What a long week! I can’t believe that I went sooo long without an update! (although I did get one or two reminders!). So what happened this week? For starters I made it to the gym every day! (I even worked out once I got there!) Faith and I managed to walk in the evenings two more times. My body is definitely rebelling at the mere thought of getting back in shape, but at this point I feel it’s a battle I’ve got to win.
We had several friends come by last night. It was really great to get to see everyone again! I only wish that I could have spent more time with each couple/person. We really don’t do this nearly often enough! The big topic of conversation? Religion? Politics? Philosophy? (any of these subjects would have been well represented with this group) Nope. Diablo II. You never can tell where a conversation is going to go! All in all, it was a good time.
But that was last night. Today we made the “back to school” rounds for Logan. New clothes, new shoes, school supplies, etc. Faith found a couple of Vegan cookbooks at Border’s, and I managed to find a remaindered (bargain) copy of Neil Gaiman’s “Smoke and Mirrors”.
After Faith had finally told the Animal Hospital that she would only work as relief (very part-time kind of thing), the personnel person called her and begged her to come back as an instructor! So Faith has set her own hours and pretty much runs things her way! You go, girl! 
Faith and I walked again tonight. Also made it to the gym this morning. I feel pretty good, a bit stiff and sore, but that’s to be expected.
I finally played DiabloII with some folks from work. Wow, that will make the time go by!! Two hours and if Mark wouldn’t have said how late it was, we probably could’ve played all night! Nice bit of distraction.
Just finished our evening walk! That’s two days in row!!
Strange days are upon us! I actually managed to haul myself out of bed at 5:00am this morning and went to the gym!! I am going to try and make this a part of my daily routine. With that in mind, I have resolved myself to get to the gym every day this week. Not necessarily for heavy workouts, but a light cardio routine each morning (and I stress the word light) before work. It felt really good this morning. We’ll see how it goes throughout the week.
Well, we lost another person at work. The switch manager is going to Dothan, Alabama to do the same job he does here, only for about $35,000 more a year. Go figure! This kind of stresses me out a bit, since we have all these upgrades coming and he was in charge of them. Since he is going to another cellular company, he was wlaked out today, so we don’t even get to pick his brain for information. I view this as a bad thing. We (as a company) will surely recover, but in the meantime, I know where the slack will need to be taken up. Right here. Harrumph!
Very busy weekend. (again) Friday night/Saturday morning was spent at the office once again performing yet another switch upgrade. Only four more to go and then we will be current and can start planning our next round of upgrades.
Saturday morning (after a refreshing three hours sleep) I volunteered to assist my nephew. It seems he was elected to remodel his girlfriends’ moms’ bathroom. Very nice of him. Would’ve been nicer had he known what he was getting into! I must say that he did a great job on the floor tile! I installed a light fixture and prepared the sink area. I will probabaly be going back next weekend to finish up the job. Saturday night Logan and his cub scout den performed the flag ceremony at the Ambush soccer game. While he was doing that, I spent the evening discussing parental stratagies with my brother and sister. He sure does have his hands full!
Sunday I went over to Mom & Dad’s to again work on the roof ( the rain last week proved that I’m no roofer and that the leak was still there!) I think I’ve got it good and sealed this time! I think if this doesn’t work, then a new roof may be in order. We’re trying to put that off as long as possible.
Faith, Logan and I started taking evening walks as part of our resolve to start living healthier. We had a very nice time. We walked up to Logan’s school to find out who his teacher is and it turns out that he was assigned to the good one!
Came home a bit early today to catch up on a few things around the house (as well as this journal). I have to work yet again tonight! This is getting a bit tedious, weekends should NOT be spent at work! (not that I can really complain- the work is interesting and challenging, not to mention that it does pay the bills- well, most of them anyway!)
Faith has been working on a cookbook for the animal hospital. Everyone submitted a recipe or two and she has been entering them into the computer. So I loaded MSOffice2000 ::ducking to dodge the stones now being hurled in my direction:: and then proceeded to download the 40meg worth of patches required to make it somewhat secure.
Welly well well! I’m back from a bit of the ole’ ultra-violence (otherwise known as a “Corporate Conference”). The first two days we operated at warp +9 (which will peel back the hull of a moderate trade ship, not to mention what it will do to your skull!) Granted, this is mostly due to the fact that my company is way behind in deploying WAP technology and this is really our only opportunity to stratagize on the deployment as well as bang out any infrastructure issues. (Heh, issues? Nah! No problem, man! yeah, right!) The third day was absolutely excruciating! We went from warp +9 to snail -3 and it was all an overview! Needless to say, we skipped out a bit early on this!
Now for the actual good stuff! WAP (wireless application protocol) is actually rather intriguing and may prove to be quite useful! The protocol allows for very solid connections at 9.6k which is definitely enough bandwidth for text based sites. (Which is what this is designed for to begin with) There are two big concepts here: First there is the transition between http and wsp (the wireless equivalent to http). A web page designed for the mobile user is encoded using wml (wireless markup language) and then served to the central office (my office in this instance) where the transport mechanism becomes wsp. Wsp then carries the document to the phone for browsing. This brings me to the second concept: browsing a wap document is a bit different than navigating an html doc. The base structure is the same, but in the case of wml documents are represented as “decks”. Each screen that is displayed is known as a card. The entire deck is downloaded into the phone and then the user is allowed to navigate between the cards. Pretty basic interpretation, but that is the general drift. Check WapForum.Org for more details.
This will be the last update for a few days. I leave for the WAP conference in Chicago in just a few hours. I’ve been doing a bit of digging around about this protocol and I don’t think this is going to be a very exciting conference. I sure hope I’m wrong!
I’m still excited about the cruise, though!!!
Oh yeah, not that I’m really into internet comics, this one is rather amusing. It’s been around for a while, so you may have seen it, but I just discovered it this morning.
Went over to mom & dad’s to work on the roof a bit. It’s been leaking so I resealed around one of the vent pipes. Hopefully that was the problem. That’s where it appeared to be coming throuh when I climbed into the attic for a look.
We have already decided on our vacation for next year. We really hadn’t talked about it much since we just recently returned from our vacation this year, but I just couldn’t pass up this opportunity! My mom made some reservations for one of the engineers at work for his tenth anniversery and he was discussing the plans with me on friday when I noted that the prices he was getting seemed way too good to be true. This morning, while working on the roof, I asked my mom about it and sure enough, it’s true! So I said “Sign us up!” Next april we will be going on our very first cruise! (details of the cruise, if you are interested can be found here)
Not much to report today. Upgraded our Autopace server at work. I thought it would take much longer than it did. Joe and I finished up and got out of there by about 8:30pm. I wasn’t planning on leaving until early in the morning.
Aha! Finally! I took the time to arrange an archival process for this journal! I also revamped the second page as well as the top of this page a bit to reflect the link to the archives. (simplicity is wonderful!) Now for the really big news- I finished the rough draft of “Our Week in Orlando”! There is also a picture gallery as well! All the information about our trip is there. (with the exception of our actual expenses- which I may post for informational resources) The format isn’t the best and neither is the grammer, but it’s up for all the world to see! After I re-read it a bit, I’m sure that I will want to modify it some, but until then take a look and let me know what you think! (random@mo.net)
Jeff, Journal | Jeff | 
August 19, 2000 6:54 pm | 
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