Hot Time in the Ole town…

Last weekend I and RB went to the wedding of a couple of friends of mine. I met them while partying down at Gustavus College when I would visit MQ. It’s funny a lot of mine good friends I met not at the school that I graduated at but where one of buds from high school went. The difference is that I probably spent too much time doing other things, like working, when I wasn’t in class – the second time I went to the U. This kept me from getting into a lot of trouble. And let’s face it, some times you make really good friends while misbehaving, if not when you are dealing with the aftermath the day after!

The wedding was nice, it was held in a pretty liberal Catholic church in Bloomington. I was told this by my wonderful GF. The church doesn’t have kneelers so it is pretty progressive. The ceremony was presided over by deacon not a priest who was nice enough, even if – to me – he rambled a little bit. The bride of course looked beautiful and the groom did seem nervous at all. Not a hint that he what he really wanted was to take off running. Of course I kid…. I Kid… The whole service was not to long, nice, and pretty nice all around. But the good part of a wedding is not in my opinion the service but the reception.

The reception was held at the Embassy Suites and was very fun. There was a DJ; always a good choice in my opinion there should always be dancing. True to their roots as partiers there was an open bar including not just kegs but also full drink services. The dinner was nice. It was a very good party. A lot of people I haven’t seen, or don’t see enough, showed up and everyone was having a good time. We even met LJ’s GF for the first time. She is pretty cool. He should have brought her around to meet everyone a long time ago.

Unfortunately there was a little bit of unwanted excitement. One of the Usher’s car caught on fire in the parking lot! Of all the bad luck to have your car catch on fire, and at you friends wedding in which you are part of the wedding party. No one knows what happen. A couple guys went out to smoke (I still am in love with the new no smoking laws) and they looked over and saw a car smoking. Then one of them said..”Hey that looks like my car”. And it was. The fire department showed up and hosed his car down putting out the fire. The car was basically a loss.

Believe it or not the owner didn’t seem to care much at all. His dad is an executive of the insurance company he uses and they already had an adjuster on the way and a rental car lined up. On top of it the hotel took pity on him and gave him a free room sweet. I’d like to say this was surprising but this guy always seems to go into a stinky situation and come out smelling like a rose. So at least he is going to make out on the deal. It was crazy though. All in all though I think it was a good night for everyone who showed up to the wedding

System Down

If you hadn’t noticed my website was down for about two weeks. The hardware was working and I could access the site locally so I just went on thinking it was ok. MQ even wrote me an e-mail saying “Why can’t I get to your site”, I simply responded that it was working fine. Then I flew out of town again and tried to access it remotely… Huh sure enough it was down. What a pain in the @$$.

Well I won’t get into to much detail but here is basically what was wrong. My ISP changed my address with out telling me. Because of this all the name servers sent the traffic to the wrong IP address. This is really not a big deal. It was a 10 minute fix once I found the problem. If only I had a heads up it would have been a non-issue. This is actually the second time this has happened so I may look into changing services again. Anyway it is back up and now I think I need to get some new posts online. Therefore there may be a bunch of re-dated (to when they should have been posted) entries in the next week or so.

For example this blog is actually being posted in early May but the outage occurred in mid April.

Softball

Seeing as I have been in Dayton for going on 7 months we (by we I include myself Michael and SA from Pittsburg, and Akhil a consultant from Boston though the statement is probably true for the whole project team) have seen about everything there is to see in the area. As the project is getting dragged out – mostly due to client resource issues – we are trying to find more activities to keep us entertained. Due to the delays the amount of work to do has leveled off and we are more regularly finishing for the day around 6:00 to 6:30, which is nice. But now we have to figure out what to do with ourselves.

The first this we found is the driving range. We have been going about once a week for a month or so. The range is one of the craziest places I’ve seen. It’s called Utters and Putters and it is located in Yellow Springs, OH. Just as aside Dave Cheppel lives on a farm in Yellow Springs, though we have not run into him yet. Utters and Putters is located on Young’s Dairy Farm. No kidding an actually farm that has been turned into an entertainment establishment. They have 2 restaurants, a picnic area, a driving range, mini golf, and home made ice cream parlor. The driving range is a lot of fun. The heated stalls are literally in a barn that they cut the side open on for driving. The targets for the wedge are old farm tires and a couple of old grain trailers! The mini golf is also very farm themed. The prices aren’t bad either. Michael is looking into hosting a mini golf tournament for the client and the project team.

We also signed up to play on the client softball team. Now I haven’t played softball since 2001/2002 when I played on my dad’s church league. However, I can still through, catch, and hit. Which is more than I can say for a lot of the team, a lot of them are first timers. The league is coed and you must have an equal number of men and women on the field at any given time. I have to say though the women from the client staff are far and away better than the men. The consultants aren’t bad. Michael and I get by, by knowing the fundamentals, and Akhil is just naturally athletic. There is one superstar on the team but he is the husband of client staff. The coach is pretty good as well. She is a manager that is working with me on the reporting team. We only had one practice but it was a lot of fun. We may not get to play again though because they keep change the day of the week on us. If it is on Thursday (as of the last e-mail I received) we can’t play.

So if softball doesn’t work out, then our next venture is racquet ball. Unfortunately the only court we can find in town is 20 minutes away. Crazy, I am really surprised it is so hard to find a place to play racquet ball. Though; I haven’t played racquet ball since I was a teenager. We shall see.