Many of those of you who know me know and tease me about the fact that I hate driving. I don't know why some people (e.g. JMac, who drives just for the sake of driving) love driving so much, it causes me physical pain. I really should get a car with cruise control or something so it doesn't hurt so much, but after driving for a while my right heel hurts bad and generally I feel bad for being so cramped in the car, I just don't like it. That said, Yesterday I got up early, after my shower got dressed as nicely as possible, and then drove down to Austin, TX to meet with the creators of the Metadot Portal Server.
One of the primary reasons I don't like driving is probably because I have a terrible sense of direction, and Mapquest directions sometimes suck… bigtime. This was no exception. First of all, the directions involved getting on I-35 South, taking an exit and going down US81 South, only to have it merge directly back into I-35 South again a couple hours later. This was silly and I'm not sure why I didn't pay enough attention to the overall directions to realize it earlier and just stay on I-35, it would have probably been much faster considering US-81 goes through several towns and every time it hits a town it drops down from the 70mph between towns to 30mph inside it, sometimes with stop signs and traffic lights to deal with as well.
Also, while traveling down US-81, I got caught behind moving houses. Yes I said houses, plural. Not once, not twice, but three times did i get stuck behind a slowly moving house being moved to wherever it was going.
Furthering the topic of bad directions from Mapquest, Mapquest told me to exit I-35 South and take the “N MO PAC EXWAY”, not only is this a horrible abbreviation of what the street's name is, but this street doesn't exist, or at least, there is no road sign anywhere that I could find that had “MO PAC” anywhere on it. After calling Metadot explaining I was lost and what I was looking for, they told me that the road had at least 4 other names, and I was eventually able to find it by one of those names and go through all the other surface streets to eventually reach FM 2222 which is the road on which Metadot's Headquarters can be found. After my meeting, they gave me directions to get back to I-35 and guess what, FM 2222 leads right to I-35, so when Mapquest gave me directions that said exit I-35 and take all these other surface streets to get to FM 2222, one of which doesn't have that name, they could have saved me a whole lot of time and frustration and just say exit I-35 at FM 2222.
The meeting with Metadot went rather well overall, although they don't have a position available for me to work for them at this time, they did say that they often have too much work for their programmers to do alone and that they will send me some consulting projects to help them out. It was fun getting to meet the people who wrote the software that I work with day after day. I got to meet Daniel G, and Cory K, whom I've known their names from the Metadot forums, but meeting them face to face and talking to them was a real treat. After spending some time talking to Daniel and taking the grand tour, I sat down with Cory and he gave me the insider tour of the newest version of Metadot. Man Metadot has some really cool new features, I just hope that I can get them all implemented on my sites because they really are quite amazing..
Anyway driving home was a lot easier, I drove FM 2222 up to I-35 and drove along the service road until I found a place to eat (Applebees, where I had steak, salmon, and stuffed poppers, YUM!) and then I started up I-35, which was slow at first because I was in Austin and it was rush hour, but once I got away from the city it sped back up.
Right around 7 o'clock I started getting sleepy, so I pulled over to a rest area and took about a 45-minute nap, then I bought an ice cream bar and coke at the vending machines and then kept on driving. I stopped at another picnic area at 9:20 to quickly call my Girlfriend and talk to her for about a half hour before continuing my way home. I would have talked longer but I no longer have a car charger for my cell phone and I wanted to make sure I had plenty of battery power in case of an emergency driving home. I arrived home right about 11:50 p.m. and talked on the phone again, giving both JMac and MrGoo a recap of the events of the day before going to sleep.
One last note about yesterday, Before leaving Arlington I picked up 2 Pepsi's and a Coke to drink on the way, and Both Pepsi's were iTunes winners (cool for me since none of the Pepsi's I had bought previously had won), so…
[iTunes is now playing If We Are the Body by Casting Crowns (Album: Casting Crowns) (3:59)]