Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Because I was up so late the night before, I didn’t wake up until around 10:30am today. When I woke up, I did some morning website reading. I also decided to try playing a different character in Asheron’s Call 2. I did a lot of reading and research and finally decided to try out a Lugian who will be primarily a Melee fighter but will specialize in elementalism so he can summon pets to help him out.

Previously, I had been playing ‘Vlanna’ the human archer. I created a new Lugian named ‘Nokie’ (am I original or what?) and set out to become a powerful warrior. Armed with new knowledge I managed to rocket up to level 7 before even leaving the newbie training island. I think the monsters there give a different type of exp because you can level so much faster on such lower-level mobs there.

After that, I raced through thirteen different quests: the three obelisk search quests, the first five vaults, the wasp-slayer, beetle-slayer, and armoredillo-slayer quests, the ‘brother’ quest, and the mist opal search quest. When I finished the last one, I was level 15. The key to gaining levels (at least early on) is to do all of the quests. You gain experience MUCH faster going this route than by killing things straight-out. I managed to get to level 15 in one day. That’s pretty good I think.

For the last vault quest I met up with a guy I played with a little during the beta-test phase. He is a Tumerok healer named ‘Tonk’. It’s pretty amazing that someone I was in the beta test with is on the same retail-game server (Morningthaw is the server out of about ten) and we were the same level in the same vault and in the same fellowship. It was pretty cool.

Playing a melee-fighter has been much more enjoyable (and much more easy) than the archer. I think Nokie may be a keeper. I was playing with the graphics settings and found a pretty good balance between performance and quality. I can’t wait to upgrade my PC though, as I think things will go much smoother.

Before logging out tonight, I took a screenshot of Nokie:

I went over to Michele’s apartment for dinner around 6:45. I was supposed to cook meatloaf but I forgot to thaw the ground beef and didn’t realize the folly until it was too late. So we had Michele’s very good baked-potato soup instead (it was supposed to be a side-dish). It was quite good! Her garbage disposal was backed up and when she ran the dishwasher, it caused the sink to overflow and water spilled out onto the floor. Michele called the apartment maintenance people and someone came out to fix it. I left her place around 10pm.

Things have been progressing quite nicely this week. We’ve been blowing through the sequence diagrams for exchange valuation. I anticipate that we’ll be mostly finished with tech design by the end of Friday and we can start coding next week.

Today we had an all-hands meeting across the street with the business and it was announced that Brent Browning, our current director (and Accenture employee), is resigning from Accenture and will become our new vice-president. This was pretty surprising to me because he just recently became a director and now he’s moving to the next level. It’s also very surprising that he’s leaving Accenture. Because of his promotion, there is a power-vacuum where his previous directorship position was. In the area I work, we’re speculating that our current manager, Carole Godwin, will become the new director. But no one knows for sure what’s going to happen. If it IS my current manager Carole, I can only wonder who will fill her manager position.

Some people from work scheduled an after-work happy hour gathering for today at 5pm. Originally I wasn’t planning on attending and even told Michele that I was going to be going over to her place. However, in light of the announcement at work, I felt inclined to go. Not as many people went this time compared to before. Casey asked me to bring my camera to get some photos of everyone, so I took a few pictures.

This is a picture of the group that was left shortly before I went home (around 9pm):

I went straight to Michele’s apartment before going home and stayed there for about an hour and half with her. When I got home, I logged into Sojourn and hooked up with my guild mates and we killed the troll king. It was definitely a fun light-hearted adventure.

Today I went with Michele to Home Depot to buy a live Christmas tree. We bought a 7-foot tree and the guys at Home Depot cit an inch off the base and cut off the lower branches. They also pushed the tree through this circular ‘bundler’ thing that wrapped it in this plastic netting. I strapped it to the top of my explorer and we drove it to her place:

Once there, we had trouble getting it to stay in the stand. She was tired of dealing with it, so we left the tree outside and planned on working on it later today. I think I strained my back when I was lifting the tree because the rest of the day I had lower back-pain.

We drove out to Michele’s parents’ house to drop off Makayla for a few hours. Since it was such a beautiful day (crisp, sunny and 55 degrees), we drove to the Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield park to walk around.

We didn’t spend much time once we got there, but it was a very beautiful day.

Later that evening we met Michele’s Parents’ at a Mexican restaurant to pick up Makayla.

