Jeff Billimek’s Journal

By the time I woke up those that had spent the night were already gone. So it was just Craig, Julie, and I. While I was waiting for Craig and Julie to get up, I used Craig’s computer to log into my computer and work on my weekly finances.

The three of us cleaned up Craig’s house from the mess that was generated from the party last night. Julie and I swept up the confetti stuff that the silly little New Year’s poppers generate.

After all of the cleaning Craig start cooking breakfast. He was making breakfast tacos (homemade)! I love breakfast tacos and never get an opportunity to eat them in Atlanta since no restaurants make them.

He fixed up a batch of scrambled eggs, bacon, onions, green peppers, and potato. After toasting the flour tortillas, I spread some butter on them and then sprinkled cheese on top of the taco. I had three. They were very good and I was stuffed.

We didn’t do a whole lot for the next few hours but around 2:15pm Craig and Julie took me to the airport. I was there pretty early so I took my time. I noticed a long line for security.

The San Antonio airport does their security really wacky. When you approach the snake barriers at the front of the line near the metal detectors, you have to show your boarding pass and photo ID to a non-TSA guy before you can go any further. Then, once you get to the front of the line (you are stuck in the snake barrier thing the whole time), you have to once again show your boarding pass and photo ID to another non-TSA guy who then lets you walk up to the metal detectors (and then you deal with TSA).

Maybe it’s just me but there seems to be a glaring inefficiency with this system. Why are they checking your ID both at the end of the line and at the front of the line? It’s baffling. The only explanation I have is that this non-TSA security company has some contract with the airport (maybe they are a union - that would explain the wacky inefficiencies) and now that TSA is in place, they have nothing better to do other than multiple, redundant, and time-wasting photo ID checks.

To my great surprise I got the last seat in first class. I was a bit disappointed that we never got hot towels - that’s one thing I look forward to in first class. The beverage service was pretty slim too; they only came around once or twice once we were air born. If I was a paying passenger who just spent a lot of money on first class, I would feel pretty ripped off.

On the plane ride home I read book 9 of the wheel of time series. It’s a particular good part where Rand is confronted by his three girlfriends and they are all strangely happy to share him among themselves. They ‘bond’ him as their warder which means that they can feel anything he’s feeling all of the time.

As we got close to Atlanta, the sun set and I snapped a photo out of the window:

I went to bed sort of late last night so it was tough for me to get up at 7am. I woke up so early because I wanted to clean up some of the crap around my apartment before the install guy comes over.

My DirecTV installation was scheduled for today between 8am and noon. I got most of the junk cleared up by 8:30am. Around 9am I got a telephone call on my landline from the installer. He said that he would be over between 10am and 11am. After I got off the phone with him, he called back a couple of minutes later and said that it would be later - between 11am and noon.

11am came and went. 12pm came and went. By the time 1pm rolled around I got pretty nervous and checked my landline. My piece of crap cordless phone wasn’t working correctly! It’s a little flakey whenever it is off the base unit and will often not get a dial tone or ring at an incoming call. Since that is my only connected phone to the landline, I most likely missed the installer guy calling again! It’s pretty frustrating!

Since I had no way to contact the installer, I called up DirecTV and explained the situation. They gave me the phone number for the installation company. I called them, and they said that they would have the installer call me back shortly. This time I had my piece of junk cordless phone on the charger so it would ring correctly.

When the installer came, I gave him directions and shortly after that he arrived. He was a older balding Indian man who wore a utility belt. When I showed him to the back porch, he pulled out an astrolabe-looking device and peered through it towards the southern sky. This is what it all came down to: Would I be able to get a signal from my porch?

Fortunately his prognosis was good. He then asked if the apartment management allowed drilling into the balcony to mount the dish. I didn’t think so but he said that if he can’t drill that he will have to install some type of mounting pole which will cost $50. This really upset me. I called up the leasing office to check on the drilling rule and they did confirm that there is to be no drilling. They also reminded me that there is a $100 deposit that you must pay when getting a satellite system. I’m sure I’ll get around to paying that some day.

The installation guy also said that he would have to use some special ‘flat’ cables to run underneath the back door and underneath the window. Those are $5 each and I would need three. I started whining about how I wasn’t expecting to have to pay anything for installation and the guy said he would give me a break on the cables so I would only need to pay for the $50 mount. Whatever.

