Monthly Archive for February, 2004

I got up early and was out of the apartment by 6:30am. I made it into work around thirty minutes later. It was an early day for me; maybe this is a good sign for the rest of the week.

We had some integration tests today. They wanted to try to verify if a particular MQ-series problem was fixed. Because I didn’t have much to do from the applications side, I only half-listened to the bridge conference call.

I did, however, spend a great deal of time today working on the rrdtool thing again.

Melissa sent out a lunch notice for a birthday lunch for both Keith and I. Keith’s birthday is on the 4th, and mine is on the 15th, so we’re having a lunch on Friday the 13th. That was really thoughtful of her to do.

For lunch today a few of us went to the Greek place and brought it back to eat in the break room.

I ended up working late today and didn’t leave until about 6:!5pm. I was pretty busy with the rrdtool stuff all day long. I’ve very close to figuring out the cryptic syntax and concepts to create the correct database. I hate not having a complete understanding of it and I’m determined to crack the secrets of rrdtool so I can make best use of it. I know I’m very close.

Jennifer invited me over to her place this evening. She’s installing Windows XP and Visual Studio.NET, and maybe I can help. I left around 8pm and stopped at Publix to get some subs to eat.

The drive over to her house wasn’t that long, but I did get lost following the directions because I turned left too soon. Fortunately with a quick phone call to her, I found my way.

Her house was really nice and large – I was quite impressed. She didn’t have a spare HD, so a fresh install of XP wasn’t feasible since she has a lot of data on her HD that she doesn’t want to lose. She’s currently running Windows 2000 and tried without success before to do an ‘upgrade’ install. We decided to forego the XP upgrade for now and just install Visual Studio.NET. This process proceeded along quite smoothly.

We listened to some great music and had our subs from Publix. While the last part was installing, she asked if I wanted to play a nice game of chess. I love playing chess and haven’t had an opportunity to play for a long time, so this was a great treat. She’s a strong player (or I’m just not that good) and it was a close game – I barely won. I think this was mostly due to a lucky queenside castle on my part.

Eventually VS.NET was fully installed and I gave her a very brief walkthrough. Shortly after that I headed home. I had a great time.

Before I went to bed, I did a search for any upcoming shows or movies with ‘Dune’ in the title. To my astonishment I saw that the super long 4-hour version of Dune is coming on tomorrow night on SciFi! This was like a jackpot. I’ve always wanted to see this version of the film because you can’t buy it anywhere. I had to resolve _EIGHT_ conflicts on my TiVo in order to get the recording set up.

I had a lot of meetings today. My day started out with a staff meeting. We haven’t had one in a while, so it was nice to get caught up on all the latest rumors.

After that, I was glued to my speakerphone as I participated in another conference bridge call for the latest integration test.

Scott A. came to see me about some configuration files but I had to ask if we could postpone because I was pretty swamped. I also had to cancel a meeting with some guys from release engineering in which I was going to talk with them about some of the problems we’ve had with the build tool.

This morning Brian and Casey were talking about going to Pig & Chick for lunch. I had to go to a lunch meeting today so I was sad that I would miss out on some good ribs. I found out later today that they didn’t go to Pig & Chick after all. Brian told me that they were going to postpone until I could go. That was nice!

We had our big 2-hour-long lunch meeting today to talk about performance improvements. Jegan and I went and most of the participants were managers. Our director was chairing the meeting.

It went really well. We got most of what we wanted. This was great considering that the portfolio principal was present too. After the meeting my spirits were very high. Carole and Jegan were pretty energized too.

I made an appointment over at Team Ford to have my Explorer looked at. The driver-side rear window will not roll down and when it rains really hard the map lights up top will sometimes leak water. The appointment is for Tuesday next week. I’ll probably have to rent a car. I was going to have them do the “30,000 maintenance service” but people have been telling me that it’s mostly a waste of money.

Jennifer and I chatted a little today. We made arrangements to meet for coffee after work on Friday at a Borders bookstore.

I was supposed to have my yearly performance review this afternoon with Carole, but she got pretty busy. She came by with my review and asked me to sign it because they are due into HR today. She promised that we would go over it later.

We were supposed to activate some code in production today but I think the results from integration test were inconclusive so we’ll do some more testing tomorrow.

I ended up working pretty late again today. I didn’t leave work until around 7:30pm. I spent most of the evening at work trying to figure out some of the graphing techniques of rrdtool. I’ve already figured out how to make normal graphs, but I want to do something a little fancier. I want the ‘area’ graph to have a fading color gradient.

Whenever I have a big problem to solve, I find that when I stand up and pace around I can some up with a good solution. This technique didn’t fail me tonight. After pacing up and down the hallway a few times, I finally came up with the solution:

