2003 March Archive at Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Monthly Archive for March, 2003

Mar 1st 2003

Bluetooth Keyboard & Mouse

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

I had a nightmare last night about a nuclear holocaust. For some strange reason (It’s a dream, what can I say) I was at a seedy strip club in Las Vegas near the airport. In my dream, the Las Vegas airport is like thirty miles from downtown separated by desert. So in my dream I’m sitting at a table with some dancer trying to sell me something and out of the corner of my eye I see a bright flash from the big window emanating from downtown Las Vegas. To my horror I looked out the window and saw the mushroom cloud over Las Vegas. It was a terrorist attack. In my dream I had the same dread-filled horrible feeling I got on September 11th. Then, in my dream, I went back to the airport and was trying to fly standby back to Atlanta but all the flights were grounded.

It was an odd dream. I usually enjoy nightmares, but this one really disturbed me. As soon as I woke up, I turned on the TV to “CNN”:http://www.cnn.com/ just to make sure that everything was ok.

I was supposed to go to a “LAN party”:http://fragfest.adratek.com today that Mark White told me about. I spent the morning installing games like “Unreal Tournament 2003″:http://www.unrealtournament2003.com/, “Splinter Cell”:http://www.splintercell.com/, and “Counter Strike”:http://www.counter-strike.net/. After I installed some of these games, I realized I hadn’t played Counter Strike in (literally) years. I decided that I probably wouldn’t be too useful at the LAN party since my FPS skills left a lot to be desired. So I decided to forego the LAN party today until I can hone my skills some more.

I spent a great deal of time updating stuff in “Money 2003″:http://www.microsoft.com/money/. I decided to reduce the value of my “Ford Explorer’s”:http://www.fordvehicles.com/suvs/explorer/ asset account to reflect depreciation. I went to the “Kelly Blue book”:http://www.kbb.com/ site and got the updated value for it. This led to like a $12,000 reduction. I put this in as one transaction for 3-1-2003 but that screwed up net worth. It showed my taking a huge hit for this month. That’s not what I wanted so I distributed the depreciation over the five months since I bought the car. This made things a little smoother. I now need to update the asset amount once a month to keep it smooth.

I also called “Best Buy”:http://www.bestbuy.com/ today to see if they had the “Microsoft Wireless Desktop Bluetooth”:http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/keyboard/wodbt_info.asp in stock. I had been checking over the past few weeks and they finally got four in last night. I drove out to Best Buy and bought it using the gift certificate I got from Mom for my birthday.

On my way home I also stopped at “Target”:http://www.target.com/ and bought a new electric razor. My old Norelco broke and I had a full week’s worth of facial hair that’s been driving me crazy. I got the top-of-the line “Braun Syncro 7526″:http://www.braun.com/na/products/shavinggrooming/dryshaving/dryshaving/syncrosystem.html. It’s really cool. It self cleans and everything. It was pretty expensive though.

After I got home, I started charging the shaver and installed the Bluetooth keyboard + mouse. The keyboard is a lot nicer than the old Logitech wireless keyboard I had. It has those special buttons across the top that give me one-touch access to common things. You can also remap those buttons to whatever you choose. The mouse is basically exactly like my old corded Optical Intellimouse Explorer. It also has five buttons. One drawback though is the Intellipoint software no longer allows you to map buttons to custom things ties to specific applications. I don’t know why they took this functionality out, but it was really nice. The Bluetooth range is really nice too. The keyboard worked in every corner of my apartment, even through two walls. I was impressed.

Mar 2nd 2003

Strike 1 against AC2

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I haven’t played “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/ since before I left on my vacation. When I came back I checked my favorite AC2 news site, “AC2HQ.com”:http://www.ac2hq.com/. My heart sank as I read the “preview for the March patch”:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/AC2/Episodes/Episode4/ep4_lttp_1.htm. The developers are tearing apart the class that I play, Feral Intendant. In a nutshell, the Feral’s have three skills that work in concert with each other:

1) Leader of the Pack: Lowers Damage but increases combat speed
2) Iron Piercers: Lowers armor class but increased damage
3) Lumbering Might: Lowers combat speed but increased armor class.

When used together, the skills canceled out the negatives and you ended up being slightly better off. Now, the developers from Turbine are saying that this has always been a bug and isn’t supposed to work this way. They are going to be changing it such that you can only use one of these skills at a time. Now that’s a load a crap. If this is a bug, why wasn’t it fixed during the lengthy beta test period? If this was a bug, why didn’t we hear a peep about it for the four months the game has been in retail? To make radical changes like this long after the game has been released is unacceptable. It throws the player population completely on guard against future radical changes. It makes it such that the player community can no longer trust the development team. We were given no warning or indication that anything was wrong. For the developers to say that this has always been a bug and never intended is a huge cop-out. They aren’t owning up to the fact that they didn’t properly balance classes during beta test and are only now getting around to it four months after going live. That is really disappointing.

The only saving grace is that they most likely recognize how much they are alienating players with these changes (they are making major changes to more than just Feral’s) so for the duration of the march patch, players will have a one-time-use /reset command that will untrain all skills and give players a fresh start to re-spec to whatever they want. Even with this, I’m not sure I’ll be playing Asheron’s Call 2 after the patch. I just don’t have any faith in the development team anymore. Who knows when they next radical change will come about. I don’t want to play a game in constant fear that it’s going to be turned upside down because it wasn’t properly beta tested.

So I played AC2 for a little while today. I hooked up with some of my guild mates and we went around Livnak and killed stuff. Nine of us gathered together in Whitebay and prepared to go adventuring:

I played for about two hours and then logged off.

Mar 3rd 2003

Photo Request?

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

I didn’t have any software builds to do today, so I worked on Exchange Valuation coding and testing.

For lunch, James wanted to go to Midtown. We decided to go to “Noodle”:http://www.noodlehouse.net/ for lunch. It turns out that over the weekend, James went through the process of buying a condo at a place called “Metropolis”:http://www.metropolisatlanta.com/. After lunch, we went with him to drop off a check (it may have been a down-payment?). We also got to see the place. It’s a brand-new 20-story condo building that has a very post-modern look to it. The ceilings (and some walls) are all bare cement. The facilities and amenities seem nice but it’s pretty expensive. The one-bedroom, 750 sq ft. place James is going to purchase costs around $172,000 and there is also a $250/month association fee. That seems sort of expensive to me for 750 sq ft. However, the location is really great being in the heart of midtown Atlanta.

During the day I got an unusual e-mail from a company that makes promotional magnets (I guess like refrigerator magnets). They wanted to know if they could use one of my “Chicago skyline photos”:/gallery/chicago_08-03-2002 posted in my “photo gallery”:/gallery for a promotional magnet. I wrote back asking which one they were interested in and I also inquired as to what sort of licensing or royalty system they use.

Around 3:30 we had a special ‘3-3-03 3:33pm’ meeting to celebrate our successful system test posting to the database. Carole (out of her own pocket) provided soft drinks, cookies, chips, and fruit. Directly after the meeting we had a team-lead meeting to discuss the strategy for the next system test code build. We decided to wait until March 17th before doing any more system test builds.

After work I got a hair cut and went grocery shopping. I spent the rest of the evening wrestling with “Windows Media Player”:http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/ to get my older MP3’s into my media library correctly.

Mar 6th 2003

coding again!

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I never heard back from that company asking to use one of my “Chicago skyline photos”:/gallery/chicago_08-03-2002. I guess they didn’t want to pay for its use and found something else. Hopefully they didn’t use it anyway!

