Denver 2006, trip #4
Jun. 6th, 2006 12:16 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nlbarberI'm back in Denver, for the fourth and last time this year. I hope. It's the last scheduled database test, anyway.
The trip didn't start out so well, despite coming in on Saturday to meet up with friends and take in a baseball game. I'd broken the 2 support legs off my rolling laptop case when coming home from Portland, and then epoxied them on as a temporary fix. This worked well enough that I forgot to go find a new case until the day before leaving for Denver, and then couldn't find one I liked. Naturally, one leg fell off in the Atlanta airport, and the other gave it up in Denver at baggage claim. I dragged the three people I was meeting in Denver to 3 stores after dinner on Sunday before finding an acceptable replacement. The lack of a shoulder strap may get it replaced before it breaks or wears out, though.
Then I discovered that when I tried to put the laptop to sleep before leaving for the airport and tried to unplug the external drive onto which I'd moved my home folder (this is in Mac OSX), I'd done a Very Bad Thing. The home folder got corrupted somehow, so while I could still log in, I had a default Dock and couldn't see most of my files in my user area. I may blog the gory details later, but suffice it to say that after a number of attempts, I still haven't got my home folder back on the external drive, although I do have my home folder back the way it was. Mostly. Except that it may be on some phantom pathname that I can't see in the Finder. Must deal with this, but hopefully I can get through this trip the way I have it now. Oh, and to make this more fun, I forgot to pack my mouse, and was dealing with this using the touchpad until I managed to borrow a mouse from someone.
But the baseball game was pleasant--we got the expensive field level seat, but far enough up to be in the shade. And we went to the Denver Zoo beforehand to kill some time, which was also pleasant. Zoo comments: Denver and Atlanta clearly use the same zoo facility design team. Denver has a few nice exhibit areas, but mostly they are unexceptionable--too much bare concrete (though decorated to look "natural"), not overly large (rather like Atlanta, maybe a little worse). The big cat displays looked horrible to me, though. Little concrete enclosures with glass fronts so the visitors could clearly see the cat, but the cats had nothing to do but lie on a shelf (tiger, snow leopard) or pace in a space about twice his body length (Amur leopard? can't remember). I will assume that they only confine the cats to these during peak visiting times, and hope that there's more roaming space somewhere off exhibit.
And today, after an only slightly jinxed first day of database testing (the Ingres database got corrupted on both the local server and the backup one in HQ...what are checkpoints for?), we played games. One end of the table had Ticket to Ride Märklin, and I was in the group on the other end playing Carcassonne. First time with Carcassonne for all of us but the game owner, so we lacked a lot in strategy but had a good time with it nonetheless.
I need to get caught up on the kitchen remodeling blogging, and on my PDA there's a partial post on what happened last week. Must get that moved to the laptop so I can finish it...
The trip didn't start out so well, despite coming in on Saturday to meet up with friends and take in a baseball game. I'd broken the 2 support legs off my rolling laptop case when coming home from Portland, and then epoxied them on as a temporary fix. This worked well enough that I forgot to go find a new case until the day before leaving for Denver, and then couldn't find one I liked. Naturally, one leg fell off in the Atlanta airport, and the other gave it up in Denver at baggage claim. I dragged the three people I was meeting in Denver to 3 stores after dinner on Sunday before finding an acceptable replacement. The lack of a shoulder strap may get it replaced before it breaks or wears out, though.
Then I discovered that when I tried to put the laptop to sleep before leaving for the airport and tried to unplug the external drive onto which I'd moved my home folder (this is in Mac OSX), I'd done a Very Bad Thing. The home folder got corrupted somehow, so while I could still log in, I had a default Dock and couldn't see most of my files in my user area. I may blog the gory details later, but suffice it to say that after a number of attempts, I still haven't got my home folder back on the external drive, although I do have my home folder back the way it was. Mostly. Except that it may be on some phantom pathname that I can't see in the Finder. Must deal with this, but hopefully I can get through this trip the way I have it now. Oh, and to make this more fun, I forgot to pack my mouse, and was dealing with this using the touchpad until I managed to borrow a mouse from someone.
But the baseball game was pleasant--we got the expensive field level seat, but far enough up to be in the shade. And we went to the Denver Zoo beforehand to kill some time, which was also pleasant. Zoo comments: Denver and Atlanta clearly use the same zoo facility design team. Denver has a few nice exhibit areas, but mostly they are unexceptionable--too much bare concrete (though decorated to look "natural"), not overly large (rather like Atlanta, maybe a little worse). The big cat displays looked horrible to me, though. Little concrete enclosures with glass fronts so the visitors could clearly see the cat, but the cats had nothing to do but lie on a shelf (tiger, snow leopard) or pace in a space about twice his body length (Amur leopard? can't remember). I will assume that they only confine the cats to these during peak visiting times, and hope that there's more roaming space somewhere off exhibit.
And today, after an only slightly jinxed first day of database testing (the Ingres database got corrupted on both the local server and the backup one in HQ...what are checkpoints for?), we played games. One end of the table had Ticket to Ride Märklin, and I was in the group on the other end playing Carcassonne. First time with Carcassonne for all of us but the game owner, so we lacked a lot in strategy but had a good time with it nonetheless.
I need to get caught up on the kitchen remodeling blogging, and on my PDA there's a partial post on what happened last week. Must get that moved to the laptop so I can finish it...