Teeth....

I got to have a root canal yesterday. In Number 29, number 19 is next in dental terminology.



I spent the day at home afterwards trying to work and not spill soup on myself. It took them several tries to get me completely numbed up.

Jennifer is finally getting hit with how things are emotionally. She can finally relax enough to greive and it hurts. She's going to hang out with Eve and Patricia this weekend.

Me and Pooks should get some much needed alone time. We've got other things planned too, but I'm looking forward to my time with her.

Yes, I'm back and who is linearb?

I'm back from Switzerland and very glad to be home. For some reason while I learned a lot at the conference I didn't enjoy the trip a whole lot. It was weird. Getting home was an exciting adventure. After taxi
ing out to the runway the plane had to come back for engine trouble. Engine trouble lead us to be stuck in the airport for 6 hours. That sucked and caused us to have to run to catch the last flight to Jacksonville with about 0 minutes to spare. A lot of others we stuck in New Jersy until the next day. We were lucky in that respect.

Now I've had a fun time getting the things I've learned applied to work stuff. It's going ok, but I still feel like I'm not getting things done fast enough.

Jannifer my sister broke up with her girlfriend last night and stayed with me last night. It's a rough situation.

I got a message on an old blog post from someone named linearb asking me to look them up on thier WoW server. So I know one of my old friends was called linearb, but I can't remember who! So if you ever leave a message by a nickname, be sure to include enough facts so that the person can remember you. I know it was someone interested in greek though. Linear B is an early form of Greek Language. Whoever my unknown friends are, they sound smart. If anyone really wants to find me though, I'm 'Fiendhammer' on Skywall(horde), and 'Bunnyfoofoo' on Stormrage(alliance), and many more. I go through alts like they are chicken nuggets.

Late Wednesday night, or is it still early evening?

My TV clock is local time so it reads, 01.45. My Computer clock says it's, 7:46PM. My body doesn't know who to beleive.

The conference is being held at UNIL, Univeristy de Lausanne. It has a very nice scenic view across Lake Geneva to the mountains.


You'll notice a lot of grassland in that picture. How do you deal with large amounts of open fields?

With Sheep of course!

More Sheep... Sheep2, Sheep3

I talked briefly with the shepard that was putting up temporary fences to keep the sheep in the area that needed "mowing". He had his sheepdog there to keep the sheep in line. It was neat to see him call them and get them moving. It really brought home, "I know my sheep and My sheep know me." They ran to his call with bleating and clanging bells. It was really cool.


More Sheepdog... sheepdog2

After conference stuff this morning Dan and I went of some mapserver things and figured out some implementation details for a project we're working on. We came back to the hotel talked for a while and I took a nap for a while, three days with four hours of sleep finally caught up with me. I went back to Taco's (the conference bar) and atalked for a long while with some guys from a GIS group in Switzerland. I felt embarrassed b/c they were asking me GIS questions about Florida and I had no clue. What's the area of Jacksonville? What's the population of Florida? Etc. It was rough, but really fun to talk with them. They also asked me about why I'm not married yet. Pooks would have cheered them on. :-)

Dan came by and took me to another bar where several of the GIS guys were hanging out. They wanted to get away from the crowds and do something a little more out of the way. I say out of the way b/c it was in no way intimate...



Yes there were several young ladies wearing outfits like that. To go with that, here's the Meter of Beer we were drinking from...



The waitress would bring out this meter long tube of beer with it's own spout and you got to pour your own. It was a lot of fun. I had a you french lady come up and ask me in French where the "Toiletes" were. While she was talking her hands where flying and she answered her own question by looking at the sign over our heads. She stopped by several times after that to thank us and would talk, but I had no clue what she was saying.

After the second meter ran out and last call (around midnight) we hung out still talking GIS and web developement. I didn't ask my question about the mapserver source code, but I'm sure I'll get a chance tomorrow night.

It was a long way home.

Long winding roads lead us back to our hotel.

I miss home and family. It's been a long trip and I'm ready to head back.

Ouch...

Ouch.

