Woo, off to MPLS again, and other stuff.

Well, I'm off to Minneapolis next week to go do some install work at a very large corporate customer of ours that is headquartered there. Should be interesting, and it'll be a new experience for me -- I've never really been on point for an install like this before, but the customer seems to like me so they asked for me specifically.

More importantly, I got some news today that an old friend from high school was in a boating accident while on vacation in Alaska. Sadly, he did not survive. It still hasn't quite hit me yet. We stayed in contact after high school and we visited each other several times over the past few years whenever our paths crossed.

I think back to high school, and I remember how much of an uptight little perfectionist I was. I was so angry at my personal situation that I couldn't take a joke. Some of that remains with me today, but I have mellowed a lot over the years. And he was the one person who flat out told me - stop taking everything so seriously. After he did that, sometime around 10th grade, I was finally able to start coming out of my asshole shell and start socializing more without feeling like everybody hated me or was making fun of me behind my back. Oh, I was still an asshole through the rest of high school, but I think it was his encouragement, and encouragement from others that started to change me.

It still hasn't quite hit me yet. It probably will when I go to the funeral or memorial service back home. I just hope I don't miss it due to being in MN.