Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Originally I chose to name my journal turing::Jeff using the perl syntax to be clever. Michele suggested that I use Leased Territories (a reference from Neil Stephenson’s The Diamond Age). However, I don’t know if the name is sticking with me. At first I thought Villa-Straylight (reference from William Gibson’s Neuromancer) but Michele thought that was ‘gay’.

Yesterday at work we had our first team meeting for the newly re-organized project. It looks like my work assignment won’t change much but things will get really busy in the next week or two, and stay that way for the rest of the year. Finally, I hope I’ll be able to do some hard-core software development instead of filling out reams of silly test-forms for a one-character change to a config file.

My father is in town for a couple of days on business. We went to Einstein’s in midtown for dinner last night and as such I had to skip going to the gym. We’re going to see about dinner tonight before he has to catch his flight back to Atlanta.

I went to Michele’s apartment last night to test the allergies. The previous two times I’ve visited her, my nose would get clogged up and start running constantly while I as in the apartment. So Michele called the allergy center and they suggested spraying for dust mites. She cleaned the whole place Sunday and last night while I did get a bit stuffy, it was nothing like the previous two times.
Michele declared that she has been looking at diamonds over at Blue Nile, and she wanted me to take a look. She was all excited about the super flawless cuts and super clear colors. Now I want to do a little test. Below we have three pictures of diamonds of differing color, taken from Blue Nile. I can’t see any difference between the three:

Mystery Diamond #1:

Mystery Diamond #2:

Mystery Diamond #3:

My Dad got an early flight back to Austin last night, so I didn’t have dinner with him. Instead, I was able to go to the gym, as originally planned. Since it was Tuesday, I worked chest, shoulders, triceps, forearms, and abs. Today I worked biceps, legs, back, and abs.

My brother Larry was supposed to call me last night so we could finalize our plans for the Alaska trip at the end of the month. He never called, but I did some research on trails and have a good idea where we can go. He called today at work and said that he wants to take another look. We have to decide soon so I can make lodging arrangements. We’re both looking forward to this trip vey much. I went before in 1999 with Kyle (Photos). This time, I’m pumped up because I know what to expect, and I’m really looking forward to putting my new camera to the test.

Work was very productive today. I heard a rumor that I may become a technical lead very soon, so I’m definitely looking forward to that. I completed the complicated code merge from all of the bug fixes of our “1.1″ release to the “1.2″ code branch without too many problems. I also participated in a very good meeting about our “Path Director” imitative for the 1.2 release. We gained a lot of ground and are certainly on our way to a successful technical design in a couple of weeks.

Around lunch time, Craig called me and asked if I wanted to join him for lunch. Of course since Craig lives in San Antonio, I jokingly said that I wouldn’t get back to work in time. He explained that he is in Atlanta in the airport for a layover. Since I work right next door to Hartsfield Airport, I drove over there and had lunch with him and his Dad in the Houlahans airport restaurant just off the atrium.

I saw this article on slashdot.org about diamonds, so I shared it with Michele since we’ve been talking about diamonds and engagement rings. I think she got the wrong idea because she sent me an IM saying,

[04:00 PM] Michele: I had been blinded by the brillance reflected off the diamonds, but now I see the light
[04:09 PM] Michele: I see the error in my thinking

So of course I get the feeling that she thinks I want her to not want a diamond or something even though I said,

[11:26 AM] Jeff: I don’t necessarily agree with it, but it’s an interesting read…

When I shared the link with her. We’re supposed to talk about it tonight.

This is becoming long winded, so lastly:

While I was drinking my smoothie after going to the gym, I got an e-mail from Asheron’s Call 2 Beta Admin welcoming me to Asheron’s Call 2 Beta! I’ve been waiting for this for a long time! I frantically searched the message for instructions on downloading the client, but it wasn’t there! I had an id/password but no download! I immediately looked on the fansite boards and people were lamenting that they didn’t get the second e-mail yet (the same one I’m supposed to get with more info). Someone mentioned that a ‘large site’ has the client for download, so I checked gamespy.com but didn’t find anything. I then checked fileplanet.com and found a 600 megabyte ‘Asheron’s Call 2 Beta: Very High Detail File‘ for download! Since I don’t subscribe to their lame pay service, I have to wait in line for the download. As I write this, I’m number 38 out of 362 in line. I’ve been in the queue now for about an hour, so I hope to be able to try it tonight!

Woke up late. I thought I remember taking a shower the night before too, but didn’t realize I actually didn’t have a shower in almost two days until I was halfway to work.

