Cerebral Gibberish

Well, my trip to Lafayette, LA. was not canceled after all so I flew down there last Thursday. Total travel time including the almost 2 hour layover in Houston, TX. was ~7 hours. Both legs of my trip down there were on the small, 50 seat (1 x 2 seat configuration) Embraer RJ145 jets which really sucks to fly on if you’re taller then around 5’3″ which included me and the NCSU Women’s Volleyball Team that was on the flight with me to Houston.

Any ways, I arrived in Lafayette around 1:30pm and while waiting for my baggage I tried to find a hotel room using the airport kiosk without success. After that I got my rental car and headed to the job site. The drive there was pretty easy and over all the damage from Gustav looked to be pretty minimal on the outside but I’m sure places were still without power and unseen water damage. I didn’t really get much work done on Thursday since the other vendor that was there was still getting the SAN storage and servers they were responsible for up and running so I started to do some research on the blade hardware the company was using and how the networking in the blade chassis worked as well as learn more about how the existing network was setup and how our setup will fit into it.

Around 6pm I decided to try and find a hotel again and this time I got lucky got a room at a local Hilton that had some last minute cancellations. Leaving the customer site around 9pm I headed to the hotel looking forward to some quite relaxation time since I’ve been on the move since 6am. Entering the room I was greeted by the sound of two carpet drying fans and a dehumidifier. When I left to grab some dinner I checked with the front desk to see if I could turn them off but they requested that they be left on so the room could dry out without damage. So being a nice guy I left them running all night which pretty much ruled out any quite time.

Friday was pretty much non-stop 17 hour work day. I didn’t even get a chance to have lunch or dinner and by time I left for the day at 2am, there were no places open to grab some food. I pretty much lived on a cold sausage biscuit that one of the guys had left over in the morning, hand fulls of Coco Puff and some peanut butter on crackers. Saturday I spent about 3 hours tying up some loose ends which left me with about 2 hours to do some site seeing before heading home. I was hopping there would be time for me to take a side trip to see the French Quarter but no such luck.

My flight back was actually more enjoyable since both legs of my trip back were on bigger planes. I arrived back in Raleigh around 11pm and this time was able to enjoy a quite (IE: without fan noise), relaxing evening.