Dale Miller

I am now officially on a diet. I weighed in at 191 this morning. That’s about 30 pounds over where I need to be. I’m now serious about losing weight. I know I can do it if I’ll just apply the appropriate willpower. Goodbye snack food. Goodbye eating out. Hello low-calorie meals.

I left the house late this morning, since I needed to drop Ashley at the vet at 8:00. I figured an hour would be plenty of time to get there, and maybe even be a few minutes early. That would have been true if it had been my normal time, but hitting highway 10 at that time of the morning is ridiculous. It took me nearly thirty minutes to get from Kroger to I-430 — that’s only about two miles. That didn’t start my day off well, but that was the worst that happened, so I should be grateful.

Today was predictably busy, since I have been gone for a week. I really accomplished little, but at least managed a few things to make folks glad to have me back. Being useful is always a good thing.

Missing a week of dance class was not good. I was fairly lost for a good potion of class, but I think I can pick it up before the week is out — I hope so anyway.

While driving in this morning, I was listening to Radio Disney. Yes, I know it’s supposed to be for kids, but it has more music than most any of the early-morning Little Rock stations, and I like much of it — so there. I was amused to hear both “We Will Rock You” by Queen and “Route 66″ by the Cheetah Girls within a short period. I wonder how many of the Disney target market realize just how old those songs are. Of course the Cheetah Girls is a new release, but the song came from 1946. The other thing I found interesting was an ad by the North Little Rock School District. I didn’t realize that the public schools were now in competition for students. Apparently you don’t necessarily have to live in NLR in order to go to school there. I don’t know what sort of arrangement one has to make (do they charge tuition for out-of-district?), but it was not something I had heard of before.

I’ve spent much of my evening watching Farscape. I expect to do that for the next several days until I’m caught up. I’m most of the way through the first season now.

I made it safely back home last night. I did have one interesting thing happen along the way — I had a pleasant and reasonably-priced meal in an airport! The T.G.I.Friday’s in DFW (at gate B10) had a special that had a fair price and the food was good. I generally refuse to eat airport food just on principle, but I was hungry and they were in the right place.

That’s pretty much all that happened yesterday other than lots of sitting.

The week here has gone by — slow, fast, and otherwise, but it’s nearly done now. The class was good, even if sometimes a bit tedious. I think I can make Identity Manager do pretty much all UALR might need. Now if I can survive the political wrangling necessary to do things right. I much prefer technical issues. I am comfortable in that sphere.

One highlight of my week was making UALR’s IDM installation populate the new Oracle Internet Directory for the portal. That is now officially our first IDM project. I’m going to have to tweak it quite a bit when I get back to the office, but it works! That’s a major step in the right direction. The LDAP for NETID is likely to be next. Those are the easy ones.

The second highlight of the week was spending a couple of hours this afternoon walking on the beach. The weather was beautiful, though too cool to swim :( It was still nice to just walk along the sand and breathe the salt air. I probably got too much sun, but such is life.

I’m going home in the morning. I’m quite ready for that.

I have, in the past, truly hated buying a car. I stressed going into the task, and always felt bad afterward. This time was a bit different. I actually performed comparison shopping this time, and didn’t worry about the salesfolk. I visited about twenty different dealers today, making notes, taking pictures, and walking away without ever filling out a form. Once I had visited the major Pulaski County dealers (and several in Faulkner), I found the best deal for the vehicle I wanted. I actually feel reasonably good about this purchase. I paid a bit more than I wanted, but not more than I felt the vehicle was worth.

I am now the owner of a red (maroon? burgundy? something dark) 2002 Chrysler Sebring LXi convertible. I think it is a reasonable compromise between sporty and practical. Hopefully it will last me a while. Even though this was more pleasant than other car-buying experiences, I have no desire to repeat it soon.

Classes start tomorrow. That’s fun because all the students are back on campus. That’s also bad, because all the students are back on campus. :) UALR is rather boring between terms, but the first few days of a semester are always hectic. I’m taking modern dance, about which I know nothing. Hopefully it will be as interesting as ballet was.

I must, simply must get back into an exercise program. The DSC fit/well programs start up again next week. Of course, I’m going to be out of town next week, but I can certainly start going when I get back. I have put on far too much weight and I’m going to lose it … somehow.

My last night in Tampa wasn’t terribly pleasant. The powers that be decided to do work on the nearby highway around 2:30 a.m. that involved very loud machinery. This did not help my sleeping any. At least that was the only night I had that problem. Friday was fine, but long. I finished my class around noon, drove around for a bit, stopped at a beach at the causeway and sat and read a bit, had a late lunch at a Greek place in Ybor City, and headed on out to the airport. I was there quite early, but I really didn’t have anything else to do, and it’ far better to be early than late. Besides, Tampa has free wireless access. :) The flights back were uneventful, but tiring. I had to hurry to get through Atlanta, but made it with several minutes to spare. I got out of the Little Rock airport around 10:30, and made it home (with a stop to borrow a car) about midnight. When I woke up this morning, I was simply drained. I spent a good portion of the morning in bed, and feel somewhat better now. I need to start looking for a car, but just can’t bring myself to do that today.

I had a call yesterday from State Farm. They have decided to declare my car totaled. This is both a bit of a relief and a bit of a worry. Relief because that means I don’t have to be concerned about whether it would run right after being fixed, and a worry because I simply hate buying cars. The good news is that I’m probably going to get more for it from insurance than I could have as a trade-in. The bad news is that my rates will probably go up. We shall see. In any case, I’m going to be shopping for a car once I get back home.

I passed two unremarked anniversaries late last month. December 23rd marked one year of growing my hair out. Maybe in another year it will actually be long.

December 31st marked 10 years of having a quote of the day on my web page. Unfortunately, I no longer have a three-month period (July-December 1998) due to deleting them and not realizing the fact until the backups had all rotated off. That’s annoying, but can’t be helped. When I started collecting quotes and posting them, I had no idea I would keep it up this long. I should put them in a database and make them searchable. That may be my next project.

Day two of class. So far I haven’t picked up much new. Much of the material was touched on in the previous classes. This afternoon has potential to be more interesting, though. We shall see.

This class is going a bit more slowly than the previous two, I think due to the composition of the students. There are a few who aren’t programmers, and they take the full (recommended) time for the labs. In my previous classes, we usually finished the labs in substantially less time than Sun allocates. That was nice. This time I’m finding time to play on the Internet, write LiveJournal posts, and read in between modules.

On to Module 4.

After the long, tiring drive up to Highland to return the car yesterday, I crashed much of the afternoon and evening.

Today I got up, packed, and headed to the airport. I was worried about getting there only a bit over an hour before my flight, but it didn’t really matter. The flight was delayed coming into Little Rock, and they didn’t turn it around particularly fast. We left little rock right at an hour late. I was supposed to have exactly one hour between flights in Atlanta. The pilot made excellent time to Atlanta, where we sat waiting on the ground to get to the gate. By the time I deplaned and walked to my next gate (nearby, oddly enough). I missed the plane by about five minutes.

So…. walk to the other end of the concourse to get a new flight. The flight was, of course, in a different concourse. Took the tram from the A to the B concourse, and schlepped down to A7, to find out the flight had been moved to A29, at the other end. Sigh. Got to A29 and found I was number 11 on the standby list, and they were showing a possibility of seven seats available. As I was becoming resigned to being in the Atlanta airport for an additional two and a half hours, they somehow decided that not all of the reserved seats were actually reserved. All the standby passengers were allowed on. Then we sat on the ground for a while. We finally got into the air and left Atlanta in our wake.

Hopefully the rest of my week will go a bit more smoothly.