|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I am weary of Cleveland -- not that I've seen much of it, just the area around the airport and between my hotel and the customer site I've been working at, an area of factories and warehouses and highways and railroads and strip malls and office parks and budget this and dollar that, flat, very flat, the highest things around are elevated highway overpasses and the skeletal towers of high voltage electric transmission lines just waiting for a visit from Godzilla. Oh, I suppose I should count the block of offices where I've been working, a pair of massive glass boxes five or six stories tall, set far back from the highway amidst acres of asphalt parking lots and flat green lawn. Now I suppose I should not characterize the entire area around here by this limited sample that I've seen, a rectangle perhaps six or seven miles long and two or three miles deep -- is it so very different from parts of Warwick, RI, the area surrounding T.F.Green Airport? Perhaps not, but it is just so very bland and blah and it goes on and on! It reminds me of what Virginia Wolfe said about San Diego: "There's no there there."
Mostly I just want to go home. I miss my family!
It seems as if I had not had time to relax after coming back from Norway when I had to take off again. Yeah, okay so I had a week, eight days even, to recover... but I was extremely busy during those days and I have such a mountain of work to do both at my job and around the house... and next week I have a class to teach, which will keep me busy all week and mean four days of working from eight a.m. until six or six-thirty and on Friday from eight until maybe three or four (or five?) and then the following week I have to face setting up fourteen computers, installing lots of software, configuring them, testing them, etc., all assuming that the new furniture for our new classroom has finally arrived... and the week afterwards I have to teach all week. Hell, I'm exhausted just thinking about it, especially because of all the prep work and study I need to do before I teach that class and I will have no time at work to prepare so I'll be trying to do that at night at home.
Okay, is everyone as tired of hearing me complain as I am?
We had some technical problems with the way our systems had been set up for this class and so while my colleague was delivering the presentations I was talking with Hamid on my cellphone to get his advice and help as I attempted to debug and fix the problem until my phone went dead because I had used up the battery (and I hadn't brought my charger with me because on standby it should have had more than enough charge to last until after I returned home)... I must have rung up quite a nice sum in roaming and long distance charges (I think Hamid was at home in Massachusetts and yesterday I was also speaking with people in Pittsburgh). (Yeah, don't worry, once the bill comes I'll submit an expense account for reimbursement.)
I am feeling a bit better about my ability to present this material. Please note that I feel no insecurity about my ability to deliver the material for any of the courses I've been teaching over the past five years (yeah my fifth anniversary in this job is only three or four days away) -- I know I can teach that stuff, I am secure in feeling that I have considerable subject matter expertise and have often been called into client meetings by marketing people who counted on me to anchor technical discussions with potential clients. But this whole java world I'm getting into has quite different technical underpinnings, and I've been forced to attempt to learn a number of new technical areas simultaneously and I have been quite concerned over the diffence in my expertise level in my usual fields and in these new fields. However, I've been feeling lately that things are falling into place. This afternoon, for example, I delivered an off-the-cuff discussion/explanation about the value of EJBs with Container-Managed Persistance, where the containers handle the actual database calls, so deploying a given EJB into one container may allow it to access a DB2 database while deploying that same EJB into a different container may allow it to access an Oracle database or a Sybase database. I realized when I finished that not only had I answered the student's question to his satisfaction, others had been listening and they also indicated that they now had a better understanding. (But I still need to add much more knowledge... now that I have the big picture, I need to add more and more details... and I still suck at hands-on use of VisualAge for Java.
Despite my concern at this past Sunday's weather forecast for the Cleveland area (snow advisory) the weather after Monday became much more pleasant... it was not too chilly when I arrived Tuesday, even though it was late at night, yesterday was mild and today... ah, today was beautiful (except, of course, I was stuck inside an office building from a few minutes before eight a.m. until five minutes before six o'clock), sunny, blue skies, warm... and it stays light much later than in Rhode Island... we're on the eastern edge of the time zone there and Cleveland is on the western edge, that's quite a difference in the time of the sunset... on the other hand, to make up for that, dawn comes correspondingly later.
I'm used to big city high rise hotels... they typically have windows almost the full width of the room and I like to pull the curtains wide open, bringing early morning light... and when on the sixteenth or twentieth or whatever floor, who cares if the curtains are open, there's nobody there to worry about how I'm dressed or not dressed... but I'm on the second floor of what's really a motel type layout, so the entry door is on the exterior wall along with the only window, facing out onto the second floor walkway... so my drapes are tightly closed and I feel a bit claustrophobic... and the drapes do nothing much to block the noise and vibrations of the nearby freight trains.
The negatives from my Norwegian journey did get scanned again and I got the magic access code numbers just before I left on this trip and did not have time to check the photo site to see if they were indeed loaded this time... and my connection to the web from this hotel room is not that great, keeps locking up on me and speed varies a lot so I've not attempted it from here. After I get back I'll check 'em out and post some (the hardcopy pictures I have look as if there are some that would be worthwhile posting).
p.s. Dear Cleveland:
I am sorry that I find you to be bland and boring. However, I can say this about you, you have good drivers. As I mentioned here Tuesday night, the airport rental car shuttle bus driver joked that we should be careful when we get behind the wheel that the locals were just as bad drivers as we were. No, he was wrong... I've been driving in both morning and afternoon rush hour traffic here and I have to say that Cleveland drivers are more cautious and less agressive than Rhode Island and Massachusetts drivers. Try driving I-95 through Providence at rush hour! Whew! And Boston? Fuhgedaboudit!