He brought in the boxes for the standalone receiver as well as the Tivo unit. He said that I could hook them up myself if I wanted things to go faster. I was more than happy to hook things up. I first hooked up the standalone receiver to the old television in the bedroom. Instead of running a cable wire from the wall to the television, I ran it from the television to the DirecTV receiver. I also plugged in the receiver and plugged in the phone line.

Next I moved onto the Tivo unit. It’s a 40-gig Samsung S4040R. I unplugged the coax cable line from the television and wall and plugged it into one of the satellite receiver slots on the Tivo. The box had another coax cable which I plugged into the second satellite input on the Tivo. I then ran the S-Video cable from the Tivo directly into my television. I ran the RCA audio cables from the Tivo to my stereo receiver. Lastly I plugged in the phone line and plugged in the power cord. I turned on the television and saw that it was working (audio and video). It was sitting at a setup screen.

By this time, the dish was mounted on my new $50 steel pole and the guy was running the wires down to the door and window. I helped him with the flat wires. I was skeptical at first but they worked out quite well. Once he had those secure, I plugged the coax cables into them and was ready to go.

When he was all done, he was surprised that I made as much progress with the receivers. I then went through the on-screen setup for the Tivo & DirecTV. It was very simple and easy. I was happy to see the satellite signal strength for both receivers on the dish at around 95%.

Next, the installer called up DirecTV and gave them serial numbers and specific info from the boxes the receivers came in. After that, he gave the phone to me and I had to walk through the service activation with the DirecTV rep. I signed up for the ‘Total Choice Plus’ package with local channels. He tried to sell me some kind of warranty but I turned it down. As he did something on their side, he had me switch to a local channel to make sure the signal is coming through. That was fine. He then had me switch to an ‘extended channel’ but there was no signal. Within about 30 seconds the channel came in. I was in business. I also signed up for their three-month free trial of HBO.

When it came time to pay the installation guy for the $50 pole, I asked him who to make the check out to. He showed me his ID badge with an Indian-sounding name. It seems sort of shady to pay the installer directly. I wonder if it is just a scam?

After he left, I spent the rest of the day setting up the system and reading the manual. I wanted to start setting up ’season passes’ but the info in the guide was incomplete. A message at the bottom of the screen said that it will take about two days to download everything.

So work was pretty usual today, but since I’m writing this entry almost seven days later I can’t remember too much about it! I ended up staying at the office later than usual. Tonight Jenn arrives from Mexico and I’m picking her up at the airport.

Her flight was scheduled to arrive at 6:30pm but it was delayed about forty minutes. I left for the airport around 7pm and parked in the short-term parking. Once inside the terminal, I made my way to the security checkpoint and flashed my badge to get through the line without a boarding pass.

It felt pretty nice to walk through the airport without having to carry a bag. Once I reached the ‘E’ concourse I went up the escalator to the ‘International Arrivals Lobby’. This is where the people on arriving international flights are deposited. They have to go through quite a bit.

Once you deplane, you make your way down a long hallway to a large open area full of immigration desks. Assuming you pass through there without getting sent to the orange room, you make your way downstairs to the special international baggage claim. You collect your baggage and then haul it over to the customs area. Assuming you don’t act too suspicious (i.e. don’t go somewhere international for just one night), you pass through there to the baggage re-check. Then, you make your way through metal detectors in order to re-join the airport.

At the end of the security checkpoint is a tiny ‘lobby’ where I waited for Jenn. I probably got there too soon because I ended up waiting for about 45 minutes. Fortunately I had my Nokia 3650 phone with me so I could pass the time surfing the web.

Eventually I saw Jenn. We greeted each other and made our way to baggage claim where she got her bags once again.

I was starving so we didn’t waste much time and headed out for dinner. Jenn wanted to go to a place we’ve gone many times before and it’s sort of our favorite place to go. It’s a Chinese restaurant in Vinings called ‘Orient Express‘.

On the way there I was distracted talking to Jenn and accidentally got on I85 North. Woops! I took the first exit and turned around in what looked to be a bard part of town - although maybe that’s just because it was dark.

We eventually made it to the restaurant. I had the General Tso’s chicken and she had the General Tso’s Tofu. As always, it was delicious!

When we got back to my place, Jenn showed me some of the things she got while in Mexico. She has a paper mache naked mermaid angel thing. She also had these cool bingo-like cards with pictures and words on them in Spanish (i.e. a picture of a sinister looking devil with ‘el diablo’ underneath it).

Jenn brought me a huge litre-sized bottle of Kalua as a Christmas present.