On Tuesday we had a last-minute 3pm all-hands meeting. Brent (our vice president) announced they hired a new director for our group as the position has been vacant for the past three months or so. They are bringing in an existing director from the EBS group. After the meeting I went to Brent’s office and spoke with him for a few minutes. I asked him about the possibility of all development being outsourced. He assured me that this was not the case, but they may indeed look at outsourcing certain non-business specific pieces. For a while now I’ve been apprehensive about all software development becoming commoditized and all of the work being shipped offshore. With that looming prospect, it sounds like a change of career is in order. Brent also alluded to the fact that I may be getting more challenges in the days ahead. That sounds like a really great prospect.

Fortunately there have been no more software builds this week so I’ve been able to concentrate on coding again fulltime. Because of that, it’s been a really great week so far. As a matter of fact, I wrote a lot of code Tuesday night after I got home. Wednesday night I went over my code line-by-line and think the code is pretty solid now. Today I tested and tweaked these changes and started some serious unit testing. So far, all of ‘my’ code is executing with no problems. I’m planning on spending all day tomorrow hammering out different unit-test scenarios to test as many pathways as possible.

James (the guy I went to “Dublin”:/jeff/archives/2003/02/06/atldub.php with) asked me if I wanted to go to St. Maarten (SXM) this weekend. Going out there the flights are pretty tight but coming back it’s wide open. So if we don’t make it on Saturday morning, it is no big deal. Casey also said that he wants to go too.

After work today around 5pm a few of us went to the same bar we’ve gone to before. We played pool and had some food and drinks. It was a smaller crowd than usual, only myself, Carole, Casey, James, Bob, and Jay.

Mar 7th 2003

half a day wasted

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Since I have a lot of unit test scenarios to run through, I was planning on going into work early this morning. As things played out, I didn’t get in until about 8am, which was about an hour and a half later than I planned. It turns out that I saved myself a lot of frustration.

According to Alex (who got in at 6:30am), we have been having “clearcase”:http://www.rational.com/products/clearcase/index.jsp issues all morning. We can see the vob and the files in the vob, but whenever we attempt to view a checked-in clearcase element, we get an NFS error. At 8am, our clearcase admin requested everyone to end their views so he can restart the vob server at 9am. 9am came and went and we didn’t hear anything. Finally around 10am, we were told that the issue was still being looked at. 11am rolled around and now we were being told that they need to reboot the entire server. When I got back from lunch the server had been rebooted, but the vob wasn’t mounted. Finally at 2:30pm everything was working again. All day long until 2:30pm we had 15 or so developers just on our team sitting around not able to work. What a waste!

I managed to get some work done today but I admit it wasn’t nearly as much as I would have hoped. We’re still getting a core dump when depopulating the coupon objects. I’m planning on looking at that tonight when I get home.

After work I played “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/ac2/default.htm for a little while. Just for the hell of it, I decided to try to solo a ‘group mob’ near Whitebay. I found a lone 12,000hp Steppe Armoredillo and prepared my spells. I lead the attack with my spear to get my beetle to attack. While the mob was coming towards me, I switched to my axe and initiated the attack with a soft underbelly and visceral melody (shield-bash) combo. They both landed. I hit with a stolen youth to replenish vigor. The battle was going quite well. I had him down to half-health when the stun wore off and he started to attack me at a faster rate. I cycled between stolen youth and hunger (health drain) for the rest of the fight and won! I had no expectation to take on one of those solo and I was ecstatic! Of course the feeling is bittersweet since that’s all going to be taken away in a week or so when they propagate the new patch completely destroying my class.

I also played with the graphics settings, enabling pixel shaders. This made the water look really cool.

After playing AC2, I logged into work and did some debugging on core dump for my engine. It looks like we are performing a bad operation when deleting a container from our special internal container object. I know we delete from this in other instances so there must be a simple solution to the problem.

Mar 8th 2003

St. Maarten, Day 1

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My alarm woke me up at 7am and I lazily tossed and turned for about thirty minutes until getting up and taking a shower.

I wrote yesterday’s journal entry, got dressed and packed. I left for the airport around 8:30. When I arrived at the airport I checked in and headed to the international concourse, gate E02.

While I was walking to the gate I saw James walking towards me. He announced that Casey was already at the gate. James was on his way to the central international lobby to see about some breakfast. I went on to the gate and saw Casey waiting there. So it looked like the three of us would be going to “St. Maarten”:http://www.st-maarten.com/ - the more the better. This was especially good since James and I had no real plan. We didn’t even have lodging arrangements. Since Casey has been here before, we were counting on him to direct us on where to stay and where to go.

Casey was slightly concerned that it was 9:45 and we still didn’t have a plane at the gate. It looked as if we were going to be delayed leaving. I went back to the lobby area to get some more cash since I only had about $25 dollars on me. This has got to be the most un-planned and un-organized trip I’ve ever taken. It’s certainly a new experience for me.

After getting $100 out of the ATM I headed back and intercepted James again. I went with him to the food court and we each bought a light breakfast. We went back to the gate and didn’t see Casey. The plane still wasn’t at the gate. There was heavy fog this morning and apparently this was the cause for the delay.

We eventually saw Casey who was with another guy named Tony. Tony works in middleware dealing with mainframes. I wasn’t aware middleware did anything with mainframes.

Casey and Tony got assigned seats in the very back of coach. James and I (with our earlier seniority dates) managed to get first-class. We, of course, gloated to Casey and Tony who were grumbling about being in the rear of the aircraft.

We ended up leaving an hour late. The flight is actually three hours long, so being in first class was quite a treat. I noticed that there were still two empty seats which I found interesting since Casey and Tony were in the back. Sure enough, a few minutes later both Casey and Tony came sauntering up into first-class. It looked as if they were given the last two first class seats.

The in-flight movie was “Die Another Day”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0246460, the most recent James bond flick. I had about four or five drinks, and a pepperoni pizza lunch.

Casey was really working the flight. Between chatting with James and the woman in the seat next to him; as well as chatting with the flight attendants in the galley, Casey was hardly ever in his seat.

It turns out that the woman sitting next to me works for Delta in their Mexico City office. She’s on a three-week assignment in St. Maarten to supervise the station there.

When we finally began the final approach into St. Maarten, I could see the island out of my window on the left-hand side. Casey shouted for me to look for the tiki-bar as we landed. Sure enough, just as we were about to touch-down I saw it on the beach adjacent to the runway.

We rushed through customs and got a taxi to the hotel where we needed to wait in line to check in. While we were checking in we asked for the airline employee’s rate. They told us that they would see what they could do but they assured us they would get us a special rate. I wonder why it was so mysterious.

The hotel was very nice. To compare, I thought it was nicer than the place Craig and I stayed in Jamaica.

As soon as we got to our rooms (Casey and Tony got a room while James and I got another room), we changed out of our flying clothes and into shorts and t-shirts.

We headed down to the beach and made a b-line to the tiki-bar. Once there we spent the next few hours drinking and watching the planes. There were a lot of cute girls near the bar. From what I’m told, Casey and James were talking to two girls at the bar and after a while, they left. Casey complained that James scared them off but James denied this. At another point there were two other good looking girls at the bar. One had what I assumed was her boyfriend and the other girl with them looked alone. Casey decided to seize the moment and took a drink to her. Unfortunately she was a snooty French girl and just said ‘no’ to him. He tried to explain that it was a free drink and then she said, ‘go away’.

