Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Since I already decided to hold off on my hiking trip until Sunday I stayed up late the night before and slept in this morning until about 10:30am. When I got up and checked various bulletin boards, I say someone make mention of the space shuttle Columbia being lost. I immediately flipped on the television to Fox News and saw the same images of the fireball streaking through the skies of Texas.

Weather radar stations throughout Texas could observe the ’streak’ of debris falling towards the earth:

I stayed glued to the television for most of the rest of the day and watched the continuous coverage. The NASA news conference at 3:30 gave some technical details. It seems that some of the temperature sensors from the left-wing of the vehicle went offline and then there were some sensors relating to he left tire also going offline. As they were investigating this, all contact was lost with the vehicle. It is surmised that this is the initial point of catastrophic failure and breakup. Some are speculating that there was a thermal event in which the left wing was damage (missing tiles?) and during entry to the atmosphere when the rolling maneuvers were taking place as the shuttle rolled onto the left wing, something gave out.

I remember the space shuttle Challenger blowing up as well. I think I as seven years old and we all watched the news that evening and saw Ronald Regan’s speech to the country. It is a sad time despite ‘only’ 7 people being lost considering many more die each day from automobile accidents. I hope NASA can get back on its feet quickly as I personally feel that space exploration is important.

The replacement 512MB ram module from Kingston arrived yesterday via FedEx. I installed it with no problem and I’m back up to 1GB. It’s amazing to think that back in 1994 I had a 386 processor and 4 megabytes of ram. At the time 8 megabytes of ram was a lot. Now I’m running 1024 megabytes (1GB) and it’s no big deal. I wonder what it will be like in 2010?

I had a very long day at work today. I spent all day yesterday and all day today battling every problem that popped up relating to our code build. There are always so many problems and kinks to work through at the beginning of these phases. All the work I’m doing now upfront will make it that much easier down the line. It’s a shame that the new guy starting Monday is missing out on all of this. It’s going to be a challenge to train him and do my regular job at the same time.

During the day today while I was waiting for a build to complete or for people to get back to me I spent some time fixing up my site a little. I finally upgraded all the templates to the Movable Type 2.51 version. This update includes a new search box to search all of the blogs. I also cleaned up the templates and css to get as close to the standards via the W3 XHTML validator as possible.

After work I downloaded Unreal 2 and continued ripping all of my CD’s to windows media WMA (variable bit rate) format. It’s a pretty slow process. I also logged into work and continued doing my build-master stuff. I finally called it quits around midnight.

I didn’t wake up until 7am today. It took me about two hours to get ready this morning. I packed and tidied up around the apartment. I also logged into work and checked on the status of the troublesome ‘dataservices’ RET component. I called the clearcase administrator Bob O’Brien at his desk to see if he could make a change to that components configuration file so I can attempt to build it again. I didn’t leave until 9:20am and got to work around 10am - certainly a late time to show up for work! I didn’t feel so bad about arriving late since I was already doing work from home while I packed.

At one point today there was a stressful situation in which we had to make several changes to our ‘Object Maker’ generated code. Jegan and I got into a heated debate on the appropriate way to handle this. He wanted to ’stage’ all seventy generated header files while I wanted to check-in all generated files and be done with it. We finally agreed to check-in the files for now and develop a long-term solution after this build. This event ended up costing a lot of time and I was unable to complete building all 25 components today. In addition to not having the components built, the Middleware group still wasn’t done making their fixes to the configuration deployment scripts. I met with Carole before leaving today and gave her an update. She was pleased with the progress we’ve made and is fine with us wrapping up on Monday since I won’t be in the office tomorrow.

I also got a call-back from the Kennesaw State University continuing education office about their photography course. I was interested if a student could use a digital camera for their ‘Photo I’ course. I was told that it’s only for film cameras. They told me that they have a new ‘digital camera’ photography course starting this summer and gave me the number to the instructor for that. I called the instructor for this new digital camera photography course and unlike most of the other ones I’ve looked into; the focus isn’t on stupid crap like “what is a digital camera” and “how to upload your pictures”. Instead, according to the instructor, it will be a photography concepts and composition class but using digital cameras. That’s perfect. I’m probably going to sign up. It will be Tuesdays and Thursdays 6pm-9pm from May 13 through May 22.

