This was this morning’s second exercise. We programmed this thingie that is called a hub. Went a lot smoother than we thought it should go, but then again everything is easy when you are playing follow the leader. Basically the instructor goes through the tutorial on his PC which is projected on the wall in front of the class. We students just click and hopefully stay the path.
Just wait until Thursday when we get back to ASCO and try it by ourselves.
Back in Albemarle for another couple of days of GibbsCAM training. This time it is three of us, Mark from last week plus another Mark from the Tool Room. Once again we are staying at the Holiday Inn Express and I’m conducting business on their communal PC near the lobby.
Like last week, I got the guys checking in to use my Priority Club Card number, so this trip I’m racking up triple points towards future stays at a Holiday Inn. Trouble is to agree to it this time I had to promise to take them along on Donna and my next free stay. We’ll get a room with two double beds, one for us and another for the two Marks…
An elderly man entered into a confessional booth:
Man: “I am 82 years old, and have a wonderful wife of 60 years; many children; grandchildren; and even a couple of great grandchildren.
Yesterday, I picked up two college girls, hitchhiking. For some reason, they thought I was kind of interesting. One thing led to another, and we ended up at a motel where I had sex with each of them twice.”
Priest: “Are you sorry for your sins?”
Man: “What sins?”
Priest: “What kind of a catholic are you?”
Man: “I’m Presbyterian.”
Priest: “Why are you telling me all this?”
Man: “I’m telling everybody!“
On Friday night I did finally get through to a CSR and finally got my point across that the phone was broke as I have had it for a week now and the signal strength meter has even twitched off of nothing, zero bars, nada, zippo. Of course the warehouse was closed, so it was too late to get a new phone shipped out to me. They are going to send it FedEx overnight on Monday and it was to be here next Tuesday.
The reason I say was is because tonight when we got back from the mountains, I had to set about a dozen clocks in various rooms and to make them match as close as possible I needed a correctly set timepiece to carry around with me. Since neither Donna nor I own a watch the only thing I could think of to use was the worthless cell phone. After syncing the time on the phone to the time on the PC, off I went. Somewhere about mid job I noticed something strange on the phone display, bars on the left side indicating that I was getting a signal to the phone! I dialed it’s number from the home phone and it rang. I couldn’t answer it as the CSR had emptied the minutes in preparation for adding them back to the new phone when it got here.
I called the Tracfone customer service number and after a short wait I was hooked up with my minutes and held in my hand a working cell phone (a week late.) Now there are only two questions remaining: 1) Will I get a phone via FedEx on Tuesday? and 2) How long will this phone work?
On last night’s trip up to the mountains to spend the night, there was construction on US441 between Clayton and Dillard, GA. We must have past 30,000 of those orange construction barrels as the Emperor past through the 30,000 mile mark.
Yesterday morning I washed the car because we had a MMC event in the early afternoon. This was our Senior Drive. One of the Club members is the Administrator of the Elmcroft Assisted Living Center in Martinez. He and I concocted a scheme in which the Club would come over and take the residents who wanted to go on a top down Miata drive instead of their usual Saturday 8-passenger van ride. We had a perfect day for it too, lower 70’s and a cloudless blue sky. We had 5 cars and 5 passengers for the first trip and when 4 more people showed up, we did a second slightly shorter trip for them. The one fellow who I drove was so appreciative that I was embarrassed by it. This is definitely an item we should do at least once a year.
When we got up this morning in the north of Georgia it was in the lower 30’s and there was a layer of frost covering the car. We wimped out for the first couple of hours of driving. The leaves didn’t cooperate in the whole picturesque, blazing fall color, Norman Rockwell painting we had hoped to see, but you take what you can get and we got extremely patchy color. We even did a 20-mile segment of the Blue Ridge Parkway in hopes, but the colorful vistas never materialized. There was one short stretch of NC 215 coming down off the parkway that in a matter of minutes we went from bare trees to patchy color to green. Never the less we had a wonderful time in our 24 hours of the mountains. We got in a night away from home, a short hike in the woods, a look at a beautiful twin waterfall and miles of twisty roads.
Daylight Savings Time ends (or is it starts) tomorrow morning at 2:00AM. So tomorrow at this time it will be this time.
Don’t forget to set your clocks ahead 23 hours tonight before you go to bed or you will be late (or is it early) for church on Sunday.
Called Tracfone customer service today at lunch and was lead through a series of steps, one of which was restoring factory defaults, and when nothing worked the barely understandable CSR said I am turning this over to our tech department. If it doesn’t start working by 1:00PM call back. Here is your case number. Tonight, still nothing so I tried to call just now and got a busy signal. Waited a few minutes and tried again. This time the phone rang and it was answered by a recording that announced, “Due to high call volume, you call cannot be completed, please try again later.”
Last weekend regular gas was going for $2.42 a gallon. Yesterday it was $2.29. In the business section of today’s paper there was an article titled, “Oil Companies See Record Profits in 4th Quarter.” Do you think that the sudden drop had anything to do with public relations?
Is it just me or do the new GM minivans look an awful lot like the Mutt Cutt van from the movie Dumb and Dumber?
