Monthly Archive for June, 2003

Today for lunch we played horseshoes at Casey’s.

The players:

Casey

Scott

Alex

James

Brian

And of course me.

The competition was intense. The teams were: Casey/Brian, James/Scott, and Me/Alex. The first match was Casey/Brian vs. James/Scott. It was a slaughter. James and Scott didn’t have a chance. The second game was Me and Alex vs. Casey and Brian. After a slow start, we were one point away with a score of 2-10. But Alex and I had a second wind and came back to win every consecutive round, finishing the game with a ringer thrown by me. The final score: 12-10. Casey and Brian were speechless.

Everyone gaping in awe at the stunning victory by Alex and I

The next game was James & Scott vs. me and Alex. It was a close match but the fates were against us and we lost 10-11. The next match was James & Scott vs. Casey and Brian. This proved to be an easy win again for Casey and Brian.

Half-way through that match, the FedEx guy showed up with Casey’s new digital camera. Play was suspended while Casey signed for the camera (and of course opened the box).

The final match was Casey & Brian vs. Alex and me. It was an intense game. Early on Alex and I both threw ringers in the same round. Casey and Brian were preparing for a quick end, but then Alex and I had trouble maintaining our winning streak. We lost the match 8-11.

I spent most of the morning testing and tweaking the scripts I wrote yesterday afternoon. Originally I wanted to package up my scripts (as well as Jegan’s two scripts) with our ‘configuration component’ as some of these scripts are intended to massage the configuration files and thus it seems logical to me that they would be bundled with them.

However, that’s not how it works. The configuration component is special and it will not allow you to package scripts with it two two reasons:
1) You cannot force the scripts to deploy with the execute bits set.
2) The installation parser operates on ALL of the scripts and will puke as soon as it sees the special characters embedded within the ksh scripts.

So, I don’t have a simple way to deploy the scripts to the system test environment. For the interim, I’ll have the testing team ftp them over until we find a better deployment solution.

Around 11:30am today most of the people in my group left for the Atlanta Braves game at 1pm. Before leaving, I changed into my Abercrombie green cargo shorts and dark blue t-shirt. Some of us met at the Varsity for lunch before the game.

After lunch we drove over to James’s condo to park and Scott drove all of us over to Turner Field in his Expedition. We parked and walked the short distance to the stadium.

This was my first time to Turner Field. It’s a pretty nice stadium. The seats seem a little too cramped together for my taste though. About 15 people from the office showed up and we all sat in the same area.

It was very hot today at the game. Since we were down in the stands, there was no breeze and that made things a lot more stifling. I took my camera long with me and took about 120 photos throughout the day. At one point, Bob, Brian, Casey, and I walked up to the top of the stadium where it was a lot more pleasant. With it being above everything there was a nice breeze.

I’m not a huge baseball fan so the game itself wasn’t all that exciting for me but the lazy afternoon sun and laid back atmosphere made it a really great experience.

After the game I stopped by the large Wolf Camera store in midtown to exchange the camera bag for a larger one.

When I got home I had BBQ chicken marinated in Neuman’s Own caesar salad dressing. I also grilled up an onion bathed in olive oil and brown sugar. It was pretty good.

I finalized my weekend plans with Craig. I’ll be flying out to San Antonio tomorrow after work and then coming back Sunday morning.

I spent the rest of the evening uploading and manipulating photos from the baseball game today. I took a series of 8 photos from the top of the stadium and used the cheapo ‘PhotoStich’ software that came with my camera to stitch them together. I took the photos handheld and with auto exposure. This wasn’t the correct technique for taking panorama-candidate photos but I didn’t have a tripod and I forgot to lock the exposure. Nonetheless, I was pretty happy with the results.

I created a photo album containing some of the photos from today.

Last night Carole paged me asking if I could (at home or at work) activate the build (that Ram did last night) this morning after the 8am deployment. So when I woke up, I knew I wouldn’t get to work before 8am, so I took my time and waited at home for the 8am timeframe. 8am came and went and mid-tier engineering didn’t deploy the build yet.

Around this time I got a page from Ram. He forgot his ID and needed to be signed in. I paged him back indicating that I was still at home and I called Casey asking him if he could sign-in Ram. After about 10 more minutes of no deployment, I paged Ram asking if he could activate the code while I drove into work.

Work today was semi-productive. My ‘task list’ is getting smaller which is a good thing. I now have three main things to work on:
1) Implement partial reissue change request into Exchange as well as modify the currency conversion routines.
2) Do some major performance testing& tuning to all of the 1.2 engines.
3) Complete the ‘1.3′ conceptual architecture document as well as design against the signed-off business requirements.

Some of these tasks are very broad. I think it’s going to be a challenging and rewarding summer.

For lunch today Alex, Brian, Susan, Casey, and I crammed into Casey’s little VW Golf and drove into midtown. We went to Nickiemoto’s and all of us, save Alex, had the same dish: Peking Spicy Chicken. It is so delicious! Unlike everyone else, however, I had mine with noodles instead of rice. I like it better with noodles.