[code]function graph_contention
{
${RRDTOOL} graph ${GRAPHS_DIRECTORY}/$1 -s $2 -e $3 \
-v "percentage" -t "contention rate $4" \
-l 0 -u 100 -r \
DEF:value=$RRDB:CONTENTION:AVERAGE \
CDEF:95=value \
CDEF:90=value,5,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,5,-,IF \
CDEF:85=value,10,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,10,-,IF \
CDEF:80=value,15,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,15,-,IF \
CDEF:75=value,20,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,20,-,IF \
CDEF:70=value,25,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,25,-,IF \
CDEF:65=value,30,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,30,-,IF \
CDEF:60=value,35,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,35,-,IF \
CDEF:55=value,40,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,40,-,IF \
CDEF:50=value,45,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,45,-,IF \
CDEF:45=value,50,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,50,-,IF \
CDEF:40=value,55,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,55,-,IF \
CDEF:35=value,60,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,60,-,IF \
CDEF:30=value,65,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,65,-,IF \
CDEF:25=value,70,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,70,-,IF \
CDEF:20=value,75,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,75,-,IF \
CDEF:15=value,80,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,80,-,IF \
CDEF:10=value,85,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,85,-,IF \
CDEF:5=value,95,-,0,LT,UNKN,value,95,-,IF \
AREA:95#FF0000:"Contention " \
AREA:90#F50000 \
AREA:85#EB0000 \
AREA:80#E10000 \
AREA:75#D70000 \
AREA:70#CD0000 \
AREA:65#C30000 \
AREA:60#B90000 \
AREA:55#AF0000 \
AREA:50#A50000 \
AREA:45#9B0000 \
AREA:40#910000 \
AREA:35#870000 \
AREA:30#7D0000 \
AREA:25#730000 \
AREA:20#690000 \
AREA:15#5F0000 \
AREA:10#550000 \
AREA:5#4B0000 \
LINE2:value#000000 \
GPRINT:value:LAST:"Current\: %.2lf" \
GPRINT:value:AVERAGE:"Average\: %.2lf" \
GPRINT:value:MIN:"Min\: %.2lf" \
GPRINT:value:MAX:"Max\: %.2lf" \
COMMENT:"\n" \
COMMENT:"${TIMESTAMP}\n"
}[/code]

Basically, I had to teach myself reverse polish notation (RPN). I used it very briefly in computer science in college, but now had a practical use for it. I had to come up with formulas to break up the value into twenty pieces and assign a slightly darker red color every step along the way.

The result is a graph that looks something like this:

This evening I saw a new article about offshoring of job to India. I’ve made a short collection of articles that has enough depressing information to keep the drug companies in business for a long time:

The New Face of the Silicon Age
yourjobisgoingtoindia.com
Inside Outsourcing in India
New Export Rules Ease IT Work in India
Aussie firm gets bad press for India outsourcing
The Specter of Outsourcing
Who are outsourcing to India?
As outsourcing wave breaks, some stand firm

Last night I had a strange nightmare. I was taking a test in my old high school (William Howard Taft high school in San Antonio). When I finished the test and walked out into the (empty) parking lot, I saw my explorer sitting by itself and all the doors were open. This freaked me out and I ran to it thinking that everything inside would be stolen or something. To my surprise everything was still there, including my backpack. When I moved my backpack I noticed that it was a lot lighter than normal. I looked inside and to my horror my Canon EOS 10D digital camera was missing! Someone stole my camera, lenses, etc from my backpack! It was an awful feeling and all I could think about was weather or not my automobile insurance or personal articles floater would cover the loss. I was also pretty upset because I never added the 50mm lens to my floater policy so that wouldn’t be covered.

When I got into work this morning I saw a meeting request from Dave. He scheduled a meeting for next week to talk about authorizing use for rrdtool and wants us to present a case and justify it. He invited a lot of people including managers so I feel a bit blindsided. Hopefully it will turn out ok.

I was pretty stressed out about Dave’s meeting and to make matters worse, we were having some issues in integration test again. We were getting inconsistent behavior and were unable to reproduce it in the development environment. Whenever you can’t reproduce a problem, it becomes extremely difficult to correct (i.e. mars rover).

In fact I was so busy the first part of the day that I couldn’t go out for lunch again. Casey offered to pick something up for me which was really cool. He got me a big bacon classic value meal from Wendy’s.

For most of the day I worked with Jegan, Sameer, and Alex to figure out what the problems are. We finally tweaked the integration settings to enable full verbose logging. We’ll have to wait until Monday to see what results we get from this because the other groups weren’t around this afternoon.

Earlier this week Krishna sent me a link to some interesting townhomes really close to where I currently live. There is a new development just inside I-285 off Akers Mill road. He stopped by today and we chatted a little about it. I think I’m going to take a hard look at those townhomes.

James and I finalized our plans for the St. Maarten trip this weekend. He said that he would give me a call tonight if anything came up and he can’t go.

Mallick invited me to a party (sort of a house-warming party a couple of years after you move in) Saturday night. I told him that I would not be able to go because I’ll be out of town.

Jen and I had plans to meet for coffee after work. The Borders bookstore we’re meeting at is in a shopping center called ‘The Avenue’ off Roswell road. Next to Borders is an Abercrombie & Fitch. I stopped in there to see if I could find any cargo shorts on sale. My favorite shorts from American Eagle recently had a button malfunction (is that like a ‘wardrobe malfunction’?). Since I don’t have a sewing kit and lack the skills to sew buttons, I thought I would see if there were any shorts on sale. Unfortunately the only stuff on sale is the winter wear. All of the summer clothes are full-price.

When I walked into the coffee shop, I saw Jen. She got some coffee and I got a tropical iced tea. We sat and talked for a while. Jen informed me that she has a friend who used to work for Abercrombie and they actually do go through training to be rude and indifferent to customers! I always used to joke about that and it turns out that it’s true!

We walked around the bookstore for a while and then left to get some dinner. We went to a nearby sushi place and had lots of sushi. Afterwards, Jen invited me over to her place to watch ‘Chicago‘ since neither of us saw it before.

While I was following Jen to her house, I called Craig to let him know that I won’t be able to go to San Antonio tomorrow for his party since I’m going to St. Maarten. About five minutes after I left the message for Craig, James called and told me that he had to cancel for tomorrow. At that point, I decided to not go by myself mainly because the hotel would be about $180 and that seems a little too high for just one person.

