Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Saturday night Michele and I went to a fancy restaurant in Vinings called Canoe. Our reservation was for 8:15pm. When we arrived, we had to wait like 30 - 40 minutes even though we had reservations. I wasn’t too happy about that. Because we spent the whole day running around playing paintball, we were both sore and tired. I had a hard time staying alert throughout dinner.

Nonetheless, the dinner was excellent. Michele had the roasted duck, and I had the veal venison or something like that. Their portions are tiny, but I guess that’s to be expected at an expensive restaurant. After dinner we went straight to bed.

We slept in until 9am on Sunday, probably due to all of the physical exertion on Saturday. Michele helped me do laundry and then we went out for lunch around noon on Sunday. We decided to drive around midtown until we found a place that looked good. That plan never works right. 45 minutes later we still didn’t find a place and ended up in buckhead. Eventually we settled on a chain restaurant we hadn’t been to before.

Yesterday was a fairly productive day at work. After work, I got a haircut and did my weekly grocery shopping. I also finally fixed the passwords from expiring every day on my linux box as well as cleaning up some of the error messages during the cron.daily run. I also updated my Nokie Sojourn Page with statistics from last month.

Friday after work I took a short nap until Michele came over. She wanted to take a short nap too. After napping, we decided to head out for dinner. As we were leaving, the sun was setting and looked incredible:

We attempted to drive around Midtown to find a place to eat. That proved to be futile. Instead, we drove around for over an hour not finding anything (where are all of these restaurants supposed to be in midtown, anyway?). Eventually we drove into Buckhead and ate at a place called The Rockbottom Brewery.

We got up early on Saturday morning to head over to Michele’s apartment to do some cleaning. Her closet was really dirty and she wanted to give it an overhaul.

This is the before picture:

And this is the after picture:

We finished that up around noon and went to Longhorn Steakhouse for lunch. On the way back from lunch, we drove past a cool looking metal sculpture of a knight battling a dragon:

I went to the gym to work on biceps, back, legs, and abs. When I got back, Michele took a photo of me laying on the floor:

We decided that we were going to watch a scary movie. We first looked at the current movie listings and nothing sounded appealing. So instead we headed out to blockbuster video. There we decided to rent the original Halloween. For being a 1978 movie, it was pretty good. Afterwards, Michele was scared about what could be in the closets.

This morning the weather was nice so we wanted to go do something outside. After a lot of thought, we decided to head out to the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield Park. We started up the 1 mile trail to the summit of the mountain, but Michele was having some breathing problems, so we headed back down. We drove around for a little while until we came to the Kolb’ Farm area. This was flat with a large open field. I took a few pictures, this is one of them:

While we were walking, something must have snapped in Michele because she got real upset all of a sudden. We headed back home without much conversation. We had a talk before she left and there seems to be some problems in our relationship. I’m having a difficult time keeping up with the bouts of depression and grumpiness.

Yesterday was a pretty miserable day at work. My facial skin rash was still prevalent and all I could do was feel the constant itching and burning on my face. I brought some Bath & Bodyworks lotion to put on my face, but it didn’t seem to help much. The Aloe Vera (which I left at home) works better. My face is much better today.

Later Wednesday evening around 10pm, Michele called and said that she was scared because some strange guy just walked into her apartment. She said at about 9:45 there was a knock on the door followed by it being unlocked. A lanky Hispanic man walked in. He saw her and said, ‘I must have the wrong apartment.’ then turned around and left. She was concerned that a maintenance? guy would be coming around close to 10pm. Since no one else was in the apartment with her and Makayla, she called me. I agreed to come over and spend the night with her. I arrived at around 10:20 and we went to bed. Four hours later at 2:30 I still couldn’t fall asleep. Makayla woke up and didn’t want to sleep either. I told Michele that I was going to go home as I couldn’t fall asleep. I drove home and went to be around 3am. I finally fell asleep. Since I knew it was so late, I changed my alarm to wake me up at 8am instead of 6am. The extra two hours made a big difference as I can actually concentrate and get work done today.

One of my co-workers (Veena) was having a core dump (sigbus) in a program she’s testing. I helped her out and discovered that running a local instance of tuxedo causes complications if you have two different libraries with classes of the same name. This is not a problem when you run in the actual domain tuxedo space. We got that fixed and I went to lunch to Chupes (Cuban food) with Casey, Brian, James, Anil, and Susan.