After lunch I completed my FirstCase time entry for the week and sent off my weekly status report. I tentatively requested time off around September 1 because Larry and I are planning on going hiking somewhere around that time. Originally we were thinking about Yellowstone but it looks as if it may be difficult to get there that time of year. So now we are examining the Canadian Rockies (i.e. Banff) or Alaska again.

Around 5:45pm Carole called Casey and I into a meeting to discuss the partial reissue change request. She was interested to know exactly what the problem was. We explained it to her with an example on the whiteboard. She also wanted to know about our time estimates. The bulk of the work will be in the exchange engine and I think it will be a week-long effort. She gave me the nod to unofficially start coding the fix.

I left work around 6pm. I took the Marriott Courtyard shuttle bus to the airport and checked in at the kiosk. For a Friday afternoon the airport was surprisingly empty. I guess the ‘rush hour’ was around 4-5pm.

The flight to San Antonio was very uneventful. Book 6 of the Wheel of Time series is getting pretty good!

When I arrived, I called Craig and he picked me up. Staying with Craig this summer is his 20 year-old cousin, Jeff.

We went straight to dinner from the airport to a Thai place. Craig and Jeff are on the Atkins diet, so they had a lot of meat. I had some delicious chicken fried rice.

When we got back to Craig’s place, we hung out for a while until Alex came over. Then, we debated for an hour about what to do. We ended up not doing much except for certain things and watching Jason and the Argonauts. I went to bed half-way through the movie.

My iPAQ woke me up at 5:45am and I woke up, dressed, and packed. Craig woke up at 6am and he drove me over to the airport. I walked in and was alarmed to see a very long line at the security checkpoint! Originally I planned on checking in at the counter so I could request a window seat. But in light of the long security line, I just used the kiosk so I could quickly get a place in line.

Fortunately the line was moving at a decent pace and I got to the gate before they started boarding. The San Antonio airport has always been such a disappointment. They are doing ‘construction’ around the gates and because of this there is NO waiting area at the gate. So there were 150 people standing around crowding the tiny hallway in front of the gate.

To make matters worse, when they began boarding the first class cabin, a lot of people (like a bunch of sheep) rushed the boarding doors. I had a hard time believing that the 50+ people who were clogging up the boarding doors were actually sitting in first class considering the plane only has 16 first-class seats.

Indeed, the mindless mob clogging up the boarding area (similar to how your toilet gets clogged up) continued to stand in the boarding area, slowing everything down. Not surprising, most of these people were the last to board.

I don’t understand why people who are holding a boarding pass with a seat like ‘15B’ find it necessary to rush the boarding doors and STAND there, blocking everyone else and end up being the last to board anyway! If I had my way, the gate agents would be issued cattle-prods to set things straight!

I managed to get a window seat in first class. I think the days of a hot meal on an airplane are over. In the past when I was in first on this route, I would have been offered a hot omelet. Today I got corn flakes.

I snapped some photos through the window on the flight back.

When I arrived in Atlanta, I took the Marriott shuttle bus back to my office building. Also in the bus was a tall, attractive girl who requested to be dropped off at the Delta GO (General Office). After she got off the bus, the driver asked me why I didn’t get her phone number. I replied, “I think she’s a little out of my league.” He then chastised me for selling myself short. But then he said, ‘Oh I get it. I understand now. I wasn’t going to go there!’ I think he was insinuating that I’m homosexual (which I’m not).

When I got home around 11:30 I unpacked and did laundry and cleaned.

Today was another productive day at work. I spent most of my time working on the Exchange Valuation partial reissue overstatement change request. I’m nearly finished with the coding portion now and am polishing things up.

Mom called me this morning to see if I wanted to go with her and Jim out to Harrisburg to visit her mother the weekend of the 28th. I’m going to try to make that trip.

The usual lunch group wasn’t around when it came time to go to lunch today so Alex and I went over to Wendy’s. We talked about Photoshop, Gnucleus, and Ebay.

Around 4:45pm I headed home. When I got home, I laid down on my bed to rest my eyes. Before I knew what happen, I drifted into a pseudo-sleep state but then the phone rang. It was Jenn. She came over around 6:15pm and we got some things together for tonight.

At about 7pm we headed out to the parking lot to wait for Kati and Josh. Kati is a girl Jenn works with and Josh is Kati’s boyfriend. When they arrived we loaded up my explorer and then headed down to midtown.

Josh was sitting up front during the drive into midtown and he was talking about an activity he participates in called ‘Orienteering‘. It sounds like a lot of fun. You have a map and a compass and a course you’re supposed to follow in the ‘woods’, away from trails. You have to navigate to certain boxes where you mark something to prove that you’ve reached the waypoints. It sounds sort of like geocaching but you don’t use a GPS (that would probably be cheating).

We parked and carried all of our stuff into Piedmont park. It was quite pleasant. There were a lot of people enjoying the park on this sunny afternoon. We made our way to the sports field to stake out a plot of grass. We spread some blankets and got everything arranged. When we sat down there was no one sitting around us, but undoubtedly this would change.

