WhistlinDixie

Vacation, At Last

Today, my brief summer vacation finally started. You are probably thinking, "Wait. Didn’t he get back from Chicago last week and go to Myrtle Beach?" Well, of course I did. What made today so much better is because my brother left for a youth conference in New Jersey with the church youth group. He won’t get back until next Saturday afternoon! It’ll be nice to be at home without him bothering me (and watching Star Trek constantly. Curse you, Spike TV!) . If any of you out there have younger siblings, you know exactly what I mean.

Sunburns and Bogies

Well, yesterday, I got my arms sunburned pretty bad. The rest of my body was spared because it was underwater. Today I woke up and told my mom that I was going to hang out in our room for the day if we had another day at the beach. About five minutes after I told her this, my uncle, Bruce, called and asked if I would like to go golfing with him. I took him up on it, since he is the only person that I ever go golfing with. I coated myself with sunscreen and headed out for the links.

I’m not sure what hurt worse, my sunburn or my game. For my game, I had a pretty decent excuse: I hadn’t been golfing for three plus years, which just happened to be the last time I golfed with my uncle. On my best hole, I could have saved for par, but my lousy putting forced me into a double bogie. I think, that if anything, I was worse in this game than any of the others that I have played. My sunburns could have been a major factor in my poor performance as well.

The Weirdness Continues

You’d think that every vacation would have one weird event, ours being the fire yesterday. Well, we had a second this afternoon. While my dad, Brian, and I were at the beach, a security guard showed up and started talking to a group of kids. Turns out that they had set up a bong on the beach out in plain sight. They seemed to not care about the security guard, so he went and got a real policeman. After he got on the scene, the kids and the two law enforcers talked for a while. They eventually made the kids take the bong apart and had one of the kids take the bong with him as the officials escorted him off of the beach. I’d like to see you try to explain that to your eight year old cousin.

Not The Way To Start Out A Vacation

Surprise! So maybe I lied a little. I am indeed writing this from Myrtle Beach. However, you won’t be reading this until I get back, so there will be plenty for you to read.

We got to our hotel at around 8:30 in the evening, so we decided to go down to the beach since our hotel is right on the beach. We messed around a little in the surf since none of us were in our swimsuits. My brother and I were walking back toward our parents when we noticed that they seemed fixated on our hotel. I looked up and noticed what I thought looked like a fire on one of the balconies. We watched it for a while, not sure what it was. When it grew in size, we realized that it was indeed a fire. We started wondering why there were no fire alarms going off because there were people in rooms very close to the fire. Finally, after people started yelling from the beach that the building was on fire, someone finally set off the alarm to evacuate the building. Something like a half an hour later, firefighters finally made it up to the room. While they were trying to figure out the best way to attack the fire, I noticed a truck driving up the beach. When the truck stopped, I looked up at the balcony, only to see that the fire had been put out. After watching the fire for half an hour, I was a little bummed to have missed the fire being extinguished. We were able to reenter the building about fifteen minutes later. Here is a highly magnified picture:

Goodbye, Chicago

Tonight marks my last night in Chicago. I’ll take off tomorrow morning for my drive home. If I am lucky, I’ll make it home in time for supper. Then, I get to do my laundry before going to bed. The next morning, I’ll be back on the road for a family vacation to Myrtle Beach. We’ll be meeting my aunt’s family and possibly my grandma. I might even run across Chief while I’m there, since our visits overlap by a day or two. Anyway, I’ll be back in around a week, so that means about two weeks home before I get to go back to school. Lucky me.

Drive By!

Before anyone has a heart attack, my car is free of bullet holes, as am I. I, however, was a victim of a drive by yesterday on my way home from work. This was a drive by that I never even imagined, even in my wildest dreams. I was a victim of the dreaded drive by advertisement! Confused? Don’t feel bad. I was too when it first happened.

I was driving home from work with my windows down since my AC is not working, again. Right after I pulled out of a stop light, I noticed a blue van driving along side me and its driver was shouting at me. After my experience with downtown Chicago, I figured that he wanted over since he was in an exit-only lane. I slowed down to let him into my lane, but he stayed driving right along side me. I was starting to get agitated, so I looked over at him to see if I could figure out what he was shouting. No sooner did I do so than he asks, "Hey, you want a home theater system?" I looked back at the road for a second, wondering if I had heard correctly. I turned my head back towards him, only to hear him ask, "You want a home theater system?" At this point, I had had enough, so I shouted an emphatic "NO!" back at him and tried to put some distance between that wacko and myself. And to think that I thought that pop-up and pop-under ads were annoying.