Last night I checked the forecast for the Helen, GA area and it looked great: mostly sunny. Because it’s October fest in Helen and mid-October, we thought it would be fun to drive up that way for the day and possibly see the trees changing colors. We planned on waking up at 5am to get an early start.

When the alarm started buzzing at 5am, I hit the snooze button. I ended up snoozing it two more times until turning it off. Around 6am, Michele woke me up asking if we should get up. I took a quick shower, got dressed, and started getting our things together while Michele took a shower. I downloaded the directions from mappoint.msn.com to my iPAQ.

We hit the road just before 7am from I-285 to I-85 onward till we got to Helen. The drive up there was pretty nice as some low-lying fog was hugging the ground and blanketing the mountains and valleys. There was virtually no traffic. We got there around 8:30 and had breakfast at a local breakfast place. Since it was so early, Helen was pretty much dead. We decided to drive around some more. We headed out towards the Richard Russell scenic highway and ended up at Anna Ruby Falls. We paid $3 to park and hiked the one-way 0.4 mile path to the falls. Since it wasn’t sunny yet and low light, I took along my tripod in my backpack along with my camera. We stopped along the way and took several pictures. It’s a good thing I took the tripod as the light was indeed too low for hand-held shots. Some of the pictures I took of the running water turned out with the cool ‘motion’ effect due to me using a slower shutter speed.

We were pretty much the first people on the trail that day. While we were hanging out at the falls, more and more people started to pile in. I was amazed at the number of people carrying tripods and SRL-like cameras. I’ve never seen that before on a trail.

I added some of the photos I took to my photo gallery in the one titled Anna Ruby Falls, 10-12-2002.

Here are some sample photos I took:

After Anna Ruby Falls, we decided to head out to Ellijay, GA for the Apple Festival. It took about an hour & half to drive there. Even though we were doing a lot of driving, the drive to Ellijay was really pleasant because it was around 75 degrees and sunny. We had the windows down and the sunroof open. When we finally got to Ellijay we parked next to what looked to be a festival area. It turns out that it was just a bunch of crafts and food being sold. We were hungry as it was around 1:30pm.

I asked some locals where a good BBQ place was. The gave us directions to a place with a bunch of pigs. Since it wasn’t within walking-distance, we got back in the car and drove to this BBQ place. When we got there, it was pretty crowded and we had to wait about ten minutes to get our food and sit down. Michele had a pork sandwich and I had the beef plate. The food was great!

After our (late) lunch, we decided that we had enough for the day and were going to head back to Atlanta. But before we headed out, we wanted to get some funnel cake too. We drove back to the crafts & food area of town and got a $4 plate of funnel cake. While we were there, we figured that they had shuttle-buses taking people to the real fairgrounds where the apple festival was taking place.

Michele drove back while I reclined in the passenger seat. When we got back Michele complained about a headache. We decided to rent a movie and pick up some burritos for dinner. I went to Blockbuster to rent The Usual Suspects, but they didn’t have it. So instead I got Panic Room. When I got back we ate and watched the movie. It was pretty good. I was pretty impressed with the special cinematography effects in the movie. For example, transitioning between scenes was done seamlessly through the house. They made the transition look as if the camera was traveling through the walls.

After the movie, Michele got really quiet and started acting depressed. I asked her if anything was wrong and she said ‘no’ (as she was laying on the bed with her head buried). I had no idea what to do, so I ignored her while I cleaned up the apartment. A few minutes later she came in the living room and said that she had a mild anxiety attack and was feeling depressed. Her depression was dragging me down too. We both went to bed feeling sad.

I wrapped up most of what I’ve been working on this past Tuesday. We now have a functioning flow of data from:

1. from our input stream, through our input translator into our own internal binary objects
2. then streamed into all of our internal engines (through Tuxedo calls)
3. then into our ‘output’ translator which converts the internal binary objects back out to the adapter which populates the processed data to the ticket datastore.

There are a couple of lose ends to tie up with that, but it’s mostly out of the way. Wednesday around lunchtime we got an e-mail telling is that we will all be getting new computers on Thursday.

