jeffpollard.net

My new friend

I'd like to tell you all about a new friend of mine. The first is a friend that I met at MacWorld New York. This is a great pal that has really made my life easier in the past week or so. He never forgets to remind me about important dates, which I sometimes have trouble remembering. His name is Entourage. Actually, his full name is Microsoft Entourage, part of the Microsoft Office:2001 for Mac suite. But most people just call him Entourage. All jokes aside, at the Microsoft demonstration where I won my new mouse, I learned tons of features that were in Entourage that could make life easier for me. One of the best features (and probably the one that finally made me make the switch from Outlook Express) is Palm syncronization. Instead of keeping my calendar, to-dos, and notes in my Palm software and my address book in my email program, why not keep it all in the same place? That's what Entourage does. This may not seem like such a breakthrough for PC users, but this has been somewhat lacking on previous versions of Mico$oft's email clients. So, now I keep all of my Palm data in Entourage and I don't have to switch back and forth between the two. Nifty.

On a completely different subject: As you all have seen by my photo gallery from this past weekend's show, there was quite a turnout. I took some 107 photos, and I emailed the editors over at SporTruck.com to see if they wanted to use my photos for their online coverage of the show. Well, I received an email back from one of them last night, saying that they'd like to use my photos, and if I ever take lots of pictures at future shows that they may be interested. Not too bad. It's kind of an honor to have my photos up on their site. The photos should be up on their site in a few days, so go check them out. Either way, it's a great site with plenty of other photos from custom vehicle events around the country. Definitely one of my favorite "truck sites".

I guess that's about all for now. My schedule with my blog has gotten waaaay out of sync. Lately, I always forget to update it at night, and then I remmeber on my way to work the next morning. I suppose my internal clock still isn't back to normal after all of our traveling over the past month of two.

Trucks and Ducks

Finally...a weekend at home. This has been a much-needed lazy weekend at home. Sortof.

Yesterday (Saturday), there were two big events that Olivia and I wanted to see. The first was the East Coast Nationals show over in Mechanichsville. I had almost forgotten about the show, amazingly enough. I had been thinking about possibly entering the Taco in the show, just to see how it would do at this stage in it's development. But I had waited too late and, clean-wise, it wasn't in any condition to be shown. We decided to go and look around and take pictures, though. It turned out to be a MUCH bigger show than I expected. I had never been to this show before, so I wasn't quite sure how big it would be. There were tons of people there, and some really nice rides. I got a chance to catch up with some people I hadn't seen in a while, and see some trucks (and cars) that I had never seen before. Over all, an awesome show. I've posted 50 of my favorite photos from the show in a photo gallery.

The second event yesterday was the annual Big Brothers/Big Sisters Rubber Duck Race downtown. You could purchase a duck for $5 each (the $$ goes to the charity) and then they dump all of the ducks in the canal and they race to the finish line. The owner of the winning duck wins $1500 and a chance to win a new VW Beetle. It was pretty fun to watch.

Today, I slept in until 1pm. Wow. It's been a long time since I've slept in that long. And, I only woke up because Olivia came in and woke me up to tell me that I was missing the race. So, here I am, relaxing and enjoying my Sunday, for once. I hope you're doing the same.

We love you..you giant freakin' Q!!

Wow. What a rush. No, I didn't just go skydiving, or caving, or co-ed naked scuba diving. I just took a healthy shot of NyQuil. And man, was it nasty. It's been a while since I've taken the green junk, so I had forgotten how bad the after-taste is. I sorta' anticipated some nastiness, so I took a chaser into the bathroom with me. It didn't work that well. The taste is still in my mouth. But...my cold is getting ready to die a very VERY slow and GREEN death. Yep..I'm out for vengence this time. I don't get sick very often (usually no more than once or maybe twice a year), but when I do, I can usually kill it pretty quick.

Today was awesome. It was another run-your-pants-off busy day, but it rocked. I was on a roll. I felt like there wasn't a problem I couldn't fix. By the end of the day, I had no open help desk tickets, and I even cleaned out my voicemail box that had accumulated 15 messages today. I wish people would stop calling me. heh heh.

Dialpad, where are you??!!

Hi again. I know I just wrote in here earlier today, but I figured I'd blabber a little more tonight.

The consulting went very well this evening. I was able to solve all of the problems and provide some advice for purchasing a new computer and a server. And..I made a little cash on the side. That never hurts.

