Posted 12:08 AM by MEATHEAD

Got back from my LA trip Tuesday evening after a long weekend of working. Let me tell you... That flight is Long and wonderful delta doesn't give you a meal! You have to buy one if you wanted. Sheesh. Like $5.00 for a dadgun PB&J! And Atlanta Airport just plain sucks! Every damn connecting flight is in the concourse that You're not in!! Then they are renovating the concourses and there was NO air conditioning in the concourses. On to the trip... LAX really wasn't bad. They have enough signs to get you to where you're going. Baggage was easy and car rental pick up was easy. You're in and out of there in no time, well not exactly no time but you're on the move enough it seems like it's taking short period of time. Probably took about 1 hour to get baggage and get out to the car rental pick up and get on my way to Woodland Hills and to my hotel. The drive from LAX to Hotel was pretty easy to, 405 to 101 and you're there. I got there mid-afternoon so traffic wasn't too bad. Got to the hotel and I was bushed. The flight really takes the wind out of you. The Hotel was right on Ventura BLVD. so I decided to take a drive up and down Ventura looking for food places and such since I was going to be there a few days. I was kinda looking for something new and different but all I freaking saw was a damn subway and other fast food every 3 blocks. I did see a place called the Weinery! Any place with a name like that has to have some good dogs :) Made my way back to the hotel and called it a night cause I knew the next couple days were going to be hell. Went into the office friday and met our Denver support guy who made the trip also to do some work on the Denver group side of things there. The office is split up with both Knoxville corporate people and Denver Group Sales people and right now were separated in the support aspect, plus he was doing server stuff and I'm not part of the server group. I won't bore you with work details but we couldn't do much friday cause we had to shut the servers down and re-arrange the rack and thus people would not be able to work so we kinda just tried to plan things out on friday. The office is right next to a mall so we walked over to the food court there and had a bite to eat and then my colleage says "That Guy over there looks like Chuck Norris" Sure enough about 5 minutes later there's a few people trying to get autographs! Damn Chuck Norris chillin out in a Mall Food Court with his Very young honey. That was cool. We spent the rest of the afternoon trying to get this video conferencing unit working. That was supposed to be the easy part of the trip and when that went all to shit we knew it was going to be a long ass weekend. Spent saturday 8am till about 10pm and sunday 8am-9pm in the hot highrise building(they turn the air off over the weekend) with issue after issue. After we got the server rack re-arranged and replaced a server I had to work on things went a little smoother for me but my co-worker just couldn't get any of his stuff working so it was pretty bad for him. The process I had to do was not difficult but just long as hell. We have 17 people out there on my side of support and each machine was taking about 2/12 hours to upgrade so it wasn't fun for either of us. We wanted to try and do what we had to do Saturday so we could have sunday to hit the beach or something but it came clear very quickly that that wasn't going to happen.

Anyway, saturday afternoon we took an extended lunch at a place called Cables or Gables? and met some good friends of mine who were kind enough to make the drive to meet, he's station in the air force a couple hours away. I met their cute 1 year old for the first time and she is absolutely precious. A real bundle :) Easily the Highlight of the trip. Food was good, kind of one of those Diner type places. Probably comparable to Shoney's in K-Town with much better food and service. Service so good that they talk you into eating something else :) My buddy wanted taco's but the waitress said, no you don't want that... they're not any good here and talked him into getting fajitas instead where they brought him 1 vinyl record sized tortilla. It was pretty funny.

On to foood. Since we only get to claim $25 a day for food expenses we didn't get to dine as well as we had hoped. Friday we had Fatburger which was pretty good. I've had them before in chicago and hadn't been impressed but this was a standalone and not in a mall so it had a different atmosphere to it which was nice. Saturday for dinner we ate at Jerry's Famous Deli. I knew about this place cause I used to own some stock in them. The Menu was HUGE!!! There were over 2000 items on it. Good Damn Food! The portions were absolutely ridiculous. My buddy had 2 eggs and it looked like about 6. I had a philly steak with onion rings and it looked like a side of beef surrounded by a garden of onions. Awesome food! It's a jewish place so instead of bread or rolls they bring out pickles as the complimentary appetizer. Different types of pickles along with Pickled tomatos. Really interesting place. On Sunday we wanted to eat at this all you can eat seafood place called Todai but alas we were too late and ended up at Denny's next to the hotel :(

Monday rolled around and I was expecting a shit storm cause all the changes I had made to everybody's computers, my nickname is PC Nazi at work as I remove stuff that isn't supposed to be there. Surprisingly it pretty much went off without a hitch. The biggest problem was screen resolutions which was easily taken care of. My co-worker left in the afternoon back to Denver and I had to stay another evening so I left about 5pm and finally was able to do something touristy.

I took one of the LA worker's advise and took a drive down Topanga Canyon through the mountains and eventually hit the ocean! Beautiful! Not nearly as clear as the east coast cause there is a Fog covering the west coast. Then took a right when I hit the ocean and up through Malibu :) Some gorgeous houses. Skycry would be impressed with some of the architectural achievements on the mountains. It was pretty much a big circle and then ran into the 101 again and said Fuck it! I'm going to Hollywood, so off I went. Made into Hollywood and Took the suggested exit of the Hollywood Bowl. I drove up and down Sunset BLVD, Vine and Hollywood finally settling on a parking lot a block from Hollywood and Vine where the Walk of Fame starts. Started walking down Hollywood Blvd. looking at all the stars and snapping a few pictures of significant stars, at least to me. Finally made my way to Grauman's Chinese Theatre and took a bunch of snaps of hand prints and footprints. As it was starting to get dark I head back down the other side of Hollywood Blvd. Not a place to walk at night so I picked up the pace and got the hell outta there and head back to Fatburger for one more meal in LA.

All in all an OK trip. It was kind of a fly by the seat of your pants operation as the planning for it didn't really happen. I had my stuff ready but the server group really didn't communicate very well with each other on this. They were all able to work Monday morning and that was biggest thing so from that standpoint it was a success. If it wasn't for work it would have been great. I really like LA, I was born for a big city and it was very nice out there. I may have to return. I've already proposed that somebody go out there on a quarterly basis for check-ups as they don't have local computer support.