(Roughly over Amarillo, Texas) I’m on the flight back home now. Just watched “Freaky Friday.” the inflight movie. I enjoyed that a lot more than that stupid “League of Extraordinarily Lame Gentlemen (and a chick)” film I saw on the flight to Atlanta.

The last day of the class went pretty good. I was able to finish the material by about 2:15, which gave me 15 minuts to answer some final questions and bid adieu to the guys who were my students.

I really do enjoy teaching these classes. I wish I could do it more often. I think it went really well considering I have not taught for a while.

I think it would be cool if Guru Labs could send me back out there when they do the system administration class, but they’ll probably have some more full-time guys by then and they won’t need me to fill in.

Things at Iodynamics have been slow this week, which is understandable considering I’ve been two time zones away.

I was planning on doing a lot of Iodynamics work from my hotel room in the evenings, but it just wasn’t working out. My laptop just couldn’t handle the load of running Apache, PostgreSQL, KDE, and Mozilla-Firebird in a responsive manner conducive to software development. It may have helped if I had some more RAM in the computer, but I suppose the point is moot now anyway since the laptop is probably hitting the trash can or something. I don’t know what I can do about the keybaord problems. Something’s probably fried. It’s frustrating to me because I can’t do anything about it. If it were a desktop computer, I could probably fix something like this, even if it meant replacing the motherboard... but where these laptops use pretty specific components (I think), it seems pretty useless.

The semi-good news is that I have another laptop - a Sony VAIO - a client gave to us to see if we could fix it. We determined the problem was either the hard drive or the hard drive connector. Either way, we said, it would be too expensive to fix it if they were just going to use it for desktop computer anyway.

I’ll try to fix that computer and if I can fix it, we’ll see if we can pay or credit our client for the laptop for its parts. The hard drive in my old laptop is only a few months old, so if the problem with the Sony is the hard drive itself, then fixing it is easy: move the hard drive from my old laptop into the VAIO.

According to the computer-generated map they’re showing on the screen, we’re a little more than 50 miles past Amrillo, TX now - getting close to the Texas, New Mexico border.

Yesterday, the message light on my hotel room phone was blinking. I listened to the message. It was the front desk telling me I had received a letter sent to the hotel. I knew Christine was sending me something, but I didn’t know exactly what it was.

I went down to the front desk and got the letter. It was from Maya and had a cute drawing inside. She also drew a picture, I think it’s supposed to be me, on the outside of the envelop. Some guy saw me looking at it in the elevator and said his kids did that to him too and told me I needed to store it in a shoebox somewhere. Heh heh.

I didn’t bring enough changes of clothes to make it through until Friday. I had planned to hit a laundromat on Wednesday or Thursday to get a couple days of clothes washed and cleaned, but I couldn’t find any nearby coin laundries in the phone book.

So, when I asked at the front desk about the letter, I also asked them if there was a coin-operated laundry in the hotel (I thought there might be, but I hadn’t seen it or any signs leading to it). The guy at the front desk told me where it was, so I took some clothes down last night (the clothes I’m wearing right now, in fact) to get them clean. I was a little surprised to find the washer and dryer did not require any money to operate. They were coin-operated, but they were set up so all you had to do was push the empty coin slot tray in and then you could use the washer or dryer....

My stay at the Marriot Courtyard hotel in Alpharetta was really pretty good. The free continental breakfasts in the morning were the best I’ve ever encountered. The maid service was always top-notch... except for the time they threw away the big McDonalds cup I was using even though I purposely didn’t put it in the garbage can. And then, the free laundry service. Wow. Cool.

Well, we’re probably over New Mexico now. That means it’s all downhill from here... uhm, figuratively speaking... uh... whatever.

I’m going to try to get some sleep now since I’m shifting time zones again and because I need to be well-rested tomorrow morning when I go to Logan to do a premise wiring job for one of our clients.