The Luney Bin: H. Wade Minter

As I’ve been reminded by everyone from my Mom to Sarah Pauling, I’ve been slack about updating this over the last month. It’s partially due to the horrible internet speeds here at the hotel at night, which make doing anything on the internet painful, and partially due to the fact that I feel like I’m just going to work, coming back to the hotel, and waiting for the family.

But Operation: Reunite The Family is now underway! The moving truck pulled away from Rolesville Thursday evening with a house full of stuff, bound for San Antonio. Today, I picked up the keys to the rental house and took a load of my stuff over from the hotel. Tomorrow, Holly gets on a plane and flies into town. Our stuff arrives on Tuesday or Wednesday, and then on Saturday, my Mom brings the girls to town. At that point, this ordeal that began on April 4th will be over!

I don’t tend to blog much about work, especially since Rackspace is in the quiet period, but work’s been fun so far. It’s quite a bit different than what I’m used to – I’ve been in small-ish IT shops for most of the past decade, generally having to do a little bit of everything. Now I’m in a 2000+ person company, and focusing on specific technologies. But the corporate culture is a lot of fun, and it seems to be a good place to work so far.

One thing that has happend that I suppose would rate as “interesting” is that I’m performing improv regularly. The former-ComedySportz club in San Antonio (now a National Comedy Theater group), which was on semi-hiatus for a number of years, is ramping back up, performing regularly and adding new players. As I’m one of the few people in the group with any serious ComedySportz experience, I’ve been offered (and have accepted) a leadership role in the group, helping to train players, work on the show format, and provide guidance. It’s a lot of fun, and challenging as well. From working with an owner in another city, to dealing with the friction that comes with “Hey, here’s a new guy. He’s going to be telling you what to do.”, it’s a different set of issues than you get by showing up to work the mic a couple of times a month. I think it’s working well so far, though.

So now that the family is starting to come back together, maybe I’ll be more motivated to write and take pictures. It’s been a hard time here alone, but it’s almost over.

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P1030845.JPG, originally uploaded by minter.

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Our house in Rolesville is, as of this morning, officially under contract and off the market!

Switching realtors seems to have made a difference. We dropped our old realtor after a month of very weak showings, picked up Jennifer Spencer, and a little over a week after hitting the market, she had us three showings and a great offer, which we accepted last weekend. The paperwork and earnest money checks were completed today!

If all goes well (fingers crossed) we’ll close in mid-late May, and then Holly and the girls can join me out here in San Antonio!

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I’ve survived my first week as a Texan. It’s been alternating between a crush of activity at Rackspace, getting acclimated, meeting people, setting up my workstation, etc., and very quiet loneliness back at the hotel, missing my girls. So I’ve been trying to keep busy with the former to avoid the latter.

As a guy born and raised in the Mid-Atlantic (VA/NC), there are some thing about Texas that are somewhat weird to me. They include:

• Frontage Roads – I mentioned this earlier, but it’s still something to get used to. For those (like me) who don’t get out much, I’ll explain. In Virginia or North Carolina, when you exit the interstate, you tend to take a cloverleaf or ramp off of the interstate and onto another road, which generally runs perpendicular to the interstate. The ramp is very short, and you’re quickly onto another primary road. In Texas, though, they have these “frontage roads,” where to exit the interstate, you take a short ramp to the right, and you end up on this one-way road that parallels the interstate. This road can go on for quite a while, and it’s the road that intersects the other primary roads that you may want to get on to, while having turns into parking lots, etc. as well. So when I want to exit onto Huebner Rd., for example, I’ll take the exit, drive about a mile on the frontage road, and then turn onto Huebner. It takes some getting used to. And on a related note..

• IH vs. I – Back east, people generally refer to interstates as I-number (I-95). In Texas, it’s more common to see them referred to as IH-number (IH-10). And beltway-like roads that circle a city are generally called “Loop-number” (Loop 410).

• Short Trees – While North Carolina’s no Pacific Northwest, we’ve got a lot of pine, and pine grows very tall. Even the oaks and other trees shoot up quite a ways. It seems like most of the trees around here are very short and scrubby. Maybe everything isn’t bigger in Texas?

• Sweet Tea – I kind of knew about this one going in, but it’s very hit-or-miss as to whether you can find sweet tea in restaurants. I don’t really expect it in the Mexican restaurants, but it’s somewhat jarring to go into a steakhouse and get told “No, we don’t serve sweet tea.”