James and I left for the airport around 4:30. We got checked-in and to the gate (E9) around 5:15pm. James went to the bar across the hallway and had a cigarette or two. I joined him and we talked about work.

Both James and I got business elite class of course (the flight was wide-open). Every time I fly in business elite I’m reminded why I love working for Delta so much. Before we even leave the gate they give us a drink and a menu. They also have the nice leather electrical reclining seats with the personal video monitor. When I boarded the plane, a flight attendant took my coat and hung it up. Shortly after takeoff they bring another drink and a dish of roasted nuts. The nuts are actually hot, it’s wild. Then they bring lemon-scented hot towels to freshen up with. They also came around giving out newspapers. Then come by and ask us our dinner entrée selection from the menu. Dinner consists of three courses (each brought separately): salad, entrée, and desert. Before arrival we also get breakfast.

As I write this the video monitor reports some fun-facts about our trip:

Current speed: 640mph
Altitude: 27,000 feet
Outside Temperature: -32 degrees Fahrenheit

I woke up to the sound of a knock on the door. It was the cleaning people. It was 1pm already.

James took a shower first and then I did. We got dressed and headed out into the city.

James wanted to stop by some shops near the hotel so we headed in the direction towards the shops. The weather was a bit ominous but at least it wasn’t raining - yet.

We entered what appeared to be an unassuming store on the corner of a building. When we got inside, however, it turned out to be a large three-level mall. We walked around and browsed in the shops but didn’t get anything.

When we left the mall it was starting to drizzle outside so I slung my camera across my shoulder underneath my coat. We walked around some more and went into an Irish gift shop. Most of the stuff was pure junk but then again all souvenirs are. James bought something and then we decided to do something about lunch.

We picked a little unassuming cafe to have lunch at. I ordered a really good item I’d never seen before. It was hot ham (they called it bacon, but it’s really ham) and cheese wrapped inside a tortilla. It was delicious! After we finished eating but were still sitting at the table we discussed what we would like to see and do for the rest of the day. Looking at the map, I suggested that we go to Trinity University since it was next door. Also near Trinity is the national art gallery.

It was still drizzling outside as we made our way to the university. The grounds were spectacular. It looked just like it was: and old ivy-league school. The grounds were gated and most of the buildings were very old. I took a few photos despite the light rain.

We spent some time walking around the university grounds and decided to head to the National art gallery of Ireland which was close by.

The art gallery was much like the Smithsonian but smaller. The admission was free and it was pretty nice inside. Most of the paintings were from the 1600’s and a lot of them were religions in nature.

We spent about an hour and a half in the gallery before departing. By this time it was about 5pm so we headed back to the hotel. Back at the hotel I took a short nap while James went over to a nearby coffee shop. When he came back about an hour later he announced that he went to a cyber-cafe instead.

We both took showers and changed into slacks & button-down shirts before heading down to the hotel bar. There we got some seats, ordered some drinks, and talked. While we were there James struck-up a conversation with two girls sitting next to us. One was from Sydney working in Dublin as a bartender and the other was from Leeds in England working in Dublin as a legal secretary. We talked about where we are all from and of course the Iraq situation. Not surprisingly, they were dead-set against war with Iraq. They eventually left.

As the evening progressed we ordered some appetizers. I had a salad and James had french-fries. We eventually went down to the club lounge at 11pm and had a few drinks.

While both the bar and the lounge were teaming with young attractive girls, nearly all of them were there with a guy. What a bummer. Nonetheless we had a good time and headed back up to the room at 12:30.

I woke up around 7am and immediately started working. I logged in to Delta’s VPN and fired up the Outlook Web Client and checked on the responses to the emails I sent out on Sunday night.

Our release engineer, Bob O’Brien, had made some progress but there were still a few problems so I called him and he began work on some of the issues. While he was working these, I got ready and drove into work, arriving around 8:30am.

