Today’s theme is ‘Curves‘
(click on the photo for a larger version)
Monthly Archive for August, 2003
Aug 1st 2003
On Wednesday Jenn came by after work and gave/loaned me a really cool mini-fridge to place in my cubicle:
Today was a pretty un-eventful day at work. We had lunch at ‘623‘. A lot of hot girls were there as always. I was most productive the last half of the day. I fired off several correspondences about some problematic tickets we’re having in Exchange Valuation. Jegan and I attended a logical architecture meeting for another group. I sent off our conceptual architecture document to the ‘SAT’.
Around 6:30pm Jenn came over with some groceries in tow. We made ‘enchiladas suizas’. It involved a lot of preparation. But my idea of ‘normal’ is baking a frozen pizza or hamburger helper so I could be a bit off.
After making dinner we wrapped up the casserole dish and headed out for the party. One of her co-workers is moving to Iowa so they are throwing a party for her. The house is in Decatur and we followed the mappoint directions but they weren’t that great. The party started at 8pm and we didn’t get there until around 9pm.
The house was beautiful and all of Jenn’s co-workers are really nice. We didn’t leave until around 12:30pm.
Aug 2nd 2003
I woke up at 6:30am and got ready for my 8:33am flight. As I’ve been doing in the recent past, I parked at my office and took the Marriott shuttle bus to the airport. I got to the hotel around 7:30am. The shuttle bus didn’t show up until around 7:50am. I was pretty upset that it took so long to show up.
I didn’t get to the gate (E07) until 8:18am. The flight is scheduled to depart at 8:33am. Fortunately they had my boarding pass waiting for me (seat 5E in business class). I boarded without incident.
During the flight I watched ‘Finding Nemo‘ and had a hot omelet breakfast. I also consumed two crown & cokes during the four-hour flight.
When I arrived in San Diego I went into a restroom and changed into shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals. Amy picked me up from the airport. Cal was in the car with her. We drove out to La Jolla and met Larry, Tucker, and Lily on the beach. It was a beautiful sunny day today. The Pacific Ocean was pretty clear (to me) and the sky was a brilliant blue. I had a good time.
Around 11:30am we packed up all of our stuff and walked into the restaurant area of La Jolla. We lunched at a nice place where I had a cheese and egg sandwich.
After lunch we headed to Larry & Amy’s house. They showed me the new office addition that was built onto their house. I was amazed at the quality of the construction.
Larry and I took both cars (the Suburban and Yukon) and drove separately to a furniture warehouse place where we picked up two end-tables. When we got back to the house, we unloaded them and carried them upstairs.
By this time it was around 2pm or so and we went out to the pool. We played with Buster and Coco in the pool with some tennis balls. We would throw the balls in the pool and the dogs would dive in after them. Buster was better at this than Coco. We discovered that Coco loved to play with the giant beach-balls though. If you toss it at her, she will bounce it off her nose sort of like a soccer player head butting the ball. Unfortunately she was trying to bite down on the beach ball and destroyed three of them. Amy brought Lily out and we played with her in the pool too.
After the pool I took a shower and dressed for dinner. Rachel the nanny came over so that just Larry, Amy, and I could go out to dinner tonight.
We went to a great restaurant in La Jolla and sat outside. Larry brought his camera and a nice bottle of wine. The outside seating overlooks the ocean and we were able to see the setting sun. It was a great atmosphere. I had the Alaskan Halibut. I would classify the dinner as delicious.
After dinner I helped Larry with some stuff on his new computer and wrote in my journal.
Aug 3rd 2003
Larry & Amy’s guest bed is always such a joy to sleep in. It’s a very comfortable queen-size bed with high thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets. I woke up around 7am and had a smoothie for breakfast.
We decided to go to the beach in La Jolla again this morning. Around 9am we packed up the suburban and drove down to the beach. On the drive into La Jolla the sky was a bit overcast and I was worried that we wouldn’t have any sunshine. Indeed once we arrived at the beach it was non-sunny but still fairly crowded.
The original plan for today was for Larry & I to drive out to Joshua Tree this afternoon around 3pm (It’s a 3-hour drive) and spend the night in a hotel just outside of the park. Larry already made reservations at two different places to ensure that what happened last time won’t happen again. While at the beach today we talked about it and decided to skip the Joshua Tree trip this time. Larry was concerned that Amy may have too much trouble with the kids by herself this evening and tomorrow. We decided instead to go downtown this afternoon to photograph planes and then take the boat out tomorrow to some islands south of San Diego (in Mexico waters) for some snorkeling.
We stayed at the beach for about two hours. The sun eventually came out and it was quite pleasant. On the way home we called in a lunch order at Sammy’s, a place near their house. I had the mini-hamburgers. They are half-sized hamburgers with a really great bun which is some kind of sweet bread.
After lunch I went in the pool out back and played with Buster and Coco. They love playing with tennis balls in the pool. I spent probably an hour throwing the balls in the pool while they dove in, fetched them, swam out and brought the ball back to me. It was a lot of fun playing with those two well-behaved and energetic Labradors.
(Buster acting crazy looking for the ball)
(Me and Cal sitting in the backyard)
Larry and I got our camera gear together and drove into downtown San Diego. From his office building, Larry spotted a parking garage adjacent to the San Diego airport that sits directly in the flight-path of landing planes. He had the great idea of photographing planes as they land from the top of the parking garage. We found the parking garage (it is an airport park-and-ride garage) and parked there on the top level. As soon as we walked out onto the roof we heard the roar of a huge plane going directly overhead. Larry was excited to see that it was the KLM flight direct from London. It was a huge plane and seemed quite low. We were stoked about the other photo-taking opportunities we may find. We walked over to one side of the garage and waited for the next plane.
There was a sign posted indicating that no one is supposed to loiter around on the top-level of the parking garage. We didn’t see anyone else around (just empty cars). As the next plane was coming in (it was only a propeller plane) some guy wearing a jumpsuit uniform for the parking garage company came walking up to us. He indicated that we’re not supposed to be photographing planes and that we need to leave. Larry pleaded with him that it’s a great location to photograph planes but he indicated that it is a felony? to photograph planes. He said that pilots who see people on the top of this parking garage may call the FAA and authorities may come investigate for possible terrorist-like activities.
So we didn’t even get a chance to photograph one plane. There was a great photo-taking location but we had to leave because of the fear of terrorism. The terrorists truly have won. I believe the goal of Al Qaeda was to generate so much fear that things which makes America great, our freedoms, become suspended. It is a sad time in our country when we can’t even photograph airplanes or bridges or buildings. There is a good thread over at Airliners.net about photographers being hassled for attempting to photograph planes. I wonder how long it will take for the government to install checkpoints every few blocks to check peoples papers. Maybe they can even borrow names from Nazi Germany like ‘Checkpoint Charlie’.
