18 days on the road and I'm heading home

Good Morning from the Louisville International Airport, Haircare, and Tire Center. I am sitting at the Waterfront Bar and Grill having a cocktail before noon. It is a rare thing for me to drink this early, but I find that one or two drinks takes the edge off my nerves when flying.

The flight home today marks the end of couple trips to Louisville for work that started on August 9th. I spent the 9th - 21st in Louisville, the 22nd - 25th at home in Chicago, and the 26th - today in Louisville. I am ready to be home and relaxing on my couch, in front of my flat screen. Of course, I will have to work the rest of this week, but that is OK. At least I will be at home.

The project I was pulled in to went pretty well, all things considered. However, it is suffering from a cramped schedule and feature creep driven by our partner/customer. The result is frayed nerves, disorganization, unoptimized code, and frustrated employees. I am usually pretty resilient under most stress (though I have my moments) however the rest of the team who had been on the project longer were pulling their hair out. Even I was screaming at Bill Gates and the rest of the Microsoft crew by Sunday morning. Seriously, the war over how to do things in computers reminds me the differences between spawned out of the revolutionary war. We drive on the right side of the road, the English drive on the left. We drink coffee, they drink tea. Unix line endings are \n, windows are \r\n.

I am a biased Apple convert, but I think Apple finally got it right. They took a solid UNIX based OS and built a beautiful interface on top of it. Gone are the days when Macs were a third flavor in the battle over line endings (they used to be just \r)

Windows 7 and the newest Windows server is pretty and seems to work fairly well, but at its rotten core it is still windows. it still does things in the same asinine way.

Anyhow, maybe later I will rant about the evils and misuses of XML. The devil's markup. for now, I am just happy to be heading home.