I spent all day glued to my computer working all of the different build issues that popped up. I realized I missed lunch about ten minutes before out 1pm team lead meeting. After the meeting (around 2pm), I drove over to McDonalds and bought two Big Macs to bring back to my desk. I ate while working.

I continued working on all of the issues as I was determined to get all 25 of our components to build. We were supposed to have completed the builds last week but there were many unexpected problems, so it has been taking a lot longer than it should have.

At 7pm, I kicked off a 30-minute build and drove home. As soon as I got home, I continued working until 11:30 when I called it quits. I ended up making a lot of progress and felt pretty confident that we would be all fixed up tomorrow when I got Bob to fix a couple more things that I don’t have permissions to correct.

Today’s been a really good day. The stress of this first build is finally off my shoulders and I now have a basic plan of attack for finishing my coding for the Exchange engine.

I came into work with all 19 components swinstalled to the development server ready to be tested. I built and deployed our configuration package. It all went without a hitch. It’s a great feeling when you see a lot of hard work come together and the results work as intended.

We had our weekly staff meeting today and Carole introduced Ramprasad (he likes to be called ‘Ram’) to everyone. Carole also sent me a meeting invite for 4pm on Monday for my performance review. I have to wait for the very last moment before I can get my review considering that they are all due into HR by 5pm on Monday. I’m really curious how it’s going to turn out.

I left work today with the intention of doing some more coding tonight at home. However when I got home I just wasn’t in the mood for work. I’ve been literally only working and sleeping since Sunday afternoon and wanted a diversion.

I fired up Asheron’s Call 2 (I haven’t played since last Wednesday or so). I logged in Noke and killed some Gurogs. I got a tell from my patron, Orgus, asking me if I wanted any vassals. I’ve never had any vassals before, not even in AC1. I think he asked me because I’m high highest-level vassal and have produced the most experience for him than any of his other vassals. Maybe he’s offering me a vassal as a reward. He asked me to come to Cavendo. I was really far away on Livnak but I’m lifestoned in Ikaras so I managed to get to Cavendo pretty quick. When I arrived, he was there with a level 15 tumerok mage named Coda. Coda and I talked for a while and she seemed pretty excited about joining the crafting guild. After introductions, Coda swore allegiance to me. She said that she also had a secondary character that she wanted to swear to me as well. When the second vassal swore allegiance to me, my ‘rank’ increased from ‘Yeoman’ to ‘Master’. That was really cool.

After getting the two vassals ‘Sweet Destiny’ on our allegiance chat announced that the scavenger hunt was going to begin in thirty minutes in Ikaras. This was the first I heard about that but it sounded like fun. I headed over to the rally-point and after a short while other guild members began to file in too. There were enough of us for three, three-person teams. I was in ‘Team Mistifs’ with Eram (level 36 lugian) and another level 30 tumerok. We were tasked with collection ten items in 60 minutes. We had to find them on our own (no buying them or getting them from a mule or something) without cheating. We each set out on our own to find some of the items. I was going to try to get a shreth horn so I ran off to where I knew a lot of shreths were. Unfortunately Eram found one before I even got to my first shreth. So I then decided to head to darkenfould chicks to find an egg and again Eram found one before I got to them. I was going to look for an instrument and dye plant but he found those too. So I resigned myself on helping collect the 2,000 gold and mimbu carapace. While I was searching for the carapace we had all found the necessary items except for the mimbu carapace only thirty minutes unto the hunt. I was feeling pretty good about our chances to win. The other two team members also started looking for a carapace as well. Unfortunately our luck turned and for the next thirty minutes we never found one. Before the contest was over the human team managed to get all of the required items and won. Despite not winning, it was a lot of fun.

After that Sweet Destiny gathered some people together to go work on the dillo rustlers quest over on Livnak. Since I had not done that yet I tagged along. When we were almost done with it I got another tell from Orgus. He had another vassal waiting for me in Cavendo! As soon as I finished up the dillo rustlers quest I headed to Cavendo and picked up my third vassal, Jijn, a level 15 tumerok.