Larry and I left the parking garage and headed over to his office building, One America Plaza. He works in one of the highest floors and has access to all four balconies on each corner. We went outside and photographed the city from high up. Fortunately it isn’t a felony to photograph skylines - yet. I was using Larry’s new Tokina 17mm ATX Pro wide-angle prime lens. It is pretty cool how ‘wide’ it is.
(Larry on the balcony)
(A nice view of the city)
After an hour of this we went back home but stopped at a toy store to pick up some more ‘Thomas‘ train track stuff for Tucker and Lily. When we got home one of the nannies was there too helping with Cal. Amy, Larry, Tucker, Lily, and I went out to Chili’s for dinner.
After dinner I played on Larry’s new computer for a while before going to bed.
Aug 4th 2003
Larry and I wanted to get an early start today and leave the house around 7am. Unfortunately we left later because Larry and Amy were having some trouble with Lily getting ready for pre-school.
We eventually got to the marina around 8am. Even though it was overcast it looked as if the clouds would burn off and we will have a nice sunny day of snorkeling. We got the boat prepped and untied from the marina to head out, but Larry had trouble starting the boat. It looked as if we had power but the engines wouldn’t even attempt to turn over. Larry is trying to sell his boat and so the company he’s going through to sell it had it moved to a different slip in the marina. Apparently they left it in ‘reverse’ and it needs to be in ‘neutral’ to start. We finally figured this out and get it started and headed out.
While we were leaving the marina the port engine alarm came on. Everything seemed normal and the engine was running but the loud alarm was sounding. Larry cut that engine off and attempted to start it again. Unfortunately nothing he did would make the port engine start. He opened up the engine compartment and checked the oil but that looked fine.
We couldn’t make it all the way to the islands on only one engine so we stayed in the bay for a while and tried to start the engine several more times with no success. Finally we decided to return to the slip and give up on the boat trip today. Larry was pretty frustrated at this because the weather was really looking up and we were missing out.
As we left the marina we saw a warship coming down the bay and so I snapped a photo of it with my 28-135mm IS lens zoomed out all the way for an effective 200mm zoom:
Before going back home we stopped by a camera store in downtown where Larry looked for a 77mm polarizer filter for his Tokina 17mm lens. They didn’t have any in stock but he did buy a cool ‘lens pen’ cleaning device. We also stopped at an art store across the street.
From there we drove to the ‘gaslamp quarter‘ of San Diego for lunch. We ate at a pricy place called Aqua Blu. I had the firecracker shrimp fried rice. It was a pretty small portion. There are a lot of good-looking girls in downtown San Diego.
When we got back to the house I took a shower, packed, and dressed for my flight home. Larry (with Lily in tow) took me to the airport around 2:18pm. I got to the airport around 2:45pm and checked in at the kiosk with no problem. I had no problem going through security and I got to the gate very quickly. It’s really refreshing to be at such a hassle-free airport.
When I arrived at the gate I saw that the flight was delayed thirty minutes. I called up Jenn to see how she was doing. We chatted for a little while and then when we concluded our phone conversation I approached the gate to request a window seat (the flight is over half-empty). The friendly gate agent said, ‘No problem!’ with a smile and handed me a boarding pass for seat ‘4A’ in first class.
I was the first one on the plane and got myself situated with a crown & coke from the flight attendant. I was a little surprised when a lady and her two-year old daughter came to sit next to me. It didn’t bother me at all, but I though that infants (is a two-year old considered an infant?) to sit in first/business class. I know they both shared the same seat and did a pretty good job with it. In the middle section in first class was a really hot girl. Upon further investigation I realized she was traveling with her parents. She was probably only like sixteen years old or something and to me she looked like she was in her twenties. Girls ‘these days’ just don’t look like they did when I was that age and I’m only 26!
I didn’t get home until around midnight.
Aug 8th 2003
Today I implemented a bugfix for exchange valuation’s handling of a ticket in which it is exchanged for two independent new tickets. From the initial test runs in the system test environment, it looks like everything is working fine. However we discovered another bug in which we are mislabeling an exchange as invalid when it is not. This had to do with the ordering of void coupons. I implemented a fix for this as well.
For lunch today we went to a brand-new Longhorn Steakhouse near Camp Creek highway and I-285. It is nestled in a new shopping center with a lot of stores (like Target, Lowe’s, etc). After lunch we stopped at Target so Brian could get some Jelly Belly’s. I’ve never heard of them before but once Brian and Alex explained the concept to me, it sounded really cool. They are much like the ‘every-flavour beads’ from Harry Potter. You don’t know what each one will taste like before-hand (unless you cheat and look at the chart on the back of the package) so every jelly-belly is a mystery flavour.
During a morning meeting Carole mentioned that her ancient keyboard stopped working. I volunteered to help her out with a new keyboard and borrowed one from the empty conference room. Once I got it hooked up on her laptop docking station everything appeared to be working great. Her old keyboard had a bent pin which I was unable to recover.
We had a ‘final’ demonstration of our special GUI I worked so hard on a couple of weeks ago. After today we’ll be shutting down the data feeds and planning for a GUI backend solution for the next release of revenue pipeline. I’m supposed to brainstorm on ideas for that by the end of today. My inbox has 716 emails in it though so I really need to go though my email and get things cleaned up.
I spent the rest of the day working on a code enhancement for Exchange Valuation which will do an upfront ‘entrance criteria’ check before the engine even attempts to execute. This will prevent us from unnecessarily populating data when we won’t even run.
I worked late (for a Friday) today and didn’t leave the office until 6:30pm. Jenn called me from her work and asked if I wanted to go out on a date with her tonight. I agreed to pick her up from Lenox and we would go out for dinner and a movie.
I arrived at Lenox at 7pm but Jenn worked a little longer and didn’t get off work until 7:30pm. While I waited I browsed around the store. It seems that every time I go to the store, everything is re-arranged.
We walked from the mall down Peachtree street to a Mediterranean bistro restaurant called Milan and sat outside. Instead of ordering a regular entrée, we ordered (and shared) five Tappas dishes. The atmosphere was pleasant and it was a very nice night out tonight. We had a great time together at dinner. We both noticed a large percentage of the people in the restaurant were Asian. Jenn concluded that there must be a convention.
During dinner Sameer called me on my cell phone to let me know that he completed a bugfix we were looking at this afternoon before I left work. I mentioned that I would try to build the code tonight or Sunday night so we’ll have it ready for deployment on Monday morning.