It was pretty cool watching the planes land and it was also cool watching them take off. They would usually taxi and take off away from the water. This meant that they would blast their engines out to the beach. We had a sporting time running to the airport fence when a jet was about to depart. The pilot would keep the brakes on while throttling the engines. As a result of this, those standing behind the plane bore the full force of the jet-wash. I did this too. It was the sensation of an incredible hot wind blowing so hard that you couldn’t even stay standing.

Of course doing this was dangerous and there were signs warning people that they can get seriously injured. In fact, from the sand and rocks being kicked up Casey had a rock strike him in the leg, drawing blood. When an American Airlines 757 was taking off, James got blown out to the water.

It was great fun and I’m looking forward to doing it again tomorrow.

We stayed at the tiki-bar until way past sunset. When it was dark we started to get hungry and headed back towards the hotel. On the way to the hotel we stopped at this small ‘boat bar’ which was simply an old boat hull sitting in a parking-lot. By this time both Casey and James had a lot to drink and weren’t exactly sober. They struck up a conversation with the 18-year old local bartender girl which lasted about an hour.

We went back to our rooms, got changed (including putting on shoes), and headed out for dinner. Casey knew a nice place next-door to the hotel. The waitress at the restaurant was a young girl from Holland. When I found this out, all I could think of was Brian quoting “Austin Powers 3″:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0295178.

I don’t know if it was because she didn’t like Americans, or if Casey and James were being too loud and obnoxious (they were drunk after all), but the waitress wasn’t very nice to us. At the end of the meal Casey and she got into an argument about the restaurant not taking “American Express”:http://www.americanexpress.com/. It seems that Casey has been to that same restaurant a couple of times in the past and was able to pay with American Express. Tonight though, she waitress said that the restaurant does not and never did take that card. This went back and fourth a few times and bottom line is that we didn’t leave a tip.

After the slightly uncomfortable dinner, we went to the casino across the street. It was pretty nice inside. Of course it was tiny compared to the places I went to in “Las Vegas”:/jeff/archives/2002/12/28/wild_animal_park_sin_city.php. Tony wasn’t too happy with the atmosphere complaining that the crowd was pretty old, so we walked down to another casino near the tiki-bar. While we were walking down there we got caught in a freak rainstorm that lasted a few minutes. It also turns out that James tripped over some rocks (he was still inebriated) and lacerated his legs.

The second casino wasn’t very exciting either. By this time it was around 11pm and both Casey and I were getting tired. We decided that we were going to head back to the hotel. James and Tony wanted to walk around some more so we split ways. I went back to my room and sat out on the porch taking in the Caribbean night air listening to the waves. It reminded me a lot of the very first time I went to visit Larry and Amy in San Diego when they were living in the beach condo.

After about an hour of this, I went to bed but was woken up shortly after that by James returning. He wasn’t in a good mood because he didn’t have his glasses with him and got lost. He forgot to take the room key too and just had a really bad time finding his way back to the room. I asked him if he was with Tony and he said that Tony took off, so I was really confused. Then James was digging around all of his things looking for his passport. He declared that he had taken it with him and lost it. I told him that I don’t recall seeing him take it. He looked around some more and found it in his bag. I think he may have had too much to drink and it wasn’t sitting well with him.

Mar 9th 2003

St. Maarten, Day 2

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I had my iPAQ PDA set to wake me up at 6:30am. I didn’t know what time the sunrise was, but I figured if it was around 6:30, I could snap a few photos from the balcony. When I looked to the window I could see that it was already very light outside. Since I missed the sunrise, I went back to sleep for about an hour.

At 7:30 I quietly got out of bed and dressed. I went out onto the balcony and enjoyed the view for a while. James eventually woke up and got a shower. When he was finally dressed I called Casey and Tony to see if they wanted to get breakfast. They were just waking up so I asked them to call us when they are ready. While James and I waited around I got a shower and applied sunscreen. When we got tired of waiting, I called Casey back and there was no answer. I guess they changed their minds about breakfast. James and I went down to the hotel patio restaurant place and each had a $11 breakfast which included two eggs, bacon, a small hash brown, toast, and a shot-glass size of orange juice.

After breakfast we walked around for a while looking for a place to buy a razor. James had the sudden urge to shave so we eventually found one in the gift shop. We went back to the room, packed up our bags and headed down to the lobby to check out. While we were waiting in line, Casey and Tony came by. They had been down at the beach.

When we checked out we finally discovered our mystery airline employee discount rate: $125 + tax. According to Casey, during ‘low season’ you can get a discounted room for $75. Unfortunately this is considered ‘high season’ right now. We left our backpacks with the bellhop and headed to the tiki-bar.

For the next three or four hours we stayed planted at the tiki-bar. I started out with a foul tasting rum punch. After that, I had about four red bull & vodkas (they don’t have Stoli Vanilla or else I would have ordered that and Coke).

To our delight a few girls along the beach decided to go topless. Presumably since they were European they didn’t see anything wrong with it, and we certainly weren’t complaining. I saw a guy at the bar who looked out of place wearing slacks and a polo-shirt eyeing them and I think I saw him snap some covert pictures too.

I took a lot of pictures of the incoming planes using the UHS mode on my camera. Of those sequences, I made some animated GIF’s: “Landing 1″:/images/animated_landing1.gif, “Landing 2″:/images/animated_landing2.gif, “Landing 3″:/images/animated_landing3.gif, and “Takeoff”:/images/animated_takeoff.gif. I was pretty happy with the quality of the photos given the difficult shooting conditions. I pre-focused and pre-exposed on people that would be directly underneath the plane. Then, as the plane was coming in, I held the shutter, getting about ten or fifteen frames at 7fps.

To mix things up (and also at Tony’s suggestion) I set up on the other side of the runway of a huge airbus. Unfortunately people were crowding around to watch and I was seriously delayed getting my shots off. This resulted in a nasty sequence starting way too late and the plane filling more than the entire frame. Even at 28mm, from where I was standing, it was too close. To make matters worse, a lady standing in front of me fell on top of me spilling rum punch on my white Abercrombie shirt.

At 3pm we headed over to the hotel to collect our bags. Casey and Tony managed to score a temporary room (it didn’t even have a bed) to change in. Casey and Tony took turns rinsing off in the shower and we all changed back into our stifling air travel clothes. We took a taxi to the airport and checked in with no problem. Because we were there for less than 24 hours (it was just about 24 hours), we didn’t have the pay the $25 departure tax.

The ‘gate’ area was really crowded and we got our seat assignments which was first class for the four of us. The flight back was pretty uneventful. They showed “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets”:http://us.imdb.com/Title?0295297. For lunch they served beef shish kabobs with a salad, bread, and cheesecake. James had been talking to a girl back in the airport before we left and she was on our flight back in coach class. He went back there to talk with her more for about an hour. When we arrived and cleared customs I asked James about it and he said she’s a dancer (I don’t think exotic dancer) who gave him her phone number and email address.

When I got home I did all my laundry and uploaded the 335 pictures I took. I selected some of the better ones, cleaned them up where necessary in Photoshop, and posted them to a “photo album”:/gallery/st_maarten_march_2003. I also wrote my journal entries. When I checked my email I got a message from my old friend Tara Hernandez. I tried to track her down several years ago but could never find her. She told me that she found my website when doing searches for her name. I’m looking forward to replying and catching up.

The weekend getaway to St. Maarten was certainly worthwhile and I definitely need to go back.

Mar 10th 2003

broken pixel shader

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I don’t know how but I managed to get sunburn on my forehead yesterday. I had applied sun block in the morning to my entire face. When I woke up this morning I felt the familiar ’sting’ of sun burnt skin so I applied lotion to keep it moisturized.

