|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Note: the background is suppoed to show coffee beans -- i.e., java beans... the course I'm here in Cleveland for is Enterprise JavaBeans (uh, get it? coffee beans... last time I taught in France I brought some cafe-latte flavored jelly beans...
Six a.m. wake-up call. Actually I was already awake when the phone rang (thanks to having set the clock radio in the room for 5:48. I think I did okay for sleeping, probably fell asleep before one a.m., so I got around five hours. I don't remember waking up during the night. Still, I felt quite tired, could have used another hour.
Free Continental Breakfast served in the lobby... of course that means cereal, bagels, donuts, juice, coffee... but a toasted bagel and a cup of coffee and a paper cup of orange juice was better than nothing and better than having to wait until I was off in my rental annonymousmobile to look for someplace to eat breakfast. Brought a cup of coffee back to my room to drink while preparing for my day.
MapQuest's directions weren't bad at all and I had no trouble finding my way from here to the client site where the class is being taught. I'm not delivering any lectures for this class -- at least I didn't today and don't have any plans to do so on Thursday or Friday. I'm here to assist with the lab exercises -- and also to gain more experience at helping students with any problems they might encounter in doing the hands-on work. This is partly because next week I am going to be busy teaching a different course all week, but after that I have a one week window to get fourteen PCs ready for a WebSphere course that I'm teaching the following week... that includes installing all of the various software packages -- and the infrastructure for the exercises -- and testing all of it. Heck, just getting them out of their boxes and setup on the desks will take a lot of time... and as of Monday none of the furniture for that new classroom has been delivered yet.
And meanwhile, we discovered this morning that the system image installed on the PCs being used for this course is not quite the same as what we had expected... it was from a variant version of the course and it turns out that some stuff from the early part of that other course had to be executed before things would be configured right for this course. I was glad I had carried my cell phone on this trip; it proved to be very handy, although I've now racked up a bunch of roaming charges. I had been considering getting one of those nationwide plans -- first I had thought about CellOne's east coast plan, but it didn't include western Pennsylvania and Pittsburgh is the place outside of Rhode Island where I am most likely to travel so I rejected that plan -- and, somehow, I let myself get persuaded out of their nationwide plan... and, of course, I'll get hit with cancellation charges now so I'm stuck with CellOne... maybe I'll pass my phone to Nancy and/or Sean and go with AT&T, get their nation-wide no roaming and no long distance charges plan... or just cancel CellOne and eat the penalty charge and go AT&T... or, most likely, just do nothing... plain old everyday lazy inertia.
When my boss asked me if I could go to Cleveland I thought about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame... and someone in class mentioned it and said they thought Wednesday nights were free and that there might be a live band playing... My colleague said he was too tired to go and I've not been able to summon up enough energy or interest to drive into town myself... don't want to have to worry about finding my way there and finding a place to park and coping with crowds... I like to listen to old rock (and I mean old, like pre-Beatles) but don't have much interest in seeing exhibits of seventies and eighties music related stuff.
So we finished struggling with some software problems (after our students had gone for the day)... and then I came back to my hotel, kicked off my shoes and watched part of a not particularly interesting movie on HBO, struggling to keep from dozing off, then headed off to a TGIFriday's for dinner (Onion ring appetizer, a bottle of Bass ale, a small house salad, and a grilled boneless chicken breast on a bed of rice pilaf and some assorted vegetables)... then back to my room to type this in...
And now I'll post this and yesterday's entry to the web and check my email... and get to bed by eleven p.m.
Wild and decadent in Cleveland!