Work was pretty busy today. I’m still working on my self evaluation and I’ve been working with Alex Deck to extend the ‘IMTR’ objects code generator perl script. The idea is to make the script automatically create the sequence numbers instead of manually entering them into the ‘csv’ file. I’m having a lot of trouble with this because of the complex way the maps are being used in the main loop. I stayed late at work trying to find a solution and finally had to call it a day.

Last week when United Airlines dropped to around $1.00/share after they lost the emergency federal loan. On a whim, I sold 80 shares of Delta and bought 1,000 shares of UAL at $1.04. Today I was really considering the move and read that typically when a company goes into bankruptcy, the common stock can be ‘canceled’. Based on this I was a little worried. Fortunately UAL was up to $1.13 and DAL was lower than when I sold the 80 shares, so I dumped the UAL and got back into DAL (this time 90 shares).

After work I went straight to my Mom’s apartment again to help with the computer. I did some research and found that the motherboard must be set for 133MHz front-side bus if they have an Athlon 1700. I flipped some dip switches and everything was fine. She also fed me some stew for dinner and we watched Fox News.

When I got home I spent some time playing Asheron’s Call 2 (no one was doing anything on Sojourn). I decided to try out a Tumerok. I deleted my old ‘tummy’ and re-created him to start playing as a spear-thrower (missile). I was really torn between going missile or magic because I think the whole idea of using drums is really cool and it sounds incredible. However, the ‘hivekeeper’ specialization appeals to me because the concept is innovative too. The beauty of the skill system in AC2 is that I can completely covert to a mage if I want to later on. If I do that, I may forego being a hivekeeper and switch to an invoker. By the time I finished up last night, Noke (the new tumerok) was level 12.

This morning I had an appointment with my doctor (Dr. Feldman) for a physical examination. The last (and only) time I had a physical was on January, 2000 with my previous doctor. The appointment was for 8:15am, so I stupidly showed up at 8:15am. They didn’t call me to the examination room until 9am. Why did I have to waste 45 minutes of my life when they weren’t going to see me until 9am anyway? The doctor pokes and prodded me and then sent me to get urine test and a blood sample.

After the physical I went promptly to work and got there at about 10:30am. Work was interesting today. I got a sort of inflammatory e-mail from one of the contractors letting me know that I blew away a few days of work when I regenerated code for our internal messaging objects. Apparently he assumed that we only generate code one and then all changes after that must be made by hand to all 200 files instead of in one place in the generator? I called a meeting with the other leads and we worked it out. From now on, we won’t make such assumptions that people will refrain from making manual changes to generated code.

During the day I was tracking my packages from newegg.com and the latest entry showed up as ‘delivery attempt but no one home’. Previously, with all FedEx and UPS packages, they leave the boxes in the leasing office for me to pick up. I was perplexed as to why they (seemingly) didn’t do that this time.

When I got home, there was a note on my door that the FedEx guy left my packages in the leasing office. It never showed up as delivered and no one signed for them. I don’t know how that’s possible. Nonetheless, I was very excited to get my packages and set out to build the new PC. I unpacked everything and started the very careful process of assembling everything:

I first laid out the Asus P4PE motherboard and then installed the Intel Pentium 4 2.53GHz chip. After that, I carefully applied some of my leftover thermal grease to the surface of the chip and then carefully mounted the heat sink and fan on top of it. After that I installed the two 512MB PC2700 DDR RAM modules. I then installed the drives (including th new Western Digital 80GB drive). Then I spent the next hour going over jumper settings and wires to connect from the case. I mounted the motherboard in the case, and hooked everything up. When I was happy with everything hooked up, I plugged some of the connections in and powered It up. The green LED on the mainboard lit up and the fans started to spin. Two seconds later, it powered itself off. Uh oh. I then did a lot of things to try to figure out why it wouldn’t power up. Fortunately my linux box was unscathed and operational so I used that to check google for some ideas. People suggested using the regular 12v auxiliary plug into the mainboard instead of the newer square 4-pin connector. This didn’t help either.

Right around the same time, I called Michele (it was almost 8pm) to let her know that I was having problems and I wouldn’t be able to come over to watch survivor. That was a mistake. We got into a huge fight and to make a long (a very very long story) short, I immediately went over to her apartment and spent the night there.

We slept late today. When we got up, Michele fixed some cinnamon rolls. I did some more work on the computer and then we headed out to Buckhead.

