Tag: Atlantic City

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Adventure

Jury Duty in Atlantic City

Yesterday I had to do my civic duty and participate in jury duty. This time it was in sketchy Atlantic City not the fairly new building in Mays Landing. I had to park in a parking garage a few blocks from the courthouse.

The parking garage was pretty gross. The walk from the garage wasn’t too pleasant either. I don’t know how they have jurors make that walk. I honestly wouldn’t want my mom to be walking in that part of town.

When I arrived at the courthouse I had to go through a metal detector. I made it through on my first attempt, I felt so proud. Then I had to wait in a line with some fairly miserable people (it is jury duty after all) to get registered, etc. Many people were talking about how fed up they were with living in New Jersey and how they were hoping to move someplace else. I’m pretty sure it’s the cost of living and taxes that primarily had them up in arms.

Then I took a seat and waited and waited some more. Luckily one of the cases had settled early that morning, so they would only need our group for one potential trial. The woman next to me turns out is the sister-in-law of someone I grew up with. She was really cool, and destroyed me in two games of checkers on her iPad. Apparently I’m pretty bad at checkers. I did defeat her in a game of air hockey however. I was surprised at how many iPads people had brought there.

As we were being led to the courtroom like cattle a former co-worker’s husband recognized me and we chatted a bit. Mr. Battistelli shared my views on Atlantic City (or at least the part where we were situated) and it was cool to see a familiar face.

As we got to the courtroom for jury selection, I stood hoping not to get called. This just wouldn’t of been a good week had I been selected. It was most entertaining listening to some of the excuses that people had once they were called up. After about an hour and a half, the jury was selected and we were sent home.

They really need to come up with a way to make the process a bit more bearable. iPad checkers and air hockey are my suggestions.

Categories
Sports

St. Pat’s 31st Annual Run

Woke up nice and early on a day off to participate in my first ever run this morning. It was the St. Pat’s 31st Annual Run, in Atlantic City.  Mr. Yuk-Yuk and I both entered and began training towards our first 5k race a few weeks ago. 

We got there nice and early, expecting to see not too many runners due to the very cold conditions. I thought it was packed, but it’s my first run so I have no idea how many people usually show up for these things. We located the registration tent and paid our $25 entry fee. In exchange I got a cool t-shirt and one of those number things to wear to identify me.  I eagerly safety pinned the number 1379 to my sweatshirt. Have to admit is was kinda cool putting the number on.

Then we kinda just had to kill 45 minutes or so of time before the official start of the race. Majority of the wait was made up of filling up on water and peeing non-stop (I dehydrate when I get nervous for some reason) to pass the time. People watching also made for quite an exciting time. 

Then as time approached we all gathered around the starting line. Again, there were a ton of people. Made it nice and toasty. Then after a live singing of the national anthem, we were off. Mr. Yuk-Yuk made a smart move to pass many people by going off the street. I wouldn’t catch up to him until half a mile in. I managed to separate from him after a mile, and by the second mile had a sizable lead on him. 

The last mile wasn’t so kind to me. The early morning and lack of hydration was taking it’s toll at this point. Also, lot’s of credit had to go to Mr. Yuk-Yuk for the late push he gave at the end of the race which led to him beating me by several seconds. Well done Mr. Yuk-Yuk, well done.

We both managed to finish under 29 minutes, which we were both very proud of. Just two weeks ago our times were around 36 minutes. So the practice had paid off. We’re anxiously awaiting the official postings online.

Categories
Adventure Development

Edu Web Conference Day 3

12:48 PM

The Edu Web 2008 Conference is over and I’ve just returned to work.  Overall I thought it was pretty good.  Though I’d prefer more development sessions or at least more advanced sessions.  If this is held close to home again next year I’ll most likely attend if not present.  I found presentations on cloud computing and AJAX to be the most interesting.  Good event.

10:49 AM

I’m here a bit early for the next presentation.  Think I’ve checked everything out here and can’t think of anything else to do.  Next presentation is on embedding video, and hopefully it’ll be interesting.  This table I’m at is pretty dirty, think I’ll get up and move.

10:07 AM

Sitting in on a presentation for a FaceBook application called SkoolPool.  I’ll have to check out their site a bit more, this does seem like something worth checking out a bit further..  The presentation is cracking me up.  The guy has a fairly thick accent and a deep monotone voice, so I can’t make out a word he’s saying.  He sounds like a really bad Beatles impersonation.  It’s great.  And the co-speaker keeps interrupting him.  This is truly a classic presentation, a true work of art.

8:41 AM

Think I’m in the wrong presentation.  This is about web content management not working with web services.  Oh well, she seems to be giving a good presentation so I’ll hang around.  

8:20 AM

Charging up my laptop and checking email and news at one of the tables setup here with power.  Seems to be a smaller crowd today, guess people have begun leaving or perhaps are sleeping in a bit.