Kati brought some salmon steaks, strawberries, and this really cool picnic backpack. The backpack had 4 wine glasses, a table cloth, 4 napkins, 4 plates, a cheese-cutting board, and a cheese-cutting knife. It was pretty cool. Jenn brought crackers, cheese, and this really incredible white cheese spread. I brought bottled water and white wine.

As the sun started to set, we lounged on the blankets and ate our food. While we were eating, more and more people started to file into the park. About 20% of the people brought dogs with them. I thought this was normal considering Piedmont Park is touted as a ‘dog friendly’ park. However, over the loudspeakers, an announcer requested that people leave all pets at home and if they currently have pets to please move off of the activity field and onto the hillside instead. The announcer insisted that the ability to put on future movies would be in jeopardy if everyone didn’t cooperate. After the announcement none of the pet-owners moved.

After the sun set before it got too dark, I set my camera to 1600 ISO and took this picture of a lit-up building in downtown:

Finally around 8:30 or so the movie started. Today’s movie was ‘2001: A Space Odyssey‘. Because this is a free event, a lot of different types of people came. Sitting behind us were a group of two guys and a girl. They were talking quite loudly. I turned around and saw what looked to be a couple of dozen empty beer bottles sitting in front of them. This would explain their loud behavior. After a while, Kati turned around and requested that they tone it down a bit. Shortly thereafter they left.

About halfway through the movie there were a couple of what I assume to be homeless guys yelling about a lot of different incoherent things. I think they were intoxicated. One was ranting about government conspiracies. A while later, a police officer escorted him out of the park.

The movie was pretty good. I never saw the whole thing before. The most interesting part was the middle. It started out pretty slow, but the middle where HAL 9000 went crazy was the good part. The last part of the movie was only there for people who are stoned. It was a lengthy, drawn out sequence of flashing multi-colored lights.

When the movie ended we packed our stuff up and headed back to the car. We didn’t get back to my place until around 12:30am.

My alarm went off at 5am. I snoozed until 5:30 and the woke up. I took a quick shower and got dressed.

I had a bowl of cereal and packed my backpack. My trusty orange backpack has served me quite well over the past 4 years. I packed a pair of sandals, a change of socks & boxers, my tan Abercrombie cargo shorts, two tshirts, deodorant, toothbrush, toothpaste, my camera and all related gear, my book, and my PDA.

I left the apartment at 6am and drove down the mostly deserted highway to the airport area. I parked in the parking lot for my office building and walked over to the Marriott where I picked up the shuttle bus to the airport. The bus was packed and about 8 of us had to stand.

Once at the airport I checked in with no problems at the kiosk and made my way over to the gate for my 7:30am flight. I was cleared for coach class and when I went to my seat (23C), a guy was sitting in it. I said, “I think I’m in 23C”. He looked up at me with a blank expression on his face and didn’t respond for a few moments. Then he said, “Oh, are you in the middle?” I replied, ‘No, I’m in 23C’. He then shuffled some of his stuff around but I realized he wasn’t moving. I repeated again, “So I think that’s my seat.” He moved over to the middle and I sat down.

The short flight to DCA was pretty uneventful except for the guy sitting next to me had this nasty cough that prevented me from getting any sleep.

I arrived in D.C. just after 9am and went to the nearest restroom in the airport where I changed out of my ‘airplane’ clothes and into my much more comfortable shorts, t-shirt, and sandals. I then proceeded towards the metro station and called Jenn’s cell phone.

She was about ten minutes away so I bought a ‘day pass’ metro card and waited for her.

We met up and took the metro to the White House area. We walked around the White House and surrounding executive offices. It was a beautiful sunny day with bright blue skies. It certainly didn’t seem anything like the forecast which was an 80% change of thunderstorms and overcast conditions.

We headed over to a bakery/coffee shop near the white house called ‘Cosi‘. Jenn got some coffee and we each had a ’squagel’ for brunch.

Afterwards, we walked over to the Renwick gallery museum. They had a special exhibit on Frank Lloyd Wright’s stained glass windows. It was pretty amazing to see these complex and intricate stained glass windows remain in such great condition after 100 years. When we completed this exhibit we walked upstairs to the grand salon’ and were treated to hundreds of American Indian portraits. It was pretty cool. Also in the upstairs area was some more contemporary crafts. My favorite piece here was a chair with one of it’s legs reaching out to grab something.

When we finished with this museum we walked a few blocks to the nearest metro station and rode the train into Chinatown. When we got out of the station, I noticed that all of the store signs (even places like CVS and McDonalds) had Chinese characters next to the english name.

From here we walked over to the ‘International Spy Museum‘. This wasn’t apart of the Smithsonian and we had to buy tickets. It was a hefty $13/person and apparently this museum is very popular. The 12pm block was sold out so we had to buy 1pm tickets and wait around for an hour.