We also had a meeting with my manager to talk about requirements for a last-minute addition to our deliverables for this release. The deliverable is called ‘Exchange Valuation’ which is basically the handling of exchanged or refunded passenger tickets. With an expected system-test date of early January of next year, we don’t have a whole lot of time to design and code this piece since it’s already mid-October! I found out that I’m being looked at to lead the Exchange engine effort. This ‘team lead’ role for a high visibility and important component could be a very rewarding challenge for me. Currently, I’m leading up the ‘other engine’ stuff which is pretty isolated in itself. I’ll find out next week if I get Exchange or not. I certainly hope so, as this (assuming I’m successful at it) will do wonders for me getting a promotion to senior developer. Of course, with the troubles Delta and the rest of the industry is having, I don’t think there will be any promotions anytime soon.

They never replaced my computer on Wednesday which is too bad since I was in meetings most of the day. Today, however, they came around 10:30 and replaced mine. I was able to get local administrator rights so I can install stuff. I was pretty disappointed in the new machine though. The HP Vectras they bought comes loaded with Windows XP and Office XP, but the people at my company downgraded the OS to NT4 and the office suite to Office 95! That’s one of my biggest peeves about this technology company I work for. We’re using an office suite that is getting close to a decade old and we’re like three released behind the rest of the industry. It’s embarrassing when we have to ask outsiders we work with to re-send documents in Office 95 format because we’re still using such an ancient release. The current ‘plan’ is to migrate the workforce to WinXP by June of next year but I’m not holding my breath, we were all supposed to be converted to Windows 2000 by December, 2000. We’re all still using NT4. I recognize that there is a lot involved with building a desktop to deploy to 30,000 people so you want to get things right, but they move entirely too slow in my opinion.

Delta announced today that they are going to lay off around 8,000 people. Normally I would be pretty worried but the project we’re working on is very important to the business (and it’s a capital expense, not an operating expense) that I don’t think there will be cuts in my immediate area.

I didn’t talk to Michele at all yesterday. I was actually sort of surprised she didn’t freak out about that when I called her today. She asked if I would like to go over to her place tonight to watch Survivor together, but I didn’t leave work till about 6:30, so I didn’t go over to her place.

Saturday night, Michele and I went out to dinner with my Mom. We planned on going to Stony River, but when we got there, it was an hour and 45-minute wait. That meant that we probably wouldn’t be seated until 10pm. Stony River doesn’t take reservations. We decided to try another place we passed on the way there. It was new restaurant called Ocean and Pacific. The atmosphere was nice and they had mostly steak and seafood. It was pretty good. We’re definitely looking forward to going back there.

Today was a pretty uneventful day. Michele and I woke up around 9:30. We decided to cook breakfast, so I ran to the local Publix and bought some bacon and cinnamon rolls. I got the ’smoked maple’ flavor Hormel bacon. We baked the cinnamon rolls, scrambled eggs, and the bacon. Michele did most of the cooking while I prepared the rolls. While she was cooking, I started the laundry. The breakfast was really good. The maple-flavored bacon was incredible! For the rest of the day, my apartment smelled like bacon and maple, which was really nice.

Other than breakfast, Michele and I didn’t do much during the day. Before she left at 2pm, we played a couple of games of chess. I’m going to loan her one of my old chess strategies books so she’ll hopefully be a stronger player.

After Michele left, I ended up getting sucked into a marathon session of Star Trek, the next generation on TNN. While I was doing this, I decided to roll a bard character on Sojourn. After about an hour of rolling, Noke the half-elf bard was born. I played him up to level 16 before stopping for the day.

Basically doing nothing this past weekend is making me want to take a trip more and more. I’m hoping to get out of town this coming weekend, or the one after that.

It seems whenever Michele sleeps over during the week, I can actually wake up at the time I want to and get to work around 7am, which is my target time to get to work since I usually leave around 4pm if I can help it. This was the case today.

I had a couple of staff meetings in the morning today and it was finally officially announced that I am the team lead of the exchange valuation engine with Scott and Jegan working with me. Now we have a large effort to complete in a short amount of time, but I’m very much up to this challenge.

Also during the staff meeting we found out some ugly details regarding our system test phase of the project. I’ve always experienced and learned that you have three phases of testing:
1) unit test which is done by the developer in the development environment to test the specific functionality that they coded.
2) system test which is done by the systsem test team (if one exists) in a separate, system test, environment and is a test against all of the assembled components.
3) integration test which is done by a QI/testing team in a separate, integration test environment and is a test to simulate real production as much as possible.

Well, we found out that we, the developers, are not only supposed to take care of the unit test portion, as we expected, but are also supposed to provide regression test cases, test scripts, test schedules, and complete all of the documentation to give to the system testing team.

