I ended up going to Albuquerque NM last week for work.

Overall it was really enjoyable. We had a 14 hour flight direct DOH-JFK. Overnight in Manhattan, which allowed me to catch up with my Uncle (who moved to the states about 15 years ago) and his wife.

Interesting parallel - my Uncle works in the airline industry and has an American wife; I work in the airline industry and have an American girlfriend. Curious, huh?

Then LGA-ABQ, with a 10 minute transfer window in Chicago. Luckily the two gates were next to each other or we'd have been stuck. As it were we the last three on.

Albuquerque was dusty as expected. It also snowed, which I wasn't expecting.

Went to a Casino on the last afternoon. Lost 160 dollars in about 20 mins, which was a bummer to say the least. All on slots too - they didn't even attempt to make it interesting, they just took my money while (metaphorically) laughing at me.

One of the guys I was traveling with knew the manager of the casino. He suggested we go to the cable car nearby (longest suspended one in the world or something). It was about 10 mins by car, so he called us some transport......


..... which turned out to be a huge stretch limo! Seriously - the only car he had available. It drove us to the foot of the cable car and waited for us to get back.

I also had 6 ours to kill in Washington on the way back so I went to the Air and Space museum on the edge of the airport (owned by the Smithsonian now I think). Really worth going too, especially the space exploration section (if that's your thang).

11 hour flight home. Slept for 8 of them. WIN.

Anyway, just realised this was a really dull post, so check this out:



Made me chuckle.

One of my best friends is getting married at the end of next month in the UK. (e:ladycroft) and are are lucky enough to be going.

As is normal before these kind of things, my friend is having a stag party (bachelor party). It's going to be a weekend go-karting, comedy, drinking, (probably some breasts thrown in for good measure) in Edinburgh in Scotland. I've been looking forward to it for months, and it's supposed to be next weekend.

And now I can't go.

Why? Because work want me to go to Albequrque in New Mexico to visit a potential system vendor. It'll be a total of 21 hours flying there, for a 2 day meeting, then 21 hours flying back. It's 14 hours just from Doha to JFK, non-stop.

Economy all the way too.

And tonight I'm going to have to tell him. :(

So I went ahead and installed the Windows 7 Beta to my laptop last night.

Mistake.

I have 2 hard drives - one with my standard XP install, the other had Ubuntu on it (never worked with it properly - just wanted to install it for a look-see). 'OK', I thought, 'lets overwrite the Ubuntu with Win 7'.

Installation went fine (very quick, even on my 3 yr old laptop), but now I've lost the ability to boot to XP. Windows 7 can't even see my XP drive. Luckily all my data is stored on an external drive, so it isn't lost, but that now means I have to re-install all my apps on Win7 while I try and get XP up and running.

It's going to be a fun weekend!


UPDATE :
So it's all working now. Jason - your advice worked like a charm - I can now access my XP drive from 7 and run whatever programs I need to. I also fixed the bootloader problem, so I can switch back to XP whenever I want.

Hi Everyone.

So - here I am. Just a quick post to get me off the mark and say Hi.

It was so great to meet so many of you at the NYE party, especially as (e:ladycroft) speaks so highly of you all. I had a great time, and I'm sure we'll be back soon for more shenanigans.

I'll try and get some photos and stuff up, and get my profile pic sorted.

Laters,

Rory.