When I arrived at work around 8am I hut the ground running, debugging the depopulate core dump situation. I finally managed to determine that we were trying to work with a null pointer. At this point I decided to wait for Jegan to arrive and see what he thinks (since he wrote the method). After a minute of investigation we discovered that we were indeed never initializing the pointer. How I wish we were working in C# or Java so we wouldn’t have to worry about all of this pointer crap.

I spent the rest of the day working on unit-test scenarios on the exchange valuation code. I was trying to hammer out different scenarios to see if I could break the code. So far everything looks pretty good. Scott was working on data for multiple test scenarios in order to test as much functionality as possible. Jegan was working on getting DTMO to stream through the engine. Things are really coming along nicely. I’m feeling pretty good now about wrapping up testing this week.

This afternoon before I left, I ran the engine through “purify”:http://www.rational.com/products/purify_unix/index.jsp. To my delight and surprise no memory leaks were reported. There were, however, some ‘potential’ leaks and interesting error conditions with the currency converter engine that we call. I’ll have to investigate that later.

I got home around 6:30 and took a thirty-minute nap because I was exhausted - probably from staying up until 2am last night. I didn’t do anything else of note this evening except play “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/ac2/default.htm for a couple of hours. I spent some time helping my vassal, Jijn, kill buruns and complete the morsemans curse quest. After that I hooked up with a group that was going to do the Relics of the Golden Age quest. It was pretty disorganized and we didn’t actually get started for about thirty minutes after we all gathered together. Unfortunately for me at the very end of the quest in the last dungeon I died. I believe this means that I need to wait for the quest to expire which will take like two weeks or something crazy like that. I was pretty frustrated at this point so I logged off.

I did manage to snap a close-up picture of my beetle with pixel shaders turned on:

I think there is a bug with using pixel shaders with my video card (Nvidia Geforce 4600 Ti) as I get a BSOD in my Nvidia drivers after about two hours of playing the game.

Mar 11th 2003

spring is in the air

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I can certainly tell that spring is fast approaching. Today has been one of those great ’spring in Atlanta’ days. My routine today was also eerily similar to what I used to do a few years ago when I was still in school.

Work was fairly uneventful today. I made more tweaks and fixes to the exchange code I’m unit testing. I also did some work in “ClearCase”:http://www.rational.com/products/clearcase/, changing the directory structure for a few packages. We went into the midtown area for lunch to a ‘chicken shack’ place next door to “Fat Matt’s Rib Shack”:http://atlanta.citysearch.com/profile/3015340/. I had chicken fingers which were pretty good.

I left work early today at 4pm for a change. By this time of day, it was sunny and 72 degrees out. The sky was crisp and some of the trees have started to bloom in brilliant pink and ash-white leaves. I drove home with the windows down and the sunroof open. I also finished listening to “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets unabridged book-on-CD”:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0807281948/qid=1047475149/sr=2-3/ref=sr_2_3/104-3820842-7804712 that Craig lent me. Listening to the book is almost better than reading it. You still feel much more connected with the characters than you do if you had watched the movie and the great thing about listening to the book is that you can do it while driving. My commute for the past two weeks has been _enjoyable_ simply because I’ve been listening to Harry Potter. Craig promised to send me books three and four as soon as I send him back the first two.

I went grocery shopping at “Publix”:http://www.publix.com/ before going home. When I got home, I unloaded the groceries and changed into my workout clothes. I spent the next hour in the gym. After working out I fired out the outdoor gas grill. I’ve been using that grill for about five years now and it is really falling apart. Granted that they have replaced certain parts, but the ‘hull’ is all rusted out and it looks as if it’s going to disintegrate at any moment. I cooked a chicken breasted marinated in a ‘Hawaiian’ sauce. I also grilled a sweet onion. I learned a trick from Casey about grilling onions so I tried that today. I cut out a cone-shaped ‘core’ from the top part of the onion and stuffed brown sugar and butter inside it. Then I wrapped it in tin-foil and left it on the grill for about ten minutes. It came out pretty good.

While I ate dinner I watched the news and caught up on some different websites. After dinner, I cleaned up the kitchen and took a shower. Around 9:30 or 10pm I went to bed because I was very tired.

Mar 15th 2003

finally a backup strategy that works

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I spent all day today completing many personal tasks I have previously set for myself:

* Upgrade to Movable Type 2.63.
* Flesh out ‘”about me”:/jeff/about.php’ page.
* Implement backup strategy for turing and freeside.
* Flesh out webalizer report.
* Archive digital camera photos.

Still left to complete are:

* Configure prelude and shorewall.
* Rip & Send Harry Potter books to Craig.
* Go though all old MP3’s and import.
* Develop long term home buying strategy.
* Investigate KSU photography course.
* Dump everything to backup HD and remove it offsite.

The upgrade to Movable Type 2.63 was trivial since I was already at version 2.6, I just dumped in the new version. Doing that, however, I lost a patch I put in myself to place an ‘alt’ tag when uploading a popup picture. I need to post something on the MT forums about this problem as it causes the XHTML valuator to fail.

Someone had mentioned to me that my “About Jeff”:/jeff/about.php page was really sparse so I spent some time updating it with some more details.

I updated the webalizer configuration to provide some more meaningful information like refers and search strings that hit my site.

I also archived most of my digital camera photos to CD-R. Doing that filled up 8 CD-R’s and I have about 2 discs worth that I haven’t archived yet.

A big project that took most of the day unfortunately was implementing a solid backup solution for both freeside (WinXP desktop box) and turing (linux server). I tackled freeside first. I created three new ’scheduled tasks’:

# Full Backup which runs every Monday at 2am with the following command:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe backup
"@C:\Documents and Settings\Jeff\My Documents\Documents\Backups\freeside_backup_selections.bks" 
/d "Full Backup" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /hc:off /m normal 
/j "Full Backup" /l:s /f "\TURING\backup\freeside_backup.bkf"

# Incremental Backup which runs every weekday atg 2am except for Monday with the following command:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\ntbackup.exe backup 
"@C:\Documents and Settings\Jeff\My Documents\Documents\Backups\freeside_backup_selections.bks" 
/a /d "Incremental Backup" /v:no /r:no /rs:no /hc:off /m incremental 
/j "Incremental Backup" /l:s /f "\TURING\backup\freeside_backup.bkf"

# Monthly Copy which runs on the first day of every month with the following command:

1	copy \TURING\backup\freeside_backup.bkf \TURING\backup\monthly

I’m backing up directly to a samba share on turing so the files get backed up to a physically separated computer. Of course, they are still connected via Ethernet and both sit literally next to each other, but this insulated me from a catastrophic failure localized to just freeside. My offsite backup solution is to dump everything on a spare HD and store it somewhere other than my apartment. With the weekly full and daily incrementals, I have up to six days of buffer to recover from a blunder or else I drop back to the previous monthly. The main reason I’m going incrementals and not full backups everyday like I used to is that I want to have the ability to recover from corruption which would otherwise be overwritten by the previous days full backup.

freeside_backup_selections.bks basically tells it to backup everything in “My Documents” except for ‘My Music’ and the digital camera directory of ‘My Pictures’. The full backup is about 800 Megs. All of the incrementals are cataloged into the same file so restoring is fairly trivial.