So what does the system testing team do then? That’s the $1,000,000 question that we’re all trying to figure out. Here we are a development team with less than three months to complete all of our coding and now we must basically do the job of the testing team as well. To add insult to injury, the whole system test portion of the project plan for the testing team to execute is supposed to last 5 months. So the frustration is why does the testing team need 8 people if they aren’t actually doing any work since we’re doing it all for them?

It’s very frustrating.

For pretty much all of my free time today I did a large block of work with finalizing all of our ‘imtr’ object model changes and sent out an explanation of the changes to the rest of the development team.

After work around 4:30 I met with the Delta corporate audit people. They met with me earlier in the year to go over the problems with the first phase of our project release (called the Revenue Pipeline 1.1 release). Since the project is such high visibility and heavily funded, the stakeholders on the Delta side want to make sure it doesn’t screw up. Based on their interviews with many people from the first audit, the following things happened:
1) Our vice president quit abruptly.
2) Our director was replaced.
3) And two of the original managers for the 1.1 release are not participating in the 1.2 release.

The corporate auditors certainly have clout, so I don’t pass up an opportunity to meet with them when they request.

I met with them for about 45 minutes and basically told them that things are much, much better than before. I had a few concerns, one being the wacky testing snafu I mentioned earlier, and some others. They took like three pages of notes.

After work I grilled up some turkey sausage and played Sojourn to level up Noke to 21st level or so.

In Microsoft Outlook in a corporate exchange environment, one can schedule an appointment and include a resource (i.e. conference room) as an ‘attendee’ as a well to ‘reserve’ the conference room. This is what I did when I set up a meeting for today from 10-11am. The meeting was to be an exchange Valuation meeting with my two team members and I to go over the business requirements.

Unfortunately, someone else was in the conference room I reserved and claimed they scheduled the time for their own meeting there. I was confused and upset. I went back to my PC to check that conference room. Sure enough, for the 10-11am time block, someone else’s meeting was listed. What happened to my meeting? I went over to one of the administrative assistants and asked what happened. She said that I could have booked the room incorrectly (I doubt this because I’ve done the same thing several times before), or that some people have special access to the conference room and can override meetings.

My meeting was hijacked by someone! I was so steamed. What’s the point of booking blocks of time in a conference room if some yahoo can come in and take it away from you with no warning and no notice?

Carole (my manager) told me that she wasn’t able to get me on the PAT (Portfolio Architecture Team) like I requested. It’s a group of senior-level & higher developers from different projects in the company to meet and discuss impacts of certain technology decisions. She put Casey (who happens to be a senior developer) on it instead. Casey wasn’t too happy with that assignment as he doesn’t want to participate in that.

Some of the delta business people wanted to meet today in order to discuss the issues we raised when reviewing the Exchange Valuation requirements. We met from 3:00-4:30pm and covered a lot of ground. One new issue raised was how we were going to provide the exchanged ticket data to one of our downstream engines. This could make things a lot more complicated and add a lot more work.

After work, I drove to Michele’s grandmothers house west of Marietta square to pick up Makayla. I was going to baby-sit Makayla for the first time ever tonight while Michele took a test to be a Cobb county 911 operator. The idea is that she can do the 911 operator thing while earning her MBA and looking for a ‘real’ job for her undergrad degree in marketing.

Makayla and I baked cookies and she played some ‘kermit & friends’ computer game. I got her ready for bed and put her to bed around the time Michele came home.

Michele asked me what I felt about taking care of Makayla three times a week. If she gets the 911 operator job, she would most likely work 12-hour shifts at night from like 5pm till 5am and would need someone to watch Makayla while she worked. I didn’t say anything and she got angry. We talked about it and she basically said that I only go out of my way to help her only when it’s convenient for me and she always goes out of her way for me. After some emotional discussion, I finally mentioned that I’m hesitant to take on such a great commitment while both her and I have some lingering doubts about the survivability of our relationship. I, being the cautious one, don’t want to undertake something like this only to have the relationship fall apart at some point down the road. That seems like a dangerous prospect to me. After a lot of discussion, she agreed with me to an extent and we ended the evening on a less depressing note.

If the weather had been cooperating, I would most likely be waking up in the north-eastern United States somewhere close to Boston. It would have been a great weekend to enjoy the fall foliage but unfortunately, the forecast for today was rain all day long.

