Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I’m sitting in the empty north terminal at the Anchorage International Airport. My flight isn’t for another three hours departing out of gate N1. The security checkpoint isn’t even open yet. I’m thinking of taking the shuttle to the south terminal so I can get some dinner.

It’s now 5:27 and I’m sitting in the south terminal ‘food court’. I just ordered a bacon cheeseburger to eat before my flight.

Larry & I slept in until about 9am. When Larry looked out the window, he reported that it was bright and sunny! Our last day, the day we leave, is absolutely beautiful. It was really depressing that all the previous days were overcast and rainy.

We got up and headed to the lodge for breakfast but there was a big wait, so we drove into Seward instead. There we went to a little local place and I had pancakes with bacon.

After breakfast we packed up and headed north towards Anchorage. Since we had a little time, we stopped at Portage glacier. The portage glacier area is about six miles off of the main Seward highway. There we were treated to some awesome views of about three different glaciers. In some spots the sunlight was hitting just right from a good angle. For the first time this trip I was able to use my polarizer.

After portage glacier, we continued north. Once we got to the airport, I dropped Larry off and drove into town. We called it even on food and agreed to split up lodging and car rental. Lodging was about $300 and the car was around $280, so I owe Larry about $300. I’ll mail a check in the next few days.

Since I had about five hours before my flight, I drove around Anchorage until I found the movie theater. When I was here in 1999 with Kyle, we caught a movie before our flight since we had time to spare. I bought a ticket for the 2:15 showing of Blue Crush. I think this was the first time I’ve gone to the movies by myself. It felt odd. I’ve been teasing Michele about that movie since I know she wasn’t interested in it. The movie was just ok.

After the movie I drove to the airport, returned the car, and checked my bag. I listed myself for S1R priority in hopes of getting first-class.

For three full days of hiking in the southern Kenai peninsula of Alaska, the Minolta Dimage 7i handled quite well.

When I wasn’t taking a lot of photographs, I carried the camera in its case inside my backpack. When I had it out, I was either carrying it in my hand, or I wore it slung around my shoulder for easy-access. The way I wore it was such that the neck strap was resting on the right-side of my neck, and the camera hung just behind my left-arm.

In the camera case, I had two extra sets of batteries, the lens hood, polarizer, and micro-fiber cloth. Also in my backpack, I carried the tripod which I only got use of during Lost Lake trail for a panorama attempt and a self portrait of my brother and I.

The three days we were hiking, the weather wasn’t so good. It was overcast and sometimes drizzly. The last day, when we were leaving, it was sunny with a bright blue sky. Landscape photos were a challenge because the sky was completely white due to being overcast. This made metering tough to do. The foreground would be too dark if you metered against the sky and the sky would be way too overblown if you metered against the foreground. I ended up metering against the sky for the most part and tried to clean up the darkened foreground with the levels adjustment in Photoshop.

I’ve posted some lightly processed photos on my web gallery with the exception of the Lost Lake Trail photos. I’m still trying to process those as they are pretty difficult with the dark foregrounds. My expertise of Photoshop isn’t good enough to do the necessary adjustments to make them better, so I’m trying to learn. The histogram for a lot of them is such that there are peaks on the left and right side, but the middle 50% of the histogram is virtually non-existent (totally flat with no area). I can get the correct brightness and details of the foreground if I magic-wand out the sky and pump up the levels of the foreground, but the edges between foreground and sky look cartoonish. I wish I knew how to do it correctly. In retrospect, I think that putting the camera on full manual, setting aperture to f8 and then adjusting the shutter speed to correctly expose the entire scene would have yielded better results. Maybe though there was just too much bright white in the sky to compose everything correctly. Another solution might have been to take two exposures while mounted on a tripod, one exposed for foreground and one exposed for background and then splice them in Photoshop. Even if that would have worked, I wouldn’t want to mess with the tripod every single shot.

In all, I never even filled up the 1GB IBM microdrive. I took 350 photos and still had about 100 left on the drive. I went through a set of batteries each day, but charged them up at night in the lodge with my Rayovac 1h charger.

With the exception of the difficult metering of the landscape photos containing the overcast white sky, the camera handled itself quite nicely. I had the white-balance set to cloudy except for when the sun was trying to peek through, then I set it to auto. The last day when it was clear and sunny, I set the white balance to sunny and was finally able to use the polarizer to bring out the rich blue skies.

