Heinous in Germany - 17 Jan 2001
The morning dawned, once again, much earlier than it really should have. Today was the day that Marc, Mario, and I had decided to go ice skating after work. Thus, I dressed
accordingly with my "fuck redhat" t-shirt, with a hand-knit wool sweater, and some jeans. Of course, I also have my coat, hat, scarf, and gloves. Sometimes, I almost begin to
believe that I don't really live in a place that doesn't have a winter, what with all of this traveling in the winter that I have been doing to places that do.
This morning, at the office, the B80 on loan from the Texas IBM arrived. (This is a really nice server machine with 4 processors and the capability for up to 16GB of RAM. It uses RISC 64 bit PPC processors.) It is really cold, so we are letting it thaw out for a while first. I can hardly wait to impose SuSE for the
PPC on it. It really is a huge machine. They also sent a really big monitor. Not that we will really be using that too much.
I went to the ATM and got more money. There seems to be no easy way to check my account balance, except to pipe netscape through the tunnel, and use it at SuSE. That
would be a possible, if not slow, solution. Seems I can't use the web banking from outside the States. After that, I went and had some pasta for lunch. They mentioned on the
menu that they had a special deal on Margahritas. What a strange way to spell "margarita". I wonder what you put in a German margarita. It made me miss all of the good
Mexican food back in the Bay.
After lunch, I went back to the office to "slave" away. Eventually, it was time to leave to go ice scating with Marc and Mario.
When we arrived, first there was the difficult task of determining which size of ice scates I needed. I ended up with something like a size 9 (43), but those started to really hurt
my feet pretty bad when I started to scate on them. I thought, perhaps, that the size was too big, especially on my right foot, so I traded them for a size smaller (42). That size
barely fit, but there seemed to be more support. I went for the second attempt, but my feet hurt like hell in a matter of minutes. Seems the ankle support was really bad, in
addition to the blades being dull. Marc was nice enough to let me use his skates, and they were so much better. All in all, it was a pretty good time. I think Mario was a little
upset about how bad the scates were as well (like me, he had to rent scates). Toward the end of the evening, I was side-swiped by this guy in a brown hat. I almost regained my balance okay, but completely lost it
at the curve and fell flat on my butt. Boy did that hurt. I managed to get up, after swearing I couldn't move, and finished out the night.