I think some people in India caught on that Valentine’s Day is nothing more than a big marketing scheme:

Or maybe it’s because I feel like a big loser since I didn’t have anyone to spend the evening with.

It was a pretty slow day today at work. I wasn’t nearly as productive as I set out to be. I don’t know why either.

I ordered some new components from “newegg.com”:http://newegg.com/ today. I got a second hard drive identical to the one I purchased a few months ago. It’s a Western Digital 80GB 7200RPM 8MB cache hard drive. The one I have has performed really well and I think I want to set up a RAID-0 array. In order to do that, I also ordered two PATA-to-SATA converters. I’ll stick those on both HD’s and then plug both into the Serial ATA controller and I’ll be ready to go with RAID-0. At least that’s how I hope it will work.

I’ve also been thinking about an offsite backup solution. I started to think about this after I ripped all my CD’s to my computer and it ended up being around 15GB. To put them all on CD-R’s would take like 20 CD-R’s which I’m not too keen on doing. I started to look at external HD solutions but then I realized I don’t need frequent access to this data. In fact, the only reason to back it up is in the case of a catastrophic failure (fire/flood/theft/etc) in which I lose all data on not only freeside (Windows XP box) but turing (linux box) too. With this in mind, I think I’ll utilize my currently unused old HD’s as a perfect offsite backup solution.

I also started thinking about a new audio solution. Currently I have my television (cable) sound running from audio-out RCA analog leads to the line-in connection on my PC. From my PC, I have my line-out connections connected to my VCR’s audio-in via an analog RCA cable. From my VCR, I’m running another analog RCA connection to my 5-year old Sony receiver. The receiver in turn drives my bose 4.1 speaker setup. It all works and I can’t complain too much. However, I know I could do a lot better with an all-digital hookup instead of this analog crap I have going on now. In order to achieve this I’d need to replace t least my receiver. I did some research but came to the conclusion that I’ll shelve this project until I decide if I’m going to get a house or not. I don’t want to make any assumptions on the computer/entertainment system layout if it could change.

I’ve been debating about putting this in my journal or not but preserving what happens in my life is really important to me. Someone from my past, my ex-girlfriend, has been _stalking_ me. Maybe ’stalking’ is a strong word but I don’t know what else to label it when someone is attempting to call you seven times a day. I know that acknowledging the behavior will only encourage it and if I ignore it long enough, it will eventually stop. At least I hope it will.

While I was logged into my workplace VPN this afternoon, I got an e-mail from Carole (my manager). She said that she liked the “photos of Dublin”:/gallery/dublin_2003 and she wished me a late happy-birthday. She was working last Sunday too, so I replied asking if she works every Sunday. That’s a lot of dedication. Every time I see her or someone else in management putting in all this extra time I wonder if it’s really worth it to be a manager.

I got a lot done today. I filed both my Federal and state taxes online through “eSmartTax.com”:http://www.esmarttax.com/. I’m looking forward to the direct-deposit refund from both the state and federal government. I also re-balanced my 401(k) portfolio. I stopped contributing to Fidelity Magellan, Fidelity Contrafund, and the abysmal Janus Twenty. I should have done this a year ago but I never got around to it. Now I’m in Fidelity New Markets and Pimco Global Bond. I think the ‘mainstream’ growth funds still have a rocky time ahead of them with the looming war and aftermath. Who knows if the bond funds I’m in will be any better though? I doubt it can be much worse than the -30% returns I’ve been seeing with my previous contributions though.

My “apache”: log is still full of errors because of some guys over at “skyscraperpage.com”:http://skyscraperpage.com/index.php hotlinking to several of my photos from my photo album. This “thread”:http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=19101 about Austin and this “thread”:http://skyscraperpage.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=20680 about Chicago are both offenders. A simply apache rule fixed it though. Now the images won’t load over there. I don’t really have a problem with people using the pictures I take but it would be courteous to ask first or at least give credit. This didn’t happen in either case. Hotlinking (referring to the image directly from a foreign page) is bad because it steals my bandwidth.

