Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Jenn had a lot of reading to do for her different classes. We decided to go to a quiet coffee shop and have something to drink & eat (for a pseudo, light breakfast) while she reads her economics and I read my book.

Before doing that we walked to the library so Jenn could return a book. As we walked through the mostly-deserted campus we saw a lot of trash everywhere. Fortunately it was all in trash bags but there were tons of trash bags (mostly containing beer bottles/cans) all over campus.

After dropping off the book, we went back to the main downtown area and straight to the Starbucks. We looked around inside (upstairs) for a quiet table but couldn’t find anything.

Instead we left Starbucks and went down a block to another, local, coffee shop. It wasn’t as crowded and we found a nice table near the window at the front of the store. Jenn had a caramel latte and croissant and I had a mango iced tea and blueberry muffin. We stayed there for a few hours. Jenn was reading her economics book and I read quite a bit of my book. It was quite pleasant.

Around 12:30pm we decided to get some lunch. We packed up all of our stuff and walked back towards the ‘Clocked’ restaurant. This time there was a space for us to sit. I had the tasty hazelnut pasta.

After lunch we walked back to the apartment. The weather was perfect today. It was partly cloudy and cool. It was a great day to be outside.

A little while later we decided to go to the Georgia Botanical Gardens. We walked around for a little while to find a nice place to study. We eventually stopped at a bench under some trees. Jenn and I read for a while and then took turns taking a nap against each other.

Jenn suggested that we head over to the main garden area and spread out the blanket she brought along. We found a nice patch of grass in the shade and did more reading. After a while I busted out my camera and walked around, doing some macro photography.

I can’t wait to get the Canon 100mm USM macro lens.

After the gardens, we went to ‘The Grill’ for dinner. I had a BLT. Around 7:30pm I headed home.

Because I was up so late last night I didn’t make it into work until around 9:30am this morning. I didn’t feel so bad about it because I put in a lot of hours yesterday.

I put up a small photo album of photos I took on Sunday at the botanical gardens.

Today has been pretty much a constant bridge-call for me. I was stuck on the phone (thank god I have speaker phone) from 9:30am till 11am, and then from 1:30pm till 4pm. John, the guy running the integration test, has like a dozen people on the bridge and for every decision; he goes through the roster asking us if we’re ‘go/no-go’. It’s very mission control-like. I’m starting to tire of these daily, all-day-long bridge calls. We did more failover testing today with the same results as yesterday.

I got a lot of personal tasks done that I’ve been putting off for a long time. I managed to do the following this afternoon:

- Scheduled a dermatologist appt for Thursday morning.
- Selected a new dentist.
- Scheduled a doctor appointment for Wednesday afternoon.
- Ordered new bank debit card from USAA.
- Increased my homeowners deductible.
- Added the Sigma 15mm fisheye lens to my personal articles floater policy.
- Ordered two pairs of Metatarsal pads for $14.

Mom called me and asked if I wanted to have dinner at her house tonight. She’s going to be cooking ‘16-bean soup’ and suggested that we watch a movie while having dinner. We agreed that I would show up around 6:30pm.

This afternoon we discovered a core dump in integration test. Before I left I took a quick look at it in the debugger and discovered that it is happening in a string comparison inside Exchange Valuation. I’ll investigate it more closely tomorrow.

When I got home I took a short 30-minute nap and then left for Mom’s house. Traffic was pretty bad and it took me about 35 minutes to get there. Dinner was nice. The ‘16-bean soup’ was nice and hot and the fresh French bread was great. We watched a documentary called, “The Endurance: Shackleton’s Legendary Antarctic Expedition“. I never knew about this failed expedition to the south pole, but the photographs and details presented in the movie were amazing.

When I got home, I tuned into the exciting California Governor recall election coverage. As soon as the polls closed in California (11pm EST), all of the networks were already calling the results: Davis has been recalled and Arnold Schwarzenegger will replace him!

This morning I went down Windy Hill road to the medical complex for my 8:40am appointment with my dermatologist, Dr. Luchetti.

