This is the second of four backdated emails.
Hi all,
I'm writing from my new home! I think this has to be the most eventful 7 days so far in my life. My new flat mate, Todd, has headed out tonight with a couple of mates up in Oklahoma City but i'm staying home to sort out my gear, and I have a big day ahead checking out cars. Todd's living room is pretty cool, above the gas fireplace he has a huge flat screen TV, I don't know how many inches probably around 42", that screens over 200 channels or something, including hi-definition which looks amazing, and a gadget for recording TV (not Tivo though I don't think), and some interesting gizmo which takes your normal DVD and simulates HD-DVD. It's not true HD-DVD, but it's pretty close. Got the wireless happening as well, it's gadget central here between both of us.
The centerpiece of the living room, and by far the coolest thing I have seen in a long time, is a stage, a wooden stage he re-assembled from college (or school?) days, and he has screwed a mad comfy 3 seater couch to it, and put the other double couch and couch chair infront and to the side of the stage, creating a mini-cinema. So Todd is into wake boarding, has a boat over at his parent's house, has a nuts wakeboard hanging up in his room on one wall, his snowboard hanging up on the other wall, and he works as a civvie aircraft engineer at the Tinker Military Air Force Base up towards Oklahoma City. So basically, he's a champion. We're already discussing going on weekend camping trips to various lakes to go wakeboarding, when I get a car of course, and i'm gonna have to do something with the kiteboarding situation. There are consistent winds and lots of kiteboarders and windsurfers over here apparently. That underwater camera is gonna come in handy after all! I got some learning to do; Todd has these photos hanging up in his room of him getting some serious air on the wakeboard and snowboard, quite inspiring, I'll have to see to that. Can't wait to try wakeboarding, I've been wanting to do it since forever.
As cool as the loungeroom is, my bedroom is definitely not, it currently has my junk everywhere, a half-inflated air bed (we decided to give Todd's electric air pump a burl and the batteries ran out half way, so the thing is charging :) ...yeah and my suitcase is in the corner. The bathroom has another one of those weird bath/shower taps, now i've seen it in 2 from 2 places, I'm guessing it's kind of common. There is no way to change the flow! At least the shower head is a little more forgiving than the one at the (lack of) Quality Inn, where showering was like acupuncture.
I'm still being dumbfounded several times a day at various differences between my old and new homes. For my mates who love KFC, I included a pic of a twister combo. $4.99, plus tax.They don't include sales tax on the displayed price, unlike Australia. Pretty stupid, apparently it's to make you think you're spending less, to buy more. So the sales tax just makes it a nice uneven, very inconvenient number, causing me to regularly fumble around for the right coins, which I am also learning, but I stand there squinting at the coins comparing size and looking for the rough edge vs smooth edge to tell pennies from dimes and quarters and everyone looks at me thinking i've escaped from a nut house. I noticed Amy go through a red light yesterday. I couldn't believe it, and I said why did you just run that red light we're in no hurry, and apparently it's legal to go right on the red if it's clear to the left. I enjoy the reactions I get when I then tell the driver (Amy, Todd and Rajesh so far) that in Australia, red means no go, green means always go, and the light goes out if you're allowed to go when it's clear. They are so shocked at the idea of the traffic light going out. Power points have no switches. You plug your gear in and that's it, on, away you go. Toilets (of course, I had to include toilets in my email) flush half a lake...ok let me set the scene. Open the lid, the pan is half full. My first encounter was in a public toilet, and I thought I had come across a blocked one. I looked at the one next to it, half full as well. Strange, but not so strange to be impossible, but when the third one was also half full I realised well...hahahaha! So after doing your thing, the flush is initially kind of pointless, everything sort of swirls around without going anywhere, as if to make sure you can have a good look and not miss anything, and then a small round jet at the bottom pumps the goods away (turbo charge!), it drains till it's completely empty and then fills back up...half full again. It's so bizarre, I still can't get over it. If we had them on the Gold Coast, the dam would be empty in a week.
There are hardly any desserts. In a store as stupendously massive as SuperTarget and WalMart, like combining K-Mart and Woolworths into one, there are ice creams sure, but I can't see any custards, no puddings, unlike the decent selection we have back home. And forget about Tim Tams, there isn't even any chocolate hardly! There are bars and that's it, I tell these guys about family blocks of chocolate, good ol Cadbury, taking up an entire wall metres (or yards) long, and they can't believe it. So that was particularly alarming, that shopping session.