After dinner we drove over to a movie theater called something like ‘Buckhead backlot’ where we got two tickets for the 10:15pm showing of ‘American Wedding‘. We were disappointed and confused to see the concession stand closed. However once we entered the theater we didn’t see the traditional seats. Instead there were dining tables and such. It turns out that this is no ordinary theater, it’s a theater cafe. I didn’t like it too much. Since we already had dinner we weren’t hungry. The food didn’t look all that great and it was overpriced. With the funky chairs and large tables, it was difficult to sit next to Jenn.
The movie was pretty good. I thought they concentrated a little too much on the ’stiffler’ character.
Aug 9th 2003
I woke up pretty early (6:30am) for a Saturday and got things together for the road trip. Jenn and I loaded up the explorer and headed out around 8am. We went to her parent’s house to collect some more stuff (like bedding) to take.
After Jenn got everything together we left and started our journey. On the way we stopped at a Waffle House for breakfast. Jenn had a chicken sandwich with hash browns and I had an egg, bacon, and cheese sandwich with hash browns and a tall glass of orange juice. While we were eating, Mom called to seek help with her computer. It won’t boot up after the OS selection screen. Attempting to boot into safe mode, and last known hardware mode didn’t seem to help. As far as she knows they didn’t alter the hardware or install any new software. I told her that I would have to see it for myself to be of any help.
It took us about 3.5 hours to drive to Charlotte. It was pretty rough for me because I was tired from lack of sleep the night before.
When we arrived at Jenn’s Mom’s house we were greeted by her sister, Elena, as well as her mother. She was cooking a late lunch which consisted of chicken, cheese, and broccoli. It was pretty good. By this time it was around 4pm and we decided to drive into downtown Charlotte to see the Japanese culture festival.
Five of us piled into my explorer and they directed me to downtown and we found a place to park. We walked over to a large Wachovia office building where the festival was taking place. Unfortunately we arrived just as things were wrapping up.
(People waiting for door prizes)
While in that area Jenn spotted a praying mantis on a sidewalk (in the middle of downtown):
(I should have stopped-down some more for a larger DOF)
We walked over to a place called Green Park. It was pretty cool. Even though it wasn’t that large, there were some interesting things about it. It had a large fountain and interesting sculptures.
(It’s a large book made out of bricks with children crawling over it)
(I managed to catch a bee in flight)
When we were walking around, we passed an ice-cream street vendor with a hawk in his hands. He was talking with a police officer explaining that he caught the bird because it wouldn’t stop swooping down on his stand and he didn’t know what to do with it. The office called for backup and they hauled the bird downtown for further questioning. Personally, I think the bird is an Al Qaeida operative and he’ll have to spend some time in Guantanomo Bay for however long it takes for him to ‘remember’ what cell he’s a member of. I feel safer already.
Aug 10th 2003
I slept in Jenn’s queen-sized bed last night. It was quite comfortable (feather top and all). I didn’t get up until about 9:30am.
When I went downstairs, Jenn’s mom was preparing a big breakfast. She cooked up a huge stack of pancakes, fried bacon, and a fruit salad. It’s been a long time since I’ve had a nice home-cooked breakfast.
After breakfast I called up Uhaul to see why we had not heard anything from them regarding when or where we can pick up the trailer. It turns out that the pickup location is in south Charlotte (we’re in north Charlotte) in a place called Pineville.
We left to go pick up the trailer. At the Uhaul place I had to purchase a $22 hitch adapter and a $10 2-inch hitch ball. Even though my explorer has a ‘class 3/4 hitch’, I have to have a hitch adapter in order to screw in the ball.
When the guy hooked up the trailer (including the $10 wiring adapter) the lights didn’t work. He tried several different things but nothing worked. He finally suggested we drive ten minutes down the road to the larger Uhaul center to see if they could determine what the problem is.
Twenty-five minutes later I managed to talk with a mechanic who looked at it and determined that the guy from the other store neglected to hook up the ground wire.
After another thirty minutes I got the 5″-8″ trailer hooked up and paid for. We drove back to the house. Once there, we loaded up the trailer and headed out.
This was my first time towing anything. At first I was weary about getting a trailer. When I was driving from San Antonio to Atlanta one time I was behind a truck towing a haul. I saw firsthand the trailer swerve back and fourth and then the truck spun out of control. So my expectations of towing a trailer weren’t too great.
Fortunately nothing like that happened this time. In fact I was able to drive 70-80mph with no problems. Uhaul says that you can’t go above 45mph, but who does that? It took about 3.5 hours to get to Athens.
We unloaded the trailer with no problems and dropped it off at a store very close to campus. Everything went pretty well.
Aug 13th 2003
I don’t know why but I’ve had a really tough time keeping up with my journal in a timely fashion. I guess I’ve been busy or at least not up to it.
Today at work was pretty intense. We’ve been working this week to migrate out ‘integration test’ environment to the new release of Revenue Pipeline. Until now I haven’t had a lot to do, as the base infrastructure was being set up.
Today, however, has been a different story.
We had conference calls all day long at 9am, 11am, 1pm, 3pm, and 5pm. When I wasn’t on the bridge call, I was working with Van down in middleware. He was transitioning the tuxedo administration duties to Jegan, Ram, and I. Because of this, we sat with him and he led us through the steps of installing and configuring tuxedo on three nodes (master, slave, and backup).
We also went through the steps of installing the Revenue Pipeline application on the domains. We had some snags initially because another group (EBS) was having difficulties talking to DB2. Once we got those worked out, everything installed and activated correctly.
Earlier this week I spent a day or two playing Final Fantasy XI Online beta. I have to admit that at first it was a little intriguing, but I quickly grew tired of it.
Instead, I spent some time this evening playing Neverwinter Nights. I decided to play an elf rogue. I picked up a ranger level for the dual wield and am considering hitting the shadow dancer prestige class for the hide in plain sight ability or the assassin prestige class for the additional death attack bonus.
The last time I attempted to play NWN I stopped after completing the first chapter. I’m going to take my time and see how far I get. It’s had really great reviews and it’s the type of first person game that I think I can play off and on whenever I have the urge to play computer games - something I haven’t had the urge to do for quite some time now.
Aug 14th 2003
I had conference calls to attend all day long but unlike yesterday, today was pretty uneventful as far as my involvement goes. After successfully installing all of the apps, everything ran smoothly on our end. The calls today dealt more with issues and problems in the other groups that interface with us.
I had some free time to clean up things at work today. I came into work with 700 emails (all read) in my inbox. I spent about two hours going through all 700 emails and filing or deleting them. It felt like such a huge burden was lifted from my shoulders when I left today with only a few emails in my inbox. It seems silly but the fact that I had so much email to go though was starting to stress me out.
I also cleaned up my desk. It was cluttered with so much paper and junk. I spent another hour cleaning and filing paper that was all over my desk. Now it’s nice and clean with large empty spaces. I feel so much better now. I’ll probably be cleaning my apartment too since I’m on a ‘neat-streak’.