Unlike yesterday I didn’t have to wait that long before being called in. Dr. Luchetti looked at my toenails and said basically the same thing as Dr. Feldman. My insurance will not cover Lamisil and basically it’s super expensive, doesn’t really work in the long run, and could cause liver complications. She did, however, prescribe some topical drops (Exelderm) to try.

The main point of my visit was to have her look at the large & unsightly moles on my back. She looked at them and said that they are all fine but she can remove any that I want. I mentioned that a particularly large one sometimes rubs things the wrong way and doesn’t feel good. I asked her to remove that one.

She produced a needle, pricked my back twice and then 10 seconds later was putting a band id on. She used a ‘cigar-cutter’ like device to slice it off. There was absolutely no pain and it was quick and easy.

I arrived at work at 9:40am. When I was walking in my back felt a little wet. I went into the restroom and looked in the mirror. To my horror I saw a huge blood stain on the back of my shirt. I guess they didn’t pit a large enough bandage on.

I frantically sought some band aids and got some from Gina (an administrative assistant). I asked Casey to assist me and he put them over the wound on my back.

I was already a little late and jumped on the daily bridge call for integration test.

While listening to the call, I set up the model plane Larry sent me:

For lunch today Alex, Anil, Scott, Mallick, and I went to Willy’s next to Piedmont Park. As usual there were lots of hotties around.

This afternoon I went to a conceptual architecture meeting for the Omni group. It was difficult to stay awake.

Around 5:45pm I left work and headed down to the East Point tavern bar where some coworkers were having a happy hour. Casey, James, Bob J., Jeff C., and Carole were there. I had a bacon cheese burger and a few crown & cokes. Later Anil and Mallick showed up too.

We talked about work and played pool. Around 8:15pm we all dispersed and headed home.

When I got home, I started laundry and watched Survivor. I spoke with Jenn and also Craig.

I didn’t get to bed until around 2am.

My alarm woke me up at 6am today. I slowly showered, packed, and left for the airport. I was still pretty tired.

I went to work and parked in the front of my office. From there I walked the short distance to the Marriott Hotel next-door and caught the shuttle-bus to the airport. I checked in for my flight at the kiosk and then headed to the security checkpoint. Unfortunately they were forcing everyone to go through the ‘normal’ line. I was used to flashing my ID and getting access to the special, short line.

Shortly after I arrived at the gate, I was assigned a seat in first-class, seat 1D. The flight was pleasant and I got a hot breakfast consisting of an omelet, sausage, fruit, hot croissant, and cookie. During the flight I read my book and attempted to sleep.

I arrived in San Diego around 10:20am. After I deplaned I headed over to gate 37 where Dad’s flight will arrive. His flight got in a bit early and I didn’t have to wait very long. I greeted Dad and we headed outside.

Larry left work early to pick us up and was at the airport within about five minutes of us going outside.

On the way to his home, we stopped for lunch at an Italian place. I had really tasty pesto fettuccini pasta with sun dried tomatoes.

After lunch we went home and met Amy and Cal. A short while later Larry and I headed to the Time Warner Cable office to pick up a cable box. Larry wants to watch the UT-OU football game tomorrow and none of the normal stations are covering it. In order to watch it, he must purchase an ESPN ‘game day’ pay-per-view thing tomorrow. In order to purchase PPV, he needs the cable box.

When we got back home, Larry, Dad, and I headed to the preschool place to pick up Tucker and Lily. Once we collected them, the five of us went to the San Diego Wild Animal Park. We got there around 3pm so we only had about 1.5 hours before it closed.

I’ve been there once or twice before so a lot of it was familiar but I managed to get some more photos this time.

(a throng of ducks in a feeding frenzy)

(Lily and Tucker)

When we got home, we picked up Amy and Cal and went out to Macaroni Grill for dinner.

I was pretty tired at this point due to my lack of sleep and the ‘tired’ feeling one gets from traveling. I read some of Larry’s Digital Photographer UK magazine and went to bed. When I crawled into bed, Buster wanted to sleep with me too. Unfortunately it was a tiny ‘twin’ sized bed (Dad was sleeping in the guest bedroom on the nice bed).