Jen and I had vodka & frangelico shots with the shot glasses rimmed with lemon juice and sugar. It tasted a lot like chocolate cake and was pretty good.

About twelve minutes into Chicago we both decided that we didn’t like it very much and stopped watching. Instead we watched a mini ‘Buffy‘ marathon which was much more enjoyable.

After a few more shots each we got pretty comfortable and listened to some good music in addition to watching videos. We had a really great time together.

I woke up late again today. It was one of those nice waking up late feelings because you don’t have anything else pressing to do.

While checking my email, I got an evite from Jen for an ‘Anti Valentines’ party she’s having at her house for her sister.

Larry called and we chatted for a while. It turns out that he’s going to the Grammy awards with Amy. I think he called while they were driving up there because he asked if I could look up who sings ‘All That She Wants’. He and Amy were having a debate about who sings it. I did a quick google search and found that it is Ace of Base.

I spent a lot of time today catching up with my journal entries.

Jen invited me over to her place to watch Donnie Darko. I went over there and had a great time watching the movie. Before it started, she showed me a cool video for the movie which featured the song, ‘Mad World’ (Not the Tears for Fears version). I’ve heard this particular version of the song before and I was always convinced that it was an REM song, but it isn’t. It’s really performed by Gary Jules.

I woke up early again this morning because I had to be at the Team Ford dealership to pick up my explorer. When I got there, I returned the little Ford Focus. I was charged only $10 for the use of the car yesterday because the dealership covers $18.

They were still unable to reproduce the water leak issue, but they did look inside the map-light console area and didn’t notice any water damage. The rear window needed a motor replaced. There was no charge for this as it was still covered under warranty. The service advisor I worked with, Allan, did a great job and I was pleasantly surprised at how smooth things went.

It was nice to have my Explorer back. I missed the seat warmers and the power locks and power windows and leather seats and 4.6 litre V8 engine. I didn’t miss, however, the crappy gas mileage!

This morning we had out weekly staff meeting with Carole. The mood was a lot more somber than usual as Carole made some eye-opening announcements.

There was still some apprehension about the pending production load today. Some considered the results from integration testing to be inconclusive and weren’t comfortable with going forward with the changes. We all decided to do another test in integration test to verify that everything looks ok. Fortunately the test was a success.

Many of us had to drop what we were doing and attend a large meeting that Carole called. She invited people from many different groups that we normally don’t interact with. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss a strategy for ’swinging’ three of our servers from the integration environment to production. Right now we have excess capacity in SI and are CPU-constrained right now in production, so the three new servers would be a great relief. The meeting went well despite there being about 33 people crammed into the small conference room.

As soon as that meeting concluded, I rushed back to my desk to continue with the production load effort. We got the authorization to install into production and had the servers placed in maintenance mode with the control center.

I did the production activation today while Jegan turned off logging in SI. After I kicked off the first node install, I dashed downstairs and drove over to Schlotzsky’s to get some lunch to eat at my desk. I ordered my usual: A BBQ Chicken pizza with bacon added on top. The lady working the drive-through commented that the pizza looked really good and that she wants to try one in that configuration.

Back at work I finished the production load while I ate my lunch. Once that was completed, we turned the ticket flow back on and fortunately everything went smooth.

Towards the end of the day I started to drift a little bit and was pretty tired. I hate feeling that way at work because I’m not 100% there and not as sharp as I could normally be.

Jen invited me over to her place tonight. She’s working on a homework assignment dealing with .NET and databases and I offered to help out.

When I got home around 5:30pm, I took a short nap. I woke up at 7:15pm and did some things around the apartment before leaving at 7:45pm. On the way to Jen’s I stopped by Willy’s to get a couple of burritos for us to eat for dinner.

A couple of people have told me that they were confused about me writing about ‘Jen’. ‘Jen’ is not the same person as ‘Jenn’, whom I am no longer dating.

When I got to Jen’s house, we ate the burritos in her breakfast room and then headed up stairs to work on the .NET stuff. We didn’t spend a lot of time with that before Jen suggested that we watch American Beauty instead. She was shocked that I’ve never seen that movie before.

It was rainy and horrible outside this evening and I ended up spending the night.

Part of my compensation is an annual bonus. The amount of the bonus is decided on several factors: The financial health of Delta, the ‘goals’ achieved by Delta Technology (i.e. delivering certain projects on time), the title of the individual contributor, and the individual’s performance over the past year.

Because of the financial pains for most of the airlines over the past year, I wasn’t expecting any bonus for last year. However this morning Carole was handing out letters. I got mine and was very happy. I’m already planning on spending it on the down payment of my new home and/or furniture and/or contributing to my Roth IRA.

This morning we had a meeting with ODE to brainstorm over the elimination of the ‘north & south’ split in our processing. The meeting went very well and we have plans on meeting again early next week to go over the steps we each have to do. This might be slated for a ‘1.4 performance’ release shortly after the next 1.3 release.

Melissa N. organized a birthday lunch today for me and Keith S. Keith’s birthday was on Feb 4th, and mine is this Sunday. Keith didn’t care where we go so they left the decision up to me. I really had my heart set on going to Einstein’s in midtown. Unfortunately I have a 1pm meeting today (to get yelled at) so I can’t go too far for lunch. Instead we went to the Jamaican place off Old National highway.

I had the boneless jerk chicken breast with yellow rice and coconut black beans. It was pretty good. During lunch I had a great conversation with Melissa about her townhome. I’ve seen it once before shortly after she moved in and actually drove by it a few weeks ago when I was looking at houses. It’s off South Cobb drive near Smyrna and is in a great location. She told me that there are three for sale right now (they are all two years old) for around $185k. That’s not bad. I think I’ll be looking into that.