Larry contacted me and informed me that he was going to have to cancel our planned hiking trip. We had tentative plans to go hiking to either Yellowstone, Alaska, or the Canadian Rockies at the end of this month. His wife, Amy, has some reservations about him being gone for so long. We were originally going to be gone August 28th through September 1st.
I’m pretty bummed about the whole thing as we’ve been planning this trip for many months now. Larry suggested that we can go up to Mammoth around October instead. I’m still toying with the idea of taking my own hiking trip by myself to either Yellowstone or the Canadian Rockies. I figure my reservations about traveling alone would be mitigated that I’ll be in the woods anyway.
It should be simple enough to secure cheap lodging and a rental car. I would only need a couple of nights if I’m by myself and I can still do quite a bit. Yellowstone may be a bit difficult since the closest airport (Jackson) is a bit of a drive away. I still have aggressive plans to NOT miss the northeast fall colors this year.
It’s time to get off my butt and do some traveling.
For lunch today we went to an obscure BBQ place called ‘Factory BBQ’. It’s a red shack that Scott suggested looks like something out of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I had the chopped beef platter with cole slaw and potato salad. I didn’t care for the two sides but the beef was good (a little fatty).
Around 4:30pm I was sitting at my desk and Casey (who sits next to me) shouted that he saw a story on CNN about ‘simultaneous blackouts in multiple north-American cities‘. I (as well as most people I’m sure) immediately jumped to the idea that this could be a terrorist event. One would have to be pretty stupid to think that we won’t have another ‘9/11′ type attack - it’s only a matter of time. I jumped on cnn.com and read the meager information provided. The article stated that officials do NOT think this is a terrorist attack.
Seeing that alleviated a lot of my concerns. As I read more and as the day went on, the picture became more and more clear. I am really amazed at how ‘unstable’ and interconnected the power grids are.
Shortly after I got home, I called Craig to check in on his computer problems. We also caught up on things since I haven’t talked with him in about a month. It turns out he had a really wild and crazy party about a month ago. He told me a story about him hooking up with THREE girls all at the same time. But it gets better. They have been coming back over to his house (no parties this time) four or five times since. Craig told me he doesn’t have much energy these days. I wonder why.
Jenn and I had plans to go to Vinyl tonight at 10pm. Before doing that we went shopping. Our first stop was CompUSA. We looked at printers and WiFi cards for her computer. After that we went to Target where she bought some stuff for school and her new apartment. She also got one of those cool ‘bagless’ vacuum cleaners. Once we left Target we went across the street to Best Buy where she bought a very inexpensive HP inkjet printer, WiFi USB network card, and blank CD’s. I bought a USB 2.0 CompactFlash card reader.
While we were out shopping Ram called me about some build errors he was getting in dataservices. It sounds as if we have some clearcase element permission problems. I advised him to use the cleartool protect command. He called be back a while later and informed me that the command failed due to him not being the element or vob owner. Because of this, I suggested he page Carole to see what she wants to do. If she wants, we can page some people in release engineering to fix the permissions, or we can wait until tomorrow to get it resolved. He called me back a while later and said that Carole told him to just wait until tomorrow.
Jenn and I went to Willy’s for a quick dinner since it was getting close to 10pm. I had been feeling queasy ever since I got home. I think it was the BBQ I had for lunch. I didn’t feel up to going out so Jenn and I canceled our plans. We stopped by Publix to get some Pepto-Bismol chewable tablets.
Aug 15th 2003
I got an email today from an old high-school friend. She found my website on accident. This has happened a lot and is a great side-effect to posting my journal online.
This afternoon before I left work my vice-president Brent came by my desk. He gave me an award called the ‘hats off award’. It consists of a certificate thanking me for my hard work on the recent GUI project. With the award was a $25 American Express gift certificate. It was pretty nice to receive the award. I got the same type of ‘hats off’ award last year for my efforts at the end of the revenue pipeline 1.1 release. Supposedly these awards are fairly rare (at least from what I’ve seen) so it’s an honor to get it.
About thirty minutes after Brent left, Alonzo (my director) came by to give me another award related to the GUI project we did. This was a color-printout of the GUI with a text-block on the top thanking me for being ‘fast’ flexible’ and ‘focused’ in my effort.
I decided to tack the awards to my cubical walls. Not so much that I want to flaunt them (indeed, I never posted my other one) but to motivate myself to keep working hard.
Shortly after I got home the UPS guy came over to deliver a heavy box. Larry sent me his old 17-inch LCD monitor! When I was visiting them a couple of weeks ago he asked me if I wanted the monitor. Because my video card can drive two displays I happily agreed to take it off his hands. The monitor has an analog connector (not the new-style digital connector)
When I got home I did laundry and played NeverWinter Nights.
Aug 18th 2003
I didn’t really do much of anything this weekend so I didn’t bother writing any journal entries. It’s hard to get detailed about vegging out in my boxers all weekend long. It was nice to do pretty much nothing for once. Although anytime I’m like that afterwards I feel incredibly guilty for wasting time.
I spent most of the day today on the bridge call again going over the integration-environment testing. Today we battled with a big problem in the ‘ticket retriever’ java service. It interfaces with IBM DB2 and with 20 paths running; we saw many timeout/deadlock conditions. The EBS and Data services team researched this problem most of the day but were unable to come up with anything.
Late this afternoon I met with Ningyu to discuss strategies for the revenue pipeline 1.2 release dashboard GUI. With him was a representative from Tibco (the makers of BusinessWorks among other things). Since it was pretty late the three of us went into the large conference room in 10 East and I drew out the Revenue Pipeline architecture on the whiteboard. As I drew, I explained how everything worked and went into technical specifics on certain parts.
We brainstormed about possible solutions for implementing this dashboard for the 1.2 release. It was a nice change of pace for me, going over design on a whiteboard. It wasn’t that hard considering I know the subject pretty well. We left the meeting with the understanding that I would be giving them some sample data to play with over the next few days while the Tibco guy is still in town.
Because of the late meeting, I missed out on tennis. There is a ’sports club’ at work and they meet every Monday afternoon to play tennis at some local courts. Maybe I’ll try to go (for the first time) next week.
Aug 19th 2003
Early this morning I got an email from someone complimenting my photo album and asking for digital camera advice. I pointed him to dpreview.
At 9am was the weekly managers meeting. I’m still not sure why Carole wants me to go since I’m not a manager. Nonetheless it’s a fun one to go to. Today we went over a comprehensive daily plan for the next two months or so before we go live in production for the 1.2 release. I skipped ahead to the implementation date (October 20th) and didn’t see anything on the plan for prepping the production environment. This worried me. I spoke with Carole after the meeting and cleared things up. She had not completely fleshed out that part of the calendar yet and assured me that we were going to have adequate time to transition to production.