We didn’t do much this morning. I spent more time reading more of that magazine. I spent so much time reading it not only because it’s so good but I thought this would be my only change for a while. Later this morning Larry told me I could take the magazines with me. If I knew that I wouldn’t have spent so much time reading it this weekend. It’s such a great magazine because, unlike mot US-based photo magazines, it isn’t full of advertisements and ‘fluff’ articles.

I took a quick shower this morning, packed my bag, and double-checked flights. Everything looked good. Dad and I both have 11:50am PST flights.

We loaded up the car with all the kids because after dropping us off, Larry, Amy, and the kids are going to go to the beach.

When we got to the airport, saw watched in horror as we approached the terminal and saw the security line was very long. This looked disastrous. I couldn’t understand it. Every single time (i.e. over a dozen times) I’ve been to this airport before the security line was less than five-minutes.

For me it wasn’t a huge thing because I could just take the 1:30pmn flight but for Dad there weren’t a lot of options. Nonetheless we checked in and got in line. We later found out that it was so long because a cruise ship came in and everyone was getting to the airport early for their 1:30pm flights. Dad and I found a shorter line for people who have flights departing before noon. We got in that line and managed to get through security in time.

Once past security, Dad and I parted ways. I headed down to gate 40 and got assigned a set in coach (27C). It was an exit row which was nice because I had a little extra legroom.

During the flight I read more of my book, attempted to sleep, and wrote in my journal.

Jegan did a performance test last Friday and confirmed that enabling logging of the ‘DTMO’ files did not affect performance numbers. This was good because we were worried that having logging on would degrade performance such that it would not be viable to do in the production environment.

Because the numbers looked good, we set out plans on what it would take to enable this type of logging in production. We came up with the disk space requirements and floated the idea to Carole. She liked the idea and suggested that we ask Chris A. from midtier.

I drafted an email to Chris and asked Jegan & Casey to comment. Once I had their feedback, I updated the email and sent it off to Chris.

I finally got around to looking at the core dump from Exchange Valuation (from integration test). The situation baffled me. On a ‘new’ ticket, we had a ‘0′ coupon. This isn’t something that is supposed to happen, but it did. The program crashed because we initialize a null pointer only inside an if statement that in this case never evaluated true. I called Allison to explain the situation to her. She agreed that this didn’t make sense and I sent her the ticket.

I know what fix I need to implement, but I’ll wait to her back from her.

Dave M. emailed me asking for assistance on checking the pagesize from a C++ system call. I wrote a sample program and sent him the code.

I now have about 1,100 emails in my inbox (all read). I really need to go through them all and file/delete them.

Casey invited me to join him & others at ‘623′ for a happy-hour this afternoon. 623 has $2 beers on Tuesday afternoon. There are always hot girls there during the day at lunch, maybe there will be some in the afternoon too! Even though I don’t drink beer, I decided to go along anyway in hopes that they might have some real alcohol. Just Casey and Keith went, so it was just three of us. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything other than beer and wine (they will have everything starting next year). We were there for about three hours. I had a coke and Caesar salad. Casey and Keith had several beers.

First thing this morning was a 9:30am meeting I set up with Chris A. from midtier engineering and Dave M. from middlware. I headed over to the 11 West conference room and joined Dave who was already there. We waited about ten minutes for Chris, chatting to pass the time. I finally excused myself and went to my desk to call Chris. He wasn’t at his desk, so I paged him and went back to the conference room. Dave and I chatted some more and finally Chris arrived.

The meeting was pretty short. We discussed our (limited) short-term options utilizing the local storage in the six production nodes. We finally agreed to use a large 40-gig partition that exists on dpd20g and have a cron-driven ftp job to offload the logfiles on a timed interval (probably once an hour). They suggested that we create the logfiles in a batched fashion as we’ll have about 1.2 million files created a day otherwise. I fully agreed with this. I also want to look into compressing them on the fly as they are written out. Dave suggested that it may be possible to use a named pipe on one server and somehow export it to another named pipe on another server. I’ve never heard of this so I’m a bit skeptical, but I’m going to look into it.