On the whole, though, it’s a nice place so far. The weather’s been great, the Mexican food is amazing, and there appears to be plenty to do. I’m hopefully going to catch a game or two at the AHL San Antonio Rampage this weekend.

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Well, my great interstate adventure has reached its conclusion – I pulled into San Antonio around 3:30pm (Central time, natch) today. Yesterday, I left Rolesville at around 7:45am EDT, and finally stopped for the night in Gulfport, MS at around 8:30pm CDT, for around 14 hours or so of driving. I was starting to get a little loopy at the end of that leg, so it’s probably good that I pulled in when I did.

Once in Gulfport, I was treated to about 8 hours of severe thunderstorms. Now, I like thunderstorms, and can generally sleep through them, but these storms were like bombs going off in the hotel room, and it just….didn’t…..stop. I’m used to a storm blowing up, passing over, and leaving, but when I turned on the TV around midnight to make sure the world wasn’t coming to an end, they said that the storms just kept reforming over the same area. I believe it. And they must have gotten about 5” of rain overnight, as it was coming down in buckets.

Got up early and headed west, going through a little bit more weather as I headed into eastern Louisiana, but then it was pretty smooth sailing the rest of the way. In fact, the only real traffic issues I ran into were I-85 through downtown Atlanta (a parking lot even at 2pm on a Friday), and Houston (where they apparently shut down interstates on the weekends for no apparent reason). I also gained a very visceral appreciation for what programmers mean when they throw out the term $TEXAS – it felt like it took about 6 months to make it from Houston to San Antonio, with the same three trees going by my window like an old video game.

I have my stuff unpacked in the extended stay room, and hit the H-E-B grocery store (and was suitably impressed by it – they even have Woodchuck cider and Karo syrup!). And for the first time in ages, I’ve found a salsa at the grocery store that I like! Score! I can tell already it’s going to take me a while to figure out the Texas system of “Frontage Roads” that parallel the interstate and weave in and out. We don’t have that back East.

Thanks to everyone who left well-wishes on the last post. I’m looking forward to seeing what The Rack is like on Monday!

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After a couple of months that didn’t really seem real, this morning marks the end of my over nine-year tenure in the Triangle area. I’m up early due to nerves, and in a couple of hours I’ll get in my car, point it southwest, and start driving to San Antonio. I’m going to try to get to somewhere between Mobile, AL and Baton Rouge, LA tonight, sleep, and then power on through to San Antonio by tomorrow afternoon. Monday morning at 8:30, I walk into Rackspace as a new employee.

The hardest part is going to be getting separated from Holly and the girls until the house sells, or maybe early June when my corporate housing runs out. I’m already pretty down about that. We got one showing on the house with our new realtor last weekend, but this week has been very odd in terms of weather, so nothing during the week. Hopefully activity picks up soon.

Aside from that, and the albatross of a house hanging around our neck, it should be a pretty exciting time. San Antonio looks like a nice place, and I keep hearing from people who have lived there about how much they liked it. Baseball season is starting, there’s still a little bit of time left in hockey season, I should hopefully be able to skate a little bit, and finally find some decent salsa in the stores.

It’s been a great nine years here, and whethere I’m ready or not, this morning is the time to turn the page.

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Because I’m apparently as bad at updating the new blog as the old one, this is probably old news to most people, but I have accepted a job with Rackspace, in their “Segment Support” group.

“Wait!” you might say. “Rackspace doesn’t have a Raleigh office!” Well, you’d be right. The family and I will be relocating to San Antonio, TX. I’ve been in Raleigh since February of 1999, and really like it here, but San Antonio looks nice, and the job looks very promising. I’ll miss the hockey and improv, but San Antonio has a lot to offer as well.

That means that we’ve put the house on the water in Rolesville on the market, so if you know anyone who wants to buy a like-new house just minutes from I-540 and Capital Blvd, please send them my way.

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Thanks to a request for bodies from the ever-powerful Jason “JMatt” Matthews, I got to appear in a TV commercial (or, more accurately, Public Service Announcement) tonight. It aired twice during American Idol on Fox 50 in Raleigh, for anyone who will admit to watching that.

The PSA was for their What Color Do You Bleed? T-shirt sale to benefit the Red Cross. I’m in the spot wearing the NC State shirt, and saying that I bleed “Wolfpack Red.” “William & Mary Green” wasn’t an option, but I was the only one of the four who lives in Wake County, so I figured it counted for something. At least I wasn’t the UNC grad who had to wear the Duke blue.

