Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Work was pretty good today. I did a lot of coding for two of the four modules I’m working on. I’m really happy we’re tying the Rose model so closely with the source code. The only drawback I’ve seen so far is when we discover a problem, one of us must check out the rose model (from Documentum) and then have someone else check in the source-code to be modified. After that we make the changes in Rose (i.e. changing the interface) and regenerate the code. Once the code is regenned, we check it in as well as the rose model.

Carole (my manager) came by to remind me that I need to complete my self evaluation. It was due on 12-06-2002. I spent the afternoon working on it.

Since my manager left early we decided to take a long lunch. We drove out to Ashford-Dunwoody road on the north-side of town (we work next to Hartsfield airport) and had lunch as the new BBQ place called Smokey Bones. Everyone except for me had the ribs. I had the beef biscuit and it was excellent!

After work Michele came over since she’s spending the night at my place tonight. We went out to the same area I had lunch, the perimeter mall area with the anticipation of going to an Italian restaurant called Brio. When we got there, Michele noticed PF Changs next to Brio and suggested that we have Chinese instead. We valet parked (there was no parking) and had to wait 70 minutes for a table. Michele ordered the teriyaki chicken and I ordered the special. When they brought out the orders, they messed up mine and brought out something else. It was still good and I ate it. When the waitress came by she noticed they brought out the wrong food and apologized. Shortly after that she brought out the correct order and told me that I can either eat it or take it home. I had a little of both.

I’ve still been feeling a bit under the weather since Saturday. I didn’t do much at work today other than attend a lot of meetings. First, there was a 10am meeting with another group to discuss how the Exchange engine will do some of the work that is on their business requirements. That went fairly well and in the meeting I jotted down the new class & methods we will need to create in order to accomplish the new work. After the 10am meeting, I worked at my desk completing the work related to the meeting so I missed lunch. At 12:45 I ran to McDonalds and bought two big macs ($4.73) and brought them back to my desk. I munched them down while working until 1pm where I had to attend a team-lead meeting. That went on until around 2:30 (we started thirty minutes late talking about our vacations). At 3pm I had another meeting with the middleware group to discuss capacity requirements for the next release of our application. We decided that even with a 100% increase in ticket processing per day the next release of the system will be able to handle the load.

Before Carole left she reminded me that I’m supposed to complete my self evaluation (which was due a month ago). She said that she needs to have all of the performance reviews done by the end of tomorrow so she will be working from home tomorrow. I worked on my self evaluation more in the afternoon and finally went home with the anticipation of finishing it up tonight.

When I got home Michele was there. She has a doctors appointment tomorrow morning and Makayla is spending the night at her grandmothers house. I was feeling really exhausted probably from getting over this cold or whatever it is. We deliberated about what to do for dinner and finally decided on Houston’s. The atmosphere and food was great.

After we got home I worked on my self-evaluation and we watched Joe Millionaire. At 10pm I was too tired to continue so we went to bed.

Work has been really great this week so far. We’ve been making a lot of process in the coding-phase of the Exchange Valuation engine. We went through several iterations from our original design on how to handle error & informational conditions. Previously, we were returning a container of strings that represented the message. Then, we through about passing around a different container of a different messaging class but saw that we were passing it to every single method. Finally we settled on a more elegant solution: We created a special singleton class that represents the container of messages. That singleton class is listed as an attribute for ALL of our classes (since we can in theory make a log call anywhere). The constructor for every class calls the special initialize method of the singleton class to get the correct instance. It’s been a lot of fun.

I woke up this morning and used Craig’s his PC to log into my computer and check mail and catch up on my websites. I also called Michele but got her voicemail since she was most likely in class already. An hour or so later Craig came in and we talked. Apparently I missed a lot of events last night after I went to bed. Craig’s friend Oscar and Oscar’s girlfriend got into a huge screaming fight and broke up. He lent me a bunch of CD’s (books on tape) for the first book of Happy Potter. Since it was getting late into the morning we went out for some breakfast. We went to Sonic and each had two of their egg & bacon breakfast toast things. It was pretty good.

Craig recently got a new hot tub so when we got back to his house he lent me a swimsuit and we went out to sit in the hot relaxing water. After about thirty minutes we went back inside and each got a shower. After that Craig and I spent the next six hours or so playing a hotseat scenario of a computer game called Heroes of Might & Magic 4. We used to play that game (previous incarnations) as well as another similar turn-based strategy game called Warlords back when we were in High School. The latest installment of HOMM was a lot of fun and we ended up crushing the computer even on the advanced difficulty setting. While we were playing, we ordered Pizza to munch on so we wouldn’t have to leave the computer.

