Tag: Travel

Today, I have to travel to my company’s home office to teach a class. The day before I’m supposed to drive over I find I’ve got a voice mail. As I do 99.9999% of my job either via emails, IMs or F2F, this in itself was extremely odd. Then I listened to the message and found out it was a sales manager from dealership where we bought the new car.

It turns out that they want to borrow the car for a bit to have to their insurance people look it over (since it was on the lot at the time of the tornados hitting Iowa City). I thought this more than a little odd. As I was busy getting ready for my trip to the home office, I kind of blew off the message. Then this morning, I got another call from the dealership asking for the car again. I called the guy back and explained that I’m driving out of town today. He said it should really only take about 20 minutes and they’d give the car a wash while they had it. He also said they’d bring a loaner by for me, just in case.

I agreed to let him do it and then immediately got a tad nervous about it. I checked their website and found him on it. A little bit later our receptionist called and said a guy from the dealership was here. I went up to the front desk and the only person around was a scrawny looking kid. But he was wearing a sweatshirt with the dealership’s name & logo on it. Then he held out a key to him and we walked to the parking lot. The key was to a 2005 Volkswagen Passat. The stationwagon version. With a dealer’s plate in the back window, a sales sticker on the same. I felt a lot better about giving him my key and took him to my car. He drove off, and I hopped into the Passat for a quick peek.

Oh my God! The wagon is fully loaded with all the goodies Volkswagen has to offer. Now I feel slightly cheated in that I won’t get to drive this puppy for my trip. Don’t get me wrong, I love our new car and our new car does have more gadgets in it than any car I’ve ever owned. But still, that Passat sitting outside if so dang plush and luxurious. I could definitely enjoy driving that card. 😀 Oh well, at least I’m getting a free car wash. Though, now that I think about it; I’m wondering if I should have asked them to top off the gas tank. With gas at $2.84/gallon, that would have been a nice bit of savings for me. *shrug* That’s probably being a little greedy and they’ve been good to me already.

Just I had another night were I stayed up far, far too late dinking around on my computer getting some stuff setup on my local test server. This means when my alarm went off this morning; I was still in the deeper levels of sleep and it awoke me out of some dreaming. As I usually do I just kept hitting at the snooze for as long as I knew I could get away with. Finally though it was time to get up and when I did so I could still remember bits of what I had been dreaming. Those bits were enough for me to discover that my dreams had been changing each time I smacked that old snooze button.
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The more observant of you might have noticed that Twilightners has been showing up on my side bar as one of the books I’m currently reading for a while now. Well, the short version is I’ve already read it once but will need to read it again to review it.

The long version is I started reading it before going on my Japan trip and had intended to continue reading it on the plane, but I forgot to take it with me. After two weeks of mind-blowing traveling, I came back picked up the book and started reading it again where I’d left off. Then I sat down to write a review of it and my mind went blank as to what it was about or who the characters were.1

Was this because the book was bad? Not at all! I was just so wasted with jet lag that I didn’t absorb the book like I normally would and couldn’t think of anything to say about it. I plan on rereading it soonish and will write up a review of it afterwards. I apologize for the inconvenience.

1 Note to self: Reading with the intent to review afterward while suffering jet lag is just plain stupid.

I’ve been back in the States for a few days now and I’ve been meaning to1 write a little something reflecting back on the trip; however with jet lag and what not2, I’ve been a bit too tired to write anything up. Since I received a friendly reminder about it from AWelkin; I figure I better hurry up and write something. First off, let’s get the gushy fan-boyishness out of the way. Going to Japan was an amazing experience and something that I am very glad that I had the opportunity to do. Now that we’ve got that out of the way, here are some of the impressions that I’m left with from my visit to Japan.
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Testing Meme Propagation In Blogspace: Add Your Blog!

This posting is a community experiment that tests how a meme, represented by this blog posting, spreads across blogspace, physical space and time. It will help to show how ideas travel across blogs in space and time and how blogs are connected. It may also help to show which blogs are most influential in the propagation of memes. The dataset from this experiment will be public, and can be located via Google (or Technorati) by doing a search for the GUID for this meme (below).
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