We drove to Buckhead via Northside drive (I think that’s what it was). The road took us through a really fancy neighborhood and we saw some incredible houses. The interesting thing is that most of the houses were up for sale. I wonder if it’s because of the depressed economy. It took us an hour and-a-half to get to the hotel. Traffic was so congested it was crazy! Michele ran in to but the gift certificate ($350 for a ONE NIGHT stay at the Ritz Carlton). While I was waiting for her, the goofy-looking doormen wearing top-hats had me circle around the entrance.

After leaving the hotel, it took another hour to drive from there up to Town Center mall. Traffic was bad there too. We slugged it out in the slow traffic to have lunch at a new BBQ place called Smokey Bones. When we pulled into the parking-lot, it was still under construction! I almost snapped I was so mad. Michele offered to drive and we had lunch as Rio Bravo instead. I ordered a grande strawberry margarita to calm my nerves.

After lunch we went shopping in the mall. We bought some gifts and then went home. Michele left to pick up Makayla and I did more work on the computer. Michele called a little while later and informed me that her parents asked to have Makayla tonight so she was free to come back over if I wanted. Of course I told her that sounded great. She came over and we had a late dinner (10pm) at TGI Fridays. After dinner Michele & I watched the second-half of Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD while I played Asheron’s Call 2. The new PC makes it much nice to play in the higher graphics settings.

The week has been pretty uneventful. I’ve been dealing with stress and exhaustion which has resulted in me not being very productive at work. The difficult time I’m having with Michele has left me drained and very stressed.

Today all of the non-contractor employees from my managers group went to the Atlanta Food Bank to sort food. It’s a Delta Airlines volunteer program and we signed up. We left work around 11am to go to the Varsity for lunch. Around 12:45 we headed to a scary part of Atlanta where the food bank warehouse is located. Once there we signed in and watched a short training video.

We spent the next four hours sorting food in an assembly-line fashion. Some people pulled food (mostly canned food) from bins and placed them on long metal tables. The next group of people inspected the food for the expiration date and discarded any food that did not pass. The last group of people took the ‘accepted’ food and boxed it up by category. I was in the first group, the ‘puller’ group.

We had a pretty good time and ended up processing about 7,500lbs of food. I had my camera with me in my backpack which was in the car, so I took some pictures.

Veena asked me to give her a lift home since she lives on Cobb Parkway near where I live. When we got to her apartment, she invited me in to meet her husband. He recently graduated from Southern Poly Tech with an MS in Information Systems. The three of us chatted for about thirty minutes before I left. Veena gave me some Indian ‘crackers’ and water.

Yesterday I was supposed to be at Michele’s place by 9am so we could take Makayla to Michele’s parents’ house. From there we were planning on driving up to Helen to go hiking at the Raven Cliff Falls trail.

I was woken up at 9:30 by a very angry Michele on the telephone.

She went on without me and said she might see me that afternoon. Michele came over around 11:30 and I apologized for oversleeping and everything seemed better. We had lunch at Famous Dave’s and then went to the theater to watch Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers for the 3pm showing. Unfortunately it was sold out so we bought tickets for the 7pm showing and then went back home. Michele read while I played Unreal Tournament 2003. When 6:30 rolled around we went to the theatre. There, we had to stand in line for about twenty minutes before going into the theater.

The movie was pretty good. There were a few distractions that lessened the experience though:
1) Some kid sitting behind me liked to kick the back of my seat.
2) Someone’s cell phone continually went in and out of service making these annoying beeping sounds throughout the entire movie.
3) Some guy a few rows behind us decided to make loud commentary during certain parts of the movie.
4) The quality of the film in the beginning was poor. There were large and visible artifacts on the right-side of the screen for about the first thirty minutes.

After the movie we got a pepperoni and bacon pizza before going to bed.

This afternoon before going to Michele’s apartment I played some more Asheron’s Call 2 as Nokie the lugian. I managed to get him up to almost level 26! The goal is to get to level 28 so he can train a special skill called ‘reap essence’ which will steal life from the victim. This is key to staying alive since he doesn’t have any other healing spells.

Around 3:30 I went over to Michele’s apartment and we loaded up the car to drive to her grandmother house for Christmas Eve dinner and celebration. We were the first ones there. After others arrived we had dinner which included ham (not the honey-baked) and all of the other traditional home-cooked food. When dinner was over we had a gift exchange. Michele’s grandmother got me the Medal of Honor Spearhead expansion pack. Actually she gave Michele money to buy something from her.

