Once More, With Feeling
Started: 2004-06-16 20:29:58
Submitted: 2004-06-16 21:26:49
Visibility: World-readable
After graduation, I wandered around the crowd and finally managed to talk to some people I knew from Walla Walla. Shortly after standing up, Dr. Aaby walked by, so I waved at him before he ran off to connect with the rest of his people. I talked to Dr. Cross, Dr. Wood, and Dr. Aamodt before declaring myself done and walking to Gem's great uncle Ora's house, conveniently located on 9th Street in College Place. We ate lunch there, sat and talked a bit, and headed back to the cottage to pack up for the epic drive back to Portland. Once again, Gem and I ended up in the back seat with Gem's grandfather, which was a little more crowded than I would have preferred, but I managed to survive.
Gem and I made it to Portland's airport without trouble but managed to leave our fleeces in the trunk, so Gem called her mother (after we spent all of a minute checking in for our flight; there was literally no queue at all) and we retrieved our fleeces from the trunk. I found something to eat and we made it through a non-epic security queue onto Concourse C. After half an hour waiting at the gate (during which I transcribed the epic previous changelog), the gate attendant came on the intercom and announced that our aircraft was late coming out of Denver, due to a maintenance problem that eventually involved swapping the plane, and would be arriving an hour and a half late. I was not exactly pleased; our flight was already scheduled to land at 2300 MDT, which was when I usually begin my regeneration cycle.
Realizing I had plenty of time on my hands, I fired up Elssbett's DVD player and watched the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Once More, With Feeling". I had only a vague idea how it fit into the greater plot, and Gem was almost as clueless as I (she watched the first several seasons of Buffy, which helped a bit, but not much several seasons later), but I still enjoyed the episode. (It helped that Sunnydale is a place where bizarre things, like random people breaking into song, happens on a regular basis.) I have a bad feeling I may want to watch Buffy now, although maybe not from the very beginning; high school is so far behind me now I'm not sure I can properly emphasize with the characters. (I liked the episode so much, in fact, that I kept the DVD from Netflix long enough to watch Joss Whedon's commentary track this evening.)
Our plane finally arrived, ninety minutes late. It was a CRJ-700 regional jet, four seats across but long and skinny. The flight was a Frontier Express flight operated by Horizon; at one point, the flight crew came on the intercom thanking us for flying Horizon. I excused him; it was late for him as well as for us.
As we descended into Denver at the end of our two-hour flight, I tried to identify the city below me when it dawned on me that I was looking at the north side of Boulder; I could see Gunbarrel, IBM, Case Logic, and my parents' neighborhood as soon as I realized what I was looking at. As we flew towards DIA, I saw Louisville, pointed out where my apartment should be, and continued my monologue as we flew over Broomfield, Westminster, Northglen, and on to DIA.
We landed at 0030 and taxied to the very furthest corner of Concourse A, which I didn't previously know existed. When we walked out onto the tarmac from our aircraft, we parked next to a similar plane that had a few maintenance guys crawling around it, which I suspected might have been the plane we were supposed to take. We entered into a concrete block structure tacked onto the end of Concourse A like an afterthought. The walls and carpet were fairly clean, otherwise I would have suspected it was forty years old instead of the ten years old I knew it to be, since nothing at DIA is older than ten years.
We retrieved our bags and headed out to catch the shuttle to the Pikes Peak parking lot. It was 0100 and I knew I wasn't going to get to bed anytime soon, so I called iTi and voicemailed Ross telling him I was going to be in half an hour late, which would give me a bit more time to sleep. (I probably would have come in later except for the Monday morning staff meeting at 0900. It turned out to be a low-key half-hour meeting that I probably could have skipped had I wanted to.)
The shuttle arrived and Gem and I eventually made it to Yoda. I wasn't surprised to see the interstates essentially deserted at 0130. We arrived home at 0200 and didn't waste much time going to bed.
Yesterday evening (that'd be Tuesday) I went rock climbing with the church's climbing club, which is targeted at teenagers; I'm along as a "chaperone" and an official belayer. We had a 2:1 ratio of chaperones to children, which was amusing.
Today was one of the few days at work when I actually get to sit down in the morning and spend all day coding. On Monday and Tuesday I tried to figure out how exactly to extract the functionality we wanted out of Windows' print architecture (I now know far more about it than I ever wanted to), which I've been fighting with for most of the past several weeks. After trying numerous tactics, I returned to an earlier idea on Tuesday and by noon had a proof-of-concept, which was much further than we had been able to get on any other method. I declared victory and set about to figuring out how exactly how to accomplish what I wanted. I spent most of today refactoring my old code, remembering how to use select() and figuring out how to send asynchronous signals between processes. (I'm technically writing this code for Windows, but I'm making life easy on myself, and our future Linux port, by using Cygwin, which I think is the greatest thing to happen to Windows since ... well, for ever.) By noon I had code that would compile; I spent the rest of the day verifying that it worked, documenting it, and trying to wire a phone into my new office.
(I didn't actually intend to write quite this much; I imagine Gem is sitting on the couch wondering exactly what happened to me in here.)