Work was a typical slow Friday, but we managed to have a really productive meeting about the new project file structure in ClearCase. The plan we came up with will be a logical, clean, and consistent standard. I took down the notes on my iPAQ and e-mailed them out. I also volunteered to do all the work.
We also had another 4-5pm meeting which didn’t end until 6pm. I left the meeting at 5:30 though. The whole point of the meeting was to work with the project architect to agree on some things about how we are going to logically place the engines so data will flow through in an efficient manner. We, the applications team, came up with a really good way to handle everything, but the enterprise architect guy was really hard to sell ideas to and a previous idea we had got shot down, so everyone was timid to bring this idea up.
After an hour and no one wanted to speak up about it, I finally brought it up. Fortunately, he took the bait and liked the idea (or at least it seemed the way before I left). Good fortune I guess.

After work I got a shower and picked up Michele to meet my Mom & her boyfriend at Dave & Busters for dinner. After dinner, Michele and I stayed and played shuffle-board and video games.

My USB hub isn’t working anymore and I can only thing it has something to do with the new video card I installed, although I don’t see why. It’s driving me crazy.

I’m working on a project at work to overhaul our entire vob in ClearCase. Before, several of our engines had the .cpp files in a ’src’ subdirectory and all .h files in a ‘include’ subdirectory for whatever engine we were working on.
We collectively decided to consolidate the source files into a single directory for each engine instead of having them split up into a src and include directory.

Casey wanted his stuff to prototype this new way of doing things. He asked if he should check in all of his files first. I assured him it wasn’t necessary that my mad ClearCase skills were no match for checked out files. So I began the operation:

cleartool co -nc .
cleartool mv src/* .
cleartool rmname src
cleartool ci -nc .

You get the point.

Well it turns out that we blew away his view-private files and checkouts by rmnaming the subdirs we moved everything from.

“No problem” I thought. I’ll just ‘cleartool checkin -from od@@/revp_1.2/1′. Little did I know that the -from selector for checkins doesn’t work for directories. Crap! Casey was getting a little concerned that I just blew away all his work for the past few weeks. I try calling Bob, our ClearCase admin. He’s not at his desk (asusual). I page him. A few minutes later he responds that he isn’t at a phone. I call Andy, Bob’s backup. Andy informs me that he can work on it tomorrow because he has to leave. He suggests I talk to their team guru, Chris, if I can’t wait until tomorrow. I call Chris and explain the situation. He has me issue some archaic commands to see the files but they all appear to be empty! He then tells me that he will work on it and call me.

About ten minutes later Chris calls back with the solution. The files are saved! The solution was to simply create a clearcase softlink to the old version (similar to what I wanted to do with the checkin from selector). I got the files back and had Casey check them in.

With some further thought, we’re going to make sure all files are checked in before we start moving stuff and aren’t going to rmname the dirs, but rename them so the other developers can copy out their view-private files if needed.

I think I have a big problem with heat.

Michele spent the night last night and typically she radiates a LOT of heat. I didn’t sleep so good last night because she likes to snuggle up to me. Probably because she’s so hot while I’m also I move away from her until I’m hanging off the edge of the bed. I’m going to try to keep the AC very low the next time that happens to see if it helps.

A few months ago I noticed I had a bit of an ant problem in my apartment. They are the nasty fire ants too, so they can crawl on your feet and bite you! I don’t fancy living in a place that is infested with fire ants. At the time I did a lot of investigation and never found a ’source’. There is really no food to speak of for them to eat. There are no trails, and no apparent nests. From what I can tell, them come up from underneath the carpet. I tried to get those worthless ant bait trap things but the ants just laugh at them.

At the time, I finally figured out that the ants must be in one or both of the two potted plants I have because they seemed to only show up after I watered the plants. Because of this discovery, the plants went outside.

Unfortunately, the ants are back. There seems to be more than ever. It’s VERY frustrating because I can’t figure out where they are coming from or where they ‘live’. There is no food source in my apartment to sustain them, so I’m at a loss. I’m so fed up with it that I’ve declared chemical warfare on them and I’m going to fumigate them out of my home. If that doesn’t help I don’t know what I’ll do.

All day yesterday I was in a single meeting at work. They call it “end-to-end” processing in which we take a sample passenger ticket and walk it through all of the processes that it must go through for our project. It took us 1.5 days to drive just one ticket. We’re going to start on the next ticket Monday.

The people leading these meetings are the Accenture contractors over on the business side. These guys are sometimes like robots. They are all always concentrating on only business and never ever break from task. I don’t know how they do it. Another stark difference between them and the regular employees is that they are all young and relatively good looking. It reminds me of the episode on Felicity where Nole worked in that web design company and everyone working there looked like models. I thought that was grossly unrealistic, but maybe I was wrong after being around these Accenture people.

