Ben’s Blog

I’ve posted some pictures from our trip on Flickr.

Cassie and I left Oxford at 7:19 (CST) Saturday morning. We arrived at our hotel in Durham, North Carolina at 10:09pm (EST). That’s about 10 hours and 40 minutes of driving and a little over 3 hours of eating, shopping, and pumping gas. It was a long day, but Cassie and I took turns driving, so it wasn’t too bad. On the way here we went through Tupelo, MS, Birmingham, AL, Atlanta, GA, Greenville, SC, Charlotte, NC, and Greensboro, NC. We are considering taking another route back, but we’re not sure yet.

This morning we slept in and ate breakfast here at the hotel. Then we took the opportunity to do a little exploring around Durham and Chapel Hill while there wasn’t much traffic. After a couple of hours of that, we headed to The Streets at Southpoint. As far as we can tell it’s the biggest and nicest shopping mall around here. It had a few nice stores we don’t have around home.

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Cassie and I both love to travel. We try to take a couple of short trips and a longer trip every year. Well, next week is spring break for both us, so we’re going to take one of our short trips. In the morning we are headed for Durham, North Carolina, home of Duke University. The primary agenda for our trip is just to get out of town and have some fun. We’ll also be scouting out both Duke and the University of North Carolina as possible places for me to get a PhD. UNC is less than ten miles down the road from Duke in Chapel Hill.

Google says it’s a 15.5 hour trip from Oxford to Durham. Yahoo says 11 hours. Yahoo Maps Beta says 13.5 hours. I think the 11 hour estimate is the closest, but we’ll find out tomorrow. Any way you look at it, it’s a long trip.

I’ll try to post a couple of times from Durham. If we take any pictures I’ll throw them up on Flickr.

Now I have to find a way to explain to Cassie why she doesn’t need seven pairs of shoes for a four day trip. :)

Cassie and I finally got around the seeing Walk the Line this weekend. It was a very good movie, with a great story and some great acting. In fact, I just noticed that Reese Witherspoon won the Oscar for Best Actress for her portrayal of June Carter Cash. In case you’ve been living under a rock, Walk the Line is the story of Johnny Cash’s early life. It was an excellent movie, and I think just about anyone would enjoy it.

I was under the mistaken impression that Johnny Cash was just a country singer. That’s not at all the case, and, in fact, he’s in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I’m currently downloading some of his music off of AllOfMP3.com (more on that later). It’s not my usual fare, but some of it is pretty good.

Another movie that I haven’t gotten a chance to see yet is Capote. I read the book as part of an honors course at Ole Miss, so I’d really like to see the movie. I haven’t been able to drag Cassie to it yet.

Long time, no post. Between work, teaching my class, and trying to write my thesis, I haven’t had much time for posting. I’m going to try to get two or three a week in from now on. We’ll see. Today I’m being lazy at my in-law’s house. I’ve replied to several emails I’ve been meaning to reply to for a long time, and I’ve gotten a little bit done on my thesis.

My thesis isn’t progressing quite as fast as I’d like it to, but at least it’s progressing. I’m still on track to finish this semester. It’s up to 42 pages right now. I expect it to top out at over 100 pages.

For a few days I thought my Linksys WRT54G wireless router had bit the dust. However, I tested the power supply with my multimeter and it was bad, meaning the router was probably just fine. I bought a new power supply at Radio Shack last night, and everthing seems to be working just fine now.

Hopefully there will be more posts soon.