have a little museum type thing in town but that is closed now. We find the factory using the handy GPS and I get out to take pictures. I only got a few pictures taken when a security guard came out and said taking pictures wasn't allowed. I slipped my camera into my pocket and we left. I did get three pictures that I, of course, will upload to flickr. I vowed to never eat frosted flakes again but given that I rarely eat them now, it's not much of a threat.

We drove on through Michigan and heading into Ontario. Crossing the border actually wasn't that difficult. They ask you a few questions, look at your ID and then wave you on. We drove through Ontario for awhile and decided to stop for lunch. We ended up taking an off-ramp too soon and drove around trying to find something and eventually giving up and getting back on the 401. We found a Tim Hortons somewhere, I can't remember the town. They don't take Visa - just Master Charge, and yes, she said "master charge." They did take US currency but change is made in Canadian. I had an egg salad sandwich and was asked if I wanted a donut with that - I declined.

We drove on through Ontario on Niagara Falls and drove back into the US to get to our hotel. From there we walked back over into Canada and walked around the area. Going through customs became a small problem though, due to a miscommunication my birth certificate was left in the hotel. They went ahead and let me go through but I was slightly worried I wouldn't get back into the US.

There are a lot of little touristy things and stores. We went to the Hershey store first where I converted a $20 US currency bill into about $16 CDN plus a cookie. I bought some souvenirs and then finally found my beloved ketchup chips in one of the shops. After that we walked up the hill of tourist traps and I took a lot of pictures.

We had dinner at the Rain Forest Cafe which is a chain type place that has a rain forest them and animatronic animals that kind of creeped me out. They also had a live shark display. I had the fish and chips and it was pretty good but too much food. Speaking of food, I have learned that in Canada stuff is still made with sugar, not high fructose corn syrup, the ketchup was lovely as was the coke.

From there we walked back down to the stores to sort a problem and I bought a few other things. Then was walked down to see the falls and waited for it to get dark so they would turn the colored lights on. It was quite nice. I chickened out on riding the "wheel of doom" but that's OK.

After seeing the lighted falls we walked back into the US. Turns out, it costs 50 cents, Canadian or US, to walk back to the US and the duty free shop has a minimum purchase price for people on foot. I was unable to buy anything at the duty free shop. At the customs coming back in there was not problems at all, no one even took my ID but then we had been through customs about 4 times at that point.

I am currently working on getting my pictures organized and uploaded. The wireless in the hotel is pretty weak. Tomorrow we head towards Lake George, NY.

Road Trip - Day One

I'm sitting here in a hotel room in Paw Paw, Michigan after a long but uneventful drive. I did see an accident happen around Chicago but it wasn't major - just one car rear ending another coming on to the interstate.

Tomorrow we are heading to Niagara Falls which should, hopefully, provide me with picture taking opportunities. I did finally figure out posting pictures from my phone to flickr so I plan to push images to that while I'm on the road. http://www.flickr.com/photos/theang/

The weather is a lot more like Fall here than back home. It's cold and rainy - should be foggy in the morning. If there's time I need to take some pictures.

MoBlog

Because I can't seem to get anything to work from my cellphone to sites I already use, flickr and blogger, I have set up my account with Alltel to create my mobile blog. I plan to use this to make quick posts of pictures, especially during my upcoming trip where internet access might be spotty.

This is the direct link to the "blog": http://www.axcessmypics.com/theang/jsps/blog

Death of a Hard Drive

So the hard drive in my computer at work finally found itself in a near non-working state. Technically it was still booting Windows but it wasn't running well and there was much noise and clicking.

First I wasted time tying to reimage the dying hard drive thinking it was just a Windows problem. Reimaging, for those that don't know, is reloading the OS and other software. There's more to that process but all you need to know is that it's like starting over. Since I don't have a custom image of my personal machine I had to use the generic lab image. The image process was not working correctly at first but I eventually got it. The hard drive was really not happy and so I pulled a new hard drive out of the parts closet and did the reimaging process again. That was most of yesterday.

Today I came in and it still wasn't acting correctly and telling me there was a "duplicate name on the network." Fine. So I decided to reimage the machine again and remove it from the active directoy list hoping running sysprep again would fix it. Same problem. Finally I figured out that at some point I set up one of my virtual machine installs with the same name as mine and that was causing the problem. For the time being I just renamed my machine and all was well.

Then, because this was just a generic image, I got to spend the rest of the day reloading my software and admin tools. The computer does seem to run a lot better now. It no longer crashes if I try to look at printer settings and things like that.

Dog Sitting and Flickr Stats

My friends went on a weekend trip to Illinois for a wedding so I agreed to house/dog sit for them while they were gone. They left yesterday morning and I've been hanging out here, mostly, since Friday after work.

I love playing with the dogs and they have full cable, which is nice. I haven't done much today beyond goof around on the internet and watch TV. There's a House marathon on USA and I've been watching that.

I found out that flickr has a lot of stats avalible about your photo streams so I have been fascinated by that. You can find out referals to your photos and how many views you get by day and such. Very interesting tool - be sure to check it out if you like stats as much as I do.

What a poor blog..

I never update any more with the main reason being - there's just nothing to update. Work was super busy the last month or so but it's slowed back down to normal now. It's pretty much routine and uninteresting.

Jorge the Bird and..

Why Working at a Library is Full of Surprises.

I was hanging out at the circulation desk this morning trying to get our printing system software updated and got to be witness to the following story:

A patron approached the desk (he's a regular) and put a box down on the counter. He told my co-worker that he needed the number for animal control so he could get the number for animal rescue. In the box was an injured bird - a dove - that he thought had been hit by a car. So she looks up the number for him and let's him use the phone to call, even though normally patrons can't use that phone.

He calls up animal control, gets the number he needs and makes another call. In talking to the rescue group it sounds like the poor bird might have been hit by a car but was still alive with some damage to its wing and eye. He then proceeds to ask if they can pick it up from the library circulation desk. Normally they won't do pick ups but he convinces them to do it and hangs up.

Next he tells us that he is leaving the bird with us for pick-up and then walks off. So now we are at the circulation desk with a damaged bird in a box. There was no idea when the rescue people would be coming to pick it up either. We all took turns looking in on it and I decided he needed a name and thus - Jorge.

Another co-worker printed out a sign for the box - "Bird Inside - Non-Circulating - Do Not Open."

There was a whole discussion about what kinds of food a dove would eat which then lead to the types of diseases it could be carrying. We found a little lid to put some water in there, just in case, but I doubt it really could drink.

The rescue people came and took Jorge away and I have no idea what will happen to him from this point on.

So it seems that anything can happen where I work.