Brian and Bob came by this morning and asked me if it was ‘Bosses Day’ today. I checked my analog calendar on the cube wall and didn’t see anything. Outlook didn’t say anything about it either. I finally found a website which gave the answer. Today is indeed national bosses day. Last year Carole made a big deal of the fact that we didn’t do anything for her on bosses day, so we figured it would be prudent to do something today. We agreed to take her out to lunch. Brian took care of the details.

Brian, James, Veena, Bob, Sameer, Alex, Bob J., Jeff C., and I took Carole to the Marriott lunch buffet. I had a great pasta from the pasta bar. I had them put in sausage, bacon, onions, sun dried tomatoes, and garlic.

This afternoon I worked more on the dtmo file changes. I hit a brick wall when I asked Jegan’s thought on it. He came up with a much different approach. While I agree with everything Jegan suggested, it’s going to take much longer to implement now.

I also spent a great deal of time on the bridge call supporting the integration test. Finally today we made some progress. This morning we were having more DB2 problems. Finally someone discovered that one of the heavy queries is not indexed. The DBA’s were resistant to put in the index suggested that we are throwing indexes to cover up bad code.

They finally relented and put in the index. When we started testing again, the system screamed and everyone was happy with the performance except for the DBAs who said that this is like a band aid fix to crappy code (not her exact words). I’m glad the code in question isn’t from our group.

We also ran through some tickets which exercise contention. This is something that I’ve been very frustrated about during the entire testing process. All of the tests that we’ve been doing are only create-sale events which are nothing like reality once we go into production. Every chance I get I remind John S. (the testing engineer running integration test) that we _really_ need to be running some contention to see reality. He’s always blown me off. Finally I had my ‘day in court’. The results were great. The engines were saturated and all six tuxedo nodes were running hot at 100% CPU. The throughput was around 19-20 messages/sec which is right on target. As far as I’m concerned we’re ready for production.

For a while now I’ve been checking the fall foliage network website for their bi-weekly updated reports on the state of fall foliage. The latest report (from yesterday) basically says that it’s about as good as it’s going to get for the northeast.

I would love to get up there. I opened up the delta travelnet intranet site and checked their destination maps. We have flights into Portland Maine, Bangor Maine, Manchester NH, and Burlington Vermont.

If I was going to do this, I would have to fly out Friday night and back Saturday afternoon. All of the locations, except one, didn’t look doable. But Manchester looked quite doable! There is a direct flight tomorrow evening at 8pm and a return flight Saturday afternoon at 4:20pm. Both flights are pretty open too.

I’ve never been this spontaneous about going somewhere before but I really want to see New England in all it’s fall glory this season. I booked a car rental ($60 from Alamo) and hotel ($70 from EconoLodge). I spent some time researching and decided that I’m going to drive around Lakes region of New Hampshire. There’s supposedly tons of nice stuff to see like covered bridges and lakes and parks.

This evening for dinner I BBQed a chicken breast marinated in a honey ginger sauce. I cooked it for just the right amount of time and it came out pretty good.

I also did laundry, watched survivor, spoke with Craig, and Jenn.

Before bed I wrote in my journal and packed my bag.

Today was a fairly quiet day at work - typical for Friday. I spent most of my time on a bridge call supporting integration test. Today we did more contention testing.

Everyone in Carole’s team got an email today indicating that our workstations would be replaced with our new XP-desktop on Monday. We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I backup up all my data in preparation for a migration next week.

Jegan was pretty busy all day with his side project. He’s helping out the ‘MARS’ team with some issues they are having with a java client.

For lunch today a large group of us went to a new Mexican-food place. It was mediocre.

After lunch we had a 20-year anniversary celebration for Jeff Chambers. He handed me his 2-megapixel HP digital camera and asked me to take some pictures. I think I’m more used to my camera.