Michele called me last night and suggested that I come over so we can ‘talk about the problems’. I didn’t want to see her because I was frustrated and angry and I knew I wouldn’t be in the most productive frame of mind.

Nonetheless I showed up and we talked about the problems. She made a list of things each of us should do:

1) I am to be there for her when she needs me and she will try to respect my space
2) I am to share things with her and not be a closed book while she will try to not nitpick everything.
3) I am to put her needs before my own and she will put my needs before her own.
4) I am not to be judgmental and she will not always assume the worst about everything.

It felt nice to patch things up, and I came back home around 10pm.

I was planning on going to bed early so I could get up before sunrise. I wanted to go to a spot in Vinings to take some photos of the sunrise.

Unfortunately I didn’t go to bed until about 1am. I decided to try logging into Asheron’s Call 2 beta and actually got on. I made a human named Vlanna and trained her to be an archer.

I took a screenshot

One of my co-workers, Veena, just got back from a short trip to Berlin. She left Wednesday afternoon and got back Sunday afternoon. Her fare calculation string was probably something like this:

ATL CDG DL 0.00 CDG TXL AF 0.00 TXL CDG AF 0.00 CDG ATL DL 0.00 …. etc

Means from Atlanta to Paris on Delta, Paris to Berlin on Air France, and back again. She and her husband had no trouble getting there and back. Business Elite class for the trans-oceanic leg. Not bad. The beauty of it is that they had 3 full days in Europe and only had to take off 2 days from work.

This inspired me to re-think my thoughts on going to Europe. For some reason I had it in my mind that I would need to take much more time. Similar to what I’m doing with my Alaska trip (see below), I could take a short trip to/from Europe and still accomplish a lot.

All day today I was in meetings. just before my lunch meeting I called Michele and asked her if she had a passport. She said she didn’t so I asked her to get one. I’d like to take a long weekend trip to Europe (probably Paris, London, or Germany) during the fall.

On the topic of travel is Alaska. In about 72 hours I’ll be on a plane bound to Anchorage, AK. My brother Larry is meeting me up there, and we’re going to be going on day-hikes for three days.

This is the tentative itinerary:

Larry arrives at 7:23pm on Thursday the 29th. I arrive at 9:23pm.
We spend the night at Alyeska Prince Hotel the first night.
Then we spend the night at Seward Windsong Lodge for the next three nights.
Friday, 8-30: Russian Lakes trail, then Ptarmigan Lake trail.
Saturday, 8-31: Seven lakes trail, then Kenai River trail.
Sunday, 9-1: Lost Lake trail.
Monday, 9-2: Winner Creek trail.
Larry fly’s out at 3:00pm on 9-2 and I fly out at 8:05pm.

I need to start making a list of things to pack. I don’t have a large bag to check as luggage as I’ve always done the carry-on thing so tomorrow or Wednesday after work I’m going to have to buy something.

I played Asheron’s Call 2 beta some more today after work. I took two more pictures.
The first one is of my toon, Vlanna, standing on a bridge.
The second one is of the same scene, but zoomed out and from a slightly different camera angle.

I have two PC’s:

1) Main desktop, running WinXP
2) Server/internet gateway/firewall, running Mandrake 8.2

I invested some time about a month ago to implement a decent backup strategy for both computers. I don’t have the storage or patience to backup everything and not even really a need to. So instead, I backup a selected list of directories and store the resulting backup directly on the other computer. For example, my WinXP box (freeside) is backed up to a samab share on my linux box (turing) and vice-versa.

The backup implementation I have is that once a week I do a full backup and every day after that until the next week, I do an incremental backup on top of the same file. The next time a full-backup is done, all the other incremental’s are blown away. And then once a month, I save off a full-backup. Additionally, I periodically archive a full backup on CD-R.

From the WinXP side, I use the built-in ntbackup tool. It stacks incrementals such that you can still get to a previous day’s incremental backup.
From the linux side, I first used tar, but didn’t like how it did incrementals (I can’t remember why now), so I switch to zip. Zip doesn’t necessarily have incremental ability, but it does have an ‘update’ switch that will only refresh files that are new or changed. This is a problem because whenever a file changes, it blows away the previous days version, so you really only have one snapshot of the files. Another problem with zip is that the current version that comes installed with Mandrake 8.2 doesn’t have large file support (tar does, incidentally), so if I want to create an archive larger than 2.14gb, it will fail. Similarly, the ntbackup tool will not work correctly if you write directly to a samba share on the linux side, so I must first backup locally and then from the linux side and then copy to a local directory on the linux side.

