My sister just told me my parents have decided they’re going to put our 16 year old Westie to sleep. 🙁

Last week I was in Seattle for my customer who is implementing. I wrote this out right when I got back, but since I didn’t finish it right then it didn’t end up getting posted. I’m throwing it up now for the hell of it.

The trip was interesting. I felt a little out of place because it’s still kind of early in Swedish’s implementation and there isn’t a lot for me to do yet. Still, the trip was kind of nice and I did get to meet a few of the people I will be working with later on.

As we went through security at the Madison airport, Jeremy and I ended up grabbing the wrong boarding passes. The result is that I ended up in exit rows on both flights (extra leg room), while Jeremy was at the back of the plane both times. I didn’t realize until we were somewhere over Montana, but it was pretty funny because he was just about the last person off the plane when we landed in Seattle. I had the right seats on the way back – it wasn’t nearly as nice.

There were five of us on the trip, so we ended up taking a limo to our hotel because it was cheaper than two cabs or waiting for a minivan. Our hotel was pretty nice, although I still think it’s ridiculous to pay an extra ten bucks a day for internet when your room already costs $159 a night; I could have stayed at a Holiday Inn and gotten wireless for free.

At this point I was going to continue to talk about what happened on the trip, but I totally got derailed and never finished. If you wanna know more, leave a comment.

We may have wireless access, but my VPN connection to Epic isn’t working. I’m not going to be able to get anything done. Dammit.

In the state of Wisconsin, each digit of your drivers license has meaning*. Amber and I went to the comedy club downtown a few weeks ago and the woman checking IDs told us that the last two numbers represent the number of people with similar names in the DMV database. Ironically, my number is 09 while Amber’s is 01.

This had me slightly baffled, but then again I don’t really know what “similar names” means or how that relationship is calculated. So I started wondering – are there many more Carson Monroes out there? I decided to head for my usual source of information – Google.

It’s been a while since I’ve googled myself. The last time I tried it I don’t know that I really saw much except maybe some old track and field results from high school (I’m pretty sure those are still out there if you know where to look). This time, though, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the top results are for…well…me. Number one is a bid that was written for me by one of my organizations in college for a service award. The theme of the bid was pretty cheesy and they got plenty of details wrong, but I appreciated it nonetheless. Number two is my Blogger profile – it’s kind of ironic because I haven’t used blogger for quite a while now. From three on, the majority of links have nothing to do with me. However, if you dig deep enough you’ll probably find a few other references from K-State along with graduation honors and a question submitted to Ask iLounge a while back. That’s pretty much it, but I can’t complain much. The top two are decent first impressions for anyone who might happen to google me. (And we all know how likely that is to happen…)

The interesting thing is that I don’t really see other real people with a name even close to mine. There’s all kinds of results for people with the last name Carson from places with Monroe in the name, but that’s really it. I guess this means I can continue to assume I’m one of, if not the only Carson Monroe in the world. And yet…I still sign my name with my middle initial just in case. Thanks, Dad.

*I stumbled onto this site with more information on unique IDs.