A carnival of technology

This week I’ve been taking a week off from work to go to an Oracle training class paid for by work. I was actually supposed to go on January 3rd, but I forgot, and after a reminder from the company controller in the form of an angrily bellowed “where did this <big number> charge come from?” and a few phone calls, now is when I was able to reschedule it for. Oracle’s Atlanta offices are in the Northpark building, just across Abernathy from the Sandy Springs MARTA station, and, along with all the new and exciting PL/SQL knowledge, I have learned this week that the Northpark buildings suck. Their parking deck is a mess. It’s built on a hill, like many things in Atlanta seem to be, so entrances and exits occur on seemingly random levels, and the way they shoehorned the standard multi-level parking deck design onto this mess between the three buildings is a bit confusing, to say the least. It’s a six-row monstrosity with lanes going up and down between levels at unpredictable intervals, punctuated by faint advisements to stop and the occasional exit sign, which usually looks something like this: “<– EXIT –>”. I think that if I were to actually follow them, in either direction, I would be taken on a winding, twisting tour of the entire deck. In the three days I’ve parked in this thing, I think I’ve exited from a different opening each time, yet I’ve always ended up on some road that, after a single turn, puts me on Mount Vernon highway. I don’t get it.

The elevators in the buildings are also an adventure. The towers have a sort of terraced design, so not all parts of all the floors go up all the way. The elevators are divided into the half that go up to 10 and a non-contiguous handful of floors in between and the half that go to 11-18 and a non-contiguous handful of floors in between. To further complicate things, the entrance from the parking deck I usually end up using after abandoning any attempt to figure out which building is which and just parking doesn’t actually take me to any of the three buildings. It instead leads to the “garden offices”, a sunny collection of walkways and shorter buildings situated above the parking decks between the three buildings where one can find some overpriced office building food, coffee, the mail room, a stationery store, a hair salon, and some guy shining shoes. So my elevator trip begins with something that only takes me up to 3. At least the coffee there isn’t too expensive. The lady in the coffee store liked my hawaiian shirt. I was one of maybe a dozen people I’ve seen that weren’t wearing suits.

In other news, I continued my quest to collect all six of the Trappist beers today with Orval, which now leaves Westmalle, Westvleteren and Achel. I don’t recall seeing any of those others in the World of Beverages, so my quest might be put on hold unless I wake up in Belgium one day. Orval was imported by Merchant du Vin, who also imports the Samuel Smith beers, and their website mentions Westmalle, so maybe there’s a little hope. Orval was rather different from the other two Trappists. Whereas Chimay and Rochefort aimed for a more sweet, spicy taste, this beer was more hoppy and had a bit of a lemon taste to it. It also came in a neat-looking contoured bottle. I still can’t figure out what that fish on the label is supposed to be holding in its mouth. It kind of looks like a pull tab from a coke can.

I’ve come to terms with two liquids today. The first is French Market coffee with chicory from New Orleans. I can’t remember if I mentioned this stuff before, but, to summarize, I got it on the recommendation of someone I used to work with and my reaction was that it’s essentially undrinkable because it’s so incredibly acidic. As you may know, I drink my coffee black, and adding some milk seemed to make it more palatable, but I didn’t bother to put in the effort to sufficiently change my ways before I gave up on that coffee and bought another bag of 8 o’clock beans. Well, today I gave it another shot. This morning I was beset with that special sort of morning laziness that made me unable to find the motivation to dig into the back of the fridge for the remaining coffee beans, so I just took a few scoops out of the French Market can, instead. I happened to have some cream (in the front of the fridge, no digging) leftover from a soup I made last week, so I added a little bit to the coffee, and it really wasn’t all that bad. Different.

Today’s other challenging liquid was Three Philosophers, a beer from the Brewery Ommegang, a belgian-style brewery in New York. Three Philosophers is an interesting product: they took their own Belgian-style quadrupel, which I find to be nothing to write home about on its own, and added in Lindeman’s Kriek, a cherry lambic brewed in a town with a Flemish name that I can’t pronounce, with the result being a rather complicated but pleasant drink. I had it once before and just wasn’t sure what to think of it, and I’m not sure I totally understand it now, either, but I think that’s kind of the point. It’s a thinky drink. Tastes like chocolate and cherries.

Sometimes I feel like I should apologize for the long lapses between entries, but then I remember that most of you are just goofing off at work, and I don’t care, anyways.

Kat visited for a couple of days earlier this week, and is now, as she puts it, rocking “the dec.” We went to see some independent film, The Jacket, at the Midtown Art Cinema on Monroe, and it wasn’t so very good. It reminded me somewhat of Donnie Darko in that it gave only partial information and little clues about the protaganist and his situation, but, like Donnie Darko, I hated it and just didn’t care enough to give it much thought. It was ok when it started. They should have put a climax in the middle, like Stripes, to make it easier to walk out halfway through. The theater (theatre?) itself seemed fairly pretentious. They had a bunch of posters on the walls for big budget semi-artsy movies, the sort that you might see in the DVD collection of an average college student, but the posters were all in French. While getting popcorn, the lady at the concession stand was complaining how the ticket people were monopolizing all the time of some director of movies I’d never heard of who was standing behind me.

The major excitement lately has been the shooting at the Fulton county courthouse, about which by now you’ve probably heard a nauseating amount. The local news programs were amusing while the hunt was going on. We don’t know where he is, but here’s a shot of 285 at Roswell Road! Maybe he’s here!

Plans for the near future are so far limited to tomorrow, when I plan to take a shot at boiling some corned beef and cabbage and pretending to be Irish for that one day a year that I’m allowed to do that. Corned beef, as far as I can tell, only comes in units that are fairly large for a single person, so come on by if you like boiled things.