Immediately following that meeting was a 10am meeting with Brian and our DBA over the impending upgrade to Oracle 9i on the server side. We went over the new SIDs and userids for our databases for each environment. We discussed the impact and what all we need to reconfigure to participate in this change. I think we were assured that the change would be transparent to us. Famous last words.
For lunch we went to the Vortex in little five points. I had a specialty burger with pineapple and teriyaki sauce. I also had a cream soda. Drinking cream soda reminded me of visiting my grandparents as they would always give me a cream soda. I always liked that.
I sat next to James at lunch and was talked about his weekend trip to San Francisco. He told me that it was only like 78 degrees there. That sounds really pleasant. I can’t wait to visit San Francisco myself. I’d love to see the golden gate bridge - especially in the early morning when the fog is still set in.
After lunch Carole told me that she got a virus alert on her laptop. I offered to take a look at it for her before she calls the help desk. When I looked at the alert (from Norton Antivirus Corporate Edition), it said she had the W32.Welchia worm. I did some quick investigation and found that it is a variant to the W32 Blaster worm. I was perplexed as to why Norton Antivirus could detect it but couldn’t remove it. It said it was unable to delete this dllcache.exe file because of permission problems (the file was running and therefore locked?)
I assured her that I would take care of it and ran a removal tool specific to this worm and removed it. Later Carole told me that many WinXP and Win2k users (there are only a few as WinXP hasn’t been deployed yet) were infected too. The crazy thing is that when infected users call the helpdesk to see what to do, they get their account disabled so they cannot log into their computer, or anyone else’s computer for that matter.
Now I don’t pretend to be an expert in this but this type of worm installs itself as a _service_ on the infected machine. A service can keep running regardless if the user is logged in or not. I’m not sure what locking people out of their computers are supposed to fix. I maybe crazy but it seems like the appropriate action is to have the infected users patch their computer and then run the removal tool. I don’t know what the helpdesk people are thinking. I came to find out later on that Brent, my vice-president, was locked out of his computer too. I stopped by his office to see about this and he wasn’t very happy with the situation.
I spent the rest of the day on the bridge call while we ran a large batch of transactions through the integration environment. So far there have been no application problems which has been very nice.
I worked late today and didn’t leave until around 7pm. When I got home I took a little nap and Jenn came over pretty late. I’m taking her to the airport tomorrow.
Aug 20th 2003
I took Jenn to the airport this morning for her trip to D.C. She’s going for a Radiohead concert tonight and will be flying back to Atlanta tomorrow afternoon.
During our weekly 9am staff meeting Carole asked me who was representing revapps on the bridge call this morning. I responded that no one is because I’m at her staff meeting. She told me to go get on the bridge call. I excused myself from the meeting and headed back up to my desk.
During the bridge call we decided to break and come back in a couple of hours so ODE can look into a DB2 problem they are having. Van from middleware mentioned that one of our services was being executed more than the others so he increased the number of instances of it on the tux domain. Also around this time Anil came to my cube and told me that he thinks the integration environment is behaving like system test with the fact that our engines are behaving in a consolidated fashion. He asked if I could verify the database we’re pointing to in the integration environment. I checked and to my horror I saw that the integration apps are pointing to the system test database. I immediately corrected the configuration. That explained the consolidated behavior of the tux services.
Recently Mallick got a new cell phone, the Nokia 3650. Amazon.com has a special right now where you get the $300 Nokia 3650 phone for free if you sign up with T-Mobile and purchase it through Amazon. That’s quite a good deal! I created a task for myself to research cell phone for a purchase later sometime this year. I know that cell phone providers are _supposed_ to be in compliance of the cell phone number portability act by this Thanksgiving, but they were supposed to have done that last year and the year before last. I don’t have a lot of faith that it will happen this year. I’m looking for something to replace both my current cell phone and PDA. The only PDA functions I really care about are the ability to have my calendar, contact, and task info synchronized with Outlook.
For lunch today we went to the A&W/KFC combo restaurant. I got the bacon cheese burger and a root beer float. It was delicious!
Today our DBA upgraded our Oracle database server to version 9i. Everything seemed to be working fine on the application side after we changed all of the configuration files and bounced the tux services. Unfortunately not everything went smoothly. Casey uses Microsoft Access to maintain the ‘path director’ table. It has thousands of rows and Casey has crafted some fancy reports and queries to maintain the table, allowing him to quickly make changes and updates. After the database server upgrade, access would no longer connect with the server. We called the DBA over and he tried a few things but we were still unable to make it work. Casey was understandably very frustrated.
This afternoon was full of problems. First, we had a core-dump situation in system test. We were unable to reproduce it in the development environment. Anil could run the problem ticket with no problems. Alex, Sameer, Narender, and I all managed to get core dumps with the ticket, but in different places.
Carole, Anil, Sameer, Alex, Narender, Ram, Jegan, Casey, Carole, and I all stayed at work very late today. We all (most of us at least) worked on solving this problem. Finally around 8:30pm we found the cause: Casey introduced a code change earlier today that had something to do with an invalid pointer reference. We patched the code and re-tested. The problem appeared to go away.
We agreed that we would do a top-down build for testing first thing tomorrow morning. I volunteered to do this. I left work around 9pm and as soon as I got home, I began working on the build. I fixed myself a coke & vanilla stoli and popped in ‘Out of Sight‘ into the VCR. I watched the movie and worked until I finally finished at 3am. It was a long day indeed.
Aug 21st 2003
Because I didn’t get to sleep until 3am last night, I got a little extra sleep this morning and didn’t get to work until 10am. As soon as I got in, I was on the phone on another bridge call until 11am at which time a large group of my peers were getting together for lunch.
We went to Willy’s adjacent to Piedmont Park. It turned out to be thirteen of us who went. Even Carole went too. Sometimes it’s unmanageable to have such a large lunch crowd. You have to take multiple cars, and then there isn’t enough room to sit together so people have to sit apart anyway.
Yesterday Canon announced a new digital camera: The Digital Rebel. In Japan it’s called the ‘Kiss’, and everywhere else it’s called the EOS 300D. It’s basically identical to the EOS 10D but has a smaller buffer, slower fps, no selectable auto focus mode, and is a silver-plastic body instead of magnesium alloy. One thing new with the digital rebel is that it takes a new type of lens mount (EF-S) in addition to the normal EF mount. Canon also announced the release of a new lens specifically designed for the 300D: the EF-S 18-55mm F3.5 - F5.6 lens (28-90 mm equiv FOV). The other difference is that the digital rebel (300D) is priced very aggressively (retail at $900, so it’ll likely be selling for around $800 after a few months). This gives some very serious competition to ALL of the high-end prosumer cameras which cost the same, if not more. This should be a great entry for people into the DSLR world. I hope this added pressure will drive down overall DSLR prices as time goes on.