As we walked around inside the ticket area, I was stopped at least three times and told that I wouldn’t be able to take photographs inside the museum. Having my camera slung across my shoulder was only going to get the same thing repeated to me every five minutes, so I packed it away in my backpack.

Jenn and I were pretty tired of lugging around our backpacks and inquired about storing them somewhere. The spy museum staff didn’t have anyplace for us to put them. Then Jenn came up with the brilliant idea of walking across the street to a hotel and storing them there. We went inside the hotel and walked up to the bellhop. We explained that we wanted to store our bags because we were going to the museum and then eating at the hotel afterwards (we lied about the eating part). The guy explained to us that they are only supposed to hold bags for guests but he would make an exception.

With our shoulders un-burdened we went back to the spy museum and waited in line for the 1pm showing. There were a lot of people in line and they were only letting a few in at a time to ease the congestion. When we entered the museum I can see why they charge so much for the tickets. They had a lot of staff working and they had a lot of large flat-panel plasma TV’s all over the walls. Everything looked as if they spent a lot of money. However with the throngs of people cramming the rooms inside the museum, it was evident that they were making a lot of money. The spy museum was pretty cool but it was certainly too crowded.

After going through the museum we got our backpacks from the hotel and took the metro to the archives station near the Smithsonian. From there we headed to the National Museum of American History. We had about a 5 minute wait before we got in due to the security checks.

Because today is flag day, there was a marching band group performing in front of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner‘ flag hanging prominently inside the entrance of the museum. An old lady sitting at a table was handing out American flag lapel pins. Jenn and I headed down to the bottom level to have some ice cream at the ice cream parlor. Unfortunately it is now self-serve so we decided to skip that.

Instead we went to the third floor and saw the firearms and war exhibits. After this, we went down to the basement again and had a late lunch in the cafe just before the closed. We had some stale-looking pizza.

While we were eating, I saw that it was pouring rain outside through the windows. This didn’t bode well to us moving around outside. Fortunately when we finished eating the rain had mostly stopped and it was just a very light drizzle. It actually felt pretty good to be outside since we were pretty hot from walking around all day.

We walked across the mall lawn and into the Freer gallery of art. I’ve never been there before and it was pretty nice. Compared to some of the larger Smithsonian museums, this one was pretty empty. One of the cool things about this gallery was a large wood-paneled room called the ‘Peacock Room‘. The style was quite gaudy and fascinating. The rest of the exhibits were Japanese and Asian art.

Connected to this gallery is the Arthur M. Sackler gallery. We went into this one as well. It was getting close to closing time (5:30pm) so we went through the exhibits rather quickly. There were several interesting Asian and Indian sculptures. We also saw a cool photography exhibit of Raghubir Singh. He traveled all over India in an Indian Ambassador car taking thematic photos of India with some part of the car in the frame.

Around 5:30 the guard ushered us outside where we saw a highly decorated Indian bus.

On our way back to the Smithsonian metro station we stopped to get some soft-serve ice cream to eat on our walk to the metro. We took the train to the foggy bottom station and walked to the hotel.

I had made reservations at the Wyndham City Center hotel. It was pretty nice inside and I was happy with it. We checked in and went up to our room (504). We noticed hidden in a corner of the room was a wadded-up frilly pair of black panties. Jenn was pretty disgusted by this.

We took a short nap, then got cleaned, changed into our ‘airplane clothes’, and headed out for dinner. By the time we left the hotel it was dark outside. We walked a few blocks to Dupont circle and then around that area looking for a place to eat dinner. It was pretty nice outside so we tried to find something with outdoor seating.

We finally came to a place called ‘Mimi’s American Bistro‘. According to Jenn, it is a restaurant/piano bar jointly owned by an Israeli and Palestinian. We were seated outside right away. Dinner was pretty good. Inside the restaurant was a piano bar and I noticed that most of the waitresses were taking turns singing! They actually sounded pretty good! Jenn and I were trying to figure out if they were just doing karaoke or something. She asked our waitress and our waitress said that indeed they really do sing, indicating that it’s a nice change of pace from waiting all the time.

After dinner we walked back to the metro station and took a ride town to Union Station. It was mostly empty inside since it was late (close to midnight). To me it looked just like an airport. There were ticket counters and ‘gate’ where people would board trains. At one gate I saw an old man sitting by himself (I don’t think he was homeless). I guess there are some people who don’t trust flying and travel via train only. In retrospect I should have taken a photo of him sitting in the waiting area by himself because it looked like it would have been a nice scene.

We got back on the metro for the hotel just before midnight. We were both exhausted from a pretty whirlwind day and went straight to bed.

Last night I went through the 250-or-so photographs I took from the trip to D.C. this past weekend. I decided to alter my workflow a little.