Well, I got myself all worked up today anticipating the release of DialPadX. For those of you scratching your heads wondering what the heck I'm talking about, I'll bring you up to speed. Somewhere, somebody figured out a way to use your PC and Internet connection to make long distance phone calls. I'm not exactly sure how this all works, but I know that it's called Voice over IP, or VoIP. As I'm sure you can imagine, this has been a very popular advancement for those penny-pinchers who like to stay in touch with friends and family via telephone.

So why is this so exciting for me today? Well, one of the premier companies that is providing VoIP service over the 'net, Dialpad, announced last week at MacWorld that they would FINALLY be releasing the MacOS X version of their software today. So, for two years I've been green with envy that PCs could use this software, and now..the day is finally here. Actually..it's 11pm, and Dialpad's website still says that DialPadX is "Coming Soon". I sincerely hope they get their act together and release it. I'm eager to try it out.

I still have the remains of a stuffy-head cold. It's been slowly dying, but the sinus medicine sure makes me sleepy. Perhaps that's why I haven't thought about updating the past few nights. Let's hope that one more solid night of sleep will finally put it to rest. HA! Get it? I crack myself up.

Where did I go?

Wait. Where am I? Oh yeh. Work. To be completely honest, folks..the past few nights, I've been so busy that I've actually -gulp- forgotten to write an entry for my blog! Imagine that! And, inevitably, I always remember as I'm driving in to work the next day. So, here I am.

As expected, work has been hectic this week with trying to get as many machines switched out as possible before our July 31st deadline (to get the old computers back to the lease company).

Not too much much else exciting, really. I'm getting ready to dive head-first into an on-the-side consulting job for a local company, JHI. They are a Mac-only shop that is looking to re-structure how they save their data. It looks like I'll probably be installing a new G4 running AppleshareIP soon. Should be a fun experience.

Home tweet home

We're back! We arrived in Richmond at around 6:00pm tonight, about 40 minutes sooner than Mike expected us to arrive. We tossed our stuff in Lauren's brand new Chevy Impalla (nice car!) and came home. Yay! I promptly went and rescued Gizmo from Paws & Claws boarding and brought him home.

We unpacked our stuff, assessed the junk mail and have been relaxing and watching the news.

It's back to work tomorrow. Since my head is a little stuffy and stuff, I wish we had another day of rest..sortof a vacation after our vacation. :)

Quick! GO! Wait! Stop! No! GO!

Whew. Another exhausting day in the Big Apple. It's a good thing that I don't live here all of the time, cause' it would wear me out. But we had a great day today being tourist-type people. We started with doughnuts at Dunkin Donuts for some quick morning energy. Then, we hoped on the subway and rode down to Battery Park and stood around for 2 hours in the blazing-hot sun trying to figure out if we should get on one of the ferrys that go over to have a talk with Miss Liberty. No, we were actually waiting in a terrible terrible line while we were asked not once, not twice, but NO LESS THAN 20 TIMES if we wanted to buy a pair of Oakley sunglasses. We finally made our way to the front of the line and rode the ferry over. Nice breeze. When we got to Liberty Island, the crowds were herendous, which I expected. So, considering the lines to go up into the statue, we opted for the exterior point-and-shoot-and-click tour. I couldn't imagine that we would be able to get any better pictures from inside the statue, plus they had access to the crown restricted to the early morning hours..and it was too late. So, we walked around the island, took some pictures, then got back on the boat and left.

When we got back to Manhattan, we rode the subway back up to midtown and stopped at the Empire State Building. After an hour of waiting in line for tickets and then another hour waiting to actually get up to the observation deck, we made it. It was just how I remembered it from many years ago, although a lot less chilly. It was December the last time I was here.

Tonight, we got dinner at the food court-type area a couple blocks away and then sat and watched traffic. People are so fascinating here. Very enjoyable to watch walk and drive. So, here's my list of things I learned while here:

I won! and "We don't serve your kind here."

Ok..It's finally over. I almost feel guilty for saying it. Yep, MacWorld New York 2001 ended today for me when I walked out of the Jacob Javits Center at around 2:00 PM. The reason I say "finally over" is because, well, I guess I'm Macworld-ed out. But don't get me wrong: I enjoyed (almost) every minute of it. I suppose my only complaint with the whole experience was a couple of the sessions that were a little boring.

