Stayed up all Friday night cleaning my house, packing, taking Mel hacking, and eating. Oops. But I managed to sleep on the plane. The Cincinnatti airport has a really good resteraunt in it. Spaghetti & Italian sausage. Most delicious. The Albuquerque airport, as always, has tons of military jets all over the place. This time I got to see a bunch of F-14s lined up preparing for takeoff.
The F-14 is the sexiest aircraft ever built. And it has nothing to do with it being in Top Gun, despite Maverick being dangerous [chomp]. It's just an aesthetically pleasing shape. I'm jealous of Guy, who is training to fly them at this very moment.
Rental car: another gold Taurus. No CD player. And wow am I overdressed for Albuquerque. It must be 80 degrees here, and I'm wearing a sweatshirt, a winter hat, and I've got my parka draped over my arm. The Hertz guy was making fun of me, said he thought it was part of my "style."
The drive to Carlsbad was uneventful and long. They've finished all of the highway improvements between Clines Corners and Carlsbad, so the speed limit is 65 the whole way now. This is good, it cuts down travel time significantly. Dinner in Roswell at Wendy's, surrounded by a bunch of NMMI steakheads in full uniform.
Said hi to John, and went to bed. Slept forever. It was great.
The whole of Sunday was spent trouble-shooting my laptop. It turns out that my 128MB add-on RAM was in the laptop, it just wasn't being recognized. After four hours of futzing, I discovered that if I unplugged the laptop, remove the battery, and discharge a capacitor on the motherboard (!!) I could get it to recognize my full 192M. How bizzare is that?? And don't ask how I figured it out... heh
Anyway, so with a little tinkering I can get my machine up to full capacity. AND John decided to just buy me 256 more MB of RAM out of the blue! That's a total of 448MB!! That's a lot!!! Woo!
See, things are always better here. As soon as I get out of Boston things start going my way. Not sure why that is.
Anyway, had dinner with Cliff & Wren last night. Cliff decides to play one of his endless series of practical jokes on me. As the waitress is taking orders Cliff turns to her and says,
"Are you single? Because this guy here is single and he's from MIT and is working in Los Alamos and I think you should give him your phone number."
He just keeps going on about it and I'm beet red at this point, and she's not sure what to make of it all. When I come back from the bathroom later on, he has produced a business card with the girl's name on it and phone number. I assume, because it's Cliff, that he's written it himself. So he further embarrasses me by giving the card back to her and telling her to give it to me. Geez. So now I'm beyond embarrassed and this poor girl is totally confused. Cliff tells me that he'll give me $50 if I call her and it turns out she didn't write it. John tipped her bigtime for all the hell we gave her.
And now I'm stuck with this girl's number who I have no intention of calling, and John and Cliff are having a field-day telling me how rejected this poor girl is going to feel if I don't call, etc. Geeeezzz!!
So I think this is war, and I have to start brewing up something special to do to Cliff.
We were supposed to drive back to Los Alamos today, but the Bronco is leaking fluids and is in the shop. So we're stranded. And I spent all of today writing out schematics and state diagrams for my CallerID circuit.