So if you see the spot on TV (it should be airing on Fox 50 for a bit), wave at me.

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Holly turned 30 on Friday. I wanted to find something special to do for her, but with money being an issue, it would have to be something that didn’t cost a lot.

Fortunately, we had our favorite babysitter on call, and I knew who to email. So thanks to some great work by Jon Chase at the Carolina Hurricanes, I managed to snag Holly a seat for a ride on the Zamboni (or “Olympia”, to be accurate) as it cleaned the ice between warmups and the 1st Period of the Washington @ Carolina game on Saturday.

I was worried that she wouldn’t be too impressed by it, but she seemed really excited. We had to be at the top of Section 115 at 4:15pm (for the 5pm game). The babysitter ran a little late, so we got a late start out from Rolesville, and didn’t end up getting to the arena and parked at Cardinal Gibbons until around 4:05 or so. We ran from the car up to the arena (finding out how out of shape we are), and got there right at 4:15. In retrospect, we didn’t need to run, because the staffer we met waited another 10 minutes for the other rider to show up. It turns out he didn’t show, so I got to take the seat on the other Olympia!

We were escorted down into the bowels (or at least the duodenum) of the RBC Center, where we saw one of the refs chatting in the hallway. Then, into the parking area for the Olympias, where we saw legend Ron Francis chatting with some folks. We got to watch warmups from behind the glass at ice level!

At the end of warmups, it was time to get on the machines. Back in the tunnel, we saw injured forward Chad LaRose, on crutches and with a boot-brace, talking to another scratched/injured player (maybe Seidenberg or Eaves, I didn’t recognize him). LaRose must have seen my doubletake, because he said “Hey, how’s it going?” I told him “Get well soon” – we miss us some Rosey out there. Ron Francis had developed a bigger entourage, one of Glen Wesley’s kids was wandering around, and on-ice personality “Ron The Ref” came wandering by. Sightseeing aside, we were strapped in and ready to go.

Holly’s zam went out on the ice first, followed by mine. We had to wait a minute while the ice crew got the nets out of the way, then it was time to clean the ice! I spent most of my time goofing around for the guys up in Section 328, while Holly said she was paying more attention to how the ice-cleaning worked.

The ride was over pretty quickly (maybe 8-ish minutes all told), we parked, got off the machines, and were led back up to the main concourse. We went back up to our usual seats in 328, had some food, and watched the game. I had one more surprise in store for Holly.

The requisite Jumbotron birthday greeting! I even had a Tweet from the Alchemist waiting for me when I got home saying “Jumbotron says Happy Birthday Holly Minter – hope she’s here!” And, it didn’t hurt that we whipped the Caps 6-3, sending the couple hundred Caps fans who’d bussed down for the game home sad.

So even though it wasn’t big and fancy, I think Holly had a good time on a milestone birthday.

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Yes, the whole family has been in the blogging doldrums for a few months. Is it the winter months? The children? Work? Hockey? All of the above?

I finally got tired of dealing with Typo, since the software seems to be mostly unmaintained these days, I’m not hacking on the Rails part, and the server that it sits on at SkilTech could use the extra CPU cycles. So I punted in favor of a fairly standard Wordpress install. Thanks to some scripts on the interwebs, migration was mostly painless. Mostly. So maybe having a new toy will inspire me to get back into the groove.

I had a kickass improv show at ComedyWorx on Saturday. One of those where everything falls into place, aside from a couple of odd technical errors on my part in the show intro. Packed house, which always helps too. And speaking of improv, big congratulations to Ted Hobgood for producing his 50th Cagematch show over at DSI. Ted’s an extremely creative guy, and he’s done great things with that format.

The Hurricanes made a big trade today, sending Cory Stillman and Mike Commodore to Ottawa for Joe Corvo and Patrick Eaves. I’m really sad to see both players go, especially Commie, who was one of my favorites. But it’s probably a good thing. The Canes’ hockey doldrums have been even worse than my blogging ones, and both players were due to hit the free agent market this summer and probably command hefty pay raises. This move will either shake up the locker room and get the players back on track, or replace two players we may have lost with two who could stick around. And Corvo especially fills a need as an offensive defenseman who can score on the power play.

I’ll probably do a post soon recapping my Election 2008 predictions from a couple months back. The summary version: I did pretty well on the Democrats and not good at all on the Republicans. We’ll see if I can figure out why.

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