Previously: I would import ALL photos directly to Photoshop Album from my camera (retaining their in-camera filenames). I would then go through them inside Album and delete the ones that were definitely not keepers (totally blown out, out of focus, poorly composed). This was problematic because the Album software is very slow to display photos. WinXP’s picture preview thing build into explorer is _much_ faster. Then, I would make a second pass through the photos and ‘edit with Photoshop‘ directly from Album. This would work fine if I did simple editing. However there must be a bug because whenever I do non-trivial editing in Photoshop (like running actions), Album will ‘forget’ that I’m editing the photo and not acknowledge when I’m done editing. This makes it’s built-in ‘edit with Photoshop’ feature pointless. I would then ‘export’ the photos I want to publish as 800×600 downsized images.

Now: I copy all of the photos to a directory on my HD (for example: My Documents\My Pictures\Camera\2003\2003_06142, DC\) and then run ‘Exifer‘ to rename them with a timestamp, thus keeping the photos in order or picture-taking time. I then run through the photos with XP’s preview program, deleting the ones I don’t want. I then make a second-pass through them and copy ‘publish-candidates’ to a ‘modified’ subdirectory. I then edit each file directly in Photoshop, and ’save-as’ the same filename but with a ‘_edited’ suffix before the extension. Then I move all of the edited files back to the directory where I imported the files and import everything into Photoshop Album. I then select all of the edited files (and ones I didn’t have to edit) and ‘export’ as an 800×600 downsized image.

A lot of my DC photos were taken indoors in the museums and as such the light levels were quite low. I was quite disappointed with all of the photos I took with the flash and prefer the available light much more. In order to achieve this, I had to boost the ISO level. In fact, most of my indoor photos were taken at 800 or 1600 ISO. That, combined with the image-stabilizer of my 28-130 lens made it possible to take all of my indoor museum shots handheld. I recently got a Photoshop action which will attempt to filter out noise from high ISO photos. It did a pretty good job. One thing that impressed me a lot was Photoshop’s ‘auto colors’ image adjustment. Because I didn’t bother with setting a custom white balance for the indoor shots, there was an ‘off’ color-cast to most of them due to the types of light used indoors. I’ve yet to see any digital camera that can correctly automatically white-balance indoor lightning. Fortunately Photoshop’s ‘auto colors’ fixed it right up and took a yellowish image back to the correct color-cast.

I put all of my DC photos into an album in my photo gallery.

My eBay auction ended Monday night. I was disappointed that it only went up to $647. Larry’s auction which ended just a week prior for the same camera fetched $690 and I was even including more stuff! Nonetheless, I’m happy that it went as high as it did. I got an email from the winner this afternoon and she proposed sending me a registered check and having me use her corporate UPS account to ship it. This sounds more preferable to PayPal since I don’t trust PayPal very much.

A large group of us took Melissa and Mallick to lunch today in order to celebrate their birthdays. We went to a great Thai place called Surin in Virginia Highlands. I was pretty hungry since I think I forgot to eat dinner last night. I ordered their ‘Thai noodle’ dish and asked for it to be spicy. It was incredibly good. I don’t know if it tasted so good because I was so hungry, but I was stunned by how good the dish was. It was so good I can’t even describe it.

I spent this afternoon tracking down and fixing a bug in Exchange. We were throwing an exception during our data population whenever an incoming currency code was null. This was due to the fact that we need to have that field populated in order to do some currency processing. However, this was causing us to prematurely exit and prevented us from doing some other work early on which would had led us to identify the transaction as ‘deficient’. So my fix was to not throw the exception, and defer handling the situation until we need to.

On my way home I stopped by Publix and got some groceries. When I got home I started some chicken marinating and also started laundry.

Jenn came over in the evening and I grilled up two marinated chicken breasts and we also had a caesar salad and dinner rolls.

Carole was unexpectedly out of the office today. It was a pretty quiet & normal day today. I managed to get a few things done.

After lunch, around 1pm, Jay came by to let me know that the testing team have already started the performance test. I thought that he must surely be mistaken because the plan we sent to Sam (manager of the test team) stated quite clearly that we must turn off logging and start up the monitoring scripts.

I walked over to Jegan’s cube and informed him what Jay just told me. Jegan and I than immediately went over to the test lab. Sure enough, like 5 people from the testing team were all crammed in there staring at a monitor. I asked Sam, ‘Did you guys already start the performance test?’ He replied, ‘Yes.’

I was starting to get a little upset and I said, ‘But we have to turn off logging and enable the monitoring scripts.’ He replied with ‘Well you guys should have already done that.’ I reminded him that no one outside of the testing team has access to the system test server so we cannot do those steps on our own. He said, ‘Well you guys weren’t in here at 1pm so we started.’

A performance test is pretty much pointless if you don’t monitor it. In addition, if you don’t turn off logging, the filesystem will fill up very quickly from all of the messages being written to disk. To me his attitude was completely counter-productive and at the time it seemed intentional. I could feel my patience slipping and was afraid I might say something I would regret, so I walked off leaving Jegan in the room.

I went to my desk to cool off. A few minutes later Jegan called me and said that they were going to restart the test. I went back to the room and assisted Jegan with the scripts to get everything ready.