All week long I’ve been stressed out about the meeting I had today at 1pm. Dave called the meeting to ‘discuss the use of shareware tools in production’ after he found out I was prototyping rrdtool for data gathering and graphing purposes. Unfortunately to me it sometimes seems that the motto of large companies is: “If it makes you more productive we will not approve it.” I had low expectations for the outcome of the meeting.

Fortunately the meeting went _very_ well. Dave was actually in support of the tool and even invited two people I’ve worked with often from release engineering: Bob O. and Andy M. It turns out that release engineering currently uses rrdtool to do website and network health monitoring. They even build an rrdtool package in our internal packaging format (RET). This is very good news.

Andy presented his case such that the current direction is to embrace open source tools and empower the developers (something I wholeheartedly agree with). As such, he has been building packages of various open source tools that we may want to use.

Between the bonus letter, birthday lunch, and the successful rrdtool meeting, I had a really great day at work today.

I also spent some time making some final tweaks to Larry’s website. I think it’s pretty much ready to go now and Larry seems happy with it. All he needs to do now is create his own 725×100 ‘header’ images to use at the top of the page in place of mine.

Around 7:30pm I left for Jen’s house. She invited me over tonight to cook dinner for me for my birthday and also to go out to a club with her sister.

When I got there, I met Jen’s best friend, Lisa. Lisa offered me an apple martini which was pretty strong but good. After Lisa left Jen and I had dinner. She prepared a very delicious tossed green salad with salmon steaks, mozzarella chunks, and balsamic vinaigrette dressing. She also gave me a great birthday gift which was a 5-disc set of audio books for ‘The Da Vinci Code‘. I’m really looking forward to listening to this on my drive to and from work.

We decided not to go out and meet her sister because the place was really far away. I had a great evening with Jen.

Today is my twenty-seventh birthday.

I stayed at Jen’s for most of the morning today. She had coffee and we talked in her kitchen and living room. I left her place around noon. The drive home was interesting because it was sleeting outside and frozen rain mixed with regular rain was raining down on my car.

I called Mom and got all her flight information so I can fly out to Denver around the same time.

Because it was lunch time, I thought about going out to get some lunch but got distracted as I researched notebook computers. After some looking around, I think the best thing to get is a ‘centrino‘ based system (or anything with a Pentium-M processor).

I started looking around at a Toshiba and HP widescreen model that wasn’t one of those monster 10-pound machines – they were around 6.5 pounds each. The specs were good: Pentium-M processor, 512MB RAM, 40-60GB HD, ‘wide’ screen LCD with a decent resolution, DVD/CDR drive, 802.11b, longer battery life (4.5+ hours), etc.

In what turned out to be a bad move, I got impulsive and decided to go to Best Buy to purchase the Toshiba. I really fancied the idea of being able to take a laptop on my trip with me. When I got to Best Buy I looked at the Toshiba as well as the HP. I liked the look & feel of the HP much better and decided to get that one instead.

I had a hard time finding someone to help me. Maybe they go through the same type of training as Abercrombie & Fitch? I finally flagged a guy down who looked like a manager. I told him that I wanted a laptop and he asked me if I’ve already talked to anyone. I replied, ‘No, I’ve already done my research and I just want to buy the laptop.’ He looked at me with skepticism but eventually asked which one I wanted. I pointed to the HP and he went to the back to get the box.

When he came out with the box, he then launched into his rehearsed speech about their silly little warranty program (for ‘only’ $250 I can have the peace of mind knowing that I dropped $250 on a worthless scam). When I didn’t appear receptive to this idea he continued to press the issue. After that he asked if I wanted to join their ‘rewards’ program in which I spend $10/year for the honor of getting more junk mail. I refused this too.

I finally said, ‘Look, I’m in a hurry and just want to purchase the laptop and go.’ He seemed to get the point but then told me that we have to go to their tech department so they can take everything out of the box and set it up for me. I politely declined and told him that I know how to use a computer already. He explained to me that they do this for my own good because if the laptop is defective or has a broken screen, I cannot return it.

This seemed a bit odd to me, so I asked for clarification, ‘If the product I buy is defective there is no recourse?’ ‘Yes’ he replied. I said, ‘No thanks.’ and walked out of the store. I wish I didn’t just waste of hour of my time.

When I got home I did some more research and am now trying to decide if I should get something a little beefy (i.e. more powerful, wider screen) or should I go with something ultra portable like the upcoming IBM X40?

Because of all the time I burnt, I never got any lunch and was now running a little late. I quickly packed for my trip. In my backpack I had my camera, lenses, sweater, fleece jacket, and my book. In my red duffle bag I had three t-shirts, ski socks, my hiking boots, underwear, ski pants, ski gloves, ski goggles, ski hat, toiletries, phone charger, and camera battery charger.

I was a bit nervous about taking two carryons since you’re only supposed to have one and a ‘personal item’ like a purse, briefcase, etc. When I got to the airport, I checked in and made my way to the gate. I was #1 on the standby list and there were about 8 empty seats in first class. Unfortunately I didn’t get to sit in first class because of that lame new automatic unlimited upgrade program.

Delta has also done something different with the boarding process that I don’t understand. Previously they would board by rows (i.e. ‘now boarding rows 30 and higher.’) Now they board by ‘zone’. There was a lot of confusion in the gatehouse as they said ‘now boarding zone 3′. Zone 3? They now print the zone on the boarding pass, but why change from rows? Maybe they don’t board from the rear of the plane anymore, but to me it seems inefficient to do it any other way.