Instead, the weekend will be spent here in Atlanta. Michele spent the night on Friday and when we both got up this morning, she suggested that we go for a walk. We drove down to the Chattahoochee River National Recreational Area close to my apartment. That place is very popular. We walked the main 2.5-mile stretch that follows the river and we passed many joggers.

After the morning walk, we lounged around for a while at my place. After getting cleaned up, we got a late (2:30pm) lunch at TGI. Fridays. Our waiter was annoying. After lunch we headed out to Cumberland Mall to do some shopping. Michele had a $200 gift-certificate to Anne Taylor. She bought a long skirt and top to wear for a wedding her & I are going to.

I certainly wasn’t in the mood to shop. Fortunately, I had my iPAQ with me and kept myself very occupied playing games on it while Michele was trying on clothes.

We didn’t get back from the mall until around 5:30 or 6. I played a little Medal of Honor: Allied Assault on the computer while Michele read practically all five books of the Cleric Quintet Series by R.A. Salvatore.

Around 9pm, we decide to look into going to a haunted house. Unfortunately, my internet connection was down. I called Noment Network (my ISP) tech support line and I get some lady who takes my info and assured me that someone will call back. That was frustrating. So, we agree to head over to Michele’s apartment to use her internet connection in order to do the necessary research for where to go tonight.

At her place, I start thinking about food instead of a haunted house and look up Atkins Park because Casey (If I remember correctly) mentioned it was a great place to go in Virginia Highlands. After printing out driving directions (it’s a LOT easier to get to VA Highlands than I remember), we headed out, opting to get some dinner instead of going to a haunted house.

When we got to the area around 10pm, we had to park a ways down a side-street as there were a lot of people out and about still. The bar-portion of Atkins Park was so packed that there were three-people deep at every ’slot’ on the bar. It was so loud and almost everyone looked as if they were having a good time. We had to wait about fifteen minutes for a table (at 10:15pm). Once seated, we ordered chips & queso cheese dip. Michele ordered a Cuban sandwich and I ordered a California club sandwich. We were probably more tired than hungry.

After dinner, we headed back home to go to sleep.

While I was connecting to the NewNet IRC server this morning, I got this cryptic entry in my apache log:

dept44.level7.fbi.gov - - [30/Oct/2002:08:23:05 -0500] “CONNECT 138.121.54.250:6667 HTTP/1.0″ 200 31812 “-” “

I wonder what that is all about? fbi.gov?

I didn’t have a whole lot to do today at work. I finished up my RP_DEBUG deprecation effort and cataloging where we still use couts in our code (we’re trying to move away from couts in light of a more intelligent logging mechanism for production).

We went to the Varsity for lunch today. Originally it was going to be myself, Casey, Brian, Alex, and James. Carole (my manager) overheard us talking about it and asked if she could go along too. Since there were six of us, Casey drove Alex and I drove the rest. After lunch it was pretty quiet. I had a short meeting with the project coordinators to give them durations on all types of tasks as they relate to my Exchange Valuation project. I had to give durations for things like designing unit test scenarios, class diagrams, coding time, planning time, etc.

I left early around 3pm for two reasons:
1) To beat the horrible Halloween-day traffic (in Atlanta, the traffic is always horrible on Halloween)
2) To enjoy some of the cool, crisp, sunny fall weather. I drove over to a different part of the Chatahoochee River Recreational area off of Akers Mill road.

The weather was perfect! It was completely clear and like 65 degrees. I had never hiked this part of the river before. The entrance is near some apartment communities off of Akers Mill road. Because of the time change, I wasn’t able to get too many pictures due to the setting sun. I managed to use my polarizer a few times and towards the end while I was under the trees, I did a lot of experimentation with my tripod and manual mode. Out of 45 photos, I selected 5 and put them up in a photo album.

Here are a couple of the pictures I took:

Over the next couple of weeks, the fall colors are really going to come out over here in the area I live.

It’s peak fall foliage right now up in the north Georgia mountains and Michele and I were seriously considering heading up there to go camping at Raven Cliff falls this weekend, but opted to fly to Maine instead.

While I was on my way home from the river, Michele called and asked if I wanted to come over to help her get ready for tomorrow. I played with Makayla and helped put away clothes while Michele cooked dinner. After dinner, I helped give Makayla a bath and put her to bed. Michele, Jennifer (Michele’s roommate), Andre (Jennifer’s fiancé) and I watched survivor. it was a good episode!