Legs & feet & back hurt. Lausanne is in the foothills of something and it's a pain in everything to get anywhere. The Metro station is up at the top of a hill so every morning we walk up a steep hill. We are getting a good view of French/Swiss Life. Smoking is allowed pretty much everywhere. We met a nice Indian lady from England, our waitress at the Conference bar actually. Monday night we sat around for four hours and talked Geology and physics and God. It was a lot of fun.

TV is interesting, Dan says avoid it after I avoid it b/c I can only understand BBC and CNN. On the (non-MTv) Music station they play a lot of techno music video's which I like.

There are a lot a very nice looking young ladies here. I am sure they are skinny b/c of all the suck ass hills that you have to climb around here. I still have not been able to get out for sight seeing yet. I will probably have to save that for Saturday or something.

Today I went to talks on Mapserv and Cartoweb. Two of the products we use at work. The mapserv was a good one not too much that was new to me, but it was good to get an overview of all the peices. The cartoweb talked sucked b/c it was 94 degrees in a room packed with people and computer and no AC. Yeah, no one has Air Conditioning here. It really sucks.

Dan and I got metro rail passes b/c the train ticket machines don't give change. So on the first day we got ripped off and then found out where the ticket office was. The lady told me that my pass was good for five years even though I only got a weeklong pass. Yeah, right was my thought, like I'm coming back any time soon.

I haven't gotten a chance to take any pictures since yesterday. I've been way too busy just trying to find things and losing money to the train ticket machine.

Made it! I have officially invaded a foreign country!

After a very long amount of time flying, then getting on a train, then walking (uphill) I made it to Lausanne, Switzerland. My traveling compainion is Dan, who works with me. On the flight we met some other GIS people from DM Solutions. We had a good time talking with them about the various project we're working on and the things they are trying to do.

Dave from DM Solutions and Dan (and Me in the reflection):



We flew into Geneva and then took the train to Lausanne, there was good and bad scenery along the way. There seemed to be a lot of graphitti around the train station. It seems to be in a lot of places now that we are here though. The city seems pretty clean but not very large.

View on the train to Lausanne:



I didn't get to do a lot of siteseeing today. AFter getting to the hotel we kinda crashed for a little bit (very tired after the flight and I didn't sleep on it. Then we wandered around looking for a place to eat before ending up back at the train station. Hungry and tired we had a beer and got some lunch. We went back to the hotel and I got a chance to talk with Pooks & Tiaroo over skype. It was good to hear their voices. Then I crashed hard and slept for four hours. It's after 6:30 now and I'm getting hungry again.

This is the view out my hotel room window:

Thursday morning, R.I.P. Windows PC

Holiday Weekend good, party pretty good, time with Pooks very good.

Tues. Night out with Dad good, hanging out and talking.

Wed. morning blah, Pooks freaked about housing. Got better by evening, I was meloncholy though.

Thursday Morning, up at 4:30, felt like yakking. Got up did some banking stuff getting ready for my trip to Switzerland. Ran virus scan while showering. Tried to update ipod, had weird slow downs, ok, time to reboot.... Blue Screen Of Death:

STOP 0x000000ED UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOUME ....damn.

A couple more reboots and a safe mode tries, UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME. I could have done a lot more work on it and I don't even know if I should try to fix it before leaving. Blah.

Eating Coffee Beans at work...

Sick today, Pooks too. Both sick, it sucks. I'm at work though and trying to use PHP sessions to have a state machine for some admin functions of a program I'm writing. I know I've done this before but it's just not clicking today. It's the sickness.

I have a bag of chocolate covered coffee beans that I'm munching on. Good, gives me energy. I skipped time with dad last night so I could go home and crash. I ended up having to work late. It was a comfort food night, pb&j and cup-o-noodles. I did spend some time programming to kinda relax. I have three copies of the yum source floating around that I'm trying to work on. I want sorted mirrors.

I've also spent some time getting my stuff 'googlized'. Various website stuff fixed up and arranged. I want to find my 'dollz' crap and get that up. I used the dollz images for a comic I did once. Fun stuff for the kids. :-)

Thinking about stuff like that just makes me want to go home. I was planning to stay late today, but probably not. I am tired and drained and just want today to be over... or really to have something more fun than php state machines to work on.