I sat at the very front of coach class at a bulkhead seat. I forgot to bring my headphones so I couldn’t watch the movie, ‘Master and Commander‘. The flight was uneventful and I read a little of my book and slept some too. The flight was about 3.5 hours long.

When I arrived in Denver, I had a voice mail from Mom. They were running about an hour and a half late which sucked. This means that I have to wait about three hours for them to arrive. As it turns out, the Airtran flight they are arriving on is across the hallway from my gate. I walked over to the center area of the C concourse to a Mexican restaurant and ordered chips and salsa as well as a crown & coke. The chips and salsa was $1.25. With the drink, it cost $8.50. That was an expensive drink. I only had one.

Back at the gate I sat and waited. The entire C concourse (the half that I was sitting in at least) was empty. It was an errie feeling with this part of such a large airport being completely deserted. I considered snapping a photo of the scene but was too tired. I actually fell asleep for a little while as I sat at the gate.

Finally their flight arrived and I greeted them as they deplaned. We got the luggage while Jim got the rental car. He picked us up at the passenger pickup and we left the airport.

The ‘new’ Denver airport is 40 miles east of Denver so we had about a 1.5 hour drive to Keystone. As we drove over the mountains it started to snow which was pretty cool. It was also fun to drive through the Eisenhower tunnel.

We checked into the condo office and drove to our building. We had covered garage parking which was nice. The condo was very nice. They upgraded us to a three-bedroom suite. It was about 3am MDT (5am EST) so I went straight to bed. Before going to sleep, I discovered a humidifier in the closet. I filled it up with water and plugged it in. Not only did I have nice white noise but I also had humid air!

I woke up around 8am today. Soon after I got up we had breakfast. We had some great omelets which consisted of cheese, bacon, and onions. We also had toast, jelly, strawberries, and milk. I drank the entire quart of milk – I must have been thirsty.

Yesterday the camera strap was bothering my neck while I skied. A scarf around my neck would be most beneficial to alleviate some of the chafing. I really need to invest in one of those nice neoprene straps which also better distribute the weight of the camera. I asked Mom if she had a spare scarf I could use. She didn’t have one but noticed that a wooden bear statue in the condo had a plaid scarf around its neck. I borrowed the scarf from the bear and wore it today.

We got some snacks together to take on the mountain today for lunch. We had carrots, crackers, and cheese. Around 10:30am we left for the shuttle bus and caught it shortly after going downstairs. We got off at the gondola stop today instead of the main mountain base.

Even though Mom wasn’t going to be skiing today, she was going to come along and take the gondola up to the top of the mountain to hang out in the lodge to read and take pictures.

Jim and I took a long winding green run down to the base of the mountain. During the descent, he had some trouble with soreness in his legs and we took it slow. When we rode back up to the top, he decided that he was going to sit out for a while and join Mom in the lodge. I agreed to meet up with them around noon.

I skied down some blue runs and took my time to photograph stuff. Unlike yesterday I opted to not use the chest strap today. It took too much time to re-fasten the camera in the chest strap. I also took more photos with my gloves on instead of removing them first. This was useful because I had much quicker turnaround time with using the camera while I skied.

Today was a gorgeous sunny and warm day. In fact, it was so nice that I didn’t war my goggles – I just wore my sunglasses. Warm and sunshine is prime skiing weather for me. I know that some people prefer it to be snowing but I love the sunshine.

I skied many of blue runs on the backside of the mountain and thoroughly enjoyed the conditions. Around noon I headed back up to the main peak and joined Mom and Jim inside the lodge. They were at the very top of the lodge in a small room overlooking the entire top of the mountain. I think this room is the highest point on the peak.

I sat up there with them for about 30 minutes while I ate snacks for lunch. We stepped outside to get some photos of the great view since we were so high up. I took photos will all three of my lenses (28-135mm, 15mm fisheye, and 50mm).

Mom and Jim left to return to the condo. I remained behind to keep skiing and told them that I would be back around 4pm. Before I left the lodge I called up Craig to gloat. He was pretty jealous that I was cutting up snow on the slopes.

I spent the rest of the day skiing from the other peak – the ‘north peak’ of Keystone. Off of this peak are only blues and blacks. It was a blast. Some of these newer trails have a lot more trees mixed in with the trail which makes it a lot more fun to ski down.

I switched to the 50mm lens and got some tight shots of the surrounding area. It was some great skiing.

Around 3:30pm I skied down to the base of the mountain. I had my hiking boots in my backpack so at the bottom I changed into my boots. This was pretty cool because I didn’t have to wear the uncomfortable and bulky ski boots.

The shuttle bus was late so I ended up waiting at the bus stop for almost an hour. That sucked. While I was waiting, I got a call from Larry. We chatted about skiing and he expressed a desire to set up a skit trip where he and I meet in Salt Lake City. I think that’s a grand idea. We also chatted more about laptops.

When I got back to the condo, I took a shower and had some snacks. We ate in tonight and had some pasta. Going against the ‘right’ thing to do, I have a few southern comfort & coke drinks. This was bad because I was already dehydrated from skiing and the high altitude. Also, the high altitude makes the alcohol a lot more potent.

We watched a couple of movies. We saw Kangaroo Jack (which wasn’t that good) and Happy Gilmore.

Around 9pm I went to bed.

The drive into work was quite pleasant because I started listening to the CD audio book of ‘The Da Vinci Code‘. The book started out quite gripping and I find myself looking forward to my return commute to see what happens next.