Carole asked me to attend a 4pm meeting with middleware and mid-tier engineering to discuss licensing costs for Tuxedo on the new servers we’re buying. The meeting is at 4pm and I realized that Jenn is going to be getting back at 4pm. I explained this to Carole and she told me not to worry because Jegan will be there too. Carole is a great manager. She’s understanding and cuts us slack when we need it. I think her style of management is quite effective because I know that I’m more motivated to do a good job for her than someone a lot less lenient.
Last night our development server (ddt230 - an n-class HPUX server with 8 CPU’s and 8GB of RAM) ran out of memory and it caused errors compiling. Today we’re still having the problem. Physical memory is exhausted and the swap partition is completely full too. The server is thrashing and performance is very poor. I contacted the server admin to see if we can request a reboot to clear up memory. HE said that we could, but Dave from middleware is looking into the memory problems on ddt230 and I should talk with him. I called up Dave and he asked me to let him investigate the cause instead of rebooting.
I left the office at 4pm to pick up Jenn. Before we went back to my place I took her to my workplace to show her where I work and introduce her to some people.
On the way home we stopped at Orient Express in Vinings for dinner. I had sesame chicken and Jenn had the General Tso’s tofu. It wasn’t as good as before, but we got to sit in the cool train-part of the restaurant which was cool.
Aug 23rd 2003
Today’s theme is ‘Broken‘
(click on the photo for a larger version)
Aug 23rd 2003
I had to work late yesterday (who doesn’t like working until 7pm on a Friday?!) and when I got home, I spent a lot of time researching cell phones. A good place to catch reviews and read very active message boards is HowardChui.com.
This morning I spent more time researching phones and finally decided to buy now instead of waiting for after thanksgiving as I originally planned. The special deal to get the $300 Nokia 3650 phone for free was just too tempting. I did an extensive amount of research and came to the conclusion that there is nothing better on the definite horizon (at least for North America). The two top choices were the Nokia 3650 and the Sony-Ericsson P800. Even if the P800 were free like the 3650 (which it is not, it’s about $450), it still doesn’t have the feature-set that I want.
I logged onto Amazon.com and ordered the Nokia 3605 + $40/month service from T-Mobile. I also ordered a Nokia bluetooth wireless headset and a USB bluetooth adapter so my phone communicate with my computer. My research revealed that the bluetooth hub that came with my Microsoft bluetooth wireless keyboard & mouse will NOT work with the cell phone. This is a major disappointment. It turns out that Microsoft’s bluetooth hub won’t really work with anything.
Ever since I rebooted turing (my linux box) last night, I’ve been experiencing strange network behavior. Both on the linux box and my windows box, I had a frustrating time dealing with page timeouts for no apparent reason. I did some research and decided that I was having some sort of firewall issue. I had this problem once before and couldn’t remember how I fixed it. I checked and my firewall (shorewall) wasn’t even running! This seemed odd that I would be having these type of problem WITHOUT shorewall running. The symptom of this problem is that freeside (my WinXP box) will appear to have an IP address of ‘206.158.52.6′ when checking a site like http://www.whatismyip.com/. My address SHOULD be ‘206.158.52.61′ but because freeside is masqueraded (NATted) behind turing, the IP address it somehow gets changed from what it should be. This is unwanted behavior on my part.
I fired up shorewall and all of my problems went away. I made a note to include shorewall in the system startup scripts so hopefully this will not happen again.
Because my new cellphone will do email, I realized that I need to migrate from POP3 to IMAP. IMAP keeps all of the email on the sever side which means that I can view the same inbox from virtually any location. My current model for centralized email is to use a POP-based solution with Outlook and have ALL my emails stored in a single PST file for Outlook. This limits my use of email to a remote desktop connectivity only and puts a requirement that I have both the linux box and WinXP box running at the same time in order to check email. With IMAP I can access my inbox from virtually anywhere (including my cell phone).
I also decided to drop the use of the Outlook SpamBayes (Bayesian) client-side anti-spam filter. The latest version of Spamassassin has Bayesian-type learning built into it which will satisfy my needs. I also correctly implemented the razor blacklist-database lookup engine for spamassassin this time - something I didn’t do before. I’m really curious to see what sort of false-positives and false-negatives I get now. I also configured procmail to automatically move email tagged as spam into a special spam folder on the server side so I don’t even have to deal with it in Outlook.
I also installed SquirrelMail PHP-based web-server IMAP mail client so I can access my email from a web browser if needed.
Jenn got off work around 7pm and came over. We went out to Best Buy so she could exchange her printer for a new one with a scanner. After that we went to dinner at Don Pablo’s near Cumberland Mall.
Aug 24th 2003
Around noon I fixed myself some lunch and watched a ‘Felicity‘ marathon on the ‘WE’ (Women’s Entertainment) channel. I even saw an episode I never saw before, what a treat! Unfortunately the episodes were in random order. One episode was from the end of season three (when Felicity cheated on Ben to sleep with Noel) and then the very next one was from the beginning of the first season (when Ben started dating Julie and Felicity found comfort in Noel’s arms). What is a person to do! It’s so confusing to see all of the episodes in random order.
I also discovered that my implementation of IMAP (the University of Washington IMAP server) has a flaw that I dislike. Only one client can access the IMAP store at one time. I did an extensive amount of research and found out that the ‘mbox’ style of storing messages prevents more than one client from accessing them at the same time. More research revealed that a ‘maildir’ style of email storage will prevent this problem.
I downloaded the Courier IMAP server but ran into some compatibility problems. All of the existing RPM packages I could find needed Glibc 2.3 and I only have Glibc 2.2. What a mess! The appropriate way to remedy that problem is to upgrade to Mandrake 9.1. I decided that toady would be that day and I proceeded to download the three ISOs for Mandrake 9.1.
After getting the ISOs and burning them I rebooted turing (my linux box) to boot from the CD. Unfortunately the CD didn’t boot. I tried again and the second time it booted up. For the first time ever I tried to do an ‘upgrade’ install instead of a clean install. I don’t have the time to start over from scratch so I decided to see how painful upgrading is.
Everything went smoothly until it came time to actually install the new packages. The installer reported errors with every single package. I rebooted and tried again. I came to the conclusion that my CD drive on the linux box is going bad or has a problem with it. It could be dust because I saw a lot of dust INSIDE the drive when I opened the tray. I never use the CD drive on the linux box so that could explain it.
I powered down both computers and transferred my DVD drive from freeside (my WinXP box) to turing. This time when I booted up, the BIOS wouldn’t even recognize the drive. I did more research and discovered that the IDE cable wasn’t completely plugged into the motherboard. It must have come loose when I was swapping drives.