I was up most of the night dealing with the production issues. We were core dumping at an alarming rate. I was paged at 11pm, 1am, 3am, 4am, and 4:40am before I finally told them not to page anymore.

When I managed to drag myself into work the next day I was pretty grouchy. We analyzed the core files. At first the stack traces didn’t look right - they weren’t providing enough information. Anil urged me to pass it along to middleware to see if it’s their issue. I didn’t feel this was the best thing to do because we had not investigated enough, but went with Anil’s suggesting anyway.

Meanwhile we continued to get core dumps all day long and it was difficult to keep up with them. I was not looking forward to tonight.

I left early today around 4pm since I was working so much last night.

When I got home, I decided to just peek inside my Tivo to see what it looked like. Actually I didn’t even think that I’d be able to look inside since I’ve read that you need a special Torx size 10 wrench to open it up. However, when I looked at the back panel, there were regular Philips screws holding this Samsung S4040R unit together.

I popped her open and took a peek inside.

It looked like a slimmed down computer but the power supply has no cover on it. I was pretty careful around those huge capacitors. The Hard Drive was your standard Western Digital 40-GB model. I think I have one of those drives in my linux box.

I was feeling a bit adventurous so I decided to pop out the drive and see what I can do. I unscrewed the drive mount, unplugged the power connector and IDE cable and gently removed the drive from the Tivo. I then powered-down my linux box and hooked things up such that my old Mandrake 9.1 HD was the primary master and my CD drive was the primary slave. I put the Tivo drive on the secondary master.

When I powered on the computer, I popped in a special modified Knoppix LiveCD with some Tivo hacking tools installed on it. Following instructions I printed out from the web, I issued the command,

mfsbackup -f 4138 -6so /mnt/c/dt2-3.1.0.mfs /dev/hdc

And about ten minutes later, it completed extracting a 2 gigabyte image from the Tivo drive.

I powered down the linux box and removed the Tivo drive. I packed it away somewhere safe because if all goes as plan, I won’t be using that drive anymore.

I have a spare 60GB drive that I’ve been using for off-site backups. I decided to convert this drive into my Tivo hacking test drive. I hooked it up and ran some more commands to ‘restore’ the Tivo image onto it.

After that was done, I hooked the new drive into Tivo and powered it up. Success! It booted with no problems.

Now that I’ve verified that the drive is ok, I shut Tivo down again and hooked it back into my linux box. This time, I booted up into another bootable CD called ‘the sleeper ISO’ because a guy with the handle ’sleeper’ created it. It basically automates the whole process to hack your tivo. I’ve been spending way too much time reading up on this so I know pretty much everything it does, so it was nice to watch it do everything - I gained a better understanding.

The process (called the ‘monte’ method) worked flawlessly. It’s a pretty clever trick actually. They have a virgin version of the Tivo kernel which still allows you to do a ‘BASH-ENV’ hack, but it then uses a special thing called ‘monte’ to dynamically load another kernel ontop of it. So what you end up with is a two-stage process. First, the hackable kernel is loaded, and all the hacks are enabled, allowing you full access to Tivo, and then the ‘legit’ newer kernel is loaded on top of it. Brilliant!

Of course, having my Tivo hacked in the current state isn’t all that great because I don’t have it connected to my network. That exercise is for tomorrow.

I woke up early so I could get to CompUSA when they open to exchange that Linksys wifi USB card. I was still running a bit late and didn’t get out of the apartment until 9am.

I decided to ditch wifi on the Tivo because I can’t find any cards that have the correct chipset to work with my limited driver options. Instead, I’m going to go with a wired USB adapter solution. I first went to MicroCenter to buy a 25-foot cat45 ethernet patch cable. After that I went to CompUSA.

At first I thought they would try to charge some silly 15% ‘restocking fee’ since I opened the Linksys wifi adapter, but fortunately they didn’t. I exchanged it for the Linksys USB 2.0 10/100 ethernet adapter (USB200M).

When I got home, I set everything up and it worked! I was able to ping my tivo box and more importantly, log into it via telnet and access the TivoWebPlus server running on it. Now the door is open and I can do some serious stuff with my tivo.

Jenn came over around 11:30am. She’s nor working until 2pm today so we decided to head over to Lenox to do some shopping and get lunch before she goes to work.

The first store we went into was Banana Republic. I ended up buying some black wool slacks, some brownish slacks, a long-sleeved striped polo-like shirt, and an orange sweater.

