Ahoy, Houston! (part II)

Still two days behind in this chronicle... but this post will take care of that, I hope.

Roswell seems to be a fairly nice town, though I didn't get the opportunity to see it in daylight. Sasha and I hit the road a few minutes before dawn on Friday, headed south for Texas.

Stopping at a McDonald's for a sandwich and coffee, I asked the young lady at the drive-through window just how far I was, timewise, from Texas. "Oh-h-h," she said, "about three hours."

That was a shock. "Three hours? Then how long to Houston?" I thought to myself.

It turned out the young lady was wrong. Within two hours, I was in Pecos, Texas, a sad little town that sits like a barnacle on Interstate 20. I stopped to get gas ($1.05 a gallon), and proceeded on to Ft. Stockton, about 50 miles further south on 285.

I would imagine that most of the town of Ft. Stockton sits south of Interstate 10, as I saw little of the settlement before heading eastbound on the highway. The last time I'd been on this segment of I-10 was back in 1990, when Galina and I were driving cross-country (literally, I guess) in a U-Haul dragging our Toyota Corolla on a trailer as we headed for Scotts Valley and my new job at Borland. We'd been going westbound, then, and for some reason I remembered the terrain as a lot more forbidding. Heading eastbound on Friday, the landscape still didn't look too inviting, but it was not as bleak as it seemed a decade ago.

Somewhere around San Antonio, I realized that I still had no idea what I would be doing while in Houston. I called the client, who told me that - for the first three days of my assignment - I was assigned to various simulations. That's probably a good idea, as the thought had crossed my mind that my aerospace technical Russian might be a tad rusty.

In the end, I got to Houston a few minutes in front of 6 pm local time. More exactly, I was at the intersection of Dairy-Ashford Road and Westheimer Boulevard, calling Lee on my cell phone. We agreed to meet at the Borders bookstore near her apartment (the access to her apartment's parking is ungainly, to say the least), and then motor on down to Pearland.

By the time Lee actually got to the bookstore and we got down to Pearland, there wasn't anything much to do except go to sleep, especially since Lee had to be at work Saturday morning at the on-the-bounce hour of 7 am. Sasha seemed glad to see her mistress, at least.

Getting up at 5:30 am was no picnic, especially since the house was cold, cold, COLD! We did get out on time, however, and got Lee to work a few minutes in front of 7. I drove around the area (near the intersection of Weslayan and Westheimer) and noted a few places I'd love to go into, but they would not open until 10 am, so I went back to Pearland.

I spent the day rather lazily, once it became clear that I could not (for some reason) access my home Linux box from here. Why I cannot do so is a mystery, which may be the subject of a separate post later. In the end, I sat down to watch a DVD that I'd left here unopened the last time I was here, The Big Red One, with Lee Marvin and Mark Hamill.

At first, Lee and I assumed that she'd spend Sunday with her boyfriend, but when it became clear that Dwayne was smitten with Super Bowl fever, Lee and I agreed that I'd pick her up around 7 pm so we could go see The Count of Monte Cristo, which I must admit has been a film I have been looking forward to watching.

It did not disappoint me. I loved it, and I am sure I will write more about it. After the film, we came back to Pearland and again, almost immediately retired. Lee got up just a few minutes ago; I've spent the better part of the last two and a half hours online, most of that time trying to figure out what's wrong with my Linux box.

I have my suspicions.

However, at the immediate moment, a growling stomach and a sentient Lee tell me that it is time to go get something to eat somewhere.

Cheers...

Here and there...

Yesterday, after returning from taking Lee to work, I eventually ended up in the area of Baybrook Mall. One of the stores on the fringes of the mall is something called Texas Art Supply, which is well stocked, indeed, with any- and everything an artist could want.

I was looking for fountain pen ink. Specifically, I was looking for red fountain pen ink, the brighter the better. As far as the major office supply joints are concerned, fountain pen ink comes in cartridges, and then only in two shades: blue and black.

When I found what I wanted, I wasn't sure it was the right stuff, given how bright the ink was, but there it lay on the shelf, ink made for "fountain & dip pens." I bought the red and the green varieties.

It turns out to be fairly difficult to wash out a fountain pen that has had black ink in it. I found an old, fairly inexpensive pen that I proceeded to flush with water for quite some time, until the water coming out of it was almost clear. I then filled it with a shot of the red, and tried it out. The hue was satisfactory.

Today, however, after the ink has had a chance to sit in the pen for a day, the ink is a sort of really dark, dark red, so I'm thinking I'll have to repeat the procedure, and may have to do so several times. We'll see.

* * *For some reason, the Perl script that I have been able to access from the store to get at my mail doesn't work when I try to hit my home Linux box from my laptop. No errors appear to be logged to the httpd error_log file and a GET operation on the script is recorded in the access_log, but nothing appears on my laptop's screen. There might be some kind of incomatibility, but I cannot imagine what it might be.

In the interim, I tried to telnet into the box, which works, up until I do something that causes the screen, basically, to freeze (i.e., stop responding). I suspect it has to do with my TERM setting, which is set to 'ansi' in my Linux environment, as the screen stops responding at just about the time the screen is supposed to be cleared. I think that when the Linux software outputs a screen-clear code, the effect is to kill any display on my remote screen, but I am not in a very good position to check this out.

* * *When all else fails, use the phone. I called Drew this morning and he logged in as me on my home machine and forwarded an e-mail from the client that tells me what I'll be doing this week.

Tomorrow, I'm participating in a "Hurricane" simulation (sims are classified using various unsettling words, such as Shock, Scream, Typhoon, Hurricane, etc.), starting at 7:30 am and ending at 4:00 pm. On Tuesday, I'll be in a Typhoon, which starts at 2:30 pm and runs until 8:00 pm (this makes me a prime candidate to support a telecon in the morning, I guess). I haven't yet opened the files for Wednesday through Friday, as I only just finished uudecoding them.

It also turns out that my participation in the sims is as an air-to-ground (space-to-ground, for all you nit-pickers out there :^) simultaneous interpreter, which really doesn't make the work any different from "regular" air-to-ground, except that the sound quality is scads better during sims.

Anyway, although the sim starts at 7:30, I need to be at building 110 early enough to get a pass for my car, and at building 30 early enough to make sure I can get into the place (or visit the security office if my badge doesn't work). That means I need to catch my beauty sleep starting Real Soon.

Cheers...