 

Categories
Adventure Development

Edu Web Conference Day 2

Edu Web Conference 2008
4:10 PM

Wow I feel really worn out.  Maybe it was that presentation that just ended.  Wasn’t too interesting to me, and I won’t mention in case that person might be reading this.  Think I’m going to one more presentation then will call it a day.  There was some pretty interesting things discussed.  The cloud computing was great, that’s something that I’m sure I’ll be using.  The AJAX demo was nice too, nothing new to me but talking to the guys afterwards was good.  It’s not too often I can talk to someone about AJAX, Javascript, PHP, and frameworks without having to explain what all that stuff is.

2:09 PM

Uploaded some photos to Flickr.  Have a few more to upload but my connection is timing out often.  I’ll try again in a little bit.  Went outside to the deck for a little bit.  Nice to get outside for a bit and away from computers and air conditioning.

1:21 PM

Just ate lunch.  Food was kinda weak.  I made myself a sundae.  

11:30 AM

I asked a question during a presentation on AJAX.  Wanted to know what YUI components were used on their site.  Doesn’t seem like there are many developers in the room.

10:53 AM

Just finished up watching a presentation on cloud computing.  I thought it was pretty cool.  I’ll have to check out Jungle Disk.  I have had an account with Amazon Web Services for a while, but now am motivated to go out and actually build something with it.

9:02 AM

Just saw Geoff.  He’s hanging out with the marketing track.  I’m now at a presentation on the development track.  I’m sitting next to Bob who I used to work with.  Didn’t expect to see anyone I knew here, so it’s cool to have someone to talk to about some of this geeky stuff.

8:04 AM

Took the tunnel here today.  Tunnels are very cool, never seem to get old to me.  Just ate some breakfast.  With a word like continental before it you’d think it’d be a bit nicer.  Oh well, the cinnamon bun thing was really good.  And the orange juice and fruit were good too.  It wasn’t the bad kind of orange juice and that’s a good thing.  I’m sitting at a table with some people who make me feel like a social butterfly.  I think I actually started a conversation or two.

Categories
Adventure Development

Edu Web Conference Day 1

Edu Web Conference 2008Today was the first day of the Edu Web Conference.  Conveniently it’s at the Trump Marina in Atlantic City this year, so it’s only a few minutes away.  I figured that I’d take Delilah Road out there and shoot right out to the marina district, but of course there’s some major construction going on and the road is closed.  So I had to turn around and took the Black Horse Pike instead.  Not too big of a detour.

I got there with plenty of time to spare so I checked out a few of the vendors set up in the lobby.  It seemed to be mostly CMS vendors and email marketing solutions.  Nothing too interesting there.  While both still have their uses I think they are in the twilight of their usefulness.  Open source CMS solutions are really getting mature at this stage and spam is really killing the effectiveness of email in my opinion (and that of the presenters too).

There were a lot of people there, I’d guess around 400-500.  Some came from far away.  Chatted with a friendly chap most likely from Ireland, and apparently there’s some folk all the way from New Zealand there as well.  Didn’t appear to be too many typical educators in the crowd (I will have to explain that type another day), mostly younger web people and some marketing people tossed in there for fun too.  I’d recommend purchasing some Apple stock as the majority of laptops there were Macs and the iPhone seemed to be brought up a lot.

 The opening presentation was pretty good.  It was titled “It’s the End of the Web as We Know It Redux” and was presented by Mark Greenfield, Director of Web Services, University at Buffalo.  He discussed the web in relation to higher education and where he thinks it’s going.  I did happen to share the majority of his visions, so it’s nice to know someone out there is on the same page with such topics.  His presentation can be found on his website.

Humorously the discussion of how they have their college catalog available online now was dead on with the views I happened to bring up in a little debate that was going on last week.  So it’s reassuring to hear that we have the same idea of sharing such information with our students that other institutions share.

In a room packed with big four year institutions, it’s great to know that our communtiy college by the shore is hanging with them if not ahead of most regarding our role on the web.  I had no idea where we stacked up with these schools living in my little bubble, but have to admit with the resources at hand we’re hanging in there and leading in some areas.  I guess that’s why I was just rewarded with a 4% raise, oh wait a minute so was everyone else…

After the presentation I hung out in the developers lounge for a little bit.  There were some guys in a dark room typing away on laptops and discussing mostly social networking and the implementation of CMS’s.  There were a lot of accents in that room, so I’d guess it was sponsored by some UK corporation.  I’ll have to ask tomorrow.  The late presentation didn’t really interest me too much so, I decided to leave at that point.  I was able to locate my car in the parking garage with no problems (I’ve had some disasters doing such in the past).

I’ll go back tomorrow morning and blog about anything interesting as well.  I’ll try and remember to bring a camera too and share some photos.