The first part of the performance test went fairly ok. We managed to process about 900 tickets. One of those tickets was causing a core dump in farebreak and some of the other tickets were crashing the external sourcing process due to a duplicated header.

We flushed all of this out and tried a smaller 600-ticket batch. This time we didn’t have any core dumps but the duplicated header problem came back.

After this point, we spent the next few hours bumbling around problems with a BSP source and didn’t collect any more statistics.

I was supposed to meet some co-workers at the East Point Tavern for drinks and pool after work today. As the time went from 5pm to 6pm and to 6:30pm, I felt that I would be unable to meet them.

Finally at 7pm we decided to stop the performance test and use the data we’ve collected so far. I paged Casey asking if they were still at the bar. I didn’t get a reply back so just decided to head home. As soon as I got on I-85, traffic was slammed. It had been a rough day already and I didn’t want to deal with traffic. Fortunately I got a page from Casey asking if I was coming. I guess he never got my first page. I took the first exit and went to the bar.

When I arrived, Carole, Casey, James, and Bob were there. Even though Carole took the day off today, she drove down for this. It was nice to have a couple of drinks as that eased my tension. We talked about work of course. We played a few games of pool and then dispersed and everyone went home.

When I got into work this morning I saw an email from Casey informing us that Brian will not be in the office today. His wife went into labor last night and they are at Northside Hospital.

Carole was out again today, but today’s absence was planned.

I’m not sure where the time went but before I knew, it was 11:15 and we were heading out for lunch. James, Alex, Casey, Anil, Sameer, Keith, Ram, and I went up to the perimeter mall area for a special Friday lunch at Somkey Bones. It was delicious! I had the baby-back ribs and I can say without a doubt those are the best ribs I’ve ever had.

I spent the rest of the afternoon working with Jegan on the performance test analysis. While I was over at his desk our director, Alonzo, came by to see what our gut feeling was for hardware needs for the 1.2 release. He informed us that we have some extra money in the budget for hardware but have to use it now or lose it. Jegan and I both unanimously felt that more hardware was a must for the 1.2 release.

Jegan put all of the performance data into an Excel spreadsheet, charted the major things and then made copies. Anil, Jegan, and I sat down in 11South and went over the results. While the test was ‘incomplete’ (we only processed 1,500 tickets and planned on doing 20,000) we still managed to gleam some useful data. The numbers we saw didn’t look that great but we noticed that the CPU was never pegged out during the test, indicating some other bottleneck. We have some new ideas about what to try next time and are very much looking forward to the next performance test.

I didn’t leave work until around 6:45pm which was a bit late for a Friday.

Carole gave Jegan and I a verbal invitation to a 9:30am managers meeting for the 1.2 release. Allison had also invited me to another meeting during the same time period to go over test results. I had to decline Allison’s meeting but sent her a follow-up email describing my thoughts on the exchange valuation piece of the test results.

The 9:30 meeting was in 11East and it was packed full of people. Almost everyone in there were managers. During the meeting I directed some of my attention to people in the room, observing their body language and the subtle glances they would make towards each other whenever a certain topic would come up. It was a lot of fun.

During the meeting, Alonzo (my Director) stated that we have to make a decision about buying additional hardware. He said that the deadline for this decision is in just one week and that we need to have some solid performance measurements in order to come up with an estimate on how much additional hardware we will need. This puts some pressure on Jegan and I to conduct another performance test before then. Carole seems to be leaning more towards a test next Monday, but Jegan thinks that we have to do it by Thursday or Friday. I’m worried that we’ll have more snags in the next test we do, delivering incomplete results.

After the meeting, I was working away oblivious to the time when Susan called me at 11:15am. She asked if there were any lunch plans today. Usually Casey coordinates lunch but he is out of the office this week. I told Susan that I would call her back. I asked James about lunch and he indicated that he was interested. I then walked over to Alex’s cube but he wasn’t there. I looked around for Alex but couldn’t find him, so I gave up on him and went over to Bob’s cube. Bob wasn’t there but I remember him being in a meeting in 11East, so I walked over there. Sure enough Bob was in a post-meeting conversation with Steve Cooper. I waited for Bob to get free and then inquired about lunch. He was game too. I walked back to my cube, called Susan, and asked her to meet us downstairs. James, Bob, and I met Susan downstairs and we decided to go to the Brake Pad since it was nice outside today. James drove.

During lunch Bob Melo engaged us in some stories about his college life at UGA. Apparently one of the years he was attending school was a big event called ’streak week’. He told us many stories about different things that happened during that week. It was very entertaining to hear about all of these rich experiences Bob’s lived through. Bob is definitely a well-rounded and likable guy. It’s an honor to work with him.

I spent the rest of the afternoon working on a document outlining and formalizing the performance testing process. I had a meeting yesterday and someone suggested that we document the process and make it look as pretty as possible because it’s going to get a lot of scrutiny in the next few weeks.

