I’m travelling for a business meeting this week.  I will be back late Friday, although given my usual proclivities I probably won’t post again until the 15th.

Unless there is a change of plans, this will be my last business trip of the year, for which I am grateful (there was some talk about a meeting in Minnesota, but I’m hoping that one doesn’t come back up again until the spring).  Something about travelling for work just wears you down.  Between being packed into a closed environment on the airplane, the dry hotel rooms, and the time changes (this time I’ll be in Connecticut), I usually pick up some kind of bug that hits me on Thursday or Friday.  Maybe I should start travelling with a mask (and lobbying hotels to put humidifiers in the rooms).

I’m taking a class in Boulder, CO next week.  Since I’m going to be in the Denver area, I’m taking advantage of the opportunity by leaving tomorrow to visit my sister over the weekend.  Given those activities, I don’t know if I’ll have the opportunity to post any updates during that time. 

I’m supposed to fly back next Friday (the 29th), but I don’t expect to be ready to mess with this weblog until after the weekend.  Unless there’s a change of plans, I will return on 11/1.

Somewhere in my travels last week I managed to get exposed to some kind of nasty cold bug.  I’ve been hacking, sneezing, and just generally miserable since Friday afternoon.  Hopefully this will pass soon.  However, until it does, don’t expect must posting here.  I’m barely managing to string together coherent sentences at the moment.

New content will appear below this entry thoughout the week.

I’m going to be travelling to Raleigh, NC for the week on business, so I won’t likely be blogging in real time.  However, I’ve written several entries that will appear throughout the week thanks to the ability of Expression Engine to do future posts.  A lot of it relates to the Keller Citizen’s Fire Academy and Community Emergency Response Team training that I’ve been taking for the past few weeks.  I’ve also got a few gun related posts for later in the week.

If I get a few minutes, or something gets under my skin, I might post something else, but I don’t know how much time I”ll have for that.

See you next week.

Update: (9/24/04)  Turned off the sticky setting, so this item will no longer appear above the other items it originally preceeded.

I’m travelling to Raleigh early tomorrow morning.  I’ve just about gotten everything packed and ready, leaving only a few things left to shove into the suitcase in the morning.

Sometimes I really dread travelling.  I’m one of those people who has to plan everything down to the minute.  It sometimes annoys the hell out of people who are with me, but I usually arrive on time or just slightly early.  If I tell you I’m going to be somewhere at a particular time, you can bet that I will have a pretty good reason if I’m not there at that time.

I also have a tendency to pack more crap than I need.  As an example, I always plan out the clothes for each day of the trip and then I throw in at least one more complete set of clothing just in case (i.e. pants, shirt, socks, underwear, etc).  I’ve rarely needed them.  However, through negative reinforcement I always pack them now, since the one time I didn’t I ended up extending my trip for a couple of days and I sorely wished I’d had them.

My computer backpack is another example.  I probably won’t need all of the stuff in there, but I just don’t feel comfortable without it.  I’ve got an extra ethernet cable, a telephone line tester, a phone cable, power adapter, and a wireless adapter (with driver CD).  The backpack also serves as a general carry-on, so I’ve got hand wipes, cell phone charger, iPod charger, disposable toothbrushes (this isn’t as odd as you might think, since I’ve got braces), an extra copy of my itinerary, some extra cash (squirreled away in an out of the way place), and a bottle of water.  In the morning I’ll put my watch, keys, wallet, and flashlight in there before going through the metal detectors (it speeds things up if you don’t have to pull everything out of your pockets and put them in those little buckets).

I was never a Boy Scout, but I think their motto is a great way to live.  I may carry a lot more junk that I need, but at least I’m prepared for most things (although not as prepared as I’d like, given what we’re not allowed to take on a plane).

<sarcasm>Lovely.</sarcasm>

I’m supposed to be in Raleigh, NC next week.  At least I won’t be on the coast, but it still doesn’t look like a good time to be in North Carolina.

Hmm… it looks like Ivan just might pay the area a visit first, though (or at least what’s left of him).

I’ve been on vacation this week, not only from work but from everything else.  It was enjoyable to get away and not pay attention to much of anything, although I didn’t go anywhere.  I built a new computer to replace my current main server, and I’m almost done getting all the files and programs set up on the new one.

It’s amazing how much time you can waste fiddling with little stuff.  As an example, I use a Python script called StormSiren that monitors for National Weather Service alerts and sends a message to my phone via email.  When I was setting it up on the new system I noticed that it failed the sending test, since my ISP now requires authentication before sending emails through their SMTP server (this also means that the version on the current server isn’t working and I hadn’t noticed).  StormSiren uses a Python mail library to interface with the SMTP server, but while the library had a login method, StormSiren didn’t have any code to call it.  I’d never done Python programming before, but in an hour and a half I added new code to add configuration questions to the “wizard”, store the ID/password in the config file, and to call the login method before calling sendmail.  I also uploaded the diffs to the SourceForge discussion forum.  I suppose I could have opened a bug report, but it didn’t seem so much like a bug as just a new feature. 

Anyhow, I was so eager to get away from everything that I forgot to put up the “Back In A Few Days” sign on this weblog. 

A storm rolled in around 6:00 this morning and killed the power in the neighborhood for about 2 hours.  I had a dental appointment at 8:00am this morning and what is usually a five minute trip took 25 minutes (because of the four lights between here and there, three of them were flashing red).

But what was most annoying (aside from all the beeping from my UPSes and alarm system) was that I was trying to get a year out of my Linux system without a reboot.  According to the boot logs, the previous boot was at 15:25 on Thursday, October 16, 2003 (which was when I first moved the system into this house).  Damn.  I barely had two months to go and I would have likely made it if not for the power failure.

I got my TXU electric bill today and was shocked to see that it was $504.65, which was composed of $272.55 for the current bill, $221.22 for last month, and a bonus penalty of $10.88 for not paying last month’s bill.  Since I knew I’d paid that bill, I was all set to ream someone (either TXU electric or BankOne’s online bill pay) a new one.  I even dug out the last statement where I had written down the confirmation number. 

Then I looked it up online.  Unfortunately, it would appear that I accidentally selected TXU Gas instead of TXU Electric.  Damn.  And I was all to go off on TXU.  Heck, they probably deserve it just on general principles for being two separate companies for gas and electric.

Oh well, at least my gas is paid for the next six months or so.

I’m still here, just a bit behind in the blogging thing.  Some kind of bug laid me low on Wednesday and Thursday.  I just couldn’t focus my mind well enough to come up with anything to write.  Friday, Saturday, and most of today were taken up with a major yard project.

More to come…