Had my first storm last night, I was waken up by an almighty crack of thunder at 3:30am. I usually don't care at all about storms, I enjoy them, but I'm so hyped up about this tornado rubbish I'm kinda anxious because I don't know yet how bad a storm has to get before there is risk of a tornado, nor how often it occurs. Todd has mentioned to me twice (thanks Todd good on ya) that we're coming into Tornado season. But Todd's house is on the line, so if he's cool about it, I'm cool too. Don't worry mum & dad, everything is fine, I've got a good plan, if a tornado comes, I'll just put my head between my legs and kiss my a hey Todd tells me that Twister was filmed all around Oklahoma as well as up in that Wakita town. I'll definitely get up there for a photo sometime and send it to you M&D, since it's your fav movie.
I've been making friends here and there, Jeri, who I met on my first night out on the town in Bricktown, an area of Oklahoma City, invited me out to dinner in a Brazilian restaraunt with her family for her sister Mary's birthday. So her family was great, quite a funny mix. Jeri likes her pepper. I saw her take the lid off the pepper and pour, actually poured not sprinkled, pepper into her tomato sauce, till it was 50/50. I was so gobsmacked I took a photo, much to her disgust. Jeri and Mary took me over to Hudson's Hideout, their local bar, where we had a couple of beers. It's a cool place, the kind of local hangout, with lots of regulars. I met my first authentic North American Indian, Van, a Cherokee who used to be in the military he's a champ, so we had a couple of games of pool, and there was a Dart board (plastic tipped darts) and Mary taught me how to play Cricket, which is a dart game. hahaha. That was great fun actually, I never knew throwing darts could be that much fun, the game has some devious tactics, maybe I enjoyed it so much coz I whooped Mary's ass. No doubt about it though, we were both hopeless, so I can't boast.
So I'm in the hunt for an SUV, a compact 4WD, gonna try for a manual but they are quite rare, about one in a dozen or less. I attached a couple of car photos. The big trucks don't have any impact in photos, the real life thing is much more impressive, and ridiculous. Rajesh has offered to give me a lift up to Oklahoma City to check out some dealerships. Hopefully I can land a deal relatively quickly, at least the biggest pressure - finding somewhere to live to get out of the $70 USD-per-night-with-no-kitchen-or-laundry hole that was the Quality Inn. The (not so good) Quality Inn was a necessary step though in this frantic life change, and it was a preferable alternative to other places we drove past.
I start work at Metavante on tuesday, unknown as yet just how I'm gonna get there, but I have a couple of options. For the non-technical recipients of this email, you can skip the next paragraph :) They are a 1.35 billion dollar financial services company, and the particular part of the company that I will be involved with is their check processing software. From what I learnt at the interview, when a customer banks a check, the check is scanned through one of 20-something types of scanners, the image is then retrieved and stored in a couple of versions (one with modified contrast to remove the watermark background to clearly show amounts, the other like an original), and the software then uses optical character recognition to read the dollar description, dollar amount, routing number, date etc, something like 140 fields. and stores the lot in a database, and the images in another special proprietary database. US law requires financial records to be archived 7 years here as opposed to 5 in Australia, and as a result the checks database is currently just short of a terabyte, and there are several terabytes of check images in the other database. Mission critical redundancy and all the rest makes for quite an involved system, on first impressions, using a mix of web applications, services, and windows applications, in a multitude of languages, but all my stuff is going to be .NET 2.0 and SQL server 2005, using Visual Studio Team System and (interestingly) they are on CVS for source control. Metavante is the provider of this technology to all of the top 10 banks and 42 of the top 50 banks in the US.
It all needs to be pretty snappy too so will be good to be working on a system that is above sloth pace like some of those at Austar. Oops, there are Austarians on this email, did I say that out loud? Sorry :)
Anyway, that's enough for now, I'm gonna go and pump my air bed up, fingers crossed the battery on the pump can hack it, as Todd didn't mention anything about having a hand pump. It was pretty funny, the whir of his battery pump was buzzing away like nuts at the start, then after a couple minutes dropped a bit and steadied, then dropped again and after another 5 or so cycles it sounded pretty sick and the air was probably going backwards. Fingers crossed!
Jason
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