During the day I tried to call Michele a couple of more times but always got the voice mail. After we finished playing the computer game I tried to call Michele at home since it was now in the afternoon. The first thing she said to me was, ‘Are you on the plane?’ I said no. She said, ‘Are you at the airport?’ I said no. She asked when I was coming back today. I told her that I wouldn’t be coming back until tomorrow (Sunday). This upset her greatly. The next hour or two was spent with us in a fight. She accused me of lying to her and misleading her and taking her for granted. Apparently I wasn’t clear enough when I said I would be back Saturday or Sunday. Eventually things calmed down.

Craig and I spent the rest of the day watching movies on his Television.

I woke up at 5:45 (CST) and packed up my bag. Craig drove me over to the airport for my 7am flight. I checked in and headed to the gate (gate 14). I had no trouble getting on the flight although I thought I had a good chance for first class. Instead I was in seat 15F. The flight back was pretty enjoyable since I was sitting next to a window. We left around sunrise and it was overcast in San Antonio. Shortly after we took off and started to climb, we broke through the clouds to clear blue skies. Below us was a thick, even layer of clouds. It looked like an endless field of snow. It was really cool. Another treat was the sunrise. While we were heading eastwardly, I could see the orange and pink colors bouncing off the cloud tops since we were flying above the clouds. I spent the entire rest of the flight reading my book.

In Atlanta I didn’t get into work until around 10:45. I had enough time to check e-mail and grab some food for out 11:30 lunch meeting about effective meetings. I spent the rest of the day coding. My manager Carole and I talked about the people we interviewed and I suggested that we try to hire one of them. She contacted the on-site IBM staffing buy and he’s getting the paperwork going. During the day Michele asked me if I could stop by her place in the evening so we could talk about some things.

After work I went home and got a shower and unpacked. Around 7:40 I went over to Michele’s apartment and we talked. A lot was said but basically we decided that in light of the issues and fighting we’ve been having recently that we weren’t on the same level of commitment with each other. Michele proposed that we cease our current relationship and ’start over’. So we’ll see how that goes.

It’s been bitter-cold and almost snowing today. To make matters worse, my stupid throat problem hasn’t really been improving. I hope I don’t have to see a doctor about it.

I called Mark about a LAN party he mentioned this weekend. He e-mailed me details and I think I’m going to try to go. Now that I have an upgraded computer it should be fun to play some of these twitch-games with other people. I’m a little worried that I’ll be out of my element though because I’m not too good at first-person shooters - especially fast-paced ones. It will be nice to see Mark again too.

James asked if I would be interested in taking a trip to Dublin for the weekend on the 25th with him. I’ve not been to Europe yet and this would be an excellent opportunity to go with someone who’s been there before. However, I’ve got two other tentative plans I’ve been kicking around for that weekend as well: A weekend ski-trip to Alta (or Deer Valley) in Salt Lake City or the Sojourn3 players gathering in Indiana. I’m leaning more towards the sojourn players gathering simply because I’ve never (mostly) met anyone from that virtual world and I know a lot of the people who will be attending. If I go, I need to make arrangements for South Bend, Indiana if I remember correctly. It should be interesting. If I do that and let James know, he’s willing to hold off on Dublin till the next weekend or the next weekend after that.

After work I had some time to settle down on the sofa and play some Asheron’s Call 2. I title this journal entry ‘path day’ but really the January patch went in yesterday. Even if I were home, I think they were still resolving problems associated with patching the game all day yesterday. As a general rule of thumb, it’s unwise to try to play on patch day. After more deliberation, I think I’m going to ditch Nokie the lugian melee/elementalist and focus on Nokie the Tumerok full-time. As a matter of fact, I spent the night converting Noke from a missile-throwing feral intendant to a melee feral intendant. While I didn’t get switched over all the way, I’m really happy with the new configuration.

I woke up early because Michele got up early for school. She has an 8am Saturday class for her MBA program. She asked if I would take her to school (and pick her up). I was going to say something about having other plans to go to Mark’s LAN party, but since I was still feeling pretty bad I decided I better not go. Because I had no reason to say anything about having other plans, I didn’t mention it to her. On the drive to school Michele and I had another serious talk and it was more along the same lines that we should break up. When she left she said that when she gets back to my place after class she’s going to take all of her stuff and leave.

I tried to call Mark but got no answer. I’ll try to call him later to let him know what happened with me not showing up to the LAN party. I spent most of the morning taking it easy and reading websites - mostly all related to Asheron’s Call 2.