After getting the hardware issues worked out, re-running the Mandrake 9.1 upgrade was flawless. It took about two hours for the operation to complete. While the computer was upgrading, I took a shower and watched Apollo 13 on the History Channel.
After the upgrade I had only minimal issues. A few pages on my web server wouldn’t display anymore. When attempting to open them, the browser would try to download an ‘x-trash’ MIME file which really confused me. A few minutes of research revealed that the new httpd.conf file for apache now treats all files ending in ‘.old’ as a ‘trash’ type file. I sometimes back up old index files with a .old extension (i.e. index.html became index.html.old). I removed the offending ‘.old’ files and everything was fine.
I also noticed that I couldn’t connect to my samba shares anymore from WinXP. I corrected the problem by running smbpasswd to create an interface for my ‘Jeff’ user on WinXP to linux. However there was another problem preventing that fix from working.
With the upgrade of the OS came an upgrade to the pain-in-the-ass shorewall firewall. It put back into place some very overzealous rules which were (seemingly randomly) blocking access to almost all ports FROM MY LAN-CONNECTED COMPTUER. Insanity. I gave shorewall an attitude adjustment and everything was fine after that.
I painlessly installed the Courier IMAP server and had it up and running in no time. I did have some problems with the Spamassassin/Procmail/Courier interoperability but finally came up with a set of procmail rules which made everything work correctly with the new ‘maildir’ style of mailboxes:
[code]#Define maildir style mailboxes.
MAILDIR=$HOME/Maildir/
DEFAULT=$MAILDIR
#Run SpamAssasin
:0fw
| spamassassin
#Move spam to the spam mailbox
:0:
* ^X-Spam-Status: Yes
.Spam/
:0: # Anything to root
* ^To.*root@(billimek|turing|localhost)*
.root/ # will go to $MAILDIR/root
[/code]
I didn’t get to bed until 4am, but I did accomplish a lot today.
Aug 26th 2003
I worked late again today. It’s not like I have a whole lot of other things going on outside of work right now, but I am consistently working over 40-hours a week. I don’t mind putting fourth the extra effort to get things done, but I feel negative about working for free too much.
This morning was the weekly 9am Revenue Pipeline managers meeting. We discussed the project schedule and Carole reminded us that we have only fifty days until our go-live date.
It was a big effort today to fix, deploy, test, and verify our last ‘defect’ for this testing cycle. I worked with Ram and the testing team to ensure that everything went smooth.
There was, of course, more bridge calls today. We had a core-file produced from one of our tux services in the SI environment. I tried to debug it but had difficulties due to the application libraries were expected to be in a certain location which does not exist in our development environment.
Jegan and I went to a meeting with mid-tier engineering in the ‘RCC’ building. This is the building where most of the servers are located. Security is pretty tight. In addition to the normal ’showing your badge to the guards before you can get into the gated parking lot’ procedure, you must get ‘buzzed’ into the lobby by the guards inside and then they write down all of your identification information. Why they scheduled a meeting in this building, I do not know.
The meeting was basically an overview of the project plan to allocate 6 n-class HPUX servers for our production environment. Some people suggested that we won’t need that much hardware in production, but I’m skeptical.
After that meeting Jay Reseigh, from the business side, came over to my cube and we met about the ‘partial reissues’ results. There were a couple of tickets that didn’t match their expected results. One of them looked to be a problem with their expected results, and the other revealed a bug in my code. I had the fix coded and tested within an hour.
I didn’t leave work until around 6:30pm or 7pm today. I went straight to Publix and did my weekly grocery shopping. I bought Twinkies!
When I got home, I fixed myself some ‘Neumann’s Own’ tomato pasta and did laundry. I also called Jenn and talked with her for about 45 minutes.
I spent the rest of the evening reading up on the specific features of my soon-to-arrive new phone. I also downloaded many apps and games to install on it once it arrives. I’m definitely stoked about having a convergent phone/PDA finally. I hope it can live up to my expectations.
Aug 27th 2003
Because it is Wednesday I went to our weekly 9am staff meeting. When the meeting started Carole said that she was going to keep it short - to about 15-30 minutes. An hour later the meeting was over.
Work today was pretty uneventful. I saw that my two packages from Amazon.com arrived already so I left early.
When I got home, I stopped by the leasing office and picked up my packages. In one (shipped via FedEX) was my new Nokia 3650 phone and Bluetooth USB adapter. The other package (shipped via UPS) was the Nokia HDW-2 Bluetooth wireless headset.
I ripped open everything and spread it all out on my living-room floor:
The first thing I did was inset the ‘SIM card’ from T-Mobile. Apparently some providers (like T-Mobile) utilize a smart-card ship to convey service. I also charged the new phone while I read the beefy manual. It charged very quickly - I think the batter was already charged. After it charged, I started charging the HDW-2 headset. It also charged quickly.
I quickly went through the manual and customized a lot of the settings to my liking. It was already mostly configured. While I was playing with it, I got a ‘text-message’ from T-Mobile with my new phone number. That’s pretty cool. I didn’t really have to do anything to activate it, it activated itself.
I tested out the wireless headset and it seemed to work great. It’s amazing the freedom one gets from a tiny wireless headset. It fits snug so I don’t have to worry about it flapping around like my old wired headset with my previous phone. The pairing process with my phone was painless. While I was playing with it, I had some troubles and it shut itself off. I couldn’t get it to turn back on. This disturbed me a little so I left it off for a while and then charged it again.
The next task was for me to set up the USB Bluetooth dongle. It’s very small - about the size of a large key that plugs into a USB slot.
The first thing I did was install the Bluetooth software. I had already done some research and was prepared for trouble with this step. Apparently Bluetooth support on PC’s is spotty at best. The particular implementation uses some wacky USB-to-serial-port emulation for the transport. Once I installed all of the software and rebooted several times, I was ready go on to the next step. I followed the instructions that several people posted on various message boards for a ‘painless’ Bluetooth process.
Everything went as planned. The Nokia Software (PC Suite) is garbage. Unfortunately I have no other choice if I want to communicate with my phone from my PC. The main reason I want the software is so I can transfer files to/from the phone as well as to synchronize with Outlook.
The synchronization process with Outlook was one of the main selling points for me to embrace Bluetooth. A big problem when I got my last phone was that I had to manually enter everyone into the address book. Now, I can synchronize my Outlook contacts list with my phone in the click of a button. The process went pretty well and it included everything like address, birthdays, etc.
I also synchronized my calendar and tasks with the phone as well. The process went smoothly and everything imported with no major snags. It’s going to be a great benefit to carry around my calendar info (meetings, etc) in my phone.