A rainstorm came through this afternoon and Jegan pointed out a rainbow to me. Looking out the east-side of our building was a big rainbow. I grabbed my camera and headed up to the 13th floor conference room where I snapped a photo of it:

I left work at 6:30pm. I was one of the last ones there (with it being a Friday). I went to the airport and checked in. While waiting for my 8pm flight, I had dinner at the airport food court. I went to one of those cheapo Chinese-food places like they have in the mall. The food was horrible.

I sat in coach class on the 2.5 hour flight up to Manchester, New Hampshire. I read my book and snoozed a little.

When I arrived at Manchester at 10:30pm, I got a big map of the state from a visitor’s booth in the lobby. I picked up my rental car and drove to my hotel, Econo Lodge.

The hotel was in a ’shady’ looking part of town. Two old guys were checking people in. The room wasn’t that spectacular but I wasn’t expecting much:

I went to sleep around midnight.

I woke up around 4:30 or 5am today. I showered, dressed, and finished packing.

Once at the airport (I parked at the $9/day park-and-ride), I checked in. This early in the morning there weren’t a lot of people at the airport. I got a tasty Cinabon cinnamon roll and waited at the gate.

I got a few winks of sleep on the 2.5 hour flight to Denver. Once there I got my bag from baggage claim as well as the car.

We drove west on I70 out of Denver towards Avon, Colorado. We stopped for lunch in Copper Mountain. I had a B.L.T.

Once at the Avon exit, it was a short drive through the round-a-bouts towards Beaver Creek. We had to pass through three different guardhouses before ascending the final road to the hotel.

We arrived at the Ritz Carlton Bachelor Gulch hotel and had the rental car valet parked (that’s the only way you can park).

When we checked in, we were told that our room was ready but if we were willing to wait a bit, we could probably be upgraded to a nicer room. The very professional staff at the hotel were all wired with microphones and ear buds. It was pretty cool how courteous and ’sharp’ they all were.

The concierge offered to give us a trail map of the mountain behind the hotel so we could go hiking while we wait. They also suggested hanging out in the spa or the bar.

Behind the hotel was a nice plaza-type area with tables and chairs and a pool. About thirty feet from the back door was a quad chairlift. There hasn’t been any snow yet this season so all of the ski runs were completely bare.

We hiked up one of the trails to some stacked hay. It was a beautiful sunny day with deep blue skies. The temperature was about 65 degrees. It was perfect. In all we were out on the mountainside about an hour.

When we came back we sat outside a bit and then went into the bar for a drink. After a while we checked back with the front desk and they had a mountain-view room available instead of the ‘valley-view room’.

The room was beautiful. It had a nice balcony looking out to the back towards the mountain. The beds were comfortable and all of the furniture was high quality.

I was still pretty obsessed with the large piece of dust on the sensor in my camera that I decided to give it one more crack. I busted out the lens pen and gave the sensor a more forceful swipe this time. This seemed to fix the problem. I no longer had that unsightly spec in the lower left-hand corner of frames taken at high apertures.

I got on the phone with the concierge and checked in on activities. I made arrangements for us to go horseback riding tomorrow morning. The concierge said that he would have the info and directions sent up to the room.

We went out by the pool for about an hour before the sun dropped behind the mountain. Despite being in the 50’s outside, it was quite pleasant. The sun was shining and the pool was heated. The pool was really cool because the water literally went up to the edge. They had some sort of spillover thing that collected the water, keeping it at the height of the edge.

We went to dinner in a town west along highway 6 called ‘Edwards’. We went to a place called Main Street Grill. Because of the low season they had a two-for-one entrée special.

Back at the hotel, we sat in the lobby area called ‘the great room’ and read books. Shortly after sitting down an attractive woman came by to offer us a drink. I had a ‘rock star & vodka’. She also brought a metal dish of toasted nuts of every kind. It was thoroughly enjoyable and relaxing.

Outside, in the back, the hotel staff erected a roaring fire in a large pit that I didn’t notice earlier. We went outside and discovered that they had a large basket of marshmallows and special roasting sticks. Of course we took advantage of this and roasted up some marshmallows. It was really cool.