I got into work a little early today. I was still so stoked from my trip that I was in a very pleasant mood as I walked to my desk. However before I even sat down in my chair, people were asking me to look at some problems they have been having.

It turns out that we have not had a successful system test all week and people are panicking right now. Mallick was up until 2:30am last night trying to get tings built and tested but continued to have problems with unresolved symbol problems.

I immediately began looking into this and while I was looking Carole called to make sure that I’m on this too – apparently it’s a big deal. One of the things I love doing in this job is solving the cause of a problem and fixing it. This kind of detective work had great rewards because there is usually a quick turnaround.

At first the problem was quite elusive. The system test environment was complaining of an unresolved symbol in a library, but searching that library in the dev environment (via the ‘nm’ command) revealed that it’s there. Further investigation revealed that the correct method is visible and checked in on the clearcase side as well as the library being linked in.

I next checked the build logs and saw that the library wasn’t being linked at link time for the build. This perplexed me because the development branch showed that it should. I then checked the release branch and sure enough the library wasn’t being included in the Makefile. It turns out that Ram made a manual change to the Makefile on the release branch. The correct version, on the dev branch, was never picked up because of the manual change. That may not have been such a good idea.

Once I fixed the problem, I kicked off a build and gave everyone an update. Mallick requested that I go to the 9am problem review board meeting to tell everyone the status since this was a ’severity 1′ issue.

Alex sent out an email proclaiming that I can’t take any more vacation. I guess this sort of thing is good for job security. I was in a pretty good mood after fixing the problem.

For lunch today a large group of us went to the BBQ kitchen. Among other things I had my favorite cucumbers & onions veggie dish. I tried to explain to everyone how wonderful the cucumbers are but no one believed me. When it came time to order seconds I of course got more. This time some of the other people in my lunch group got them too and agreed that they were wonderful.

After lunch we had a meeting with ODE to discuss the north/south elimination. Aside from getting off-topic a few times, it went really well.

I spoke with Larry today who is seriously looking into getting a pimped-out red-case new laptop from Voodoo PC.

It was a pretty stressful day at work today. I should have expected it after being out for so long though.

Jen invited me over to her place after work today. Her friend Lisa will be coming over and they want to watch ‘Friends’. When I got there Lisa and I had a nice discussion about politics and political leanings. We watched a little television and at dinner. Jen made her special salmon salad so it was very good.

I woke up later than usual since it was a Saturday. It was a nice feeling to sleep in some.

This morning I worked on my journal. I also finally got around to post-processing some of my ski trip photos. I shot pretty much everything in RAW mode which gave me a little more latitude in post processing. Out of about 160 photos I came up with 18 that I liked best and uploaded them into a photo album for the trip.

While doing the above I caught up on some of my TiVo recordings from the past few days.

Around noon I went over to Jen house. She has class in the morning and gets home around that time. She had the great idea to cook soup. We cooked butternut squash soup. I helped out by skinning the large squash, removing the seeds, and chopping it up into small pieces. The recipe also contained onions, garlic, vegetable stock, jalapeños, etc. The resulting soup was terrific. What made it even better was that Jen and I worked on it together and had a lot of fun doing it.

After lunch we played a game of chess. It was a pretty close game and I was pretty certain that I might lose during the middle game. I attempted a crude kings indian attack but Jen countered with a clever pawn attack targeted at my kingside. Fortunately I was able to pull out of it and ended up winning in the end. Jen is quite a formidable chess player. I’m worried that I’m going to lose the next time we play.

Shortly after our chess game we went over to her parent’s house. We planned on taking her dog out for a walk to a place called blankets creek. When we arrived, I met her brother, sister, and mother. I’ve previously met her brother and sister. A little while later I met her Dad. I didn’t really talk to them that much but I don’t think I made a fool of myself which was good.

We took her sisters dog (Sydney) and her dog (Chloe) a couple of miles away to ‘blankets creek’. It’s not a state controlled park but rather controlled by the corps of Army engineers or something like that. Actually it’s mostly a mountain biking park as I think we were the only people there without bikes.

Unlike the biking trails I’ve been on in California, the bikers have the right of way here which is weird. Taking the dogs for a walk was pretty fun. After we got off the main trail, we removed the leashes to let the two dogs roam around free. Chloe loved to play in the water while Sydney was a bit more reserved.

To my surprise the trail took us along a part of the bank of Lake Altoona. I didn’t realize we were so close to it. We walked/hiked for a couple of hours.

After the hike, we went back to Jen’s parent’s house and dropped off the dogs. Before we left her parent’s house, Jen, her brother, and her sister signed an anniversary card for her parents. They all pitched in and got a cruise for her parents as an anniversary present.

By this time it was around 5pm and we decided to get a bite to eat. As we drove through downtown Woodstock (my first time there) Jen suggested Mexican food. We went to a place at the top of a hill called ‘La Paz‘. I had the cheese enchiladas. It was a good dinner.

After dinner we went to a large liquor store and got some vanilla vodka, a couple of bottles of wine, and a small bottle of Southern Comfort. After that we went to Publix and bought some orange juice and the Sunday newspaper (even though today is Saturday). When we were in Publix Jen was excited to show me that there are indeed multiple types of squash. Earlier I informed her that I didn’t even know there was more than just yellow squash. Unfortunately they didn’t have anything other than yellow squash.

Back at Jen’s place we had a vanilla vodka & OJ while we read the newspaper together. The drink was great! I don’t usually care much for the taste of a screwdriver (regular vodka and orange juice), but the vanilla vodka made a huge difference! It was pretty relaxing reading the newspaper in the afternoon with Jen.

