May 16th 2000
Last week I got a raise at work. They called it an “equity raise” because they wanted to stop the flow of people quitting. By giving us a raise to make our salary closer to the “market”, they hoped to retain more people. This raise is supposed to be completely separate from the end-of-year raise they will be giving out in July. I got an 11% raise. I’m happy to see that my salary has increased over the past two years from about (removed) to now almost (removed). I hope I get a good raise again in July. I think I will because my manager (Eric Neumann) told me I was one of the best developers they have during my mid-year review last month. In addition to that, I hope I get a good bonus. I could certainly use the money. I’m planning on putting $2,000 of my bonus (if it is a good enough bonus) into a newly created Roth IRA. I can only contribute $5,000 per year, but I plan on doing that as well as contributing 10% of my salary into my 401(k).
(edited, 08-13-2002)
May 31st 2000
Having packed the night before, I was ready to leave for my trip to Hawaii. My plan was to go to work and then catch a flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles and then from Los Angeles to Honolulu. My manager, Eric Neumann, left work early so I didn’t feel so bad leaving around 3pm to catch my flight. When I got to the airport, the flight I was to take (205) had a gate change. I got on the plane with no problem. I was hoping to get first class, so I used an ‘S2′ standby priority code. I didn’t get first class, but didn’t regret using S2 because this is an important trip to me and I don’t want to take any unnecessary risks. The fight went by quick. I bought a new book the night before: The Icewind Dale trilogy. Reading that book made ours seem like minutes as I devoured every page. I’m very glad I got that book instead of re-reading another book I already had. The book is based on the AD&D Forgotten Realms world and was recommended to me before. I also reasoned that I’m going to be getting two computer games in the future based off of this world. Since we had a gate change, the flight out of Atlanta was delayed about 30 minutes. This wasn’t a problem because the layover is normally two hours. Fortunately I got on the Honolulu flight. I was amazed that the flight was completely booked since there were over 100 empty seats that morning. I think there were over 80 non-rev people on that flight. The lady sitting next to me was very talkative, so I didn’t get to read much of my inviting book. It didn’t matter though because as soon as we got in the air, I started to have intense stomach cramps. I was terrified that I had some sort of food poisoning and was dreading having to be in beautiful Hawaii while sick. I tried to sleep some on the flight to ignore the pains and fortunately it seemed to help. When we got to Honolulu, the pain was completely gone.
I need to learn how to make better paragraphs when writing. Because the flight from Los Angeles got in so late (11pm), all of the island-hopper flights were not running that late at night. I would have to wait until the next morning (which was my plan anyway since Larry and Amy weren’t arriving until Thursday morning.) I had never made any plans on where to stay the night so I had to look around. Fortunately the information desk in the baggage claim had someone sitting in it and I asked where a cheap good hotel was that I could get a room. They lady pointed me to a wall of phones with lines to all the area hotels. She recommended the Honolulu Airport hotel. I called them up and they had rooms for roughly $70.00, which I decided to take. By the time I got the room and was in bed, it was around 1am local time. Where I came from on the east coast, there is a six-hour time difference, so it ‘felt’ to me like it was 7am. I took a melatonin pill and went to bed.