I picked up Michele around 2pm and she was acting completely different than when I dropped her off. She seemed to forget everything she said earlier. It was odd. We had a late lunch at Famous Dave’s. I really enjoy BBQ. A while after lunch she left and I spent the rest of the day inside laying down or on the computer playing Asheron’s Call 2.

Michele called at like 6 (she left a voice-mail) to let me know it was cold outside and some roads were icy. I checked the news and it didn’t seem all that bad. I went into work at 8 or 8:30am. My explorer was a little coated with snow and the ground had a dusting. There were no problems on the road.

I made a real effort to concentrate on my work today and didn’t let other things interrupt me. As a result, I got a lot of work done and am feeling a little less-stressed about what I need to accomplish. As I’m doing a lot more in C++ now, I really wish I could be coding in C# or Java. I love the idea of not having to worry about pointer-management. That just detracts from writing good code in my opinion. With some things being typed as pointer and some other not, the member-accessor indicator is sometimes a ‘.’ and sometimes a ‘->’. It just makes things overly complicated. For example, I’m finding myself having to write things like:
if ( couponContainer.last()->getCouponStateContainer().at(i)->getCouponStateCode().compareTo(”U”) )

I came home to find all of Michele’s stuff gone. I guess she came over sometime during the day and took everything. I wonder why she didn’t bring my stuff over. I guess I need to go over to her place sometime (maybe when she’s not home) and get my stuff too. She still has my pager.

I became an uncle again today. Amy had her scheduled c-section and Callum Reed Billimek was delivered at 11:55am:

I played Asheron’s Call 2 a little this evening. I’m playing Noke the tumerok feral intendant primarily now and don’t really play Nokie the Lugian anymore. Noke is level 34 now and is doing quite well. However, the ‘high level’ continent called Livnak is really inhospitable and it’s very difficult to find people to group with. There isn’t much one can do at level 34 on that continent so grouping is pretty mandatory.
I took a couple of screenshots of Noke.
This is a shot of Noke on a long bridge on the first, low level continent):

This is a shot of Noke and his beetle on the inhospitable continent of Livnak:

I woke up around 8am and got ready for my 10:30am flight. I was glad to have something to think about other than the absolutely horrible evening last night. I packed just my backpack and drove down to the airport.

I checked in and waited for flight 4598 to depart to Ft. Wayne, Indiana. It was delayed taking off about 45 minutes because of mechanical problems. I tried calling Derek’s (Dranix) cell phone to let him know but I got a message saying that the person couldn’t be reached.

When we arrived in Ft. Wayne, I called Derek to let him know I just arrived. Fortunately he and Jen (Jenera) were running late so they just arrived. I headed out to the baggage claim area and met the two of them there. We put my bag in his car and waited for some of the others to show up.

A little while later, Kifle (Carl?), Yayaril (Mike), Muma (Leah), and Goroz (?) showed up. We all introduced ourselves and headed to the Ft. Wayne Hilton hotel to meet Gantoris (Ryan) and Lazus. When we arrived at the hotel we worked our way past a throng of people wearing start-wars outfits (mostly jedi) to the large hall where the D&D gaming convention took place. The room was of course filled with mostly guys all playing D&D. Gantoris reminds me a lot of my cousin John. He looks like John and has the same kind of personality. The other guys I was with said he reminds them of Lance Bass from NSYC? I don’t know anything about NSYC so I don’t know.

Dranix, Jenera, and I drove back to his place in Warsaw, Indiana. We stopped at the grocery store along the way and got some snacks and soft drinks. When we got to his place we waited a little while for Kifle, Yayaril, Muma, and Goroz to show up. We watched Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring, played chess, and talked about Sojourn. I guess we couldn’t get much more geeky than that.

Shortly after that Ronble and Larem showed up. Six of us played Risk. I hadn’t played Risk in like 8 years. It got to the point where there were only three of us left (Me, Muma, and Kifle) and we had so many armies that it took forever to do battles since you could only roll three dice at a time. We eventually decided to stop playing. I think I like chess better - you rely more on strategy than dice rolls and winning large armies.

Around 7:30 or 8pm Gantoris and Lazus showed up as well.

Yayaril came prepared to run a short D&D campaign for us. The premise was that we are a rag-tag band of adventurers who come together in order to pay off a 2,500 gold dept to the gnomish mafia for excess gambling of their tinker gnome slot machines. We spent about an hour creating characters. I made a halfling paladin named Nokia with a war pony mount. The game was pretty fun but we decided to stop playing after a couple of hours. We also ordered pizza at some point during this time.