At the time, this seemed like a nice strategy. The more I think about it though it should be done differently.

I need to have a week or two worth of incrementals and at least two rotating full-backup images. If I do it that way, then I never have the issue of blowing away something whenever I do the next full backup, or in the case of linux with zip, every day I do a backup.

Is it really worth it though? It’s a home PC, not a production server (even the linux box). Do I need that level of backup redundancy? The main thing I’m worried about is making sure I have the latest copy of all my important data. I’m not sure if there is any case in which I need to have a weeks worth or even a months worth of daily backups to account for a mistake made somewhere in between there.

Maybe the solution I have now is fine? I seem to have come round full circle.

Right now, I’m sitting in first class (seat 6A) on flight 383 from Salt Lake City to Anchorage drinking a crown & coke while the rest of the plane boards.

IROP stands for irregular operation. I was supposed to fly direct from Atlanta to Anchorage. I arrived at Hartsfield airport in Atlanta 1.5 hours before my flight was scheduled to depart. I figured that I would use the cool self-service check in kiosk to check in and check my bag.

Uh-oh.

There is a big sign that the kiosks are for carry-on bags only. I thought I remembered that you could use the kiosks for checked luggage too. Maybe it changed. So, I get in the big long line for the ticket counter. At this point I think that it’s all good still since I have well over an hour. The line isn’t moving very fast. The minutes dwindle by and I start to get worried. I finally get to an agent and when I tell him that I’m checking in for Anchorage, he explains that I’m too late.

At that moment, I felt like I was in a dream. It was surreal. I wasn’t going to make my flight. You’re supposed to check bags at least 30 minutes before departure. I was 8 minutes over-due. The agent explained to me that there are other kiosks to use when checking a bag.

He gives me a solution: I can get to Anchorage by way of Salt Lake City, but I’ll get in four hours later. I have no choice and do that. On the way to gate A23, I call Larry and explain the situation. He’s a little upset but understands.

While waiting to board, I call Michele’s parents to find out how she is doing. She was admitted to the hospital for dehydration and a 104.5 degree fever. They are going to discharge her sometime tonight and she’ll stay with her grandmother. I hope she’s ok. I miss her already.

Work was good. I met with my manager about stuff I’m working on. At this point, she told me that I was leading the ‘every engine’ team which is great on many fronts: I get to prove myself as senior developer material and get experience with more architecture type things, which is where I’d like to branch out to.

I’m writing this and all my Alaska journal entries on my iPAQ 3955 PDA in pocket word. I’ll import them into movabletype when I get home.

We woke up at 8am today. We walked down to the lodge restaurant to have breakfast. It was pretty overcast and foggy. I had fried eggs with bacon and potatoes. Larry had scrambled eggs. After breakfast, we packed up and headed out to our first trail: Kenai River Trail.

When we got to the trailhead, it was overcast, but not raining. The parking lot was empty so it looked as if we were the only ones on the trail. We hiked down through pine and other trees on our way to the river. On the way there we passed through a burn area. Back in 1991 a fire burned out over 7900 acres. The burn area was pretty cool because there were no trees, just shrubs and charred remains. There were some areas thick with fireweed too, which looked nice.

Once we got to the river, Larry casted his fishing line out some but didn’t get any hits. We followed the trail along the river, attempting to fish along the way. Eventually we came to a ’spooky’ part of the forest. It was dark, the trees were all dead and turned over and the stench of death was in the air. In this area we caw what looked to be a big bear dropping. A little farther we saw big bear tracks in a soft patch of ground. We never saw the bear though. As we continued on, the trail sort of disappeared and we took what appeared to be game trails until that, too, became un-passable. While we were trying to find our way back to the main trail, I fell off of a log, to my back about 3-4 feet down. I wasn’t hurt, but I had my camera slung over my shoulder. Aside from being a little wet, it was fine. We made our way back to the trailhead.

The next trail we went to was Seven Lakes Trail. By the time we got there, the weather improved and the sun was starting to shine. I took some photographs of the first lake, and then Larry & I had sandwiches for lunch. We hiked along the seven lakes trail for a little while before Larry wanted to turn back. While we skirted along one lake in the beginning, the trail became very monotonous: a straight, narrow path deep in the forest. He was bored.

Before dinner we stopped at Exit Glacier. This is a really cool place because you walk about a mile right up to the edge of a huge glacier. The sun was starting to set, so lighting wasn’t so good and it was getting pretty cold. We took some photographs and then headed into town for dinner.

We ate dinner at Chinooks. I had Salmon with almond topping. It was really fresh.