Life in Portland Area

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I went to NY to help David move. This is the apartment he is moving into. He and Virginia are engaged and she will be moving in this summer after she finishes up at Sienna. She would be graduating this month (May 2005), but she lacks a couple of credits and so will be taking them this summer while she works.
This is David's new car. It is a Toyota and way cool. David had been driving a Honda Accord wagon, but last winter it was totaled in an accident. However, David was (and is) doing well at work so he was able to buy a new car (he can afford it).
Here is a picture of David going out to his car to get another load to take into the new apartment. The weather was gorgeous the entire weekend, which helped make the move go a lot easier.
Here is Barbara, my former wife, or her way out to get another load to take in. We ate well throughout the weekend visiting several of the restaurants that David (and Jay) liked. It was nice to see their regular haunts.
This is the apartment building that David was moving out of. It was an older building (built about 1960 I would guess) with problems with the heat (too much) and water pressure (not enough).
This is the building where David works. It is just off of SUNY ALbany campus and in a building that belongs to the university (leased to technology companies). In mid-May 2005 David's company gave him a very nice raise. We were pleased by that as they seem to have decided to pay competitive salary and were able to get and retain more people than they had been a year ago.
This is the dorm where Jay was staying. His room was on the fourth floor of the tower. Jay is headed out to meet me in this picture. He is now taller than me (though you can't tell it in this picture.
This picture is of the Columbia dorms where Jay will be staying this summer and next semester. They have single rooms with a common area with a kitchen and such. It will allows him to ditch the meal plan (which gets expensive and he gets tired of their food). He can also stay there over the summer and work.
These dorms also have a community center (shown here on the left side of the picture) with things like a gym making it especially nice for the residents.
The weekend when I visited was also Fountain Day, the day when they turn on the campus fountains (turned off for the winter). It was held on Sunday and is a big celebration (welcomes the spring). This is the main fountain in the central square. The academic buildings are all around the fountain.
After the big celebration, they had to turn off the fountain and clean up. Jay and I passed through the area on our way to the Crossroads mall where we got a new power supply for his computer. It fixed the problem. That was a relief as that was one of my two objectives for the trip. Jay also showed me around the mall. We visited a few of the shops there and Jay pointed out the places where he is hoping to be able to work.
Then on Tuesday I took an early morning flight back to Portland, OR. David is the SCM (Software Configuration Manager, I think) for CommerceHub for now and is responsible for preparing and rolling out new releases. They had a new release that morning, so he needed to be at work by 4:30AM. He got me to the airport abouit 4:15AM for a 6:30AM flight, so it worked out well.
On the return flight, I flew on Northwest. They exchange flights with Continental (each flight can be flown with either airline). I changed planes in Detroit and had to (or chose to?) take one of their airport trams from one end of the terminal to the other. This is the track it goes along. It is a nice airport.
I got back to Portland before noon and took the Max back to work. The driver had the door to his control area open and we were able to chat a bit.... The next day at work they announced that the president and two vice presidents of AtOnce.com (the small company I was originally hired by) were made presidents and vice presidents of the YesMail.com subsidiary which bought us. They were having some serious problems at YesMail.com and so it is a good sign that our executives were taking charge. They will still have a tough time keeping our techinical people (many of whom were given notice right after the buy out), but there is reason to hope now.
Many afternoons Jim and I take a half an hour for a walk as we eat our lunch at our desks. When the weather is nice we sometimes walk down to the river and along the river for a bit. However, for the Rose Festival, our normal routes were often blocked. They had 'the tall ships' visiting which sometimes tied up traffic as they had to lift the draw bridges on many of the major highways across the river. Here are a couple of Canadian Coast Guard cutters. There were also a couple of U.S. Navy ships on the other side of the bridge, but I couldn't get a good picture of them.
The cutters were not really very heavily armed. One smallish cannon on the bow (perhaps three or four inches) and four machine guns. I imagine they mostly do rescues and rarely need any sort of firepower. However, security was much tighter than previously with this dinghy patrolling the river with machine guns on the fore and aft.