Thursday, October 05, 2006

The Endgame

Only 4 more days to I deploy. It's been a busy time since my last post. I finished up PSICAT on Tuesday afternoon, so I've mainly been working on finishing documentation at work. In other
PSICAT news, I had an interesting email conversation with Ian Skerret about his blog entry on RCP applications. Ian works on marketing at Eclipse and asked for examples of Eclipse RCP applications 'in the wild'. I dropped him a note about PSICAT (which is an Eclipse RCP application) being deployed to Antarctica, and he thought it was pretty cool. So they are going to add a PSICAT entry to their Open Source RCP Application Catalog (it's not their yet). I also (jokingly) asked if Eclipse had a flag that I could plant in Antarctica to claim the continent for Eclipse before the Netbeans folks get down there. Turns out they don't have a flag, but they are FedExing me an Eclipse fleece pullover to keep me warm down there. Awesome! I'm a sucker for swag.

Today at work, they surprised me with a nice lunch--pizza, ice cream, and seaweed. It is the mid autumn festival in China so Xiaoyun brought in some tasty treats for us. The lunch really made me realize that "holy crap I'm going to Antarctica" and I'm not going to see Cinzia, Doug, Xiaoyun, or anyone else from the department for 3 months. Tomorrow I need to clean up my desk so I don't leave a big mess while I'm gone.

People keep asking me if I'm all packed and ready to go. And the answer is: Nope. Nope, I'm not packed but I'm also not worried about it. Before I can even consider packing, we've got to get the going away party my friends are throwing out of the way. Let me set the scene for you. Saturday, October 7th. ISU-Nebraska football game. More importantly, ISU-Nebraska TAILGATE! This is normally an important enough excuse to get together. Now throw in the fact that it's the last time I'm going to see people for a couple months and you've got a good excuse to do something special. I'm not going to go into all the details but let's just say the slushy machine is making a trip to the tailgate lots and we've got 13 gallons of slushy mix to put in it.

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