Now onto turing: Before I was doing a full backup everyday to the same using zip. Now, I wrote a shell script which is executed every day at 10am:

#!/bin/bash
##
## backup.sh  -  Backup control script
##
## Usage:  backup.sh
##
 
 
## Variables
BACKUPDIR="/backup"
INCFILE="${BACKUPDIR}/.backup_incremental"
DOW=`date +%a`
DOM=`date +%d`
BACKUPFILE="turing_backup_${DOW}.tar.gz"
BACKUP_LOG="${BACKUPDIR}/turing_backup_${DOW}_log.txt"
 
BACKUP_FILES="\
/var/log \
/etc \
/root \
/home/jeff \
/kunden/homepages/14/d89824769/htdocs \
/var/spool/mail \
/usr/local \
/home/dl \
/var/lib/mysql \
"
 
EXCLUDE_FILES="\
var/lib/mysql/mysql.sock \
"
 
if [ ${DOW} = "Sun" ]; then
        #echo "DEBUG: it's time for a full backup, removing state file"
        rm -f ${INCFILE}
        LABEL="turing FULL backup on ${DOW}: `date`"
        if (( $? != 0 )); then
                echo -e "command, 'rm -f ${INCFILE}' failed: $?"
                exit 255
        fi
else
        LABEL="turing INCREMENTAL backup on ${DOW}: `date`"
fi
 
tar \
        --create \
        --verbose \
        --preserve-permissions \
        --gzip \
        --file ${BACKUPDIR}/${BACKUPFILE} \
        --listed-incremental=$INCFILE \
        --label ${LABEL} \
        --exclude ${EXCLUDE_FILES} \
        ${BACKUP_FILES} \
        > ${BACKUP_LOG} 2>&1
 
if (( $? != 0 )); then
        echo -e "Backup UN-Successfull: $?"
        exit 255
fi
 
if [ ${DOM} = "01" ]; then
        echo -e "DEBUG: Performing monthly copy..."
        cp -f ${BACKUPDIR}/turing_backup_Sun.tar.gz ${BACKUPDIR}/monthly
        if (( $? != 0 )); then
                echo -e "copy to monthly directory failed: $?"
                exit 255
        fi
fi

First thing it does is to see if today is Sunday. If it is, it will remove the ’state’ file tar uses to determine incremental backup info. Then it launches into backing up the specified directories to a tar file. After it’s done, it checks to see if today is the first of the month. If so, it backs up the last full backup to the monthly archive directory.

Mar 16th 2003

getting a lot done

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I spent most of the day today doing a deep spring cleaning of my apartment. I dusted and polished and vacuumed. I also did a very deep cleaning of my bathroom as well as all my laundry. I also filed and organized all the crap that builds up on my breakfast bar countertop.

I also went through all 15 CDs of the first two Harry Potter books and ripped them to my HD. Now I need to send them back to Craig.

I also realized that I had wrongly configured Outlook to use “jeff@billimek.co” as my email instead of “jeff@billimek.com”. Apparently this caused most outgoing emails to never be delivered. I know Tara got one because she replied to it, but a couple of people told me they never heard back from me. I wonder if Tara ever got my second email? Obviously I fixed Outlook as soon so I found out.

I also got my butt kicked again today by linux and its stupid “shorewall”:http://www.shorewall.net/ firewall. It seems that if I want to enable ip forwarding, I have to live with the firewall. This by itself isn’t a bad thing but the default firewall configuration is so restrictive that it rejects nearly everything coming from inside the local network which is silly.

This firewall has been a thorn in my side now for a long time. I even suspect that it has been the reason I’ve been getting some cryptic BSOD’s in XP. A few times now I’ve experienced degraded network performance from my XP box (which is masqed behind the linux box) and when I start playing with the connection on the linux side, BAM I get a BSOD. Of course part of it was my fault too I admit. For whatever reason I had configured the local net to be 192.168.0.x instead of 192.168.1.x. The hundreds of kernel martian messages that I suppressed should have clued me in on this. However, even after fixing this snafu, I still had problems with shorewall. My only choice is to print out the documentation and burn a few hours learning it so I can properly configure it.

I also got an email from Michele today. She basically said that she now accepts that everything is over and is ready to move on with her life. I think that’s closure.

I don’t know where the day went. Even though I got a lot done, I still feel as if the day went by too quickly.

Mar 18th 2003

bad news

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While I was getting ready to leave for work this morning I got a call from Mom on my cell phone. She told me that she spoke with her sister last night who found out from my grandfather has been taken off chemo therapy for his lung cancer. Apparently he wasn’t responding well to the therapy so they stopped administering it. She told me that they only gave him two months to live. He has lung cancer, likely from asbestos from when he worked on ships. Mom told me that she is planning on going out to visit with her parents the first weekend in April and wanted to know if I could go along too. Of course I said I would and we will be making plans to go out there either Friday evening or Saturday morning.

When I got into work, I jumped right into prepping for our big code build tomorrow. While I was working, Larry sent me an IM stating that Mom called him last night. He said that he is planning on going to visit our grandparent’s weekend after next. He asked if I could make it out there the same weekend. Even though I’m going to be going out with Mom the weekend after that, I agreed. I’ll probably fly in first thing Saturday morning and then come back Saturday evening.

It was pretty frustrating at work today. We still had code which didn’t even compile and we’re supposed to be building tomorrow morning. The culprit was the ‘operated as operated by’ service that Bob has been working on. Bob was out sick yesterday and today. Fortunately he had all of the fixes made in his view, but didn’t check the code in yet. So I unreserved his checkouts (using the ‘cleartool unreserve’ command from within his view) and then checked in the code in my own view.

Jegan and I were both wrestling with getting a true ‘dtmo’ test to go through all of the engines which at the end of the day I still couldn’t do. Jegan expressed his concern that we are going to be promoting a lot of code for system test that hasn’t been adequately tested. I guess we’ll find out how bad it is on Friday.

After I got home, I played Asheron’s Call 2 for a little while as this is the last night before the patch that renders my class (Tumerok Feral Intendant) uber nerfed. I’m debating on sticking with feral after the changes or switching to melee/healer. I’ll have to see what I like better after the patch tonight.

I got a screenshot of a butcher shereth up-close near Whitebay:

Before I went to bed I made a tweak to my dhcpd configuration. Previously the lease expired every 6 hours or so which was really low and clogging up my logs with messages every time the lease was renewed. I looked into a way to make it permanent but it looks as if WinXP will default to a 12 hour lease if the dhcpd server doesn’t assign one. So, I gave the lease expiration time some ridiculously high number (like 100000000000 seconds). This appeared to be too large as it rolled over:
[code]Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . : billimek.com
Description . . . . . . . . . . . : Broadcom NetXtreme Gigabit Ethernet
Physical Address. . . . . . . . . : 00-E0-18-D4-AE-5C
Dhcp Enabled. . . . . . . . . . . : Yes
Autoconfiguration Enabled . . . . : Yes
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.2
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DHCP Server . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.1.1
DNS Servers . . . . . . . . . . . : 204.117.214.10
199.2.252.10
Lease Obtained. . . . . . . . . . : Tuesday, March 18, 2003 11:07:45 PM
Lease Expires . . . . . . . . . . : Friday, December 13, 1901 3:45:53 PM[/code]

Mar 19th 2003

much ado about nothing

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Today we were supposed to start doing our big code build for system test. Since Ram is the new ‘build master’ I had him do everything while I observed and mentored.

