Wednesday, March 01, 2006

That's a Lot of Enchiladas

Saw in the paper earlier this week that The Flying Burrito in Chapel Hill was celebrating their 20th anniversary as (one of) the longest running Mexican restuarants in a town with more Mexican and Latin places than coffee bars. I say "one of" but it may be the oldest now - I can't think of any older.

Flying Burrito opened the last spring we were at the club and they became one of our favorite late-night after-closing stops, usually in the company of some of the guys from the Irish band Touchstone. I think Rod, their majordomo/sound guy/driver/boyfriend was working there for awhile as well. At the time they were a walk-up counter with a few tables in a space that was way too brightly lit for that time of the early morning but the food was good and they were open late. Since then they've gotten much larger and (thankfully) darker.

Over the years after moving down to Charlotte for awhile and then coming back, we spurned them for favorites like Tijuana Fats (if you miss Fats - and I do - the Blowing Rock location is still there and still has the cheese and green chile enchiladas!) and Papagayo's and later Margaret's Cantina but they've managed to thrive without us. Where we HAVE really enjoyed their food is at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park and every year as the baseball season begins we have to check to make sure that they are still there for their awesome veggie burritos - the alternative being Stamey's Bar-B-Q which just isn't going to happen.

Oh, didn't know til I was just googling around that the Tijuana Fats in Blowing Rock is haunted. Now I want to get back up there and see if we see Mary.

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Long Strange Trip

Today was officially the last day of our support contract with my primary customer, the one that I worked for before being outsourced to my current employer. I started with them in November, 1987, so today ended almost 20 years of association. Most of the people that I've worked with for many, many years were hired back - I was not primarily because (I think) the area that I've been working in for the last 18 months was one where they had retained a number of people that were itching to do their own thing in my space and partly because they turned around and outsourced part of that to another company. I'm sure that had I stayed on the server side of the house I'd have been made an offer, but frankly I have no regrets. I'll be moving on to the next adventure and feel pretty good about how that's shaping up.

But today was very weird. I think I was looking for closure that just wasn't there. I went on into the office to see a few folks (understand that I normally work from home and go into the office only rarely). One of the real oddities was doing exit interviews with staff when I was the one that was actually leaving. There was no real sense that today was the last time I'd be associated with these guys (in truth, I'll still be around doing cleanup for the rest of the week). I'll probably drop by the office Friday to turn in my security badge and some other equipment that I won't be taking with me to the new gig, so maybe that closure will come then, but right now, I just feel a strange sense of limbo.

Sunday, February 26, 2006

Laptop

I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I was shopping for a laptop. I did in fact order the Acer Travelmate from Buy.com, which arrived just a couple of days later. It is as awesome as I'd hoped. Naturally the first thing I did when I powered it up was load up the latest version of OpenCD and install Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Gimp, GAIM and a few other goodies. I'm still doing those things that personalize a system - really make it yours. Haven't tried any gaming on it yet, but from what I've been able to tell so far it should be fine for less intensive games like Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf. The only downsides so far are that it's hugeness means I need to buy a new briefcase and it gets hot. Really, really hot. Much hotter than the old Dell Latitude C610 I have for work. I can deal with both of those things and every thing else is just wonderful. I'm getting pretty close to being off the desktop altogether and giving it over to JennySlash. Very cool.