After Banana, we went into the Gap. Jenn got a skirt and some jeans and I got a blue sweater they had on sale for only $10. I also got two stretchy white undershirts.

With shopping out of the way, we had lunch at a bread place called Panera. I had a ham & swiss sandwich on rye. Jenn had a really good-looking Caesar salad and cheese broccoli soup.

I spent the rest of the day playing with my now-networked Tivo and tweaking things with the web server. I have almost everything working now except for the ‘displaytext’ module and streaming video. The displaytext module will allow me to send a specially-formatted URL to my Tivo and in turn it will flash a text message on the television. The streaming video capability will allow me to extract recorded shows from my tivo to my PC, or even watch recorded showed streamed over to my PC. The streaming thing isn’t as important to me since my computer is currently in the same room as the television anyway.

Around 9:30pm I left the apartment and went back to Lenox to pick up Jenn. One of her ex-coworkers is having a birthday party and Jenn is invited. I’ve been to the guy’s house before when Jenn was house-sitting for them back around July. He and his partner have a really nice townhome close to Lenox, just across from I-85. All of the furniture inside is really nice and good quality and for the most part, it’s decorated quite well. I was impressed.

There were about twelve or fifteen people at the party. All of the guys there were dressed really nice and I felt a bit jealous because I originally thought I dressed up a bit too, but they looked much nicer. I later found out that I was the only straight guy at the party, so I don’t feel so bad now.

We were at the party for a couple of hours. On the way back to my place, we stopped at Wendy’s for a late-nite bite to eat because I was pretty hungry.

This morning James asked me if I’d be interested in going to Tokyo with him and some other people in February. I’ve never been to Tokyo before but I think I’d like to go. I told him that I’m interested.

Today is Casey’s last day of work before he leaves on his vacation/wedding. In fact, he left around 3pm when I was in a Problem Review Board meeting. In that meeting we discussed code fixes that are slated for the next 1.2 production point-release.

Going into that meeting it was my understanding that our massive core dumps are caused by a situation exposed by running certain types of BSP tickets. In the meeting I proposed pausing all BSP tickets until we load the fix, so we aren’t constantly crashing our programs. To my surprise, the business agreed, but partially because of another functional bug they’ve observed.

In the meeting, ODE agreed to shut off BSP processing. I was pretty happy because it means that I’ll have a quiet and restful night’s sleep tonight.

I spoke with Larry today about this weekend. He’s invited me to come visit them in San Diego this weekend, but it would mean taking off Monday. I looked at the flights and it looks doable so I think I’m going to try to go.

I worked late today and didn’t leave work until around 7pm. When I was leaving the office, I saw Casey and Anil working together on a problem. I asked Casey why he was back at work and it turns out that Carole needs a code change made today so they are working on it.

Before going home, I went to CVS and dropped off a prescription that I got back in October from my dermatologist for some drops to put under my toes for my nasty toe fungal thingy (The only other choice is to spend $1000 on Lamisil and it most likely won’t make it go away). After hitting CVS, I went to Publix and did my weekly grocery shopping.

Anil paged me indicating that they made a code change and are requesting a build tonight as it’s a production-candidate code so we’re going to have to move quickly to get it into integration with everything else.

I was up pretty late working on the RET build for this O&D components, but I was also up late working on the production problems. Despite having the ftp script running, we were at 100% disk usage on all six production nodes. This is like a worse-case scenario. I had no choice but to start blowing away core files.

The problems were pretty severe. I didn’t go to bed until 3am. It seems as if the problem is now worse, and we weren’t supposed to have the errors anymore because ODE shut off BSP processing. Either they didn’t shut it off, or something else is causing it.

So I found out today that Brent wants to have a meeting tomorrow for an hour and a half so we can explain to him why we had so many core dumps in production. That fact that he’s our vice president and asking that doesn’t give me a warm-fuzzy feeling. It should be an interesting day tomorrow.

I tried to do some shopping for those wrinkle-free button-up shirts I love from Eddie Bauer. Unfortunately they only have ones with button-down collars. The whole button-down collar is a whole to-do for me. I don’t get it, I don’t like the way it looks. Would it bother them so much to make some shirts _without_ the annoying button-down collars?

My package from Newegg.com arrived today! Inside were a fresh new 160GB USB 2.0 external HD and a 120GB internal OEM Western Digital HD. I love the plasticy smell of new electronics. It’s a great smell.