So, after my first session today, I went upstairs and enjoyed the compliamentary lunch provided everyday to the "Pro" conference people. Then, I headed back out to the exhibits area to Microsoft's booth. My intent was to sit through their demonstration, but not for the explicit reason of learning more about their products. Rather, my goal was to win one of their spiffy prizes from drawing names out of a hat. The prizes included Office:2001 books, an Intellimouse Explorer (laser mouse), and a copy of Office:2001. I don't think I would've sat through the entire schpeal if I didn't have a weird hunch that I was going to win one of those cool prizes. And, when the time came to draw names out, my hunch was correct. I won a new Microsoft Intellimouse. I'd always secretly wanted one, but could never see paying $30 or $40 for one. So, i can't decide whether to keep it or sell it on eBay and get some cashola. It really is a cool mouse, but from my experience playing with Mike and Brian's similar mice, it feels a little uncomfortable to hold anf move.

After leaving the conference, I met Olivia at 11th and 45th and we went over to the Sea, Air, and Space Museum. Those of you who know me know that I don't really like museums that well, but the fact that they had a big ole' aircraft carrier sitting in the middle of New York City interested me. So, we took the walking tour around the the USS Intrepid, an airsraft carrier that has been retired since about 1983. By the time we finished looking around the carrier, I was dead tired. So, we walked back up to our hotel and I took a much-needed three-hour nap. When I woke up, I felt much better.

We walked no less than 10 blocks to find a Taco Bell and had dinner, and then came back to the hotel. We decided to stop on the 8th floor and grab a seat in the little bar area and look out the window and watch traffic and people. After a few minutes of sitting at a little table, a lady came up and (very snottily) asked us if we had figured out what we wanted. I bluffed and told her that we hadn't decided yet. Olivia had gotten a slushy drink at a little shop outside the hotel and brought it in with us. The snotty waitress was quick to tell Olivia (also in what I would consider a very rude fashion) that she needed to put that out of sight. When I picked up the menu, I noticed that their 3grams of caviar was only $65. We decided that it was time to leave. As we left, I thought to myself how similar this was to the resturaunt scene in Ferris Bueller. If only I were the sausage king of Chicago..err, New York.

So, here I sit. Twelve stories up. Watching all of the crazed taxi drivers and limo drivers (all of them named "Geoffrey") honking their horns wildly in an attempt to make traffic move along faster. It's not working.

Tomorrow, we're going to take a look at the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building.

More sessions..Last day!

Hi everybody! Whew. I was tired last night, thus the reason for not writing an entry.

Yesterday was more conferences, more exhibits, and lunch with a fellow Richmonder, John Linthicum. John is a fellow XMUG member, and it was just circumstance that he got into the same bus going back to the hotel as Olivia and I last evening. So, we decided to go to dinner, then walked around Time Square a bit.

The conference sessions are starting later today (10:30), so I got to sleep in a little this morning. I guess I should be heading off to those right now. Today's sessions (that I'll be attending) are about web publishing and OS X and another one on customizing the OS X interface. I'm really looking forward to both of them. I'd better get going..

Quicksilver..and slow people

Today's keynote was awesome. Since it's so late and I have to get up early again tomorrow for another fun-filled day at the Javits Center, I'll give you the short-short version:

New G4s with new enclosures(733, 867, dual800)

Faster iMacs..but suprisingly..no LCDs..hrmmmm (500/600/700mhz?) starting @ $999!

MacOS X 10.1 Fast. Very fast. DVD playback. Finally. I'm ready for it now.

Didn't have too much time to explore the show floor, but it was really crowded. There's way too much to see and do over there.

The conference sessions were pretty good, on the whole. One of the sessions was pretty boring, so I left and went into another session on OS X instead. Pretty fascinating stuff.

Olivia's going to call for Dave tickets at 11am for tonight's (Thurs.) tapings. They do BOTH Thurs. and Fri. night's shows on Thursday, so I guess we have a pretty good chance tonight. We'll see.

Overall, an exhausting day. For more details on the announcements made today, check out apple.com or my favorite Mac news site, www.macnn.com.

Man, these are LOOONG blocks!