On Monday I sent out a request to all developers to have any code changes required for this build to be tested and checked-in by midnight Tuesday night. This morning around 8:20am Ram and I labeled all of the code on the development branch (/main/revp_1.2/LATEST). After we labeled we began the code merge over to the release branch (/main/revp_1.2_release/LATEST). While we were merging, Ram did a quick check and noticed some checkins from the MTR team 5 minutes after we labeled. We decided to call them just to confirm that the checkins they did were not necessary for the build. They said that indeed these were necessary bugfixes as the bug was a showstopper. This in itself was a little frustrating because they didn’t bother to tell us that they were fixing a showstopper and if we continued to build based on the midnight deadline, we would have never picked up the changes. Then, a few minutes later they said that no, we don’t need to pick up the changes. It was all very confusing.

By this time I was in a team lead meeting and I brought this up to their lead, Rodney. He told me that he didn’t know anything about this but would get back to me. After the meeting, Rodney came back and said they have a lot of bugfix changes for us to pick up for the build, but they need to test them first. He said it would probably be no later than an hour.

So I lost my temper today and let it get the best of me over stupid shit like another team having additional bugfix code changes. What a waste of energy to get all worked up over. In retrospect it really doesn’t matter that they were late. We still allocated three full days for the build and will likely meet this deadline. I really need to mellow out over some things I guess. That’s a new goal for myself that I’ve filed away in my brain.

When I got home, I played a little Asheron’s Call 2 because it was patch day today. I did the one-time skill reset to Nokie the Lugian. I don’t know if I’ll play him again, but I’d like to start with a clean slate. I only played for about an hour as Noke the Tumerok Feral Intendant. I wasn’t too impressed with the changes. It’s just not as fun anymore.

I spent the rest of the evening glued to the TV watching the news. They started a countdown toward 8pm (that was Saddam’s time-limit to get out of the country). 8pm came and went and the whole time they had a live shot of downtown Baghdad. Then it came. There were reports of explosions and a few moments later the word came that Bush was going to address the nation at 9:30pm. He gave a speech basically saying that the war has begun. As the night went on, there wasn’t more news except for the speculation that the early explosions was an ‘attack of opportunity’ because they had reason to believe that Saddam and his two sons were in a certain bunker which was apparently hit with the ‘bunker buster’ bombs. The speculation was that Saddam may have been taken out.

With reluctance I pulled myself away from the news and went to bed.

Mar 20th 2003

building all day long

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As soon as my alarm went off at 6am, I turned on the TV in my bedroom to get caught up on the war news. Not much happened over night.

I got into work around 8:30am. Around 9am, Ram and I continued with the build. As we started building, Alex approached us about another showstopper bugfix he had checked in. This caused us to start over on the build for some of the components, setting us back some.

We worked at it all day, not stopping until 5:30pm. We had snags throughout the day, of course. Most of our problems were packaging definitions that needed to be updated which required us to rebuild some of the components more than once.

Ram was doing all the work while I supervised. He seems to be picking it up fairly well, so I have a lot of confidence that he will be able to work unaided the next time we do a build. I’m happy Ram is such an enthusiastic and quick learner.

As soon as I got home I tuned into Fox News to watch the war unfold. It was a bit of a letdown tonight since the promised ’shock & awe’ campaign had not happened yet. There was speculation about the possibility it may not be necessary as the Saddam regime may have already collapsed.

The only thing the news networks were showing was choppy, low-resolution, lossy-compressed satellite-phone video feeds from reporters traveling with an armor division as the drove into Iraq. It was pretty cool to see that the military is allowing live video directly from the battlefield.

I also spent some time researching different specializations for AC2 tumeroks. I’m seriously considering respeccing Noke into a melee/invoker or melee/healer.

Mar 21st 2003

airlines rally

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Like yesterday, as soon as my alarm went off at 7am I turned on the TV and got caught up on what happened with the war in Iraq while I was sleeping. Because it was dawn in Iraq when I went to bed, not much happened due to the daylight.

I got into work around 8:30 and had a voice-mail from Carole. She gave me an update on our testing strategy. We may not be starting the ‘build 2′ test on Monday because the testing group is still wrapping up the ‘build 1′ test.

There was a problem last night with the ‘edd1′ component build. Ram said he was going to stay until it completed and then kick off the last component, edd_controller. Unfortunately the edd1 component never completed, it didn’t even fail. There was a problem with it. I suspected that we had a missing line in the Makefile causing the clearmake spinning out of control in an infinite loop. Sure enough this was the problem. I fixed it and rebuilt the last two components.

After they completed, Ram and I sent off a deployment request to the mid-tier engineering group. While we waited we also built the configuration component. After that all we could do was wait.

By this time it was around 10am. I checked the real-time intraday chart of DAL because I was worried it would sell off after the run-up the past few days (due to the war). To my delight, it opened slightly higher.

The rest of the day was an incredible day for DAL and most of the other airlines. With the war turning out so well, there was a major sell off of cude oil. Because airlines are so sensitive to oil prices, they skyrocketed throughout the day. DAL was up to around $11.40/share - a 28% gain for the day. On 3-12 Delta was really low on fears that a possible war could decimate an already crippled airline industry. In the span of about twenty minutes I was able to:

# Initiate a $3,000 transfer from my ING Direct savings account to my USAA checking account.
# Initiate a $3,000 transfer from my USAA checking account to my Fidelity Roth IRA account, reaching the yearly Roth IRA contribution limit.
# Purchase 425 shares of DAL at $6.84/share.

This transaction added to my existing DAL position bringing it to 1025 shares. Because I got it so cheap, it lowered my overall break-even price substantially. Because of the action today I’ve been in a euphoric state. My original intent of starting this Roth IRA was to help with a first-time home purchase. I’ve already got a 401(k) which I’m already maxxing out my pre-tax contributions to. It’s amazing how the performance of a stock can put me in such a great mood.

Because Casey was out of the office today (I was told he went to Canada this morning) we went to a restaurant nearby called ‘”623″:http://home.attbi.com/~mjhapp/’ in downtown Hapeville with Brian, Susan, and Bob. The food was good (I had the hot ham and swiss sandwich), but the hot-looking waitress was even better. Whoever invented the low-rider jeans and tops that expose the midriff is a genius! I don’t know why, but seeing the exposed belly-button region on most girls makes my pulse race.

After lunch I saw Carole. I updated her on the build status. She said that she’ll probably leave around 1pm. She took a vacation day today and still came into work for half of the day. That woman works too much.

Ram and I spent the rest of the afternoon working out configuration issues with the build. We did several config component install and activations to a special tux domain on our development server. Eventually we hit a wall with all of the services core dumping at bootup. It was at this point that I decided to call it a day.

I left early today around 2:30. It was one of those perfect spring days today. The sun was shining and it was 70 degrees. My investment was doing great, the market looks to be finally turning around, and the United States is kicking ass in Iraq. I couldn’t ask for a better day.

I got my oil change at a car wash/quick lube place on Windy Hill and Cobb Parkway. When I drove up to the oil change place, an attractive surfer-chick looking girl took my info. She was one of the mechanics doing the oil changes. That was weird. While I was waiting for my $35 oil change in the lounge, I wrote yesterday’s journal entry in my iPAQ PDA. The TV was tuned to CNN (covering the war) which everyone was watching intently. After the oil change, I drove next door to the car wash place and got a $15 car wash.

While I waited, I tried to call mom at work, at home, and on her cell phone. I couldn’t reach her. I was planning on going over to their new house this afternoon but I guess not.

James and I were planning on going to Saint Maarten tomorrow, but James had to cancel, so I’m going to San Antonio instead to visit Craig. I called Craig to confirm. The plan is to take the 8:40am flight tomorrow, arriving at 10am central time.

