A letter home from study abroad
November 2, 1996
Today, Jerry and I went to the pirate CD and CDROM
market...imagine...if you can hundreds of vendors lining up to sell you
any computer program you could imagine for between 6 and 20 dollars. I
picked up a copy of Oracle 7.2 (a database) and a CD full of office
programs for macs (including a few russian ones...i think i got a spell
checker or two (in russian, that is) The most exotic thing I saw was a CD
of software for the Commodore Amiga....I would have purchased it for my
friend dave, but it was $40 and I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a CD-ROM
on his amiga. the only bad thing about the whole experience was that we
thought that there was a computer hardware market....and we were unable to
find it...although we did see tons of people entering the metro with VCRs
and microwaves.
After the market, it was back to the dorm, where we found liz and
leslie and shiloh and jocelyn recovering from the previous night's
festivities. Apparently, Liz fell UP the stairs in the metro while trying
to stumble home and got a nasty gash on the knee.
At some point, leslie decided that she wanted to brave the snow
(it was snowing heavily, but none of it was sticking..) and go to the
american bar and grill for dinner. Somehow, I got roped into going...then
again, so did everybody else in the room. I've been to the american bar
and grill twice before. Both times it was quite good....This time I had a
bannana shake and a medium-rare burger with salsa and guacamole. The
shake was about the 2nd best milkshake I have EVER had.....the burger was
not so wonderful....it was HUGE...to huge to eat with my hands, in fact,
and it was _RAW_ in the middle....I don't mean pink...i mean cold.
Ordinarily, I like my meat on the rare side, but this was a bit silly.
Aside from that, it was a lazy saturday evening...I spent a couple
of hours working on my Request Tracker program.....you kids at utopia can
look forward to a newer version of the web interface soon.
jesse