The rest of the evening was spent sitting around either the living room or Derek’s bedroom talking about things - mostly Sojourn. Around 3:30 everyone cleared out and I slept on the futon couch pullout in the living room.

Yesterday Michele called and left a message about some extra charge to her credit card for the ski trip to Jackson Hole. She asked if I could get the whole thing cleared up and call her back.

Today I called the place to find out what was going on. The original package was a three-night, 2 day skiing package. That costs $600 for two people. I had it ‘upgraded’ to a fought-night, 3 day skiing package which also includes transpiration to/from the airport. So the only difference is that it’s an additional night, an additional ski day, and transportation to/from the airport. When I called a few weeks ago to upgrade the package the price difference wasn’t that much according to the website. I don’t remember what the new price was, and the website doesn’t have it listed anymore (typical). I also seem to recall them saying that I could pay for it upon arrival. When I called the Snake River Lodge reservation people they told me the 4-night package was $1,900. I thought there must be some sort of mistake. I asked them to clarify and they confirmed that the 3-night package is $600 and the 4-night package is $1,900. Something doesn’t quite add up there. I asked them why there was over $1,000 difference for an extra night and extra lift ticket. The guy said, ‘Well it also includes transportation to/from the airport’. Oooooookay. I told them to screw that and I’ll stick with the 3-night package and just get an extra night which is $400. I also made sure they put it on my credit card. Someone over there needs to work on their marketing skills. After taking care of that, I sent Michele an e-mail (I deleted all of her phone numbers so I couldn’t call) letting her know I took care of it.

I was extremely busy at work today. We’re supposed to be doing our first code build on Monday. This is where we use an in-house tool developed by the release engineering group to launch a remote compile on a special ‘build server’ through clearcase. The resulting derived object (in this case, a shared library) for each ‘component’ is packaged up into a ‘RET package’. This process happens for each of our 24 components. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to configure the XML packaging file to specify what gets included. Also needed is the configuration of the BEA Tuxedo configuration & support files for each component that will be an actual tuxedo service. In addition to all of that, the ‘package creation’ work involved defining what external enterprise packages are required for compiling (i.e. the oracle client libraries). This has been eating up all of my time this week.

I made a lot of progress with this task yesterday and today and I’m confident that we’ll be ready to start our builds on Monday. Of course all of this work I’m doing is really supposed to be done by a ‘build master’ but that person hasn’t been hired yet. He’s supposed to start on Feb 10th and then I’ll have to spend a lot of time teaching him how to do everything. As it is right now, I’m doing the work of two people: 1) My normal job of leading and coding the exchange valuation engine. 2) Buildmaster.

I’m not complaining. I love the challenge and in my eyes it’s another opportunity to prove myself. Of course I could simply be naive and am being exploited but at least I have a job.

I didn’t take much of a lunch break today. I got a spicy-chicken sandwich value meal from Wendy’s. Before that I stopped by the main FedEx location adjacent to the airport where I sent off a 512MB DDR-RAM stick. On “January 18th”:/jeff/archives/2003/01/18/early_morning_class.php I started having several BSOD’s (IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL or whatever that common one is). This was highly unusual as WinXP has been rock solid for me. At first the BSOD’s were happening only in Asheron’s Call 2 and it was always in the sound driver. While I was researching this, I got some more BSOD’s with really funky messages in kernel drivers. Then I got a hard-freeze. Things were getting progressively worse. I did some diagnostics like checking the temp of the processor and inside. Everything checked out ok. I then enabled the BIOS memory-test and it failed. That’s not good. I have two identical Kingston PC2700 DDR RAM 512MB sticks. I removed the second one and powered back up. The BIOS still reported a memory test failure. I swapped the lone ram stick with the one I replaced and the BIOS posted with no problem. It looks like I have a bad memory stick. With the chips being Kingston there is a lifetime warranty. I went to their website and did an RMA request. A couple of days later I got the RMA authorization to send in the faulty stick. So I FedExed it today (With my Delta ID card, I can FedEx anything for $6.00).

After work I continued with some laundry I started the day before and watched the news while playing Asheron’s Call 2. Noke was about halfway through level 24 when I started this evening. I first looked for a group to join up with on Livnak near the Whitebay area (the newbie area on Livnak) and joined up with some tactitians named crond and cronjob. This got me plretty close to level 25. The group didn’t last very long and we split up. My guild monarch (D’oh) was gathering people in Ikaras to go on the Sherethbane quest. I ran there and joined up with them. It was pretty easy as we had a really powerful group. After that me and some other guy did the broken totem quest as well as the Moresmans Curse quest. This pushed me to level 35!