I was up pretty late installing various apps on the phone and learning it. I customized the background and operator logo:
I’m really happy with the phone so far. It has 4 megs of internal memory as well as an upgradeable 16-meg MMC card. The phone has a 640×480 camera built-in. I’m not planning on doing much photography with the phone camera considering I have the Canon 10D DSLR, but it should be fun to use when I am someplace my camera is not. It truly is a nice Phone/PDA convergent device I’ve been looking for. It’s not totally there, but it will do quite nicely I think. The best thing about all of this is that the phone was completely free (after rebates of course).
Aug 29th 2003
Yesterday I called T-Mobile to see if I could switch my phone number to something more memorable. Unfortunately they would not comply. I did, however, sign up for the $10/month unlimited t-zones service. It’s basically unlimited GPRS. From what I’ve read on various message boards, this is a great deal. In Europe people are still paying per kilobyte of GPRS traffic. This brings my T-Mobile service monthly fee to $50/month. This is the same as I was paying with Sprint, but I get more time (unlimited nights and weekends, 100 more daytime minutes) and unlimited data.
I played around with it today and was sold as soon as I configured e-mail. In a matter of minutes I set up everything so I can communicate with my personal IMAP server. On my phone I am now able to read my home e-mail. I love the freedom this gives me. On top of that, I have an instant-message client installed on the phone called Agile Messenger. With that I am able to log onto my ICQ, AIM, MSN, and Yahoo IM accounts. Now I can do my e-mail and instant-messaging from my phone, anywhere I do (provided GPRS is available). I sort of knew this type of thing was available but never really paid attention to it before because it though it would be too costly. I’ve very happy with this arrangement.
I also have a program called MiniGPS which catalogs the cell-towers you are near. What I can do is this: I pool all of the cell-towers around my office into a ‘work’ cell-tower group. Then I tell MiniGPS to automatically switch my ‘profile’ (this is my ringer, volume, etc settings) whenever I enter my ‘work’ cell-tower group. Now I don’t even need to do anything special when I go into work, my phone will automatically know I am at work based upon my vicinity to certain cell towers and switch into silent mode. That’s really cool!
I made plans today to go to Athens with Jenn on Monday. I checked with Carole and it’s no problem for me to take off from work on Monday. I’m really looking forward to spending the day with her on Monday. I think the weather is going to be nice.
Today is Mom’s birthday. I called her up to wish her a happy birthday and we chatted. She’s going out to dinner with Jim tonight and then on Sunday afternoon they are flying to New York City and returning Monday afternoon.
Work was a little intense today. We installed a new cut of our code into the integration environment and there were some issues with the database configuration that Jegan and I worked out this morning.
We had a core dump in one of our processes. I did some thorough investigation and tracked the problem down to an exception being thrown from the persist call inside one of the base classes. We threw the exception up to Tuxedo where it looks like something had a problem with it and dropped a signal 6 core dump. I was unable to extract a ticket number so we can’t replay it.
While working in Jegan’s cube this afternoon, Scott came by and started playing with my phone. He snapped a photo of Jegan (and me in the background):
They asked if I could email the photo to them. I happily agreed and emailed the photo. But it wouldn’t email. There was a ‘general error’. I sent test emails to myself with the phone and there were no problems. I thought about what it could be and then it hit me. I was attempting to email (through my personal SMTP server) external recipients. My mailer daemon (postfix) is configured to block relays (to prevent spammers from using my computer as an open relay). I edited the postfix configuration file and made an exception for my phone’s IP-address. Once I did that, everything worked fine.
I then spent thirty minutes researching SMTP authentication and came to the sad realization that it’s not really that easy to implement. For now, my patch is going to have to do.
I didn’t leave work until 6:45pm. This was mostly due to the fact that I had nothing else going on this evening.
Last night I noticed some odd behavior with ActiveSync. It wouldn’t stay connected. I attributed this to interference from the clunky bug-ridden Bluetooth implementation I just installed. I did some research and discovered that just a couple of days ago someone leaked a new version of the Bluetooth drivers. The version I’m currently using is 1.2.x. The new version is 1.4.x. Apparently this new version works with HID (Human Input Devices) now. This means that I can use my existing Microsoft Bluetooth transceiver instead of the Bluetooth USB dongle I just bought.
I methodically uninstalled all of the previous Bluetooth and PC Suite stuff. TO be extra sure, I used the System Restore to go back to the day I installed everything (this past Wednesday when I got the phone). System Restore is truly an innovative thing. I don’t know how it works, but it’s like magic.
Before restoring to Wednesday, I installed Norton Antivirus and deleted all traces of it from my computer. When I restored to Wednesday, Norton Antivirus was installed again and running. In addition, some things that I downloaded since Wednesday (zip files) were now missing. It didn’t miss a thing! It’s like a full backup/restore but the strange thing is that I don’t know were it saves everything! Score one for Microsoft innovation.
I installed the new Bluetooth drivers. I had to hack the drivers (per some message board instructions) to make them work, but it seems to be less flakey than the 1.2.x version. The cool thing is that I can now use my Bluetooth Keyboard, Mouse, and Phone all from the same transceiver.
I now have no need for the USB Bluetooth dongle I just bought, but I’m going to hold onto it to use at work when we migrate to WinXP so I’ll be able to sync my phone at work.
With the new software, I didn’t experience any more ActiveSync problems. I downloaded some more apps for the phone. One of the things I got was an ‘unlock code generator’. For fun I entered my phone’s unique IMEI and it generated the unlock code. I removed the SIM card from the phone, entered the unlock code and it told me that it was now unlocked. I don’t really have a need for it to be unlocked, but in theory I can now use it on another network because it’s not locked to T-Mobile anymore.
I tried out a new operator logo and screenshot:
Aug 31st 2003
The first part of today was pretty quiet. I slept in pretty late this morning. I spent an hour to get up-to-date on my personal finances. It was actually pretty fun to do this because my portfolio is looking better than it has in a long time.
Fidelity Contrafund has been making a solid comeback for quite some time now. In fact, my overall ROI for all dates is up to 2.6%. This is quite a feat considering how abysmal it looked a year ago. Janus Twenty and Magellan are still pretty bad (-18.4% and 14.9% overall ROI) but have also been steadily improving. Janus Twenty is still pretty weak overall though.
My Delta stock (provided as a part of my employer matching) is still my worst performing at an overall ROI of -35.1%. For my entire 401(k) portfolio, my overall ROI is now at -8.6%. To put this in perspective, the ROI for the YTD is 16.1%, so things are definitely improving. Exactly one year ago, my 401(k) overall ROI was -25.1% (with a YTD ROI of -15.7%).
This afternoon I packed up a bag with clothes and my backpack with my camera & books. Once I had everything together, I drove out to Lenox mall to meet Jenn.
I met her outside the mall (it closed at 6pm) and we both drove separately to Athens, GA. The drive was pretty uneventful and