The first thing I did was power down the TiVo and remove the ‘old’ 60GB HD. I’ve done the whole mfsrestore operation so many times, I can practicall do it in my sleep now. Upgrading to the new HD was effortless and so was installing the monte hacks. Now I have about 110 hours of recoding space on my TiVo.

When I booted up the TiVo, I decided to do their ‘clear and wipe out all settings’ option to get a fresh start. Unfortunately this operation took about 1.5 hours. I missed all my 8pm shows: The Apprentice, Simple Life, and Star Trek.

I decided not to enable the ’suggestions’ feature for now until I decided if I want to do that or not. I read somewhere that it slows down the performance of the unit. I also noticed that the new HD is whisper quiet. It doesn’t sound like a Geiger counter like the old one.

Before I closed up the tivo, I was poking around the inside of it while it was on. I raked my fingers across the top of the HD (the metal cover) and got a jolt of electricity up my arm! Lesson learned: Don’t touch stuff inside the ivo when it is on.

Once I determined that everything was working properly, I screwed in all of the screws, closed up the TiVo and put it inside my entertainment center (its permanent location).

I’ve been having a very difficult time getting up early. I know it has to do with the time I get to bed, but it’s hard to fall asleep early enough. Maybe I need to take a page out of Rush Limbaugh’s book and abuse sleeping pills! Or was that pain killers?

At work I had a meting with Carole and Alonzo in Alonzo’s office at 9:30am. During the meeting we discussed performance issues and briefed Alonzo on the arguments to lower the MQ retry count from 15 to 5. This will be a big win for us if we can get middleware to do this. Alonzo is supposed to meet with their management to try to negotiate the change.

We had a special lunch today. We went to Nikimotos in midtown. I had my usual: Two eel nigri followed by the spicy chicken. It was great (but expensive)!

Last night I emailed Jegan about that special LCD monitor deal. I recently helped him build him own computer and he’s had a great time doing it. Now he wants to get a new monitor to go along with it. I knew he’s been shopping around so I passed along this deal to him. Unfortunately shortly after midnight, Dell sold out of the monitors.

Jegan called them anyway and explained that a friend told him about the deal. They asked him the name of the person (me) who told him. When he gave them my name, they told him that I actually got the second-to-last one.

In the afternoon I was monitoring the San Diego flight. I’m all packed and ready for it, but there are like 35 ‘HK’ standbys. HK standbys are revenue passengers who have a ticket but there is no seat. The flight only has about 20 empty seats. It doesn’t look like I’ll make the flight.

I called Larry and advised him. We agreed that it’s no big deal if I don’t make it because the first flight out tomorrow morning gets into San Diego around 10am.

In the end, I didn’t make the flight. I’ll get up early tomorrow morning and try again.

I ended up sleeping in pretty late, considering my body is still three hours ahead. Larry & Amy’s guest bed is super comfortable and I always sleep like a rock on that. It also helped that Buster was curled up next to me when I went to sleep. I miss having a dog.

While I had a Myoplex smoothie for breakfast I sat in the study and tried in vain to connect to my PC again. This router situation has really put me off. I managed to log into work via the VPN client and sent Sameer an email informing him that I successfully did a top-down build of all the 1.3 code but it isn’t deployed yet. Ram will have to do that Monday morning.

As we had no babysitter this morning, all six of us were going to do something together. The weather looked really good and Larry checked the tide maps and determined that it would be a worthwhile idea to head down to a beach in La Jolla.

We packed up the car and drove to La Jolla. We really lucked out and got probably the best parking space right next to the steps down to the beach.

This particular beach is next to a place called ‘Children’s Pool‘. Despite the name, Michael Jackson was not there. Instead was a large roped-off area with a throng of seals lying on the beach. There were about a dozen photographers with their huge lenses and tripods lines up photographing the seals.

Our beach was small and when we arrived we were the only ones there. That was sort of nice. There were a lot of birds around. We came in as the tide was receding and at first Amy was worried that we wouldn’t have much beach to sit on, but Larry assured her that it would only get better.

Indeed it did get better. The day grew warmer and the sky stayed clear. The tide was going down, revealing more of the interesting rock & plant growth under the water.

We left most of our stuff on the beach (and we had a lot of stuff) and headed out for lunch. We went a few blocks to a Mexican-food place. I had a carne asada burrito. During lunch Amy relayed a story to me about the last time they were at this beach and they saw one of the cast from the ‘ER’ television show. It was Sherry Stringfield who plays Dr. Susan Lewis. Amy’s story was pretty good because it involved her accidently running into this person several times during the day.