Over at the “Digital Photography”:http://www.dpreview.com/ “Minolta forums”:http://www.dpreview.com/forums/forum.asp?forum=1024, there was a thread by a guy named Tony Rae who took a picture of a F-111 dumping fuel:

(I did get permission from Tony - I don’t want to sound like a hypocrite after ranting about the hotlinking)

I went through all my photos from Alaska onward and made some new header images to randomly load in the banner at the top of my main page. With that done, I have completed my ‘turing website cleanup’ task I made for myself which included:

* Convert monthly links to a dropdown list.
* Add new images for banner rotation.
* Add ‘about Jeff’ section.
* Add search box.
* Reorganize Photo Album.
* Add block for hotlinking images
* Validate with XHTML standards.
* Upgrade to MT 2.6

It was another terrific day at work today. I made it in early and got a lot accomplished.

I did some more coding work on the Exchange engine. I only need to write two more methods and I’m finally done. We’ve got a deadline of Feb 28th to finish coding and testing but I’m going to be out Monday - Wednesday next week so it will be tight.

Ram and I worked together on the code build for the system test environment. I walked him through all of the steps. I think he’s going to pick it up very well. He seems to learn and retain things with little difficulty.

Larry called me at work today. He told me that he and Amy are planning a trip to Hawaii this summer and he wanted to know if I would like to join them for part of the time they are out there. I went to Hawaii with them in “2000″:/gallery/hawaii-2000 and “2001″:/gallery/hawaii-2001 to the small island of “Kauai”:http://www.kauai-hawaii.com/ and had an “absolutely wonderful time”:/jeff/archives/2000/05/31/hawaii_trip_2000_day_1.php. So of course I said I’d love to go. He’s going to follow up with details. We also agreed that we need to start thinking about our hiking trip for the later part of this summer.

Today was ‘patch day’ for “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/. They published their February ‘monthly event’ which included mounts for players. I played a while this evening and managed to get though the somewhat difficult quest to summon mounts. Unfortunately you can’t use any skills or do combat while mounted. Once you dismount, the ‘horse’ poofs away and the mound only lasts a certain length of time (15, 30, or 60 minutes). On top of all that, you have to ‘pay’ gold to ‘craft’ a new mount. It’s not that bad though and they look really cool.

I also picked up another vassal today too. My patron, Orgus, is trying to re-organize his part of the allegiance tree to boost his rank, so he’s moving some people under me so I’ll go from a ‘master’ to a ‘lord’. I have no problems being called a ‘lord’! The new vassal is a level 32 Tumerok named Invoker Mistress. She, of course, plays an invoker.

I knew that staying up till 3am the night before meant that I should sleep a little later. So I set my alarm for 7am instead of 5am. I eventually got into work around 9:20am.

Right after I got to work Ram and I went to work finishing up building of the code. When we got through our builds we had to wait for two other groups to deploy the code to the development and system test servers.

Today was day two of the three-day ‘BBQ’ tour. Today we went to Brian’s favorite place called “Swallow at the Hollow”:http://www.theswallowatthehollow.com/entry.asp. It’s a BBQ place in an old barn. The fact that it’s in a barn doesn’t make it sound very good but it is incredibly good. The food was great and the atmosphere was too. I was surprised to see that it’s in Roswell, close to “Stoney River”:http://www.stoneyriver-steaks.com/. I can’t wait to go back there.

After lunch we discovered that we had a bug in the code and we had to re-deploy two components. Ram and I worked on this and finally finished around 5pm.

I spent the whole evening reinstalling stuff and organizing files and folders on my computer. Everything is pretty much set up exactly like it was before. To be honest, I don’t notice any visible difference being on RAID than before when it was not. I’ve effectively halved the operational lifetime of the HD’s now that they are both striped together in the array. If one fails, I lose all data since the clusters are written across all platters on both drives.

I really need to come up with a solid backup solution and implement it ASAP.