We got our excercise today. We woke up at around noon. I intended to sleep in pretty late because I still wasn't feeling very good. I still wasn't feeling that great when I woke up, but it got better as time went on. We ate our doughnuts that we bought at Dunkin Donuts the night before and then set off for Martin's office on 26th street. We scoped it out on the map and it didn't seem too far away. Granted, our hotel is in Times Square (46th street) and we would be walking all the way down to 26th street. Yeh..only 20 blocks. It ended up being a pretty good walk, but we made it. When I got to our office, I walked in and said, "Hi, I'm Jeff from the Richmond office." The lady at the front desk didn't quite know what to think of me. I mean, if I were her, how would I know if I should believe me? I guess she knew I supposed to be there, so she told me to walk around and do whatever I needed. The place looked absolutely awesome. It had nice woodgrain floors and plenty of cool contemporary lighting. I really felt like an outside and kinda lost, even. I did a few things that I needed to do, then we left.

We caught a cab back here to the hotel, rested up and made plans to walk to the Javits Center (the site of the big conference this week). It, too, was a pretty good walk, but it gave us both a great look at New York. The closer we got to the convention center the more Apple billboards we saw, most plastered with "I (Apple logo) NY". It was just so cool to see so many Apple billboards around. When we got there, the building was also plastered with signage. I've posted a photo gallery from today's activities.

Whne we walked in, it was exactly how all of the pictures I've seen on the 'net made it look. The ceilings are really high and there were Mac posters and signs everywhere. Signs for the new iBooks, MacOS X, and nVidia were hanging from the rafters. We made our way over to the registration area and picked up Olivia's badge, since they hadn't mailed it to us before we left. We walked around so that i could get a good idea where I'm going tomorrow and then left. We walked back to the hotel, trying to take a different route than we had taken the first time so that we could see as much as possible.

Tonight, we headed north up Broadway and saw the Ed Sullivan theater, home to the Dave Letterman Show. A guy (a CBS rep.)was standing outside and offered us tickets to tomorrow night's show if we could answer a trivia question. We decided to go for it. The question was "Where is Dave originally from?" I answered "Illinois." Of course, I was correct. So, the guy wrote our names on his clipboard and gave us a blue paper that he says will get us into tomorrow's taping of the show. Now, before you all get too excited, here's the bummer: The MacWorld conferences and seminars go from 12:30 until 5pm tomorrow, and the guy said that we have to be standing in line before 4pm to get into tomorrow's taping. I sorta knew this before he offered the tickets to us, but it was worth getting anyway. After we walked away, Olivia both agreed that the guy giving away the tickets seemed rather suspicious. While we were talking to him, I even asked him if he was just some random guy off the streets posing as a CBS employee. He pulled out a Late Show badge, but I could create a CBS badge in PhotoShop. So, we're not exactly sure that he was even a CBS employee, but it doesn't really matter now. Supposedly, you can call starting at 11am each day before a taping to get standby tickets, so we're going to try to do that for Thursday's taping. I'll keep you all informed if we get standby tickets. :)

I'm so psyched. Tomorrow morning, Steve Jobs will get up on stage, in front of me and a gazillion other Mac fanatics and give his MacWorld New York 2001 keynote address. I probably won't sleep tonight. For those of you that have TechTV, the keynote will be broadcast on there and also via Quicktime streaming using this page on Apple's website. I can't wait!!!!

Where has time gone?

Well well well. Where has the time gone? My deepest apologies for not keeping you all informed lately. My life, as I know it, has been a crazy adventure the past few days. In order to get as many of the new computers rolled out as quickly as possible, Tommy and I stayed late..really late.. last week. And we still didn't get done.

So, here we are in New York City. It's pretty amazing. We're staying in the Mariott Marquis and our window in our room is looking directly out into Times Square. We can sit here all night and watch the annoying ads playing on the huge TV screens out there. Before it got dark tonight, we took a walk down through Broadway to see what's around us. This place is pretty exciting. And not quite as terrible as I remmeber it from the last time I was here..about 10 years ago. We had dinner at the TGIFriday's here in Times Square, then came back here and explored our GIGANTIC hotel. This is a really nice place..very ritzy. And..it's all paid for. :)

Our room has an ethernet connection, too, which is pretty cool. The only problem? They never told me that I was going to get charged for it. I should have assumed as much. Oh well. I'll probably dial up the rest of the week to keep the cost down. $9.95 per day. Owch.