To my surprise, all of our stuff was intact when we returned to the beach. Even more interesting was that Larry pointed out to me that Sherry Stringfield and her husband were back at this same beach! While I was off looking for fun stuff to photograph, I noticed Amy conversing with her.

We had a great time at the beach and I got a lot of photographs. I mostly used my Canon 50mm f/18 lens and a little of the Sigma 15mm fisheye lens.

(Amy, Lily, and Tucker)

On the drive back home, Tucker and Lily fell asleep almost instantly in the car. They were pretty tired out from all of the fun on the beach today. When we arrived at the house around 3pm, the babysitter was waiting for us.

After a couple of hours getting things situated, we prepped for dinner. Tonight Larry, Amy, Cal, and I will go out alone. Amy suggested that we go to a nice local restraint called ‘Mesquite’. The name makes it sounds pretty tasty.

Indeed the restaurant was nice. The hostess girl was tall and thin as a rail. Larry brought a bottle of his own merlot (I think it was ‘Switchback‘). I ended up ordering the filet which was very good - especially with the tomato chili dipping sauce.

During dinner Larry and Amy suggested that I let my hair grow out. I don’t think I can pull off long shaggy hair very well, and I don’t know if I want to embrace this retro 70’s theme that seems to be so popular. Are we all so unoriginal that the best thing we can do is recycle styles and fashions from thirty years ago? It’s all over MTV. They are hammering this 70’s theme all over the place.

Back at the house, I looked through Larry’s latest issue of the ‘Digital Photographer‘ UK magazine. It’s a real treat reading that magazine because it is packed with such great information.

So I’ve been giving some more thought to getting a laptop. It would be really cool to have one for when I travel (to most locations). I’m worried what I’ll do to occupy myself on flights once I finish reading my current queue of books. They are calling 2004 ‘the year of the laptop’; I wonder if I should participate? I’ve already taken a few steps closer towards that by getting a Bluetooth mouse & keyboard as well as an 802.11g-enabled router.

I was pretty busy at work today. In fact, I was so busy trying to load & activate some fixes into integration that I skipped lunch in order to make sure they got in quickly. I did run to Schlotzsky’s and get a BBQ Chicken pizza (with bacon of course).

I also got an email from an old classmate from when I was finishing my undergrad work at Kennesaw. It was definitely out of the blue.

This afternoon I helped Bob M. with his Palm Pilot. He was trying to get it to work with his HotSync software and we were having problems. We both got busy and put our little side project on hold until tomorrow.

When I got home, I spent some time to go through my photos from this past weekend. I created my first photo album for 2004 with some photos from San Diego.

Today was a pretty quiet day at work compared to yesterday. We went into integration test and tested some changes that were also loaded to production. The tests went well but we were told to hold off on activating them in production until the business can take a closer look at the results.

Susan, Brian, Alex, and I went to Chick-fil-A today for lunch. We went the original location which is also called the dwarf house. This is the _only_ Chick-fil-A where one can get a hamburger (yes, with beef). I had a sandwich and a 6-piece order of nuggets.

While I was working on integration stuff, Carole and Jegan went to a meeting to talk about stored metrics and the issues we’ve been having with that database. When they came back from the meeting, it was decided that we are going to create an ‘electronic dashboard’ and Jegan and I are the ones who will be leading it up. It sounds like a fun project because it should be similar to the old ‘ATW’ project I did a few months ago.

Before going home, I stopped at Publix and did some grocery shopping. I also picked up a nice big burrito from Willy’s for dinner.

My ill-performing Buffalo Technologies WBR-G54 router has been a thorn in my side for far too long. Today was my last chance to return it to CompUSA for a refund. I was seriously considering returning it, but got lazy and didn’t do it. I’m sure I’ll regret this later on.

I spoke with Craig today who had some bad news. We were talking very tentatively about a potential ski trip about a month from now. Unfortunately he had some car trouble and can’t go now. It looks like I’ll have to do my own ski trip this winter.

Last night I finally spent some time and completed my self evaluation for work. I think it was due about a month and a half ago. It feels like a great burden lifted from my shoulders to get this done.

Today ATW announced that Delta was the winner of Air Transport World’s Technology Leadership Award for 2004. This was noteworthy to me because I worked on a special project a few months ago specifically for this. It was the ‘