March 11, 1999
Dear Everyone:
Another week, another business trip.
This one was not quite so arduous as the last.
I flew up to “Idaho Falls” on Sunday.
Met a bunch of people during a whirlwind tour of “Idaho Falls” on
Monday, then flew home late Monday night.
Of course, I was a complete
zombie all day
Tuesday, but hardly anyone noticed.
This was partly due to the fact that a lot of people were out on
their own business trips.
One set were in “Santa Anita”, while another group had driven down to
Visalia.
Normally, on Tuesdays, we hold a Technical Support meeting to
review what’s been going on in the technical world and what we’re
planning to do over the next week or so.
This helps keep everyone on the same page.
But, when I realized that I was
the only technical person in the building on Tuesday, I officially
cancelled the meeting.
My trips to “Hobby” and “Idaho Falls” have done
little to change my mind about which software product I like better.
However, they may have given me just the ammunition that I need
to convince The Powers That Be to go with the one I want.
So I guess it was time well spent.
(But too much time spent in the wrong time zones, as far as I’m
concerned.)
In the meantime, I’m investigating which “back-end”
database software
we’ll use and whether we want to buy and operate a server of our own, or
rent space on a Shared Server in Company Park.
This involves a lot of downloading of software reviews from the
Internet and trying
to find someone in CITC who will return my phone calls.
So far, I haven’t been able to put a lot of hard numbers
together. And even after we
select the software, there will still be a ton of work to do to get
everything in place.
In other news…
Before I began my world travels, I had ordered a
new computer for home. I had
it delivered to “Livermore” so that there would be someone there to
receive and sign for it, even if I was out of town at the time.
As it happens, it arrived my last day in the office before the
“Hobby” trip. (For those of
you who understand these things, it’s a
Dell
Pentium II 450 Mhz
with a 12 gig
hard drive
and 128 megs of
RAM.)
However, because I’m so busy these days, and have
little personal time to spend, it’s still sitting in a locked room in
the warehouse until I can find the time to take it home and get it set
up. I am currently accepting
nominations for a name for the new PC.
My “old” PC, Oberon, will then go into the office
for a bit. “Wilbur” and I
will spend some “spare time” deciding how to best upgrade Oberon to a
Pentium.
Then Oberon will go to live with “Jeannie”.
Since she can also use my
America Online account
(up to five screen names allowed on a single account), “Jeannie” will
“soon” have email, just
like all the rest of us.
Speaking of which, another person recently told me
to stop sending a paper copy of the Weekly Letter.
The email is all she wants.
(Even though email people miss out on the cute graphics.
Or maybe that’s why they prefer email.)
This cuts the number of paper copies down to nine, with only five
going via US Snail
Mail.
At this rate, it’s going to take me forever to go
through all those one-cent stamps.
Love, as always,
Pete
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