I also watched “Survivor: Amazon”:http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor6/ tonight. It is amazing how disorganized the all-women tribe is. I know that can’t be good representation of all women but right now things don’t look very good for them.

Flight 1949 was scheduled to depart at 11:45am. I woke up around 8am and packed and had some cereal. I also did some wrestling with Microsoft Windows Media Player. It turns out that with certain settings, it’s pretty invasive. I had the setting checked to replace tag info with more accurate information. For the most part this was not a problem but it decided for itself that some of my songs were really different songs. The frustrating part about this was that these were songs that I had ripped directly from CD with Media Player. I eventually found the place to turn this off and it seemed to help.

I left the apartment around 10am and got to the airport and checked in with no problem. I also checked a bag. The last time I checked a bag was when I went to Alaska with Larry. Fortunately there were no problems this time. I listed on the flight with an S2 pass. After this one, I only have one more, but they are renewed in April.

I barely made it into first class because like 11 people upgraded. The four-hour flight was pretty good. In first class we got a snack which included a chicken sandwich and small salad. I also had a few Crown & Cokes.

When we were making our final approach to the Jackson airport, the pilot announced that there is a lot of snow on the runway and we may have to abort the landing and divert. That didn’t sound very pleasant. Fortunately we landed without incident and deplaned via an old-school ladder thing.

Craig was waiting for me just inside the airport. There were a lot of people standing and sitting around. The airport was so small that they only had three of four gates and only one baggage claim carrousel.

We waited at the tiny baggage claim along with many other people. Eventually my bag came and we met our driver from the hotel. We arranged transportation beforehand so the drive to the hotel was in a Ford Excursion. The driver was pleasant enough and on the drive to the airport we got a couple of photographs of some Moose.

Once we got to the hotel, check-in was painless and the room & hotel were really cool. The room had nice wooden crown-molding and everything seemed high-quality.

After Craig and I got settled we headed out to the ski rental place but they didn’t rent skis until 5pm. We had about an hour so we went next-door to a bar called ‘The Mangy Moose‘. The place was packed. We had a drink but never found a seat so we headed to another part of the bar that wasn’t crowded. We split an order of nachos. While we sat and ate we had a good view of the Teton Village area outside. There were a few dogs playing with each other in the snow. They seemed to be having a great time.

We headed back to the ski rental shop and got fitted for our boots and skis. When that was done, we went back to the hotel. After a while when it was dark outside, we got changed into our swimsuits and went to the spa which included a heated pool and outdoor Jacuzzi. It was snowing outside and the hot-tub was spewing a lot of steam. It felt really nice to be in the hot water but have your head in the steamy, freezing air.

After the spa, we each took a shower. The fixtures and shower was really nice. The whole bathroom was very nice - I was impressed.

When we got cleaned up and dressed, we decided to head back over to the Mangy Moose Bar. When we got there it wasn’t as crowded as before but there was a sizable crowd inside. We each took a seat and ordered a drink. We also ordered a large pizza to split between us. We ate and talked and after a while, the staff started to clear away the tables in front of the stage. It seemed as if they were going to bring in a live band and have a dance floor. One of the staff approached us and told us that they are bringing in a band and they need to collect $5 from everyone. Craig asked me if I wanted to stay but I was pretty tired and this place didn’t seem all that exciting (it was mostly guys inside), so we left.

We went back to the hotel and went to bed. Craig wanted to watch television before falling asleep and the glare and flashing from the TV kept me awake.

I woke up before Craig around 6:10am. I got dressed, grabbed my PDA & book and headed out to the lobby to write in my journal. I looked outside and the sky was completely clear. It looked like it would be a beautiful sunny day. Around 7am I went back to the room and got my camera and tripod.

The sun was about to come up over the mountains across the valley so I wanted to try to get a few photos of the sunrise. I waited patiently and a short while later the sun popped up over a mountain across the valley. I dashed outside and set up the tripod and started to take some pictures. By this time the sun had come up pretty far so the photos probably wouldn’t be too spectacular. I swung around and got some good pictures of the mountains on the opposite side where the ski resort is.

