Ramblings From Justin Penney

The day started early. Got up at 6:30 and finished getting packed. Got my clothes and guitar togther. Finished the DVD full of music I started last night and ate some breakfast (a bowl of Cheerios and a little of my left overs from Garozzo's). I spent the rest of the morning hanging out with Jacey.

Kyle picked me up at 8:30. We're heading out to clean up and start administrating a cluster that had beenpurchased from usover the past 3 years. This cluster had been expanded by 4 to 10 nodes at a time fairly frequently.

The drive was pretty uneventful except for Kyle's sunroof having and air leak. He's got an Xterra so we jammed some folded cardboard under the cargo basket and it held the sunroof down so we could actually hear. We rolled into St. Louis at 12:10 p.m., which was just when "Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me" was starting. On KCUR, the KC NPR station, it's on at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday night and Jacey and I are nearly always doing something else and we never catch it. Today was just a frustrating continuation of that.

I love the drive up Skinker going towards Washington University. Much to Jacey's displeasure I like to look at pretty girls and there are always pretty girls jogging, walking, inline skating, biking... In a more non-testosterone driven way, it's just nice to see people out of their houses doing things.

The computer room that we are working on is awful. We started by setting some small goals because we have a huge task ahead of us. We were meeting the goals and it wasn't going too bad. We got to a good point and went to lunch.

We drove down the road to Del Taco. Last time I was in STL I wanted to go but we never quite made it. The Riverfront Times had named them as having the best fries in town so I made a point to go there today. The fries were pretty good. Not the best I've had but pretty darn good anyway. The food is pretty good overall. I'd pick Taco John's over Del Taco, but just slightly.

After lunch everything just got worse. We had to fish a bunch of power out of the raised floor. We had pretty much every tile that didn't have something onit up so we could drag the junction boxes around to where we wanted to put the racks. After we got that done we finalised the attack on the rearrangment of the machines in the rack.

All of the machines are numbered. They were not put in the racks in any kind of order. Almost all of the mounting rails were put in incorrectly as well. We got one rack completely disassembled and went to dinner.

We ended up at St. Louis Bread Company (Panera everywhere else). I really disliked Panera the first time I had it and now I've eaten it twice in less than a week. I'm aquiring a taste. It also doesn't seem as expensive as it first did. So this was down in "The Loop" which is an area I love. On the walk from campus we passed a party in a back yard, people were out eating, hanging out, talking and just watching the people go by. There were a bunch of chess games going on in the outside eating area at STL Bread, like serious games where the people hda timers. We were watching this one table of teenagers and they were just flying through these games of chess when this little kid is next up for the table. He's probably between 8 and 10 and wins 2 or 3 games in a row. It was really amazing to see a prodigy like that at work.

Once we were stuffed with bread and soup we haeded back and started reassembly. We got part way through and realised we were going to have to change the mounts on each machine as well as the ones in the rack. The batteries in all of our drills died and we called it a night.

Our hotel is a two bedroom apartment that ended up being nowhere near the college. Not horribly convenient but we'll deal. When we were checking in there was an uncomfortable moment when the clerk said, "Are you guys staying together." It just had a weird feel to it so I went and sat down in the lobby. The people around the hotel are weird! The first people I see are hanging out in and around a truck smoking a joint. We took our bags in after passing some older guys that looked at us very strangely and went to a conveniece store. When we got back the few people around the truck had become like 12 people hanging out in front of our apartment. It's really noisy.

# posted by Justin @ 11:21 PM