Last Day in New Haven

First and foremost, I'd like to thank everyone for all of the congratulatory emails and posts both here and in the forums, they haven't gone unnoticed and I really appreciate them all :)

Vinney and I went to go see Return of the King last night; yes it's long, yes it's good, and yes there are times when you want to strangle Frodo. Since there were no theaters showing LOTR in New Haven we made the trek over to Milford to see it in the only theater that had seats remaining for the 8:15 showing. I forgot just how spoiled you become when all the theaters around you have stadium seating and ridiculously huge screens; we had to sit within the first 10 rows in order for the screen to seem bigger than a TV. That part didn't bother me, what bothered me were the people sitting behind me.

There was a family (or people with some other sort of bond between one another); this family decided that about midway through the movie, they would begin "whispering" what was about to happen in anticipation that it would happen. They would also take turns "oohing" and "awwing" and "jesusing" whenever something pretty, romantic (read: anything involving Arwyn), or violent happened. Combine that with the fact that Manute Bol must have been sitting in front of me, and I can maybe see how I'd like to spend another 3.5 hours seeing the movie in a better situtation. Oh, my other gripe about the experience? Why is it that with all of the polyphonic ring tones, color screens, cameras and incredible amount of features that today's cell phones come with, that people are still incapable of using the vibrate feature while in a movie theater? At least no one broke out into conversation this time...

In any case, I didn't get to bed until around 2 and had an early start this morning around 7, so the sleepyness is beginning to kick in. The good news is that I'm a handful of Winstone tests away from being done with the benchmarks for the Raptor review I've been talking about. I apologize for the delay but I honestly didn't expect some of the tests to take this long. I'll try and write up the review when get back to Raleigh, while I'm doing some testing for a couple of other projects I'm working on (more on those closer to publication time).

Vinney gets back from class at 1PM, so we're hoping to leave New Haven around then and start driving back to Raleigh. The weather has been cooperating with us as there's no black ice or snow to worry about on the ground, so as long as traffic isn't bad the trip shouldn't take too long. The only question remains whether to push to do the entire drive today or make a stop in D.C. and split it up into two days. I'm thinking we'll decide on the road.

After spending one night in Raleigh we hit the road again, but this time to warmer climates as we head down to our own Derek Wilson's wedding. He's getting married next week, so there will be a handful of days where you won't hear from me. I'll be back in Raleigh on or around the 23rd, but I'm hoping to finish up at least one if not two articles by then so you'll have some stuff to read over the holidays.

For now, it's off to pack a bit more before it's time to load up the car. I'm hoping to finish off these benchmarks as well; we'll see how much I can pull off in the next hour.

Thanks again for all the kind words and take care.