The Beach, Just Not Myrtle

This morning I took part in a charity sand volleyball tournament for the United Way that was put on by UPS. When I signed up, it sounded like it would be fun. That is, until I found out that it started at 8:00 in the morning. After all, what teenager wants to get up at 6:10 in the morning on a Saturday? It was about a forty minute drive to get to North Avenue Beach for the tournament. I am just glad that they were late getting started since I showed up at 8:05. Anyway, my team, CACH TSG, lost the first match 15-7, 9-15, 13-15 to Metro TSG. However, since we had an odd number of teams, there were a couple of "wildcard" spots in the bracket for teams that lost by the fewest points. It just so happens that we fit into the first wildcard position. We were feeling pretty good heading into the second game against CACH Finance. Unfortunately, we did nowhere as well as we did in the first match, losing 4-15, 7-15. We were horrible. Only explanation that we could come up with was that people were tired. Afterwards, I decided to walk down to the lake and dip my toes in Lake Michigan. It was freezing (apx. 65°)! Since it was so cold, I decided against actually taking a swim in the lake to cool off. After watching another one of the games for a while, I decided to leave so I wouldn’t get a sunburn.

In other news, my last day of work for the quarter is Thursday. I get to drive home on Friday, then turn right back around and leave for Myrtle Beach with the family the next day. I get back the next Thursday. Then, just a few weeks later, I get to leave to go back to school, which starts on the 11th of July. I guess that I won’t have too much time to get bored this summer.

Now I Can Come To You

Do you find that you are forgetting to visit my site to see if I have anything new? Now you can use a little program called an aggregator to get the latest from me. Just go out and download a news aggregator that supports RSS 2.0 and subscribe to my feed. Right now I am using JetBrains Omega Reader 1.0.4, which is currently being offered for free. It requires the Microsoft .NET Framework v1.1, as do most of the aggregators that I have seen. I am sure that there are plenty of other quality news aggregators out there, including the one built into Mozilla Thunderbird and a few plugins for Mozilla Firefox, so don’t feel obligated to use the one that I am using.

What is RSS, you ask? Basically, it is a way that a web site can publish headlines or other content in a standardized format. You can then use a news aggregator to subscribe to one of these feeds. Whenever a new item is available, it show up on your aggregator the next time the aggregator synchronizes. By doing this, you do not have to go and visit each individual site to manually check for updates.

To subscribe to my feed, click on the icon that is in your browser’s address bar (in Firefox or IE7) and tell it to subscribe to the feed. If you are using IE6, you can right click the "Hungry? Feed on RSS" and click on Copy Link Location, then paste the address into your feed reader.

Innnterresssting

I found this on the net last week. I’ll go ahead and set this up for you since it is not obvious from the excerpt what this is about. There is a piece of software called Microsoft SQL Server that a lot of web servers use to provide content. For all I know, Xanga or Amazon.com could use it. There are competing products, such as MySQL, which is used by Google, but that is really beside the point. DateTime is a data type that is used by SQL Server to store, you guessed it, a date and time (ie, 08/15/1986 15:30:43). Due to size limitations, the span that can be represented by a DateTime variable must be limited. In other words, you couldn’t use one of these to represent the time of the Pharoahs or the year 3000. Anyway, not that it matters too much, but here you go:

What A Guy Has To Go Through (To Get A Library Card)

Since I’ve been learning many new things at work, I figured that I would go and get a book from the library so I can catch up on some things. The book that I want happens to be in a library in southern Chicago, but they have interlibrary loaning set up, so that is a plus.

On Wednesday evening, I went to the Hinsdale Library to get a library card so I could put out a request for the book. I give the librarian my driver’s license and she looks at it for a few seconds and then hands it back to me. She says that it must have my current address (which of course it doesn’t, since it is an OHIO driver’s licence). She asks if I have a piece of first class mail addressed to me. Of course I don’t since I saw no reason to bring mail with me to the library. When she discovers that I live in Westmont, she tells me that I have to go to the Westmont Library to get a library card, even though it is good throughout ChicagoLand. I left, broken hearted since I had no shiny, new, library card.

Today, I went to the Westmont Library. I hand the librarian a large envelope that I had received from my parents a few weeks ago. She asks for picture ID to go with it, and I happily oblige. Then she informs me that the mail has to be something official, like an electricity bill or apartment lease. I tell her that the librarian in Hinsdale told me that I could just send a letter to myself and that would be good enough. She then tells me that different libraries have different policies for giving out library cards. Really, what is the point of having universal library cards if each library has its own guidelines on distributing them? Anyway, she goes and asks a supervisor about my situation, then goes to the phone and gives someone a call. She hangs up and tells me that I really need a bill or something. However, she took down my name, address, and phone number so that the library can contact me when a decision comes down form the higher-ups. Really, does it need to be this hard to get a library card?