When I got home I immediately tuned to “Fox News”:http://www.foxnews.com/ to watch the war with Iraq. Apparently I missed the ’shock and awe’ (I’m really getting sick of that term) campaign in which 1,200 cruise missiles were fired earlier today. Baghdad was bombed extensively. The navy seals captured a major oil platform thing and thousands of Iraqi troops were surrendering.

I logged into Sojourn for about an hour and helped Digivov debug an auto-rescue tinyfuge script. After that I played “Asheron’s Call 2″:http://microsoftgamesinsider.com/ac2/default.htm the rest of the night - the first time in a long time that I played extensively. I joined up with two of my allegiance members and we did the ‘golden age’ quest but unfortunately the dungeon portal was broken with the March patch and we couldn’t do it. Shame on the Turbine QA team for not catching the bug.

I got pretty fed up with the nerfed feral intendant and decided to respec to a melee/feral. I carefully researched all the skills I would have to buy and then did the one-time ‘/skills reset’. The very first thing I did was go to Whitebay in Livnak, summoned three minors, and attacked a hunter shereth. As a feral I would most likely get my ass kicked, but I easily killed the shereth as an invoker. The minors hit so fast that all I need to do is tank (hitting stolen youth and hunger) while they turn my opponent into dog-food. I was very impressed. I took a picture of me (Noke) and my three minors:

I decided to attempt the new omishan weapon quest introduced this month. I headed over to the starting point and saw some other players there as well. They asked if I wanted to team up with them. Even though I knew I could solo the quest, I joined them for the companionship anyway. We made our way over to a dungeon entrance and began to slaughter the local monsters in search of a key that would open a special chest at the bottom. While we were killing, looking for these rare keys, I killed a quest-starter monster which tasked us to slay the boss at the bottom of the dungeon. Eventually we each found a key and we all proceeded inside the dungeon.

The dungeon was a trivial conquest and each of us got a special turquoise activation crystal from the chest. After that we journeyed to a new ‘armory’ dungeon where we gave the crystal to a ‘weaponsmith golem’ who tasked us to give a special rose token to another golem at the bottom of this dungeon, which we did. This other golem taught us a special quest recipe to construct a special weapon token. The recipe called for sec ‘white pyreals’ which are a rare drop from bururn. This is where the real time sink reveals itself.

I was up until 3:40am working on the quest. I eventually found all six white pyreals and constructed the special sword. The stats aren’t all that great but at least it looks cool.

Mar 22nd 2003

Craig’s new girlfriend

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Because I was up until 3:40am last night, it was difficult for me to wake up this morning. In fact, I decided to forego trying to make it to the airport in time for the 8:40am flight to San Antonio.

I took a shower and threw my sandals, shorts, and a t-shirt into my backpack and headed to the airport. I parked at the park-and-ride, checked in, and strolled to the gate (B27). As I was walking up to the gate, I saw my name on the cleared list for first class, seat 2C. As I saw this, they announced the boarding for first class. So, without even breaking my stride, I continued walking towards the gate and was the first one on the plane. That was the first time I’ve been able to walk up to the gate and get on the plane right away - it was pretty cool.

I was still dead tired from a lack of sleep so I slept on the plane and also wrote in my journal on my “iPAQ”:http://www.compaq.com/products/iPAQ/ PDA. When we arrived in San Antonio at 11:55am (central time), I called Craig who was on his way to the airport. As soon as I walked outside to the curb, Craig pulled up and I got inside. With him in the front seat with a girl named Christy. She was a friend of his that works for a dermatologist in “Kerrville”:http://www.kerrville.org/. We went to a local BBQ place for lunch and I had the beef BBQ sandwich.

After lunch we went to a local mall where we went to “PetsMart”:http://www.petsmart.com/ where Craig bought a bunch of stuff for his new dog (a sharpei) named ‘Spliff’. His Mom is bringing it down from Dallas tomorrow afternoon. After pets mart we went to Toys-R-Us and got the 20th Century edition of “Trivial Pursuit”:http://www.trivialpursuit.com/.

We went back to Craig’s place and watched a little bit of the war news (at my urging). A little while later we played Trivial Pursuit for a couple of hours. Like I remember from New Years Eve, the questions were a lot more difficult then the previous Trivial Pursuit editions we’ve played. Craig and Christy concurred.

Around 4:30 Christy left. Craig and I had a few drinks of “Captain Morgan Private Stock”:http://www.rum.com/products/private_stock.jsp and “Coke”:http://www.coke.com/ - they was very tasty. Craig got a call from Angela who wanted to know what the plans were for the evening. Angela is a girl Craig met on “Lavalife”:http://www.lavalife.com/ and he’s been saying great things about her. She’s a 25-year old neurobiology student at “UTSA”:http://www.utsa.edu/ who loves to ski. He seems more excited about her than I’ve seen him about any other girl. While he was on the phone with her, Alex called and announced that he is going to be leaving work soon and will be coming over around 7pm. We all made plans to have Thai dinner around 8pm and then go race sprint cars at “Malibu Castle”:http://www.malibugrandprix.com/sa/.

I took an hour nap (I was tired from both the alcohol and lack of sleep the night before) since it looks like we’ll be out late. Alex showed up at 7pm and Craig and I got changed (I wore slacks and a blue button-up shirt Craig gave me) and we all left to pick up Angela. She lives across the street from “USAA”:https://www.usaa.com/ near the medical center. In person she looks a lot better than the online pictures Craig showed me - I was certainly impressed. She has choppy-short neck-length blonde hair and brown eyes.

Dinner was uneventful and when we got to Malibu Castle, we each bought three tickets for the sprint cars. I was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and was pretty cold while we waited since the night air was probably 50 degrees.

The car racing was fun, but the lawnmower-powered sprint cars were too slow to be any fun. The best part about it was to try to take turns really fast to make the car fishtail. When we finished racing, we went inside and played a couple of rounds of air hockey.

When we left Malibu Castle, Angela recommended that we go to a bar near where she lives. We went there and I was disappointed to see that they only served beer, granted they serve like 160 different kinds of beer, but its still beer. Craig knew my distaste for beer and ordered me a pear cider. It tasted like slightly sweet beer. Other than that, the place was really nice and we had a good time. The cocktail waitresses were wearing these incredibly-short skirts with knee-high boots. That was really cool. Craig and Alex got drunk.

I talked with Angela some more and really grew to like her. She’s smart, perceptive, and just a wild spirit. There was one thing that raised a flag in my mind though. She reminded me a lot of Jen who while smart and pretty, but seemed too much of a free spirit. I think Craig made a good choice and I certainly hope things work out. Seeing that quality of girl from lavalife makes me want to give it a try. Since Craig had like 6 drinks, I drove us home. We dropped off Angela first and Craig walked her inside. Alex and I waited like 20 minutes for Craig to return. He was having a commitment discussion with her. Apparently she has problems committing to a relationship - there’s the hook. That’s the potential flaw I guess. Only time will tell if things work out with them.

Mar 23rd 2003

the uncertainty of war

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It turned out to be a sunny & beautiful spring day in Texas today. I woke up to a blazing sun and 75-degree temps. Since Craig and Alex were still sleeping, I went into Craig’s study and checked up on my websites. I had difficulty logging onto my computer via remote desktop - it timed out. I logged into webmin and took a look. After some network tests, I came to the conclusion that freeside (the WinXP box) was locked up as the connection was still established according to arp, but nothing was going through. If it was powered down, arp wouldn’t even register the NIC in freeside. This frustrated me because I had no control of fixing it remotely.

