Day: June 9, 2005

Blind to the truth, maybe?

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/front/3217908

I’m going to do something different, and post the last paragraph of the article first.

The U.S. government has issued a warning to tourists traveling to the border, at the request of U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Tony Garza. Garza has come under fire from Mexican officials who say the warning is unnecessary.

However, this is what the actual story was about:

MONTERREY, Mexico — For weeks, no one came forward to apply for the Nuevo Laredo police chief job because many saw it as a death sentence.

But Alejandro Dominguez proudly took office Wednesday, saying he was not afraid of anything. Nine hours later, he was ambushed and killed by gunmen who fired three dozen times. Officials were conducting an autopsy today.

Kinda makes one think the warning might have some merit to it, no?

The post-Jennings/Houma trip report…

D'Arque Bishop

Okay, I took an Advil last night and got a very good night’s rest; as a result, I’m feeling MUCH better this morning. I still have a slight sore throat, but that’s about it. Otherwise, life is good at the present time.

So… the first thing I did Monday morning was head over to the Enterprise Rent-a-Car right outside my neighborhood to pick up the rental car for the trip. I ended up getting a Pontiac Grand Prix, which all told was a VERY nice car. I might have to consider Pontiac when I buy a car next. While there, though, I got a call from my boss telling me to go to Corporate because their phones were down. Unfortunately, Corporate is in the opposite direction from Louisiana… I got about two or so miles towards Corporate when he called back telling me the phone issue was fixed. So, I turned right back around and headed to Jennings.

Once I got to Jennings at just before noon, I got right to work getting their server upgraded. That took about an hour and a half, and then I installed some software for the QA manager there. By about 2:30 PM or so I was done (and they were nice enough to let me raid their fridge for lunch), and so I hit the road, in order to reach Lafayette. An hour or so after leaving Jennings, I reached our offices in Lafayette and spent the rest of the work day there doing some miscellaneous work and meeting with my immediate boss. Once done there, I went to the Hampton Inn where I had booked a room, got settled in (king-size bed + kitchenette + sofa = win), and only ventured out to have dinner at Chili’s.

I woke up bright and early Tuesday morning, and left Lafayette at about 7:45 AM. I reached Houma by 9:30 AM, and from there began the process of backing up their data and doing the install on the server. Problem was, someone had replaced the routers at the Houma locations with intermittent connectivity emulators. I kid, of course, but the end result was the same: with our uplink to the corporate network down, I couldn’t complete the upgrade task. So, I went to lunch with my fellow IT employee Brent. Though we went to a daiquiri bar, all we had was po’boys and tea or soda. I finished the install when I got back (and when the net connection was back online), went to another location to install an EdgeCAM upgrade, went back to the first location to do the same upgrade there, and then went back to Lafayette. Once there, I met with my boss for about an hour discussing an issue that had come up that we needed to deal with, and then went back to the hotel. I ended up venturing back out to Chili’s for dinner again, and then back to the hotel for another relatively quiet night.

Wednesday morning I packed up, and was headed back to Houston as of 7:30 AM. By around 11:30 AM, I was back at Enterprise dropping off the car, and then I got a ride back to my house so that I could pick up my own car and make my way to the office…

All in all it was a pretty productive trip, and I got done everything I needed to get done. The only big clinchers were the fact that I got sick, and also being told I’d have to make a run down to Corpus for Friday. Fortunately, that got bumped back to Wednesday, so I have time to get ready for it. I also wish the two Who DVDs I got yesterday had arrived in time for me to bring them along with me. Oh, well… I’ll just watch them tonight.

Anyway, I gotta get back to work moving these backup tapes to our safe… fun fun.