Tomorrow, we'll be doing some more walking around and visiting the Agency's office here to do a few things.

Take care, everybody!

A meeting..with Officer Read

Tommy and I worked late last night, and by the time I got home at 9:00pm, the last thing I wanted to do was pull out my PowerBook and turn it on..for anything. So I didn't. We made good progress on installing our new computers, but we have a LOT of work ahead of us.

I left the apartment at 7:30 this morning (a little early) because of our Agency-wide quarterly meeting. As usual, I hopped on I-95 and started the journey south to downtown Richmond. I was just passing the very next exit on the interstate when I passed a State Trooper sitting on the side of the road, probably shooting radar. "Great..", I thought. And, just as I feared, he pulled out right as I passed by. I figured he was coming my way. I continued along with traffic and I could see him a few cars back, trying to get through traffic to get to me. As people moved to the side, he finally made it up beside me. He rode along beside me for a few seconds, then quickly droppedbehind me and turned on his flashing lights. Great. I knew what was getting ready to happen. I was getting ready to be hassled for some petty crap that wasn't a real danger to myself or anyone else on the road. I pulled over onto the shoulder and stopped. A pretty husky officer got out and made his way up to my door.

"Sir, you ever been stopped with this truck before?"

"Nope." I replied.

"Do you know that your tail lights are illegal?"

"Actually, they ARE legal. They say "DOT" on them, which makes them perfectly legal."

"Nope, you're wrong. Any aftermarket tail light is illegal in the state of Virginia" He sounded very snotty now.

He continued his nit picking by asking me questions about my front marker lenses, my window tint, and the height of my truck. He took my license and registration and went back to his car. 10 minutes later, another Trooper showed up and parked in front of me. I remember this happened one time when I got pulled over in my old teal truck. Possibly more than once. I find it funny how it takes 2 State Troopers to pull over ONE customized mini truck. Watch out, we're a terrible threat! The second Trooper got out of his car with what looked like a window tint meter (it measures the darkness of the tint) and went back to talk with the other Trooper. A few minutes later, they were both standing behind my truck, inspecting my tail lights. The first Trooper also had a yard stick in his hand. I guess it was time to measure the Taco. I snickerd to myself. It's legal, height-wise. They made their way up to the front of the truck and began measuring the front bumper. They then moved to the back and began trying to meausre the back. The frist trooper came back up to my door and asked me to get out. So, I went back to the back of the truck where they were standing. The second Trooper was explaining to the first that my tail lights were, in fact, fully-legal. I grinned to myself. I knew I was right and the first trooper was wrong. I felt like thanking the second trooper for correcting his ignorant co-worker. Then, they asked me what the height of the rear of my truck was. "15 or 16 inches. I measured it a couple days ago." They seemed satisfied. We moved to the front of the truck. They held the yard stick up to the front bumper and pointed at the bottom of the valence. I quickly corrected them and told them that that WAS NOT the bumper. The first trooper immeadiately argued with me, telling me that it was, in fact, my bumper. I illustrated my point by reaching down and flexing the plastic valence. Bumpers don't flex. The second tropper again corrected his colleage. The officer told me to join him in his car.

He ended up writing two tickets for me: one for my window tint and the other for my front turn signals. Bullsh*t. While he wrote out the ticket, I said "With all due respect, don't you guys have better things to do other than pulling me over for this?" He replied, "Well, I pull people over for lots of things, not just this." That's not what I meant. What I meant to ask (but didn't) was "Why do you feel the need to harass me just because my truck looks different than your average Ford Tempo on the road?"

I ended up late to the staff meeting and that's pretty much put a dark cloud over my whole day. I just haven't been able to concentrate on anything today and I'm not my usual, cheerful self.

Not quite sure what I'm going to do about this. My choices are to just pay the fines and deal with it, or remove my tint and put my factory lenses back on. But then, that would defeat the idea of customizing my truck. I hate Virginia. I should have taken a job in another state.

A high performance machine!

First, let me apologize for the entry below. I was transfering some files late last night and actually fell asleep while the files were copying over my wireless network (yes, it's only 11MB/sec theoretically). So, when I woke up, the files had finished transfering and I realized that I needed to add an entry to my website to keep you fine folks updated on my (not-so) exciting life. So, in my half-awake stupor, I wrote what you see in the entry below. Pretty funny, if you ask me. Even the tone of what I said below came out totally wrong: I wasn't dreading today's performance review at all. I was actually anxious and excited about it. I was just too tired to make it sound right.