The camera got pretty wet at one point when I fell about 3 feet to the ground on my back with the camera slung across the shoulder (I fell off of a log). Since the ground was so wet, the camera was covered in water as you would except if you sprinkled water on it. The lens cap was on, so the glass was fine, and I just dried off the water with no adverse affects.

In all, I was very pleased with how it handled.

Alaska, 2002 Album

When I got home from work on Friday I took a short nap before Michele came over. We decided to go stay in her family cabin near Jasper, GA for the weekend. We gathered our things and departed around 7:30pm. On our way, we stopped at a Thai restaurant to eat dinner. The service was unbelievably slow. I had the spicy chicken fried rice. It was really good.

We didn’t get to the cabin until around 11pm. When we were close, we we were driving down a gravely dirt road. It was pitch black and spooky. I was making Michele afraid by suggesting that one of those creepy aliens from the movie Signs would jump out at us. When we got there, we had to hike down about 50 yards in the deep woods to the pump-house in order to turn on the pump. Fortunately, Michele brought flashlights.

We slept late until around 10 or 11am. Michele brought supplies to cook breakfast tacos with, so we had bacon and egg breakfast tacos. It was a great breakfast. After we cleaned up from Breakfast, we packed up and headed out. We drove down a very rough dirt road until we came to the trailhead of the Slaughter Gap Trail. There, we hiked down about 200 yards to the suspension-bridge over the water. We hung out there for about an hour taking pictures. After that, we drove on some more and stopped for lunch. We made turkey & swiss sandwiches.

By this time, it was around 3pm, so we headed back to Atlanta. On the way back, Michele got a voice-mail that her grandmother was in the hospital (Kennestone Hospital). We stopped by there to visit her. She seemed to be doing fine. They said her condition was a strange growth that has been spreading across her head called Cellulites or something.

On our way home, we stopped at Blockbuster to rent The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. We each took a shower at my place and then went to Houston’s for dinner. I had the beef roast but it wasn’t too good. When we got the bill, my Jack & Coke cocktail cost $6.00. It’s crazy how much restaurants charge for dinks. We got home around 8:30pm and started the movie. I really like that movie and can’t wait for the sequel this December. I was falling asleep by the time the movie was over.

I spent a couple of hours this morning playing with Photoshop, trying to figure out how to both lighten under-exposed portions and darken over-exposed portions of the same image using layers. I still haven’t figured it out, but have picked up a lot of knowledge about Photoshop in the process. Michele and I had lunch at Willy’s over by the local Publix. On the way there, I ran over a screw that embedded in my bran-new $130 right-rear tire. So, after Michele left, I drove over to the Firestone location at Cumberland and waited three hours in the waiting-room while they replaced the tire (it was too damaged to patch). While I waited, I caught up on slashdot.org that I downloaded to my iPAQ and I read a chapter in my Photoshop book.

When I got home, I watched Andre Agasi and Pete Samphras play for the U.S. Open title. Samphras won in what was almost a shut-out, but it was still a good match. During that, and afterwards, I processed the photographs I took from this weekend as well as the Lost Lake trail pictures from Alaska.

I didn’t record a journal a year ago, so I’m recollecting my thoughts now, a year later.

I was sitting at my desk at work, pissed off that I had to work on a production problem for a project I wasn’t supposed to be apart of - but none of the other support people had arrived yet (they don’t seem to come in until well after 9am). It was a simple problem of some jobs running out of sequence, so I had to clean things up.

I got a call from my brother who is a stock trader in San Diego. They are constantly watching CNBC at work. He told me that two planes have just crashed into the WTC’s. He said at first it was just one plane an they don’t know if it’s an accident, but as soon as the second one hit, they knew there was no doubt that it was an attack. He told me that he thought it was ‘the scumbag arab terrorists’ since they had attacked it before in 1993. He said that he had a lot of friends in the towers since a lot of brokers work there. He got off the phone with me to call our mother.

I walked down the hall to a couple of co-workers who were huddled outside a cube trying to get a radio to work in order to get info (all the news websites were jammed at this point). No one knew any more details. Phones were starting to ring everywhere from friends & family of people trying to get info I presume. One of my co-workers suggested that we go upstairs to the large conference room on the 13th floor where we have a big-screen TV. I got back to my desk and my friend Kyle (who works in a different building) called me. We didn’t talk very long but I remember saying “I hope we kill every last one of those that are responsible.”