When I was finished with that I joined a group that was heading out to the Farali vault (level 34 minimum). I joined up with them and while we were in the vault my toon got stuck somehow. One of the guys suggested that I log out and log back in. I did this but when I logged back in, I was back in Ikaras! I was so steamed because you need a special ‘glyph’ (it’s basically a key) to get the in vault and I only had one which I used when we first entered the vault. I went hunting to get another glyph and found two. I went back to Ikaras to see if anyone wanted to go with me and one of the original guys wanted to go too because he died while they were fighting the boss mob. I gave him my spare glyph and we went to the vault. Surprisingly the two of us were able to complete the vault. The guy with me was a human archer and he was in awe that Noke was able to tank the 10,000hp Burun boss mob in the vault vestibule. To be honest it was very close. Several times during the fight I was so low on hit-points that one more hit would have sent me to the lifestone. Fortunately my ‘hunger’ attacks landed at just the right time and I got hps back just in the nick of time. Also more importantly is that I quaffed a heal-over-time potion which was giving me 125+ hps per tick.

After Farali vault I tried to find some people to go with me to the last vault on the Omishan continent called Vesaryan vault or some such (level 35 minimum). I went to the vault entrance and hung out there for about 15 minutes playing my clarinet waiting to see if any groups were going to show up. None did. Here’s a screenshot of Noke standing outside of the vault entrance (there is a waterfall on the left) playing his clarinet.

I was still feeling cocky about the last fight in Farali so I decided to try to solo the vault. I got to the vestibule with no problem. There was a bug in that my beetle was not following me and I couldn’t summon another. Logging out and back in would have fixed it but apparently if you log out inside a vault you get warped out of the vault. So I had to fight the last guy with no pet. The cards were definitely stacked against me. Nonetheless I quaffed a HoT potion and ran in. I missed the first soft underbelly but landed victimize. I missed the second and third soft underbelly. By this time the victimize wore off and the level 41, 11,000hp Morseman was wailing on me really hard. My vigor was draining fast from all of the hunger’s I had to use in order to keep my health up. Eventually I landed the soft underbelly but it was too late. He killed me. I managed to get him a little under half-health which was pretty good. I think if I had my beetle I could have won as my beetle usually does equal if not more damage than I do.

I’ve been trying to come up with an effective strategy for going to the gym. Because my work hours are so inconsistent, I don’t feel comfortable with going to the gym when I get home from work. This is mainly because I would end up going anytime between 5:30 and 7pm which are really busy times and I don’t think I would be able to find free machines. Nonetheless, this may be my only option. My other thought is to try to go in the mornings. However, I’ve tried to do that two of three times now with disastrous results. I don’t think my body is able to handle lots of exertions early in the morning. The first time I tried to work out in the morning I felt like I was going to have to throw up. The second time I actually did. The third time I ate some breakfast first and took it easy for an hour before going to the gym. I still felt like I was going to throw up.

Nonetheless, I’ve decided to try to wake up earlier to see if I can adjust my body for it and then try to work out. For this morning I set my alarm to 5am instead of 7am like I’ve been doing. Unfortunately I ended up hitting the snooze button like ten times and didn’t get up until 7am and didn’t get to work until 8am. Maybe I’ll have better luck next week.

As the week progressed I tried to think about what I want to do this weekend. I tried to see if Craig could drive out here but it didn’t work out. I also looked into the idea of going out of town but with my heavy workload and full flights, I figured I better stay in town since I knew I’d be working late today. Instead the local weather looks really pleasant this weekend. I’m planning on going hiking to Raven Cliff Falls Saturday or Sunday. I’m learning more towards Sunday now because it will be sunnier and slightly warmer on Sunday. My plan is to get up really early and drive out towards the trailhead taking photographs along the way if the scenery is nice.

Today was yet another very busy day. I did manage to complete a lot of the work I need to accomplish for our build next week. I’m also planning on doing some work from home tomorrow and Sunday. I didn’t leave work until about 6:30 today.

After I got home and got settled in, Craig called to chat about what happened with Michele. He told me now that it is over I should consider trying to find someone on Lavalife.

For a few hours this evening I played Asheron’s Call 2. I managed to get Noke to level 36. Before I logged off I was sitting in Ikaras playing different instruments with five other Lugians:

I also compiled the past two months of statistics into my Sojourn 3 statistics page.