By about 9pm we went back to Michele’s apartment and put Makayla to bed. Michele and I went to bed shortly after that.

Last night before bed I checked the 8am flight out to San Diego (flight 1969) and it just looked way too overbooked. So I decided to try for the next flight which leaves at 10:30am (flight 0315).

I got up around 6:30 and packed and left the apartment at 8am or so. It was bitter-cold outside. The drive down to the airport was a constant 28 degrees Fahrenheit. I parked in the park-n-ride and then got into line to check in with the kiosk in the main terminal. They have the kiosk’s set up differently than last time I flew. Now half of the main Delta ticket-counter line is just kiosks. I was worried that I would be in line for a long time but was at a kiosk in about ten minutes.

After checking in, I headed to my gate (A27). My big boots with the metal shanks in the inside didn’t set off the metal detector. When I got to A27, it was for a different flight. They changed gates! The new gate was A06. So I trudged down to A06. On my way there I passed an ‘InMotion‘ store and rented a 7-inch screen DVD player with Star Wars 2 and The Fast and the Furious.

I waited at the gate for them to board the plane and I got assigned seat 33D. The guy sitting next to me was an older gentleman who looked like Christopher Walkin (or however you spell it). The flight went by so quickly because I watched both movies.

When we landed and I deplaned, Larry was waiting for me in his Tahoe outside the terminal. We drove over to the other terminal so I could return the DVD player and movies.

When we got to his house, Amy’s parents (Lance and Leslie) were also visiting. Lance works or used to work for Exxon-Mobile was an auditor. I changed into shorts and a t-shirt and then Larry and I went to a gun store so he could pick up a new Beretta he ordered. We’re planning on going shooting Friday afternoon. I had some leftover turkey and stuffing for lunch and then played around on their desktop computer in the new guestroom. The converted the old study into the guestroom and are going to use the old guestroom for the new baby’s room. This is where I am to sleep.

Amy is very pregnant right now as she is due in about a month. Tucker and Lily are a lot bigger and move around very well. Tucker is pretty rambunctious while Lily is more reserved. It’s amazing to see the differences between the two of them.

Before dinner, Larry and I cleaned up the old guestroom and moved a twin bed in there for me to sleep on. We had leftover Christmas dinner and some good red wine.

I discovered something really cool with Larry’s iBook Apple notebook computer. It is set up on a wireless WiFi network (which is connected to the desktop WinXP system downstairs). I found a Mac OSX version of the WinXP remote desktop client and installed it. When I connected to my computer (Freeside) back in Atlanta, it was like any other remote desktop session. Everything I did was as if I was sitting at my WinXP computer at home. I am duly impressed. I’m so excited about this that I even took a screenshot:

I woke up, got a shower and had a smoothie and then we got everyone loaded up into the suburban (except for Amy who stayed home to rest) and headed out to the wild animal park north of where Larry & Amy live in San Diego.

Because the park opened at 9am, we got there shortly after it opened. The park is quite large like a zoo and there is a very African feel to everything. Around 11:30 we stopped for lunch and then headed home after that.

Both Larry & I got photos from the trip.

Here is one I got of Larry taking a photo of Tucker & Lily with his new camera:

Here is one Larry took of me sitting in front of a wide ‘African bush’ area:

When we got home, I laid down for a couple of hours so I would be more rested for tonight. Around 5pm we all left for dinner. We went to Rio Bravo in a very ‘Barrett-parkway-like’ multiplex area. Larry & I dropped everyone off at the door to the restaurant while we hunted for a parking space. It took us about ten minutes of searching to find an open spot. I had the carnitas dinner.

I took a quick shower after dinner and then Larry & I raced to the airport for our 8pm flight to Las Vegas. The short 55-minute flight on Southwest airlines was uneventful and I read more of my book (The Shadow Rising by Robert Jordan).

Once at the airport in Las Vegas, a limo-driver was waiting for us and took us to the Mandalay Bay casino. This was my first time in a limousine. It was like riding in a long SUV but closer to the ground.

Once at the hotel, we checked in and went up to our room on the 19th floor. We dropped off our coats and Larry’s backpack and then hit the tables.

This was my first time gambling and Larry took us to the $25-minimum blackjack tables. We sat down and he asked the dealer for a ‘marker’. The dealer called the pit-boss over and Larry asked for a $1,000 marker and gave his drivers-license. While we waited we watched two other middle-aged Asian women at the table play.