Around 10am Craig and Alex woke up and we went to subway for lunch. When we got back to Craig’s place we watched the news some more. Unfortunately the war effort has run into several snags over the past 24 hours. A US Patriot missile battery shot down a British jet. Around a dozen soldiers were killed. The Marines were encountering strong resistance in the small towns as they advance north. An Iraqi commando group feinted surrender only to open fire on the marines, killing like 10. A maintenance convoy was captured when they went off course. Iraqi TV broadcasted the captured soldiers as well as the five of six dead soldiers who appeared to be executed (bullet-hole in the foreheads). They ‘interviewed’ four of the captured soldiers asking them their name and where they were from. The soldiers being interviewed looked scared and their eyes darted back and fourth between the interviewer and an unknown person off-screen (who I presume was holding a gun to them). The Pentagon claimed that the tape was a violation of the Geneva convention and the news networks stopped broadcasting it. I never saw it personally but everyone in the media who did see it compared it to the footage from September 11th, so I imagine it didn’t go over very well.

With things on the war front not going so well (at least compared to Thursday and Friday), I can only imagine the stock market reaction tomorrow. I think it’s going to be a bloodbath. Alex left around noon and Craig fell asleep watching the news. It was so depressing to watch nothing but bad news from Iraq. I took a shower and when I got out, Craig was awake watching Jerry McGuire. Around 3:00 we left for the airport since my flight was at 3:40. Because it was so nice outside we took Craig’s 1969 GTO convertible (with the top down of course).

When I got to the airport, I checked in and headed to the gate. After they boarded everyone they paged this one guy several times. I heard the gate agent call my name (apparently I was the only standby they paged) and said that there may be a seat for me. I didn’t realize the flight was going to be that tight. Finally the agent told me to follow him and he led me on the plane and told me to take the last open seat which was like row 17. I settled in and considered myself lucky that I was the very last one to make it on the plane. I got out my book and began reading when a few minutes later the same gate agent was standing over me asking me to come with him. Uh oh.

He led me to the front of the plane where another guy was - the guy they had been paging. He finally showed up, so I had to give my seat up to him. So I missed the flight. I called Craig and asked him if he wanted company for a few hours since the next flight wasn’t until 7:30pm. He came about ten minutes later and picked me up. He was actually going to go out and visit Angela at a Barnes & Noble bookstore where she is studying for a neurobiology test. Craig let me drive his car which was fun. It was a little scary at first because I’m not used to non-power brakes. You actually had to use some force when braking.

We went to the bookstore and got some coffee at the starbucks next-door and talked with Angela for a bit. After that, we left and went back to Craig’s house where his Mom was going to be showing up at 5pm with his new dog, Spliff.

Carole (Craig’s Mom) showed up with Spliff. We fed him and gave him water and showed him around the house and the yard. Around 6:15pm we left again for the Airport. Craig dropped me off and I checked in again. When I got to the gate, they boarded the small 50-seat ASA Canadian regional jet. After they boarded everyone, the gate agent said that not everyone was going to be on, but he would try his best. Fortunately I was one of the first ones they called and got a seat in the middle of the plane. The plane ride back was really uncomfortable. The ambient temperature in the plane was like 50 degrees and I was freezing.

After I arrived in Atlanta around 10:30pm, I saw Keith and Tony (Casey’s friends) on the train to the main terminal. They had just come back from Austin. I went back to my car and drove home without incident. When I got home I saw my computer was froze on the login screen. What was interesting is that I could move my mouse around some for about 10 seconds and then it froze up all the way. That’s not good.

Mar 26th 2003

the code review

Published by Jeff 0 Comments

I woke up from a really cool dream around 6am. I battled with my alarm clock’s ’snooze’ feature until about 6:30am when I finally woke up, got ready, and went to work.

Today was a meetings day. Carole called an 8am with the other leads as well as the testing team. We discussed what we wanted to pick up for our next code build this morning. We debated for a while and finally came up with a strategy.

As soon as we got out of the meeting, Ram and I went over the game plan for the day. Since he’s had some real experience, he was able to do everything on his own. This was good because I was in meetings for most of the day. I gave him some direction and asked him to page me whenever there were problems.

At 9am, we had our employee weekly staff meeting. As usual, we covered about ten minutes of content in sixty-minutes of meeting time. At the beginning of the meeting I asked Scott to print out some of our exchange valuation unit testing scenarios for our 11am code review.

I had about fifteen minutes between the 9am meeting and my 10am meeting, so I printed out the rose model and rose code documentation. I printed out five copies of each and took them to the meeting with me so I could organize the paperwork. In the 10am team lead meeting we somehow spent an hour going over time estimates. I’m never sure where the time goes.

When 11am rolled around, I headed to the code review. It was scheduled from 11am to 1pm. Carole was going to provide lunch. She was late to the meeting, so we got started without her. Casey came in a few minutes later. Elizabeth was the reviewer. The code review started pretty well. All of the standard things were covered with no problems.

When we designed the Exchange Valuation engine, we decided early on the keep the rational rose model synchronized with the source code. This means that any _interface_ changes (changing a method signature, adding an argument, removing a method, etc) would result in us making them in the rose model directly. Then, we would use rose to ‘generate’ the code, like we did initially. Because we never removed the rose-specific controls and comments from the source code, all of our existing implementation code that we wrote would be preserved. This is how we proceeded through the development lifecycle for the engine. It worked really well with keeping our ‘tech design’ and physical implementation synchronized. None of the other engines did this. They basically threw away their tech design once they began coding, and their rose model quickly became outdated and inaccurate.

Our decision was not without controversy. During the review, Elizabeth asked why we took this approach. I explained our desire to keep the documentation current. She argued that the controls rose placed in the code results in almost unreadable code. We all disagreed, having worked on it for the past few months. Elizabeth argued that since our approach was different than other groups, it would be harder to maintain.

Around this time Carole came in and was intently listening to the discussion. Casey spoke up and argued that he had a problem with keeping locked-down source code tied to a model that isn’t necessarily locked down. His problem was that as soon as someone makes a code change independent of the model, that we’ve broken the link. They were all good points and Carole finally spoke up that no documentation is better than bad documentation.

We all went back and fourth on this for a while and finally settled that we should decide at some point during the development lifecycle to intentionally break the link. At this time, we feel that the entrance to system test might be a good time.

After the code review, Ram and I worked on the code build some more. The testing team ran into some problems with what we built in the morning, and we had to build something else again. This had a problem in Tivoli, so we had to build it one more time. Finally around 5:30pm the testing team managed to get a ticket all the way though all of the engines.

Mar 28th 2003

Meeting Larry

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

I was up pretty late last night. I didn’t make it to bed until 1am. I was up so late playing Sojourn, something I hadn’t done for a while. It was fun, my guild-mates and I went up to Avernus. Avernus is one of the few places to go to now that is really fun. With Nokie being a rogue, I can really shine there. Due to his awesome sneak amulet from Tiamat and maxed hide skill, he can move around without impunity. It’s great walking around such a hostile and dangerous place like you own it. We had a really good group too, so we were dishing out ’shock & awe’ to the demon squads there. This trip was particularly fun because Corth (a lawyer from New York) gave me a really cool loot item from there: the gloves of the tanar’ri skin. These are 2-hit, 2-dam, protection-from-cold gloves that I’ve wanted for several months now. We also managed to get the coveted amulet of sight which was a great discovery. It was also really fun because Gargauth added an awesome proc to the enchanted khanjari dagger. It can randomly proc one of three effects:

# +10 hitroll and extra hit-points
# +10 damroll and extra hit-points
# +10 hitroll, +10 damroll, and h