Up in the conference room a lot of people were gathered already, glued to CNN on the large plasma TV in the corner. I watched too. As every minute went by I felt myself getting more and more enraged. While we were watching, reports of other activities started to filter in. There was a lot of speculation which airliners were involved. We were concerned because we work for Delta and didn’t know if any of our own planes were involved. Reports were coming in about a fire at the pentagon, fire at the white house, fire in the Washington mall. No one knew what was going on. I remembered thinking how awful it was going to be because there was no way to put out such a large a fire so high up. The people above were all likely to die. They were reporting that people were jumping out of windows from the top of the tower. It never even crossed my mind that the towers could collapse.

There were a couple of younger (late twenties) guys in the room cracking jokes and being completely immature. It really pissed me off. We were watching hundreds, if not thousands, of people die on live TV and these guys thought it was all so funny.

Then the first tower collapsed. The room was in complete silence. At first we didn’t know what had happened, we thought maybe it was an explosion. Then they confirmed: one of the towers had just collapsed. I couldn’t believe it. I thought about all of the people that just died. My fists were clenched and all I could think about was how we were going to fuck up those bastards that caused this. We continued to watch in silence as the second tower collapsed. CNN broke to the West Bank where a bunch of ignorant muslim people were cheering and dancing - I thought a tactical nuclear bomb was the appropriate response, but unfortunately we didn’t do that. At this time, an administrative assistant came into the room announcing that we were all to go home.

I went back to my desk and although it was extremely difficult given the circumstances, finished working on fixing that production problem. As I drove home, I listened to the radio. All of the traffic signs had the same message: “Atlanta airport closed due to national emergency.”

I spent the next 16 hours watching the news. Every station, even the cartoon network, were showing news. It was such a surreal day.

The next day, someone mentioned that one of our co-workers (who is a muslim) was standing around yesterday telling people that this sort of thing happens everywhere else in the world and we, America, deserve this (or something along those lines). I’m glad I wasn’t present because I don’t know what I would have done especially when all I wanted to do was fight back.

It makes me very, very angry to think about that day. I still feel like I did then too: I hope we kill every last one of those responsible. I don’t want to hear any crap about how we ‘deserved’ what happened. No society deserves this and anyone who wants to cause this sort of destruction to innocent civilians should be wiped off the face of the earth - that is the ONLY appropriate response. I don’t want to ‘understand’ them or try to be friends with them. I want them dead; there is no other appropriate response to their actions.

Work today was pretty good. I wrapped up most of my work on making the currency its own standalone tuxedo service.

At first, I thought that I was going to have to write the whole controller interface because the old currency conversion engine was just used as a library call inside one of our other �derived data� services. It turns out, however, that the original developer (Keith Scott, great guy - but left the company) already included a full-blown controller interface. That cut down on the required work greatly. Now all I needed to do was write up an XML interface for the other engines to use when calling the service. They package up the currency conversion request (i.e. date, target country, amount, conversion type, etc) into an XML string and then stream it to the service via a tuxedo call. It also turns out that the interface for that was written already. The only problem is that we had bundled the currency call interface into our common library which was a mistake. We had our common library including code from the currency conversion library which introduced an unwanted dependency. Our common library shouldn�t be dependant on anything internal. What I ended up doing was yanking that code out of common and making it into its own library (but packaged as a part of the currency conversion deployment package). This library is the one that will be linked to for the other engines that need to make the conversion call. Those engines will also have a compile time #include directive to the currency conversion library in order to see the correct data structure to use when packaging up the request. That data type is then passed to the interface library which does the actual tuxedo service call. Another layer of abstraction, an added bonus!

It was also finally confirmed to me today on paper that I am indeed a team lead for the �every engine� group on the project. This means that I do work that involves more than one engine. For example, we are going to be implementing a �callback� feature-set into everything by some new library middleware has provided. This will allow us to do some slick things like fore a database cache refresh on demand or dynamically change the log-level of a specific service.

After work, Michele met me at my place. We got changed and headed out to my Mom�s place to pick her up for dinner. We took her to a really great restaurant called Stoney River for her birthday which is on August 29th. I didn�t take her out to dinner sooner because I was in Alaska her birthday weekend and she was busy until now.

She had the shrimp scampi, Michele had the pork tenderloins, and I had the usual: Prime Rib cooked medium with a house salad. Another great thing about Stoney River is they give you these incredible-tasting dinner-rolls which are a little larger and taste better than doughnut-holes.