By this time the cold was really starting to get to me. Indeed, it was -30 degrees Fahrenheit outside. I’ve never been in conditions that cold before.

Craig and I had breakfast in the hotel restaurant just like yesterday. I had two home-made waffles, bacon, and fruit. We discussed our plans for the day. We were a little disturbed by the cold conditions on the mountain. It turns out that there was an inversion active today which means the top of the mountain is actually much warmer than the base.

We went back to the room and got ready to go skiing. I decided to take my digital camera (Minolta Dimage 7i) out skiing with me today. I put it in the camera case and wrapped that inside a bulky sweater inside my backpack. This seemed safe enough, even if I had a fall.

We headed to the ski valet to get our equipment and then walked to the lifts. The weather was pretty cold, but the sun was shining brightly and the mountain and trees were framed by a beautiful bright blue sky.

We skied on both sides of the mountain and around 11:30am we stopped for lunch at the Casper restaurant. I had a pork burrito and fries. I had my cell phone with me today so I called Brian at work to get Anil’s number. I called Anil to see how things were going with the system test. It turns out that they had not started yet because of some problems with ODE. During lunch, I got my camera out and decided to carry it underneath my jacket. It was certainly more dangerous than keeping it in my backpack.

We hit the slopes again. I could easily access the camera by unzipping my jacket and pulling it out. I took a few photos every few runs. Because of the cold temperatures, I could only take a few photos before the battery meter on the camera indicated low battery. The batteries weren’t really low but the cold temperature causes the batteries to not output enough power. The first few pictures metered too bright. The aperture was f8 and the shutter speed was 1/2000. This was as fast as the camera could go and the meter readings were in red indicating it was still too bright. At that point I stopped and screwed on the polarizer. This cut out some light which helped. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to turn it to adjust the polarization effect due to my big bulky ski gloves.

It worked out pretty good skiing with my camera. I skied a little more carefully and never really fell. I had been using the lens shade such that I put it into the ’storage’ position when stowing the camera, and unscrewing it and putting it in the ‘use’ position. Apparently taking the lens hood off and on over and over caused the polarizer filter to come unscrewed. When I was trying to take a high-speed action shot of Craig, I noticed the polarizer was no longer on the camera! I panicked thinking it fell off somewhere when I was skiing. I happened to look down and saw the filter lying half-buried in the snow. I decided now was a good time to put everything up. I took off my gloves and packed up my camera, including the snow-covered polarizer.

We skied a few more runs and then called it a day around 3:30pm. We headed back to the hotel and then changed and went to the outdoor spa. After hanging out in the spa for a while we went in the dry sauna for about ten minutes. After the sauna we each rinsed off in the after-pool shower. We then went back to the room and relaxed for about an hour.

At 6pm we headed down to the spa lobby for our 6:30pm massage appointment. After we got checked in, we headed up to the 4th floor where the gentleman’s locker room. There we were shown around the facilities. It was pretty nice. There was a lounge with a big plasma screen TV. Around the back were a hot tub, dry sauna, wet sauna, Swedish shower, and rain shower. There was also a bank of about sixty lockers. We each undressed and put on fluffy robes and headed out to the lounge. While we waited for our masseuses to summon us, we watched the O’Reilly factor on fox news.

Around 6:30 a lady dressed in black came in and asked me to join her. She led me down to the third floor where all of the special rooms were. After she led me to a small, dark room she asked me to disrobe and lie on the table face-down while she waited outside.

For the next fifty minutes I had an incredible Swedish massage. She worked nearly every part of my body. The best part was when she massaged my wrists and fingers.

After the massage I met Craig in the lounge. We got dressed and headed out to dinner to the Mangy Moose. We ordered Stoli Vanilla & Coke as well as a pepperoni and sausage pizza. After another round of drinks, I ordered another drink from Craig’s suggestion.

When we finished dinner we headed back to the hotel. We stayed up for about an hour watching television. Apparently Craig likes to watch TV while falling asleep because he fell asleep with the remote still in his hand.