(This was going to be titled 26.75 when I started to write it last night, but Opera crashed.)

Anyway... I spent most of Monday and Tuesday at the newly-equipped drivers' license office in Tallahassee, training the users on the new software and generally hanging around to answer their questions and provide immediate assistance should a problem arise. Monday was kind of busy for me — some people took to it right away, but there were a couple who were resistant to change. By the end of the day, though, they were plugging away at it like pros. Which I suppose they are.

Yesterday, though, was mainly sitting around watching the fascinating mix of people who come in to get licenses. Perhaps my favorite was the young woman who came in to get a license, and was told that she couldn't have one until she took care of her license suspension in Pennsylvania. The examiner gave her a printout of the information and provided a number in Pennsylvania which she could call to clear the matter up. After quite a lengthy story about how she'd gotten two or three Florida licenses before without a problem and moved away from Pennsylvania before she was even old enough to have a license, she realized the examiner wasn't going to budge... so she went back to the entrance, took another number and waited for a different examiner to call her. He told her the same thing the first one had. About an hour later, she was back at a third examiner's station. Eventually, she gave up and just asked for an ID card.

(Some people are getting both a license and an ID card. It turns out that a number of places are starting to ask for two forms of photo ID — since I guess terrorists will only bother to forge one. I got one, just for the heck of it, since it was only $3 and it gave me a kick to have an ID from an office I helped install.)

Living in Florida, I'm used to seeing signs in both English and Spanish, but they've got a trilingual sign up on the wall: "Aplike isit la pou anregistre pou vote," it reads at the bottom, like some bastard child of French and Esperanto. (It's Haitian, as it turns out.)

Today I was back in the hot seat. Fortunately, it was a pretty short day; since I didn't have to be in the DL office when the employees started arriving, I strolled into my office at a leisurely 6 AM to begin my systems checks. I got out promptly at 5 PM, as Karen and I had to go pick up her car from the mechanic before he closed. I must be getting used to this schedule, as I don't feel too terribly tired at the moment. I've got to stick with it a little while longer, though, as I discovered yesterday that the overtime I thought I was socking away as comp time for a trip in April was actually going into my paycheck instead. D'oh!

With part of that money, I ordered the parts for my portable (and, more importantly, quiet) audio recording computer — little more than a low-wattage/low-heat small form factor motherboard, a fanless power supply, a decent audio I/O board and a 60GB, 7200RPM laptop hard drive. I'm thinking, though, if I can find a PCI expander before I start cutting ports in the ammo box I'm using for a case, I might as well add in a TV tuner/capture card so I can build a PVR. I'd like to use MythTV for the PVR software, but I keep hearing bad things about NTFS drivers for Linux (it'll need to share the data partition with SONAR, and since video files will quite frequently break the 2GB limit of FAT32, that means I've got to either use NTFS or cut the disk space in half so each operating system has its own sandbox to play in. On the other hand, GB-PVR doesn't look like a bad alternative if I end up keeping the machine Windows-only.