So, the review went very well. Glen(my boss) and Steve (head of the dept) had some very nice things to say about me, and even as humble as I was trying to be, it made me feel really good and I couldn't help but smile. I, of course, thanked them, too. As I expected, I was given a pay increase. And, quite unexpectedly, I was given a promotion to the next "level", "Customer Engineer II". Now, don't get too terribly excited. My job duties haven't changed. I'm really happy.

Tonight, I took Olivia out to dinner at Olive Garden and then drove around exploring a few roads we've never been on.

After we got home, I called Mom and Dad up in Maine (they're on vacation) and chatted with them about their vacation activities. They actually went canoeing today. Yeh! Mom and Dad! Weird. I didn't realize that they enjoyed that kind of thing. I know I would have, if I would've been there.

Oh, and I've also posted photos from our trip to Asheville, NC for the Lewis Family reunion this past weekend. Enjoy!

home again..

Quick note..We srrived back in Richmond earlier Sunday evening.

This weekend was plenty enough to reinforce my feeling that I may want to move to North Carolina one day.

Tomorrow: my performance review at work. Yay. Should be fun.

Too many faces to remember!!

Wow. Never in my life have I met so many new peopleWow. Never in my life have I met so many new people. If you've been following, this weekend, Olivia and I traveled down here to (just north of) Asheville, NC for the Lewis family reunion.

It's been a long day complete with lots and lots of food to eat, people to meet and mountains to climb. And I'm tired. But, I figured I'd write in and say to everyone out there. So, HI!

We have to get up early tomorrow to eat breakfast with Olivia's grandparents and then make the 7-hour trek back to Richmond.

Oh, one final note: if you're a race fan, if you missed the Pepsi 400 tonight, you really missed it. Dale Earnhardt Jr. won tonight's race at Daytona, just 5 months after his father died on the same track in the final lap of the Daytona 500. What a sweet victory. I don't think I've ever been so gripped by a sporting event as I was in the final 5 laps of tonight's race and then during the celebration afterwards.

Leaving for Asheville

Since we're leaving for Ashville (for Olivia's family reunion) shortly, I figured I'd leave you allw ith some more eye candy of my wheels to enjoy tonight in place of my normal (insightful) entry. I may or may not have access to a computer Saturday, so if you're surfing around bored, go check out my Disney pictures again. Or, better yet, go wash your car (or truck). It needs it! Of course, this doesn't mean you, Brian.

Click the thumbnails for larger images. Enjoy!

Back in the saddle again!

Back in the saddle again today, boys and girls. It was nice, even though it was rather busy at work.

When I got home, Olivia and I ran through our normal routine of getting the mail and then we went to PetSmart to get Gizmo some food and then over to the mall to get a new audio cable for my home theater system. At some point in the past 2 days, Gizmo chewed all the way through the cable, rendering it completely useless. I guess he thought that was a fun thing to do. I disagree. That takes the score of this ongoing battle to Gizmo: 2, Cables: 0.

I got to watch The Screen Savers again tonight. Pretty exciting. Olivia and I both commented that we hadn't really watched any TV in about two weeks.

Olivia's parents went to Nags Head today and then we'll catch up with them when we go to North Carolina this weekend for their family's family reunion. Both Olivia and Bruce (her brother) have warned me that their family is weird, so I'm curious to meet them all.

Tomorrow's Friday which makes me happy. Later!

Time for WHAT?

Here I am! I'm not lost after all. The past few days have been so incredibly busy that I haven't had time to share my experiences with you all.

So to re-cap, we got back from Florida late late Saturday night. I woke up early Sunday and tried to have the guys at Firestone mount my tires. No luck. Olivia's friend's wedding was at 6pm Sunday night. So, that's where I've left off, faithful readers. Here comes the interesting part:

So, we're driving to the wedding on I-64. I look down and the gas light is on and since I hadn't noticed it before, I figured it just came on. So, I move over to the right lane to get off at the next exit. And that's when it happened. Her car started sputtering and died. Yep, we had run out of gas. We pulled off, locked the car and began walking towards the exit to find some gas. We had only walked a little ways before a guy stopped and offered us a ride. It probably helped that both Olivia and I were dressed in nice clothes (for the wedding). So, he gave us a ride to the gas station where we got a gallon of gas in a little gas can. Some people from Pennsylvania were gracious enough to give us a ride back to the interstate. Nice folks. So, we put the gallon of gas in the tank and drove down to the gas station to finish filling the tank up. That was definitely an experience that I hadn't ever been through. Pretty embarassing..but pretty funny, looking back on it now.

