Nashville, Day 4: Booze, Broads, And The Sports Bra

It snowed pretty hard Wednesday morning, but only about an inch was on the ground. The air was 22F, it was nice to see the snow blowing out my window. Since it was so cold, I went for a run in the hotel gym before class. I don't travel much, so I don't normally get to use treadmills. However, each time I do, I'm always amazed at the temperature in the hotel gyms. Why are gyms always at 68F? What happens when people exercise? They get hot! What happens when the get hot? They sweat, yo! It's always pleasant to start out the day dehydrated.

The training has been good, but the hands-on stuff is a little disorganized. Or rather, it's organized for last week's class. About every 45 minutes, the instructors say "Um, ahah, uh, this wasn't like that a week ago." and then spend fifteen minutes trying to fix the problem. The lab environment had been changed over the weekend, and the lab-books haven't been updated. The instructors are smart people, though, so at least it's interesting to watch them troubleshoot.

At lunch I talked with a classmate who was from India but grew up in Bahrain. Pretty cool. Only a few more continents and he'll have his World Trivial Pursuit wheel filled in.

With another student, I talked politics. He said that for 2008 he was "hoping we'd get a leader that would be able to make decisions themselves, and not care what the public thought." I asked what he thought had been going on the last eight years or if he'd heard of concept called representative democracy. Zing! Oh, man, I thought I was pretty funny.

Remember the thing in the lab network from Tuesday that kept changing its mind like women? Well, back in class, we learned that VMkernel can change its mind about which virtual processor is bound to which logical processor. As we were told, "VMkernel can change its mind about this every 20 milliseconds, depending on CPU load. Which is not as often as women change their mind, but it's pretty often. Heh heh." So true! So very true!! Testify, brother!

The same instructor later said that a technology called VMotion "is the best thing since the sports bra." Which we all know is pretty great.

There's a lot of talk about alcohol in the class, so I feel at home.

Instructor: "OK, let's talk about some real-world scenarios. So let's say that it's Friday night at 4:45pm, and you're ready to go to the brewpub, and your phone starts ringing because your client's virtual machines are running slow. Now, as I said, you wanted to get to the brewpub. What do you do?"

And:

Instructor: "OK, let's take a break. The day will soon be over and we can get some beers in us, heh heh heh."
Student: "You sure drink a lot."
Instructor: "Yep. You've got to know where the free happy hours are."

After class, I came back to the hotel, temperature in the low twenties, a little ice and snow on the road. In my room, I went online and bought a ticket for the Grand Ole Opry for Friday night. Check! Then I headed out to go downtown in the Pontiac Weewee. XM's stand up comedy station is my new best friend.

Broadway was pretty cool. Old and new shops, bars, lots of neon. Reminded me a dustier 5th Avenue in San Diego. The streets and bars were very empty, but I suppose that's how it goes at 6:30pm on a really cold February night.

I headed into the much-ballyhooed Robert's Western World. It may have been famous, but when I arrived it was just like any other small dive bar, except (a) there was no cigarette smoke (woohoo!), and (b) it was empty save for four white-bread touristy couples in their 80's. I think the "Voted #1 Honky Tonk" advertisements I've seen on the web must also have been published in RV Aficionado.

Anywho, they made me feel at home with cans of PBR and a great cheeseburger. The band there spent 30 minutes setting up, and had only played three songs when the waitress made her way around the bar, telling everyone that they were closing since the sewer was backing up and they needed to fix it. I had wondered what that expanding puddle of water was. Bleck.

So, yeah, I was kicked out of a honky tonk in Nashville. How cool is that?