I brought my camera along and we snapped some photos I used the ADI flash setting and put the camera into portrait program mode. Out of the six photos I took Michele closed her eyes during the flash on each one!

When I was going through the photos to remove the red-eye from my eyes, Michele suggested that I use Photoshop to airbrush some tiny red spots on her skin. I ended up using the ‘healing brush’ tool. It’s really cool and super easy! You just select an area of ‘good skin’ and then click on the blemish you want removed.

Monday was pretty boring so I didn’t write anything. Work was slow and I never could get productive. I played Asheron’s Call 2 beta last night and got bored and logged out. Is the game just not good, or am I no longer obsessed with computer games? What a frightening thought.

I woke up this morning and found a dead roach in the living room:

At work I spent more time than I should doing car shopping. At first I looked at the 2002 Lexus RX300 and the 2002 Acura MDX. Both were around $38,000 - $40,000. A little pricey. I also looked at the 2002 Ford Explorer and 2003 GMC Envoy. Of the two packages, I looked at the more fully-loaded ones.

Lexus and Acura have no special deals. GMC has lower interest on 60 month financing, something like 4.3%. Ford has a really sweat deal: No payments until Jan, 2003, 0% interest on a 60-month deal, and $400 off for recent college grads. In addition to that, I get a special pricing deal through Ford since I work for Delta. They call it the X-Plan. You basically pay invoice cost. So that means no haggling. Not having to deal with the sales guy “having to go check with his manager” and wasting a lot of your time.

When I got home from work, I did more close scrutiny between the Explorer and Envoy. I spoke with Michele and she suggested that I come over. I went to her place and she cooked me scambled eggs. We then looked at cars online. We found two good Explorer candidates:

Medium Wedgwood Blue Eddie Bauer Edition with the V8 engine, sunroof, side-airbags, towing kit, aux air control, and 3rd row seat package. This was $37,260 MSRP.

Aspen Green Eddie Bauer Edition with the sunroof. This was $33,970 MSRP. I’m going to call both places tomorrow and will see about getting a test drive.

Thursday afternoon I started to feel a bit off. I had a scratchy throat. I felt worse by Thursday evening and went to the local CVS for some sore throat medicine. I was pretty sure that I may have strep throat. The medicine I took was the kind that makes you sleepy, so I had no trouble sleeping.

Also on Thursday, I went with Michele to Best Buy to help her pick out a Wi-Fi (802.11b) router for her apartment. Right now she and her roommate are each paying for a separate cable modem line. With this, they will be able to consolidate their connection into just one subscription and NAT the connection to the network inside the apartment.

I went into work on Friday and still didn’t feel any better, so I logged onto Aetna (my insurance provider) to select a doctor, since my previous PCP (Primary Care Physician) left last year. I hadn’t been to the doctor since then. I selected Dr. William McDaniel of the Promina Health group. I scheduled an appointment for 8:15AM on Monday, September 23.

I made a little progress on the project I’m working on now at work: I’m supposed to integrate an alternate ticket source type in our input translator engine. Right now, it only knows how to use ET (Electronic Ticket) sales data. I’m trying to integrate it with ES (External Source?) sales data like international BSP’s (BSP is Bank Settlement Plan). It looks like our code generator is compatible with the new format, but our internal messaging type needs to be synchronized with it. I’m waiting to work with a lady who can help me resolve the differences.

We had a team lead meeting with my manager on Friday as well. I compiled and presented a list of all the technical & system requirements that we’ve identified. Before this, our manager only knew about the work relating to the business requirements. We identified quite a bit of work that she didn’t realize. I’m going to put it into an excel spreadsheet and send out to the rest of the team leads to assign the work and provide estimated completion dates.

I was supposed to spend the night with Michele last night but since I’m feeling sick, I didn’t want to be around her. I was also supposed to go to the Jasper, GA for a family reunion on her fathers side. I didn’t go, however, because I am feeling sick. Instead today I have been laying around, quite bored. I watched Sleepless In Seattle on TBS.