A short while later I left her place to go home so I could change for the party tonight. On my way home I called Craig and chatted with him for a little while. When I got home I changed. Jen came over shortly thereafter and we left for the party at her friend Dave’s place.

At the party I saw a lot of the same people from Jens other party last week. It was pretty fun. Her sister was there and came up with a cool drinking game called FUBAR. You have a deck of cards and everyone takes a turn drawing a card. Depending on what card one draws, they must do something. One of the things to do is to draw another special card with a secret message on it. The special cards were written beforehand and contain instructions.

Jen got one of these cards and it instructed her to take one person into a back room for five minutes. Fortunately she picked me!

Also at the party one of Jen’s friends gave me lots of advice about stuff. After a while we left the party. I drove Jen’s car.

I got into work around 7:30am today. It was a lot busier than yesterday. I find that I get a lot more accomplished if I make myself a list of things to do – and actually do them.

I also took care of some personal things. I went over to junkbuster.com and filled out some info to have them prep a ton of form letters to sent to various advertising & direct mail organizations. Basically each letter tells the organization to stop sending me junk mail and collecting personal info about me. I ended up with 18 letters.

Around lunch time I stopped at the local Hapeville post office and bought 18 stamps to mail off the letters. Some of my co-workers thought I was silly for doing that but I think it will pay off. I’m sick of getting junk mail.

I picked up a club sandwich and a cup of chili for lunch from Café on the Corner.

Today I got a lot of work done which was nice considering my very unproductive week last week.

Jen asked for my help with proofing a paper she’s writing for one of her classes. I used a new feature of Word that I’ve never used before: tracking changes. It’s pretty cool. With that feature turned on, any changes I made to the paper were listed in a toggleable window below and they were pretty clearly marked. When I sent the paper back to Jen, she was able to accept of reject every single change I made. Pretty cool.

Jen had class until 11pm tonight so we didn’t hang out together. Things seem much lonelier without her around.

As soon as I got home, I decided that I was going to run an Ethernet wire from the study downstairs to the living room upstairs – how hard could it be? Well it turns out that it’s very hard.

At first I got excited because I saw the cable line running from the unfinished storage room up to the living room. I saw the cable outlet in the living room and removed the faceplate. Surely I could use the existing hole to feed an Ethernet cable along with the cable wire. No.

I used my drill to make some pilot holes inside the cabinet along the wall to find the wire and attempted to see exactly how it goes down trough the floor along the wall. Apparently it doesn’t follow a straight line. This was quite frustrating.

After about three hours working on this I was left with some holes and still no solution to get a wire down to the storage room below.

Next I looked into running a line out from the storage room, through the bricks, to the outside. I used my masonry drill bit and after lots of drilling, managed to drill a hole from the storage room to the outside, large enough to accommodate a cat5 cable.

This seemed the most direct solution: Run a wire from downstairs to the upstairs along the outside of the house. There was even an existing hole where I needed going into the house from the satellite dish cable wire. Unfortunately the hole wasn’t large enough to fir another cable.

So, I used my drill to make a new hole to the outside. Only there was one problem: my drill bits aren’t long enough to drill all the way to the outside from the living room.

Disgusted, I shelved this project until I can figure out what to do. Anil also called to talk about a problem he saw in system test. It looks as if someone was changing the configuration of system test to point to their own libraries. This was causing the tests today to fail. We were baffled at why someone would do this. I promised Anil that I would fix it in the morning and send an email out to the team.

The rest of the evening was much more productive now that I wasn’t tearing up my new home trying to wire the stupid cat5 cable. I did a lot more research into XBMC (Xbox Media Center), including looking at source code. I now have a much deeper understanding of that application as well as the xbox in general.

I made XBMC my ‘default’ dashboard, and set it up such that it will automatically go straight to the weather forecast screen at bootup. I also resolved the performance issues with playing large playlists over samba. I got a lot done and was very pleased with myself. Now all I need is a stereo!

This morning I got an email from Jen asking me what I think about leadership. She has to study about leadership in the IT world for her midterm this weekend. If interested in this subject, she’s invited me to study with her on the subject.

Originally I was planning on getting a lot done this morning but now I must chaperone one of the vendors from yesterday. I spent pretty much all morning working with them. I helped them become familiar with our HPUX environment so they can tweak their product to work on our system.

Like yesterday, I had a lunch meeting today. It was the same vendor from this morning and they presented pretty much the same thing to a larger audience today.

Just before the meeting Carole pulled me aside and told me that she would like for me to lead up the First & Final project. Casey is attending a requirements review across the street and she would like me to go with him as a part of the transition.

Shortly after the long lunch meeting I went with Casey across the street for the requirements review. The meeting was fairly boring and a bit overwhelming because I had a lot of catching up to do on this new project. After we finished the meeting I felt a lot better about it and finally got a handle around what we’re supposed to be doing.

When I got home I spent a lot of time cleaning up shows on my TiVo. It’s now not quite so overwhelming anymore. I record way too much considering I never watch any of it.

For dinner I had the tasty mozzarella & spinach ravioli that Jen brought over from before.

When I woke up this morning I looked outside and saw that it snowed last night! Everything was covered in the fun white stuff.

(From my patio with the DirecTV dish in the foreground)

(Overlooking the tennis courts & front of the property)

The local news was doing a fine job of sensationalizing the event. It’s the storm of the century! Of 2004. They had legions of reporters positioned at all treacherous intersections to hopefully catch some spectacular car crash. I’m sort of surprised that they didn’t refer to the falling show as ‘white coffins of death from the sky above!’

I left a little late this morning. As I was driving into work I saw a local news van pulled off to the side of the highway and a film crew was _filming a car off the side of the road that was obviously abandoned long ago_. I guess they didn’t have much luck finding a real accident and had to resort to finding _something_ that would fit their story.

As I got in the office I heard Casey getting all excited about a new peer-to-peer VoIP (voice over IP) communications package. Sameer went out and bought a bunch of $3 headsets for the computer and they were all chatting over the network.

James and I talked a little bit about his trip to Dublin. It sounds like it went very well.

Jen and I chatted a little this morning. She noticed that I said something about out chat yesterday and I misinterpreted what she told me. We talked about it a little and cleared up the confusion.

For lunch today we went to Chupe’s. They have really great French fries that they only serve on Thursday. Brian, Keith, James, Alex, and I met Melissa there. Lunch was good and we had some great conversations.

This afternoon I went to yet another First and Final meeting. Sara led the meeting, going over some minor changes to the official prorate and MTR requirements. It went pretty well and she did a good job.

I got out of the meeting early and went back to the office to get some work done.

I’ve also been thinking about looking into an interest only mortgage and/or a 5/1 ARM. A lot of people have been advising me about this strategy and it seems like it might be a good idea, especially if I don’t have a long-term time horizon to be in my new place. I certainly don’t see myself in the same townhome/condo/etc for twenty or thirty years. Maybe more like seven or ten.

Brian passed along the name & number to a mortgage guy he’s been using to do all of his refi’s. Some other people in the office have gone through this guy too.

I also called the realtor that Mom told me about. She called back about fifteen minutes later but Carole was in my cube so I couldn’t talk to her.

Carole wanted me to look at a datamasking issue that they have been having trouble with. Casey had been working on it but had to leave for a doctors appointment. She paged him to call me so we could discuss. He didn’t call back so I took a look and made the code change that should have fixed the problem. Around this time Casey called and confirmed the fix.

I built the code in RET but discovered a Tivoli binary distribution error. This is something that was outside of our control. Considering it was now 6:30pm I couldn’t reach anyone to look into this.

Carole, Alonzo, and Mallick were in my cube waiting for this code to be deployed to system test so they can validate the fix. It was a lot of pressure to get it done and I felt a little trapped.

After paging the Tivoli duty pager, the Tivoli guys couldn’t find anything wrong. Another dead end. Finally I took a gamble and called Chris A. the system engineer at his desk. He was still in the office because he’s working on a late-night RFC. He was able to help.

Eventually I got the code deployed. While Mallick was running some tests, I got a call from Jen. It’s been a long time since I’ve spoken with her on the phone and it was so nice to hear her voice. She was concerned about the falling temperature combined with the wet roads and wanted to urge me to go home soon to avoid any trouble.

I ended up working pretty late anyway and didn’t get out of the office until 9:30pm. We ran into a few snags all over the place and I stayed behind to help. Carole, Mallick, Casey (who came back from the doctors office), and I were there pretty late getting this problem solved. What a good group of people to work with.

When I got home I had a great chat with Jen over IM. We talked about some serious stuff and some no-so-serious stuff. We made plans for me to visit her tomorrow night after work. I’m really looking forward to it. I’m also starting to wonder: Could she be the one?

I managed to get quite a bit of stuff accomplished this morning. Pretty much all of it was on the computer and it was difficult because I think my monitor is getting worse. It’s actually pretty blurry now even though I have it at a low resolution. I tried several different things (tweaking the monitor settings, degaussing, changing the refresh rate, etc) and nothing seemed to make it better.

While I was getting everything done, I had TiVo running in the background – catching up on a lot of shows that I’ve previously recorded. I think I watched about 10 episodes of the History Channel’s “Modern Marvels“.

I did my taxes today. At first I used TaxCut to determine my federal and state taxes. But TaxCut wanted something like $20 to e-file for me. No thanks. I pointed my browser over to freetaxusa.com and e-filed my taxes for free. I’ll have to do my state taxes by hand, but that should be easy enough to do.

It actually worked out quite well with my federal taxes. The past few years I was getting very large refunds and this frustrated me because I was paying too much every year, prompting the big refunds. This year I did some adjustments to my W2 such that I would be not paying as much in federal taxes. I figured out the correct formula thanks to MS Money. My planning paid off and my refund was much lower – only around $200.

When doing my state taxes, TaxCut tried to tell me that I may have to pay an underpayment penalty? I didn’t touch my state deductions; it’s at 1, where it’s always been.

I spent a great deal of time cleaning up files on my computer. I’ve been using the same organization for many years: Downloaded stuff gets put in c:\dl. Anything downloaded from P2P clients (like eMule, etc) gets put in c:\b. I unzip/untar/unrar/etc archives from c:\dl and c:\b into c:\a. Anything that I want to keep and back up to a CDR, I put in c:\a\burn. Because I haven’t been keeping good file hygiene, I had a LOT of crap built up in all of these directories. Today I went through all of it and cleaned it up.

Finally, I spent a lot of time cleaning up my browser bookmarks. I didn’t finish, but I’m about halfway done. When I’m finish I should in theory have a very refined and semi-deep hierarchy.

I had Caesar salad and rolls for dinner. The Publix-brand Caesar salad is actually quite good!

Jen is out with three of her friends tonight for a girl’s night out. However, she invited me over to her place after 10pm. Before heading over to her place, I packed up some stuff and took along two DVD’s (Running Man and Ronin).

When I got there Jen and I were very happy to see each other. It turns out that she’s already seen those two movies so we didn’t watch them. Despite that, we had a great time in the evening and I spent the night.