I'm in New Jersey (currently, East Windsor) for work. I drove 286.61 miles from home to here, and only stopped at the beginning for fuel. A little over 4 hours in the car. Now, my goal is to find pizza and a Lowe's to get a new inverter for the car.
fun stuff, lemme tell you :-)
Labels: work
First: I miss my family, something fierce. Both of my kids are under the weather, and I'm not there to be dad, and watch TV with them, and play games, etc.
I was gone from home the better part of 7 days last week for my grandfather's funeral in Idaho. This week I'm traveling for work basically all week. I left around noon on Sunday to drive to Cleveland (current position), and will return home Wednesday night for the night, then it's off to New Jersey and Manhattan on Thursday and Friday.
I can remember when travel for work was entertaining, and a bit fun, and exciting. That ended a while ago. I don't know if it's that I got older and just don't handle the transitions or awayness as well, or if it's just that I'm burned out on the prospect of drinking my coffee half a styrofoam cup at a time, or sleeping in beds that aren't mine, or the fact that I'm in the beds alone, or the fact that my kids aren't actively being... well, kids.
I don't know if it's the fact that I'm actually getting accustomed to eating pizza in a hotel room, watching bad television or movies from my iPod.
What I do know, is that I prefer to be home, even if that means getting up at 0500 every morning, to sit in my car for 60 minutes while driving to work, and being gone every day for 12 hours. I would rather spend 12 hours a day from home, than 24.
Blech.
goes in $HOME/.bashrc
# test for secure remote connection and start screen
if [ -n "$SSH_CONNECTION" ]
then
if [ -z "$STY" ]
then
screen
fi
fi
I performed an experiment this week that I've been toying with for about a year. Last March, I got a GPS receiver from a buddy of mine, and started playing with the idea of having my laptop send email check-ins to brightkite.com every 10 minutes.
Here's what you need:
1 x GPS receiver
1 x laptop running your favorite GNU/Linux distro
1 x cellular wireless data connection
1 x brightkite account
Here's my DeLorme GPS Receiver:
And my Comms Unit (including 3G data access):
And, the laptop:
The most important bit is the scripts. First, we need to pull the data from the GPS receiver. Here's my FollowMe script:
#!/bin/bash
# $HOME/GPS/scripts/FollowMe.sh
# last updated: Thu Mar 17 22:00:10 EDT by slacker@tyr
# start gpsd as root
sudo gpsd -n /dev/ttyUSB1
DATE=`date +%y%m%d-%H%M%S`
mkdir ~/GPS/$DATE
GPSDUMPFILE=~/GPS/$DATE/dump.nmea
GPSDRIVEFILE=~/GPS/$DATE/dump.gpsdrive
RSLTFILE=~/GPS/$DATE/dump.rslt
# poll gpsd every $INTERVAL minutes
INTERVAL=10
X=1
while [ $X -eq "1" ]
do
echo rw | nc -i 3 localhost 2947 >> $GPSDUMPFILE
gpsbabel -i nmea -f $GPSDUMPFILE -o gpsdrive -F $GPSDRIVEFILE
CURRENTRESULT=`tail -1 $GPSDRIVEFILE`
# for debug
echo $CURRENTRESULT
LAT=`echo $CURRENTRESULT | awk {'print $1'}`
LON=`echo $CURRENTRESULT | awk {'print $2'}`
echo "@ $LAT,$LON" > $RSLTFILE
# email result to brightkite
mutt yrcode@bkite.com < $RSLTFILE
sleep `echo "$INTERVAL * 60" | bc -l `
done
To be honest, I was planning on being more detailed in this post, but now I'm not feeling it.
Anyway, the result was pretty sweet: lnxcwbyOtR on twitter and on brightkite. Oh, if there are any specific questions, lemme know :-)
Yesterday, I drove up to New Jersey to visit a customer, and a potential customer. The business end of the trip went very well, but I'm going to focus on the personal stuff.
When I travel, I try to find Hampton Inn's to stay at. That way, I get the Hilton points, and they are easy to find, and consistent. The Hampton that was nearest to where I was working was on Passaic Avenue, in Harrison, New Jersey. Nice hotel, and there was a bar in the lobby. I got to the room, and here's the view I had:
I don't fault Hilton... There's only so much you can do with a location just across the river from downtown Newark. :-)
I availed myself of the Manager's Happy Hour at the lobby bar. The view from the back patio of the hotel was lovely:
I then ordered some veal parmasean and ziti from Gina's Pizzaria, watched some 007, and went to bed.
The next post, will be about the geeky fun I had with my mobile comm unit, GPS receiver, and my laptop.