Around 6pm I changed into my softball clothes and drove over the to college park softball fields. I had only played softball one other time with the team even though they have played about 4 games already. The game started out pretty slow and by the 4th inning or so the score was 1-2 or so (we had only 1 point). It came my turn to go up to bat. The softball league we play in has rules such that you start out with one strike at bat to make things go faster.

When the first pitch was thrown to me, I tried to kill the ball, but missed. For the second pitch I decided to change my tactics a bit and hit the ball lighter in order to have more control over the bat. This strategy seemed to work. I connected with the ball and it didn’t go flying very far. Instead, it caused the basemen to scramble to get it. I ran as fast as I could to first base and made it just in time!

Full of adrenaline from the base-hit I was ready to charge second base. I watched the next batter closely and it was another hit. Again I ran with all my might for second base and hit the pad with a few seconds to spare. This was feeling pretty good. The next batter also had a decent hit and I ran off towards third base. The hit was caught and tossed to someone running towards me to tag me out. I tried to maneuver past him, putting me off balance. When he tagged me with the ball, putting me out, I lost my balance and fell backwards tumbling to the ground. My teammates threw an uproar at first thinking the guy shoved me down. When I stood up with a big grin on my face they saw that everything was ok.

The next inning when I was playing right-center on the outfield, a long drive was hit towards me so I ran in and barely caught the ball. Apparently this was a key catch because all of my team mates were very happy that I caught it.

To my surprise, after the game my teammates labeled me as the ‘MVP’ for today’s game. We lost 1-11.

Shortly after I got into work this morning Gina, an administrative assistant, came walking by and asked if I could go outside to the Feld Pavilion and help move picnic tables. Today around lunchtime we’re having our network systems portfolio ‘all-hands’ meeting.

I walked outside to the pavilion and saw a few other people bustling about. A couple of guys were working on the huge BBQ pit. A couple of other people were arranging items to be used for the lunch meeting. I didn’t see anyone else there to help move the large picnic tables. Finally another guy I recognized from my floor came walking up. Karen, Brent’s administrative assistant, directed us to move a couple of picnic tables. Me and this other guy moved them where she wanted. At first we thought that was all she needed but then another lady had us move a couple dozen other larger picnic tables. Several times we had to move the same table multiple times as she was unsatisfied where she originally wanted it. I wonder if all women are like that when it comes to moving things.

When I finished with my thirty minutes of manual labor, I went back to the 11th floor and joined Carole and Jegan for a meeting about performance testing. We met in Carole’s office. She informed us that Sam, the testing team manager, was being transferred to another project effective immediately. This was quite a shock to me. I can only guess that it was a sack because you don’t normally transfer the testing team manager in the middle of a system test. Carole will be assuming responsibility for the six-person testing team until a replacement is found.

Carole directed us to call a meeting this afternoon to discuss another performance test for Monday. She suggested who to invite and informed us that the 10East conference room is open for a thirty-minute window at 3pm. Jegan and I set up the meeting request and sent it out to a lot of people. I worked as fast as I could on finishing up our performance modeling document to present at this meeting.

At 11:30am several of us headed downstairs and out to the Feld pavilion. It’s Called the Feld pavilion because it’s named after a former CEO of Delta Technology, Charlie Feld. Charlie joined the company around 1999 and made a lot of (good) changes and then left around 2000. After him was Bob DeRodes who left in early 2002 for a CIO position at Home Depot. Our current CEO is Curtis Robb.

Lunch was served first. They has hamburgers (both beef and tofu) and hotdogs. I sat at a picnic table with Carole Godwin, Bob Melo, Jeff Chambers, Veena Barde, James Waters, and a couple of others. There were about 180-200 people present.

After we all finished eating, Brent Browning (the vice-president over the Network Systems Portfolio) began the meeting. He talked about the usual health of the company and topics like that. This was the first time I’ve seen Brent in a large setting like this and I think he did quite well. Carole pointed out his public speaking prowess in that he rarely said ‘uhh’ or ‘umm’ while speaking.

I saw a few people snapping photos and I regretted not bringing my camera down with me too.

The last part of the meeting was a ‘creative status report’ from a couple of projects. One was a ’singing’ status report in which the managers of the project all stood in front of the microphone and sung a song set to music. The other was sort of a mini-play in which the entire team from another project acted out the trials and tribulations to software development. Their play was set to sound clips from various Beatles songs.

When the meeting concluded I went back to the 11th floor and immediately into a meeting with Carole, Jegan, and Denise from mid-tier engineering. We had a brief discussion about purchasing additional hardware for production. Denise walked us through the realities of what is feasible and what isn’t.

After that meeting I only had enough time to make some copies of our performance modeling document and head down to 10East for our 3pm meeting. A lot of people showed up from different groups. I conducted the meeting, outlining what we’re testing and what we intend to do with the results. We had a few discussions about the other groups that interact with our application and everyone seems to be on board with a performance test for Monday.

At 3:30pm we were ushered out of the room by some other people who needed to prepare for Steve Cooper’s 30-year anniversary celebration at 4pm.