I also piddled around on the internet and was looking at the Astronomy Picture of the Day site. There was a really cool composite picture of the lights of the earth from space at night:

North America close-up:

Europe close-up:

Work has been pretty productive the past two days. I found some things to work on and have gone after those tasks with a voracious appetite. I cleaned up our build framework to no longer give the option to build ‘debug’ libraries as we were always defaulting to debug libraries in the first place. Since we can and will have core files in production, we want to be able to examine them to see why we cored. I also cleaned up the mess some of the developers made when they started a lengthy new development in a core library that crippled everyone else in the project. They checked in code that caused everything to break. By the time I was called in to help, over a hundred files had been checked in, some multiple times. I spend a couple of hours this morning working with our ClearCase support group to clean up the mess and split up their work into a safe area so others wouldn’t be impacted. I’m also working on deprecating all of the now not-needed #ifdef RP_DEBUG guard blocks in all of the code. We have this all over the place, so I whipped up a perl script to do it automatically. I’m very pleased with the results.

Michele told me something bad happened at work today and she is supposed to call her boss at 8pm. She asked if I could come over when she does.

After I got home today, I did full backups on all of my critical files for both turing (Linux server), freeside (WinXP desktop), as well as all of my camera archives. I’m burning the last of 4 CD-R’s right now. I’m going to take them to Michele’s to hold for safe keeping.

I’m also thinking about doing something similar to the guy who cataloged every single thing in his house. mc.clintock.com is the website and there is even an article in Wired about it. I probably won’t be as detailed, but I want to get a good inventory. Logistically, I’m thinking of using some sort of backing to place the object against, shooting in 640×768?, and then masking out the background to have just the object with a transparent background so it will look nice when posted. This will yield two things:

1) A ‘fun’ project. I think it will be fun, but some others don’t agree with me.
2) A wonderful way to catalog everything for insurance purposes.
3) A learning opportunity for more advanced web authoring.

Michele came over yesterday after work. Makayla was spending the night at Michele’s parent’s house. When she came over, she lamented that her hair looked like a vulcan, so I took a picture.

We went to Houston’s for dinner Thursday night. I had the flying chicken platter and Michele had a salad. The chicken fingers weren�t as good as I remember. The $8.00 Crown & Coke I had was good, although I don�t know if it was worth $8.00. Michele spent the night at my place on Thursday.

Friday was a pretty productive day at work. I hashed out the error-handling conditions with Steve Crowgey and also worked on a potential new code generator that will generate code for our new messaging and object model for the �south� engines. It was nice to dig around in perl again.

After work Friday I spent some time making Michele�s gift. We�re exchanging hand-made gifts to celebrate two years of dating. I�m making her two custom CD mixes with all of her favorite songs � at least I hope they are her favorite songs.

I was supposed to meet Michele at her apartment at 8pm, but she was late. Her and I had plans to go out with her roommate (Jennifer) and her roommates� fianc� (Andre). Andre�s old college roommate came along with us too. We went to a Japanese steakhouse somewhere neat Roswell road. The food was great as well as the presentation. I was pretty sleepy, probably recovering from the all-night linux fiasco on Wednesday so I wasn�t too talkative. I think I have a new craving for oily fried rice. I really love the fried rice from the Thai places and the fried rice at the steakhouse was really good too.

Michele and I got up at 8am this morning to prepare for our all-day paintball outing. As a sort of informal team-building exercise, our director (Brent Browning, an Accenture guy) put together this paintball event for today. They chose a paintball place called Arkenstone Paintball. We got there around 10am as planned. About ten people showed up. Of those that I knew were Casey Theriot (at work he sits next to me and is a team lead) , James Waters, Scott Eisert, Mallick Huggahalli, Mallick�s wife, Brent Browning, Clay (also an accenture guy), Allison (also an accenture girl), and Brent�s two brothers. There might have been a few other people as well that I don�t remember. Michele and I had our fatigues on and were ready to go.

I had a great time. It was fun to play paintball in the woods outside instead of some dark and hot warehouse like I did before when I was in high school. We played about twelve or fourteen games total, each game lasting about fifteen minutes. Unfortunately I didn�t get any pictures, but Brent took some photos of the whole group, so I�m going to try to get a copy from him. Close to the end, Michele got hit in the face through her mask and got the paint stuff in her mouth. She wasn�t feeling too good after that. While it was a lot of fun, it was also tiring. It�s been a while since I�ve run around all day squatting and crawling with a gun in my hand. It sort of reminded me of �playing guns� with my friends when I as younger.

Michele drove back, so I took some pictures from the passenger seat while we drove back on a beautiful partly-cloudy 83 degree day:

Speedometer.

The sky looking through the sunroof.

Side mirror.

Windy Hill exit (where we exit coming from the North).

I need to wrap this up quick because we need to get ready to head out to Canoe for our special dinner tonight.