Monday: Back to work. Since the dolts at Firestone couldn't mount my 17" tires, I decided to call on Custom Cruisin' and let them put them on their touchless tire-mounting system. I left work a little early (thanks, Glen!) drove home, threw the wheels and tires BACK in the truck, and drove to Custom Cruisin. The guys there were really nice and mounted the tires with absolutely no problems. And..the wheels are still in pristine condition. I made it back to Fireston with just enough time to have the guys there mount them up for me. Nice.

Tuesday: Went to work at 9am(this is normal). At 11:30, someone with enough authority decided that we were going to close the agency at noon (this is not normal). Pretty cool. So, I came home, washed the truck with Mike and then unloaded about 30mb of digital "film" on my freshly-washed beauty. One of those pictures is in the entry below.

Today, we spent with Olivia's parents and went and watched the fireworks at King's Dominion tonight. The fireworks show was pretty amazing, but not as amazing as the smart-ass that tried to escape quickly from the park and wound up driving his Ford Expedition into a ditch and smashing his front bumper. That SUV won't quite go anywhere, now will it? Idiot.

Tomorrow? It's back to work. I've got 90 new computers ready to go out to their new "homes". Tommy and I have our work cut out for us.

New Wheels

Day 6 AND 7 Pictures..

Finally, my Disney Day 6 AND Day 7 pictures are up! I forgot to take pictures of my wheels this morning, but it looks like we're getting off at 2pm today, so I'll give the truck a good wash and then take a bunch of pictures. Stay tuned later for more!

They're on!!

It's been a long, crazy day..but the wheels are on, I have a brand new 500mhz Titanium PowerBook and Olivia's parents are in town. Like I said, it's been a long day.

Stay tuned for pictures of the new wheels actually ON the truck tomorrow..and oh yes.I know, I still need to post the photos from the last day at Disney - Magic Kingdom. My apologies for not posting them by now.

Tomorrow, I'll get SOMETHING done!

Home!

Home at last! We arrived home around 11:30pm last night, unpacked most of our stuff and went straight to bed.

Our flight took a little longer than expected because of some foul weather around Orlando, but we arrived at Dulles at around 6:45pm. Brian's parents picked us up and took us to their house where they treated us to a nice home-cooked meal. Thanks yet again to Mr. and Mrs. Korte!

Olivia and I left shortly after eating (nothing like eating and running!) so that we could make it back here to Richmond in case her parents showed up. Her parents are making the trip to Virginia for a short vacation and for a wedding of a family friend. We weren't sure if they would be coming here to our apartment or down to Tidewater, so we wanted to be here, just in case. It turns out that they decided to stay down there for the night, since the wedding is Sunday evening.

I woke up around 9:30 this morning to head over to Firestone to pick up the new shoes for my lady (new wheels for the truck). The front desk guy let me take a look at them when I got there. Niiiiiiiiice. So shiny. So perfect. I waited an hour and a half for them to get to me and then the fun began: mounting 205/40-17 rubber bands on a set of 17s. You see, this particular shop doesn't have a newer machine designed for mounting large (and difficult) tires onto custom wheels. Most reputable shops have such a machine and I guess I just assumed that this shop had newer equipment. So, the tire guy slaved over the tire-mounting machine for about 10 minutes. Then he called over another guy. They both worked on it. And another guy. Three guys working on it. No luck. After 20 minutes and plenty of words that a sailor would be proud of, they decided that they just weren't going to be able to mount the tires on these wheels. So they gave up and told me to take the wheels and tires to a shop with a touchless mounting system and get them to mount them for me and they'd take it off of my bill. Fair enough. So, I brought the wheels and tires home wiith me. Now the task is to find a shop that's willing to mount my tires for me...and not scratch them. Until then, I have a make-shift end table and the place smells like rubber.

In a little while, we'll be off again, down to Tidewater for the wedding. When I return later, I'll most likely post pictures from Magic Kingdom and our return trip.