I briefed Carole about the 3pm meeting and then headed down to the 10East conference room again to join Steve’s celebration. I’ve never worked directly for Steve, but I’ve worked near him a long time when I was on another project and I consider him to be a really straight-laced stand-up guy. From what people said at the celebration, that viewpoint is shared by many people. I have a lot of respect for Steve and his work ethic.

Later this afternoon I was in Carole’s office talking about something for tomorrow and she told me that she received an email from corporate security about me. My heart sank as I thought about all of the different things I could have done wrong. She started digging around her inbox and found the email. It turns out they logged an attempt to open a locked door with my proxy card. It hit me. A few weeks ago when we were walking to the parking lot for lunch I walked along one wall moving my card over the readers next to several doors. I fully expected to see the red light flash indicating that I wasn’t authorized to enter and it did. I was just playing around and afterwards the group I was with joked that I would get a visit from corporate security. It turns out that it was no joke! Carole told me not to worry about it.

I didn’t leave work until 7:30pm. While driving home I remembered why I like spring and fall so much better than summer. Even though it was ’sunny’ today, the sky was ‘overcast’ and hazy. It’s hot and muggy and you can’t even see a blue sky. I snapped a photo of this unsightly hazy sky when I got home:

I read about a different kind of spam filter on Slashdot today. It is an outlook plug-in based on the SpamBayes project. It works on a different spam filtering mechanism called Bayesian which is a form of statistical analysis. You ‘train’ it by telling it when an email is spam. After a while I learns what is spam and what isn’t. The cool thing about this plug-in is that it’s integrated within Outlook such that if you drag a spam email to your ’spam’ folder, the plug-in will automatically recognize that type of email as spam. Furthermore, if you drag a false-positive incorrectly-identified piece of mail from the spam folder to your inbox, it will automatically learn that that type of email is not spam.

I turned off spamassassin and am actually looking forward to getting some spam so I can see the filter in action!

I downloaded and installed the Canon 10D 1.0.1 firmware upgrade. I also conducted the infamous ‘focus test‘. It was very hard for me to see an out of focus situation. However I think there could be a very slight front-focus going on. I’m not worried though. The different is so hard for me to see that I can’t be 100% sure.

I was invited to attend a Bris today for Brian’s new son, Will. Before seeing a particular episode of Seinfeld, I never knew what a Bris was. I attempted to follow the directions to the location (his brother’s house) up in Alpharetta. Everything was going great until I attempted to find a road called ‘Brumbelow’ off of Nebit Ferry road. I went up and down the length of Nebit Ferry three times and I could never find the road.

The Bris was supposed to start at noon and it was already 12:10pm. In addition to being lost and late, my neck and upper back was in a lot of pain. I must have slept funny last night or twisted my back/neck somehow but I had to be careful how I moved my head. I could have called for directions but I was pretty pissed off about being lost and late that I decided to give up on the Bris.

In the afternoon I picked up Jenn at her house and we went to the Island Ford Chattahoochee river area. When we started on the trail, we spotted a snake sitting in a pool of water.

The cool thing about this river area are the numerous and interesting rock outcroppings. Some of them extend out so far that it makes a small cave underneath.

We went to one spot with a large rock outcropping and heavy tree cover. The light from the sun in the overcast sky shone through the green leaves in a way that made everything bathe in emerald. It was quite peaceful.

I didn’t wake up until about 8am. Because the house is on a hill a nice breeze blows through the area and we had the windows opened last night. The gentle breeze blowing through the house made sleeping very enjoyable. The large king-sized bed was much more comfortable then my lumpy old bed at home.

Around 9am Mom & Jim showed up and shortly after that we had breakfast. Mom-Mom’s house is very charming. The whole place reeks of being cozy and it definitely shows. Before we sat down for breakfast I snapped a photo of the inviting dining-room & table. Most of the indoor photos I took this weekend were shot at ISO 1600. I much prefer the natural light than the harsh flash. I was pleasantly surprised with the relatively low noise at 1600.

After breakfast I packed up my backpack and prepared to leave. We all did the obligatory posing for photos and then left for the Harrisburg airport.

(Mom & Mom-Mom)

(Me and Mom-Mom)

Mom & I got selected to be searched again at the Harrisburg airport. The last time this happened my camera bag set off their bomb-making material scanning device and there was quite a delay. Fortunately that didn’t happen this time.

I sat in the very last row right next to the bathroom of the 50-seat ComAir CRJ on the way back to Atlanta. I sat next to an 88-year old man who had quite a personality. He mentioned to me four times during the flight that the TSA people took away his 2-inch pocket knife and he was quite upset about it.

There were a few families traveling on this small plane and seeing one particular family around my age with a daughter around Makayla’s age made my thoughts drift to Michele. I wondered what would be different or how I would be different if her and I never broke up.

I finally finished my book: book 6 of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.

When I got home (Mom & Jim dropped me off) I saw a large box in the living room. It wasn’t there when I left. I called her up and she brought over a patio chair she won at work. She’s loaning it to me until she gets her own place with a patio.