Not that kind of party, but I still get connected.

Thursday 7th

When I arrived at the office today I noticed a pile of car keys at the reception desk. I was reminded of the proverbial "wife swapping" parties of the 70's and made some joke about it. As it turns out the keys were there because everyone was getting their car washed and vacuumed. Another little perk, so I chucked my keys in as well.

I did some further work this morning and took my own car to lunch, with my laptop already packed. Some of the crew had left earlier so 3 of us headed to a Chinese. I had some lemmon chicken and fried rice. I left stright from there for my meeting at Schlumberger. The GPS helped me get there with minimum fuss although there were some occassions where I was changing lanes to follow instructions. It was over 30 miles but most of it was on freeways. The I45 to town is 5 or 6 lanes wide in both directions.

It gets slower once you get off the freeway and there was road works on one of the streets I used so in the end I had only 5 minutes to spare before my meeting time. I checked in , got my badge and waited in the foyer. A classy one at that with lots of marble and a grand piano. Outside is a bronze statue of a flock of geese. There's a sign saying, Please do not sit on sculpture. A bit unnecessary, since nobody wants to be goosed.

Sam came in from getting his lunch, guessed it was me and took me up with him. About 120 minutes later he got the message that I was waiting for him downstairs. The meeting was quite promising. The proposal is they he develops a plug in library with a limited number of calls that handles the interface between out program and their connection library, which in turn does the actual communication with the data feeds. He thinks he'll have it finished by tomorrow or if not will have at least identified the problems.



I drove across the road as I left into Tangle wood to see how the other half live. A lot of big and impressive houses there, but like the second little pig, they are built of sticks, not bricks.





Back on to the freeways and even though it was only 3-30, they were already starting to get filled up. I have mentioned the big trucks here and I saw a couple of them you just don't see in Australia, pick ups with extended rear wheel arches and double wheels on the back.

Here's something else you don't normally see on the road in Australia.



I was almost the last to leave the office tonight and after a brief period at home headed for the Mall. I haven't been there before this trip but after wandering around for only a short time decided I wasn't in a shopping mood anyway. I did spend some time browsing in the bookshop but again no sale. By then it had started to get dark and the lights were on so I took some photos. There is a canal development that runs along the edge of the mall.

I ate in a slightly up market "Tuscan Grille" - they had cloth serviettes for a start - and had shrimp and lobster fettucinne and a caesar salad.