Eventually the pit boss gave a nod to the dealer and the dealer gave Larry $1,000 in chips. He gave $500 of them to me and we started. Immediately a cocktail waitress came by and took our drink orders. I of course got a crown & coke. I was a little slow at getting up to the pace of the blackjack being played and Larry kept me from making mistakes. It was pretty exciting to be throwing out $100 bets on a single hand. The cash came and went and while we were playing, Larry got another $1,000 ‘marker’.

After about an hour and half of playing we stopped to move to a different casino. From what I started with, I was up $35. I think Larry was up around $300 or so. Larry paid back his ‘markers’ and we left. Larry said that at one point we were down about $1,400. We went out the front of the hotel and got a Taxi to the Bellagio.

Once at the Bellagio we found a $25 blackjack table and played a few hand there but then moved on to a $50-minimum table. This is where we spent most of the night. It was really cool in the casinos. There were so many beautiful women (half of whom looked like they were call-girls) and everything was so elegant. I lost track but I think I had about 8-10 drinks the whole night. After a few hours of playing blackjack, my ‘money’ was starting to whittle away. Larry suggested that I sit out while he tries to make some of it back. Different people came and went to the table we were gambling at. It was pretty cool watching home go through some $400 or so hands.

When we were done, Larry paid back his markers and I think still had $1,000-$2,000 left over. Before going back to the Mandalay Bay we stopped and had breakfast. I had some buttermilk pancakes. By this time I was pretty worn out. Once back at the Mandalay Bay we decided to hit the $25 tables again for a little while.

I think Larry went from a few hundred to $1,000 before stopping. Not a bad profit. I took my $35 in chips and managed to build up to around $350 or $400 at one point but then things fell apart and I ended up finishing the night with just $5. We cashed in and Larry gave some of his winnings to me telling me it was a graduation gift. That was quite a nice gift!

We went back to our room and laid down for about 30 minutes before heading to the airport for our 6am flight. The trip to Las Vegas was really fun and I can’t wait to go back. Of course next time I won’t have around $1,000 of someone else’s money to ‘play with’ so I’m curious how much different the experience will be. Nonetheless it was great fun and I can certainly see the appeal of it.

Work was pretty good yesterday and today. We did the initial code generation of the Exchange Valuation application from the Rational Rose model. Most of the time was spent tweaking various settings to make the generated code look exactly like we want. I spent most of the day today getting the settings defined correctly so we can easily re-generate the code whenever we modify an interface or introduce new methods/classes/relationships/definitions. The beauty of using the Rose code generator is that any implementation changes we make will be preserved whenever we generate the code again. This allows us to maintain synchronization between the design and source-code.

Around 1:30 Veena came by to tell me that the other teams’ managers are letting everyone go home at 2pm. Because our manager, director (actually we don’t even have a director right now), and vice-president are out today we had to decide for ourselves if we should go home at 2. Obviously we didn’t deliberate very long.

I got home around 2:30 and at 3pm I called into a telephone conference bridge to conduct an interview for a potential new employee. Anil also called in to ask technical questions as well. The IBM on-site contact for professional services was on the bridge was well. After the interview, Anil called me to talk about how it went. According to what the guy from IBM was telling me, it seems like Delta may be planning on shipping off most or all development work to India because of the cheaper labor. This doesn’t paint a very rosy picture of my future employment. Maybe I should re-consider the MBA program after all?

I went over to Michele’s apartment around 4pm. We’re going out to dinner to celebrate New Years Eve. We were still only barely getting over the huge fight when I made the fatal mistake of suggesting that flights look good to San Antonio (to visit Craig) if she didn’t want to do anything with me.

Michele, Makayla, Michele’s roommate (Jennifer), fiancé (Andre), brother (James I think - maybe Jason), and I went to a Japanese steakhouse called Mo Mo Yas for dinner. The food was good. A family sitting next to us saw Michele, Makayla, and I sitting next to each other and remarked that our nights of Buckhead bars were behind us. That was pretty ironic considering they never even started.

After dinner we went back to Michele’s apartment and we put Makayla to bed. Andre’s friend? named Steve showed up and we all played Taboo. Michele, Steve, and I were on a team against the other three. We won.

After Taboo, we played the Simpson’s edition of clue. I won. At some point midnight rolled around. We also played Trivial Pursuit (the twenty year anniversary edition) but stopped playing after about an hour. Then we went to bed.