With only a few hours of sleep last night, the jetlag, time-zone change, and high altitude (over 10,000 feet), I was exhausted and went to bed around 9pm.

Yesterday afternoon I called the Concierge desk and made an appointment with ‘bachelor’. One of the amenities of the hotel is that guests can make an appointment with their resident golden retriever, Bachelor. I made a 10am appointment for today.

We went down to the front desk and they called up the special dog valet guy. A few minutes later the special dog valet guy brought up Bachelor. He instructed us to not let him off leash and to enjoy ourselves.

It was fun taking him for a walk up the mountainside behind the hotel. We spent about an hour out there with him before returning.

After the walk with Bachelor, we left the hotel and headed to the Holy Cross National Forest ranger station. Inside the building they had about a dozen detailed trail maps for trails in the area. We decided to go on the ‘Missouri Lakes’ trail.

It took about thirty minutes to drive to the trailhead. We spent most of the time on a forestry service dirt road. With the compact rental car, it was slow-going.

The trail was quite nice. It is unusually dry for this time of year as they usually have at least one snowfall by now. However there hasn’t been any snow, and little precipitation for quite a while. As a result, it’s been very dry this late summer.

I was a bit nervous because everyone had been telling us that hunting season recently began and that we need to be careful not to get shot.

Once we reached some meadowland, it reminded me a lot of the ‘Laguna’ area in California where I’ve been with Larry a couple of times before.

We didn’t have much of a breakfast or lunch so we were a bit hungry. In addition to that, the high mountains all around cause the sun to ’set’ very early. It was getting pretty dark despite only being around 5pm. We cut the hike a little short and returned to the trailhead.

After the hike, we felt like a juicy hamburger for dinner. I inquired to the concierge where to get such a meal and was told to try a place called ‘Gaslight Grille’. She gave us directions and we headed out there.

When we arrived (around 6pm) it was very crowded. The entire outside patio area was packed full of people with their dogs. We finally figured this out when we saw a sign that indicated some sort of happy hour special for people that bring their dogs with them. That was pretty cool.

We sat outside and I had a buffalo burger with cheese and bacon. As before, we had drinks in the lobby this evening before retiring.

One of the cool things about this hotel is that morning-lunchtime, housekeeping comes around and makes the beds and cleans up. Not only do they clean everything but the replace ‘wet’ robes with fresh robes, fresh towels, they even fold-up clothes that happen to be laying on the floor and straighten up papers and other things on the desk. The attention to detail is mind-blowing.

In the evening (when we’ve been out for dinner), they come and clean the rooms again. This time they remove the comforters and ‘display’ pillows from the beds and turn down the sheets. They leave chocolates on the pillows and turn on the radio to classical music. It’s awesome to be treated like royalty.

Today’s theme is ‘Power‘

(click on the photo for a larger version)

A .50 cal Desert Eagle handgun is fired into several galon-sized jugs of water.

This morning I did my weekly banking stuff. I checked my credit card online statement and noticed that I had an $89 credit from Howard Johnson! When I first noticed that I was overcharged by Howard Johnson, I immediately contacted them and they didn’t want to help me. I disputed the charge with my credit card company and now I notice that I have a credit. It looks like justice prevailed today!

While I was straightening up the living room, I came across the New Hampshire road map that I made extensive use of during my trip there last Saturday. I decided to scan it into Photoshop and highlight the route I took along with the points of interest (nine total):

1. The start of my trip in Concord.
2. I exited I-93 at Ashland and began the tour along the smaller roads, specifically highway 113.
3. At the intersection of 113 and 25, I decided to head back west along 25 instead of continuing on to my original destination of Silver Lake. The rain was so bad that continuing on eastwardly didn’t seem wise.
4. I went down highway 109 to stop at Wentworth State Park. Because I was closed, I parked near the entrance and walked along the shore of the lake.
5. I took the wrong turn out of Wentworth and went along 109 to the intersection