Well, I've been gone from here too long. Yes, I am lazy and it's too easy to just post some dumb little blurb on Twitter instead. I'm MattVolk on Twitter. I post inane things there on a semi-regular basis.
It appears that starting sometime next week, I will be in Charlotte, NC for the foreseeable future. I think it's at least six months, but who knows. My company is trying to figure out a way to not screw us due to North Carolina's oppressive income taxes. Their top rate is 7.75%, vs a 3% flat rate in Illinois. I figure by next Wednesday I'll be down there.
I've come up with some goals for the 'adventure' in NC:
- Never eat dinner at a national chain restaurant. There is too much good local food in this world to settle.
- Work out at least three days a week. It is way too easy to sit in the hotel room or in a bar a be a lazy bum. I've done it before. Also, I made the mistake of using a scale last week and really didn't like what it said.
- Learn to program. I have an idea for a useful application for the forthcoming iPad and so I need to learn how to program in Objective C to build it. I haven't done any real programming since college, and that was in Fortran, which is practically a dead language these days, so I have much learning to do.
- Eat breakfast every day. I'm hoping to end up in a hotel with free breakfast, if it doesn't I'm going to attempt to go get a real breakfast of some sort.
I'm also pondering buying an old Miata. I've always wanted one, and there seem to be a bunch of relatively cheap late '90s cars on EBay. It would be easier to have a beater to drive around down there instead of taking my nicer car down there. It's either a Miata, a really old 3-Series or a Civic SI. The main requirement is a manual transmission.
One thing I won't miss about Chicago: