Monthly Archive for February, 2004

Feb 1st 2004

house hunting

Published by Jeff 0 Comments

I was up late last night so my cell phone ringing woke me up at 10am. It was Mom. She wanted to know if I was still up for looking at houses/town homes/condos. I just woke up so I mumbled that 11 or 11:30 would work for me.

When Mom came over we headed out to the South Cobb Drive area. It was pretty disappointing to see most of the places with signs like “From the 450’s” or “From the 700’s” - a little out of my price range.

We drove around all over that area including the east-west connector and I quickly came to the conclusion that condos and town homes are only found near the highway. All of the new housing developments only had gigantic homes. Does everyone buying a house need six bedrooms?

We had lunch at a little Chinese place. I had the sesame chicken.

I need a real estate agent. First I need to figure out exactly what I can afford. I don’t know why it’s so hard for me to figure out. I use MS Money religiously and track (to great detail) literally every cent I earn and spend. I fear that I’ll be forced to cut back on my 401(k) contributions which are currently maxed out right now. I took a look at exactly how much I’m putting away to that every month and it’s staggering.

I’ve been using ‘exifer‘ to rename my photos with a more meaningful name. Instead of something like ‘PIC5127.JPG’ it renames it to something like ‘20030131_182705.jpg’ which is a date and timestamp of when the photo was taken. A while back I read a great review about another program called ‘Downloader Pro‘ which does something similar but is more powerful. I think I’m going to switch.

I also updated Adobe Photoshop Album with the latest patch to version 2.01. They still did not fix a glaring bug with the photo orientation. Newer cameras embed the correct orientation in the image directly. Photoshop CS recognizes this and handles it correctly. Photoshop Album does not - not even with the latest patch that was released a couple of weeks ago. This is unacceptable. Adobe Photoshop Album sucks!

Before the super bowl started I decided to record it. I used TivoWebPlus to use the search module to look up the game and create a recording for it. I did a keyword search for ‘football’ and the TiVo rebooted! So much for my nice uptime.

It failed with the following error:

Filesystem assert: err || cb == 0 at fsactive.C line 470 in TwStatus FsActive::MappedRead(FsRunList*, long unsigned int, void*, long unsigned int)
Filesystem flagged as inconsistent!
Tmk Assertion Failure: err || cb == 0
TwStatus FsActive::MappedRead(FsRunList*, long unsigned int, void*, long unsigned int), line 470 (fsactive.C)
Tmk Fatal Error: Thread tivosh <10795> died due to signal -2
cea4c0 cfd604 cfcd00 cd270c bc7adc bc61e0 bc27e4 c23268 bfa548 c58428 c23268 bfa548 bc46d0 bc27e4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 c00020 c23268 bfa548 c58dd4 c23268 bfa548 bfa1a0 bfcbf8 c43cc4 c69330 c6c9fc c4e948 c4ee94 c21f5c bf94a8 c23268 bfa548 c451d0 c489fc bc0a40 400778 d79090

But when it rebooted, I realized I had a much lager problem. I got the dreaded ‘Green Screen of Death’. It advised me to leave the tivo plugged in and connect a phone line while it tries to correct itself. Since I can’t connect a phone line to it, I decided to take matters into my own hands.

After powering down the TiVo, I opened it up, extracted the HD, and hooked it into my linux box.

I mounted the partition and started disabling some of the hacks I installed. My initial theory was that I installed a hack that it didn’t like. This didn’t fix the problem. Some searching on the internet revealed that the green screen of death is usually the result of a corrupted MFS filesystem and the best thing to do is to let it correct itself (you don’t need to let it dial out). This idea was solidified when I looked at the kernel log file and saw that it was attempting to do a filesystem fix during the green screen.

Because I’m impatient, I modified the etc/rc.d/rc.sysint file to load up the telnet server and network drivers before the green screen. I wanted to log in and watch while it fixed itself.

When I powered it back up, I was able to log in and look around. Sure enough it took about fifteen minutes for filesystem fix and sanity checks to complete. Once that was done, everything was fine.

Feb 2nd 2004

he who controls the spice controls the universe

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

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.

Feb 3rd 2004

calculus

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When I got into work this morning, I was informed that we may have a breakfix to put into production today. I got the detailed and immediately set out to build the code.

As the code was being built, I verified with Carole what sort of plan of attack we want to do. The idea is to deploy the binaries to integration and production. Once deployed in integration I’ll immediately activate and we’ll test the code. Assuming the code passes integration, I’ll then immediately activate in production. Sounds like a plan!

The build server must not have been too loaded this morning because the library built much quicker than usual. I fired of a request to do an emergency push of the code and called the contact in sustaining engineering to give them a heads up. It takes them a while to deploy to the twelve servers so I broke for lunch.

I went to lunch today with Scott, Mallick, James, Alex, and Anil. We went to Slice. For $5 I had: Two LARGE slices of pepperoni pizza, a delicious chocolate-chip cookie, and a fountain drink. Not bad.

James told me that he may be going to St. Maarten this weekend. It sounds like the perfect excuse to go! I’m not so obsessed with skiing right now since I’ll be going in a couple of weeks anyway. With the cold, rainy, dreary weather we’ve been having I could use some sunshine in the Caribbean.

A little while after lunch the code was deployed and I activated it. We ran our patter of tests and everyone seemed satisfied. ODE wanted to send a larger file through so we kicked that off and waited a while. Finally around 4:30pm Andrew from ODE paged with and informed me that the tests passed and we can activate whenever we want.

I didn’t activate though. It looks like we may have another change to put in. I kicked off a build of the code and went back to my work.

After pouring over the documentation and examples, I think I finally ‘got’ rrdtool. I think I now understand the subtle nuances to creating the correct database recipes. When explaining it to Jegan, I compared it to the point in time when you finally ‘get’ calculus.

Armed with this new knowledge, I created a database with the correct settings and plugged it into the system. While it was collecting data, I turned my attention to the graph recipes. I got so engrossed in it that I didn’t leave work until 8pm.

This evening Craig called me. He was really excited and told me that I need to tune to the SciFi channel because the super extended long version of Dune is on! I calmly informed him that I’m already TiVoing it. I love TiVo!

I did laundry this evening and watched ‘24‘ and ‘Real World‘. I still have like fifty shows ready to be watched that I may never get around to. I shouldn’t have created so many season passes. Maybe I’ll go through and clean it up soon.

Feb 4th 2004

pacing helps you think

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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

Feb 5th 2004

program improvement

Published by Jeff 0 Comments

We had another round of integration testing today. I don’t know why but lately it’s been a bit troublesome when we test.

I was also occupied with helping Chris A. (from MidTier engineering) with some server upgrades. Like before I had to shut down and reboot the tuxedo servers.

Because my part came along around 11am, I had to skip lunch. I also had a 1pm meeting scheduled with some folks from release engineering. They wanted to interview me to find out how to better design the next release of their build tool. I’ve been a pretty heavy ‘power user’ of this tool ever since they released it. One of the good (and bad) things about the Revenue Pipeline project is that we have been pioneering or rather beta testing many of the internal applications and processes. This is good in that we get to use what is supposed to be the latest and greatest, but it’s also bad because we end up having to deal with bugs and quirks.

During the meeting, I explained to them all of the problems that we see with the tool and basically the overall tedious nature of clicking all day long to baby-sit the builds. They noted my thoughts and also gave me some ideas about how we can speed some things up. I need to talk to Carole about their suggestions and hopefully we can make use of those.

After that meeting, I ran to Wendy’s and got a spicy chicken sandwich value meal for lunch and brought it back to my desk.

I spent the rest of the day finalizing the rrdtool prototype and wrapped it inside some HTML. I shared the link with Jegan and Veena - they liked it. Dave also got wind of it and called me. He was pretty excited and asked what the future steps were to go about getting this into production in an official capacity. I explained that we’re just prototyping right now but will be having some conversations with the right groups to get the proper authorization.

I ended up working late again today because we had a late test in integration test which I had to help from the tuxedo administration side.

On my drive home from work, Larry called and we chatted about our upcoming trip to Hawaii. He’s pretty excited because he found some great camping gear that is extremely light. We’re going to be camping out on the Kalalau trail and will need camping gear. He found some sleeping bags that weigh only one pound and compress down to the size of a litre bottle of water. He also found a really small tent which we can use his monopod with as a stake to hold it up.

After I got home, I also helped Larry with Gallery Remote so that he can upload pictures to his new website. The current ‘release’ version wouldn’t allow photos cropped by ofoto to be added for upload. Larry sent me the pictures and I had the same trouble. I checked the forums and couldn’t find any answer, so I got the latest CVS nightly build version of Gallery Remote and the problem appeared to be fixed.

I also got an email from a nice guy who wanted to give me a heads up about a post on dpreview.com. Some of the photographers are planning on meeting up at the Atlanta Zoo this weekend to geek out and take photos at the zoo. Unfortunately I’ll be out of town but it sounds like fun.

Feb 6th 2004

blindsided

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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.

Feb 7th 2004

Mallick & Anita’s party

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I was up pretty late last night so I slept in really late today. That’s also part of the reason why I didn’t go to San Antonio for Craig’s party. I called Mallick to see if it was too late to RSVP for his party and he was happy that I would be able to go.

I did some cleaning around my apartment and finally threw away a ton of old boxes that have been collecting in the corner. Now my living room is much less cluttered than before.

This afternoon I called Jen to thank her for the nice time last night and asked if she wanted to go with me to Mallick’s house-warming party. She was warm to the idea and agreed to come over around 6:30pm. I emailed her directions.

Shortly after Jen showed up, we headed out to midtown. Following the directions Mallick sent was pretty easy and we found his condo with little trouble. It was a bitter cold night tonight as we walked through the parking lot to find the entrance. Sameer arrived around the same time and joined us.

When we made it up to Mallick’s condo, some other people were already there. Brian and his wife were already there. We sat in the living room and chatted and enjoyed some appetizers. Mallick offered us a drink and suggested a rum & coke. It turns out that it was Bacardi 151 rum, so it didn’t mesh really well with the coke. In fact the bottle had a huge label warning that it is extremely flammable.

A little while later more people arrived. Scott, his wife, and their baby came. Carole and her husband came after that followed by Casey, his wife, and Casey’s friend.

We spent some time chatting with Anita. She’s quite the hostess. I noticed a small shrine in their kitchen, and she explained about there being deities for many different aspects of life. It was quite interesting. We had veggie tacos as well as fish tacos - they were both very delicious.

After the party, Jen and I went back to my place and watched the super long version of Dune.

Feb 8th 2004

Mad World

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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.

Feb 10th 2004

Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging

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I actually went to bed pretty early last night because I needed to wake up early this morning.

Today I had an appointment to drop my explorer off at the Team Ford dealership to have them look at two problems. Sometimes when it rains really hard, water will drop from the center map light console and the driver-side rear window won’t roll down.

I dropped the car off and got a rental car. It was a tiny Ford Focus with no power anything. Driving it felt like I was driving a go-kart.

The big thing at work today was a lunch meeting Carole scheduled at the last minute. It was a meeting with her and the team leads. Today we talked about the performance improvement imitative and strategized about scheduling follow-up meetings with the rest of the groups.

Ever since I filled out an online mortgage loan pre-approval thing, I’ve been bombarded with calls from different lenders to get more info. One guy who called yesterday called again this morning but I was busy. I called him back this afternoon and gave him all sorts of personal info that would be great for identify theft.

I got an interesting email today from someone named Claudia who was searching for someone:

I’m sorry to bother you, but I met a guy named Jeff on icq and we got disconnected before I could get his e-mail… or last name… I know he is from San Diego and likes to take pictures. I was wondering… are you the Jeff I was talking to?
please don’t think I’m crazy, but I had to ask…

I hope she finds her friend Jeff from San Diego.

While watching ‘Closing Bell‘ on CNBC, they gave a cool report about corporate dating habits:

-A new poll shows that 75% of the U.S. workforce has dated a co-worker.
-This is up from 50% a year ago (it’s been a busy year for some people).
-75% of office daters hide it from their colleagues.

The dealership called me back this afternoon and said that the rear window is fixed - it was a burnt out motor. They were not, however, able to reproduce the leak problem. I’ll be picking up my explorer tomorrow morning around 7am.

Jen sent me a link to the Myers-Briggs personality test which I took. The results are that I’m a INTJ: Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Judging.

Feb 11th 2004

cellar door

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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.

Feb 12th 2004

gratitude

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Last night Mallick paged me asking if I could do a top-down build of 1.3. I got home around 6am and logged into work. The first thing I did was kick off a recursive label from the vob root and then jumped in the shower.

The labeling process takes about thirty minutes so I didn’t waste any time when taking a shower. After everything labeled, I merged and checked in the code on the release branch. Then I kicked off a top-down build using the burretoh console.

At work I monitored the build and worked on the implementation plan for the retirement of the three integration-test servers.

For lunch today we went to Steak and Ale to meet up with Dennis M. and Matthew G. Matthew used to be a co-worker who left some time ago. We used to work together on PRA. Dennis retired about four years ago. He was my first manager and the guy who hired me.

Lunch was good and about twelve of us who used to work with Dennis and Matthew went. During lunch Dennis told me that our old director (who has since left the company) didn’t like me. It took Dennis and two other managers to go over his head to the department vice-president in order to get me promoted from associate developer. I never knew this story. I wonder why that director didn’t like me.

After lunch I told Dennis how grateful I am of the opportunity he gave me six years ago when I was hired with no degree. Dennis informed me that it was an upbeat and positive attitude that helped a lot. I still stand by that philosophy.

I talked with the ‘East/West Mortgage’ guy today. He ran a credit check on me and fortunately it came back excellent. He gave me a bunch of confusing info about how much of a loan I can afford and the different mortgage options. The next step is for me to find a place and then, according to him, we can have everything wrapped up in about a month.

This evening after I got home, I did laundry and caught up on some TiVoed shows. I also finished up the RET builds from work because we had some troubles with the builds.

Feb 13th 2004

bonus

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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.

Feb 14th 2004

cupid’s arrow

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I was pretty unproductive the first part of the day today. I balanced my checkbook and did some more research for my home buying project.

I helped Larry out some more with his website. He wanted some links added to the links section, so I added them and emailed him detailed instructions on how to add/change them on his own.

Jen invited me to a party at her place to celebrate Valentines Day in a non-valentines-day fashion. It is called the ‘anti-valentines day party’.

I was running late and didn’t leave my apartment until 8pm. On the way to her house I stopped at a package store and got a bottle of merlot. When I arrived at the party, there were already a lot of people there.

It was nice meeting all of Jen’s friends. I talked to some more than others. I had an interesting conversation with a guy who is from southern France and he explained to me that the southern French are typically pro-American when it comes to the ‘war on terror’, while the northern French are more anti-American. This was an interesting perspective.

I also met Jen’s sister who looks a lot like Jen but is slightly taller. She was pretty flirtatious. Jen’s friend Damon (I wonder if that’s how it is spelled) was there but I didn’t get a chance to talk with him much. Apparently he’s a perl guru which is cool. Actually it seems that a lot of Jen’s friends are in the IT industry.

Jen’s best friend Lisa and her boyfriend showed up later. Lisa’s boyfriend tried to give me advice by saying to loosen up and dance, which I think I am horrible at. I don’t know what it means to loosen up - do you just relax your body? I try that but end up still being all stiff and stodgy.

The party started to die down around 2:30am when a lot of people left. Jen’s sister took a short thirty-minute nap on the sofa. Jen’s friend, Tom, ended up spending the night in the guest bedroom. I spent the night too.

It was a fun party and I’m happy I got to meet everyone. The more time I spend with Jen the more I like her. I have yet to find any flaw or reason to believe that she isn’t perfect. It’s sort of strange to go this long and everything seems so wonderful. I’m really looking forward to see how things will unfold.

Feb 15th 2004

27

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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!

Feb 16th 2004

Keystone, day 1

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It’s such a wonderful feeling to wake up naturally without any alarm clock. For me this is a rare occurrence unless it’s on a weekend or while I’m on vacation. Today I’m on vacation and I woke up at my leisure at 8am. Considering that I went to bed at 3am the night before this wasn’t a whole lot of sleep, but I felt completely rested and excited about the day. The bed was so comfortable with the big fluffy blanket which helped me sleep quite soundly.

Jim was out getting some groceries from the store. I took the opportunity to snap some photos of the condo using my 15mm fisheye lens. Mom was sitting in the living room reading some literature.

When Jim came back, they made a big breakfast. We had fried eggs, strawberries, toast, and orange juice. It was great to have such a hearty breakfast.

After breakfast we went out to the sporting-good store called ‘GART Sports‘. We rented skis for Mom and me. It was a great deal at only $10/day for skis, boots, and poles. We also bought lift tickets for keystone. These were also a great deal. It was about a third less than the normal ticket price.

Back at the condo we changed into our ski gear, grabbed our equipment, and headed out to the shuttle stop. We just barely missed the shuttle so we had to wait over thirty minutes for the next one to come. It was cold outside.

When we arrived at the Keystone resort base area, we got Mom signed up for a beginners ski lesson. Once she was all set, Jim and I headed to the crowded lift. By this time it was around 11:30am.

It was an exhilarating feeling to snap my feet into the skis again. The last time I did so was a year ago with Craig in Jackson Hole. Eventually we got onto the lift and glided up the mountain.

We skied all the way down on a long and windy green run. I had no trouble getting my ski legs back and thoroughly enjoyed the feeling of skiing again.

When we came up the second time, I used my cell phone to snap a photo from the top of the mountain. I then sent the photo via email (through my phone) to Larry and Jen. What cool technology.

(Taken with my cell phone)

After a couple of runs, I felt confident enough in my abilities. I extracted my camera out of my backpack (which I always wear skiing) and placed it around my neck. I wore it underneath my ski jacket and strapped to my chest via the chest strap I use when hiking. It worked out quite well.

Today I used only the 15mm fisheye lens. I wanted to get some wide-angle shots and the lens is faster than the 28-135 (despite the 28-135 having IS). It also has such a huge plane of focus that I don’t have to worry as much about getting the correct focus, which is good when trying to take a picture as quickly as possible. I had to remove one of my bulky ski gloves to operate the camera so my hand got quite cold whenever I stopped to photograph.


(with a 15mm fisheye, it’s quite easy to take self portraits like this.)

I did a few more runs with Jim (mostly blues) and then he decided to call it a day and went back down to the base of the mountain to join Mom as her lesson should be wrapping up soon.

I stayed on the mountain a while longer and skied down all blue trails. It was so much fun being able to ski again. Despite having the big expensive camera strapped to my neck, I still went fast and wasn’t too cautious. I have that insurance, after all.

In fact, I was feeling so good that I did some moguls and actually liked it.

One of the great things about ski resorts is that there are so many cute girls all around. Of course I have to remind myself now that a lot of them are probably literally ten years younger than me. I feel so old. I never had to worry about that sort of thing before and now I do. They all look so much older than they probably are. I think it’s all of the growth hormones we have in our food supply these days.

Around 3:30pm I headed down to the base of the mountain. I checked in on Mom who was sitting in one of the bars with Jim. She wasn’t in a happy mood. Her first experience learning how to ski was bad and she hated it. She said she doesn’t understand how people _want_ to get all sore and tired out. She never wants to ski again.

I changed back into my hiking boots and after a short while we headed back to the shuttle stop. Everyone was pretty tired, although I didn’t feel that sore. I took a shower and then called Jegan who was still at the office working late. Everything seemed to be going ok at work.

A couple of hours later we left for dinner. On the way we stopped at the sporting goods store and returned Mom’s skis.

For dinner we went to a steak & seafood place called ‘Pug Ryans‘. I had the prime rib steak but it would have been better with horseradish sauce.

On the way back to the condo Larry called and we chatted about laptops. It turns out that he’s in the market for one too. He’s pretty tired of his iBook and wants to get a PC-based laptop.

Back at the condo I went to bed fairly early because I was pretty tired. I only got about five hours of sleep the night before.

Feb 17th 2004

Keystone, day 2

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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.

Feb 18th 2004

ski, drive, fly, sleep

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Last night I had a nightmare about Jen. I had a dream that she called me and said that we’ve been spending too much time together so we need to stop seeing each other.

I didn’t sleep very well last night. I got up at 7am. Shortly after I woke up, Mom cooked breakfast. We had scrambled eggs (with onions and cheese), strawberries, toast, and orange juice. I really miss hearty breakfasts like this.

After breakfast, I photographed the sunrise behind the mountains. I also packed up all of my stuff and got changed into my ski gear.


(sunrise in Colorado)

Even though we’ve got a flight around 3pm, I wanted to go out skiing for a couple of hours this morning. Jim took me to the base of the mountain around 8:40am. I changed into my ski boots, put my hiking boots into my backpack, and got into the ski lift line at 9am.

This time I took a lot of blue runs down the left-side of the front of the mountain. Like yesterday it was warm today, the sky was a little cloudier, but it was still nice.

I was one of the first people down the trails which were mostly freshly groomed. With the sun still rising, many of the trails were still shrouded in shadows from the mountain.

On my first trip down the mountain, I stuck on the right-hand side and followed blues all the way down. Unfortunately I got stuck onto a steep mogul field and had to spend a lot of time slugging it out to get through it. Fortunately I didn’t fall, which was a bit surprising.

Next time I took different blue runs down the mountain. It was so warm today that I ended up taking off my hat and gloves. It was pretty liberating and fun to wear only my jacket and sunglasses.

Towards the end of my time on the mountain, I got a little braver and wore my camera outside of my jacket. I held my poles in my left hand and grasped the camera in my right hand. This allowed me to ski down the mountain as fast as I like while still keeping a finger on the shutter of the camera.

I had fun with this and filled up the rest of my memory card by skiing down some steep blue runs very fast and snapping off some photos. In order to better convey the idea of motion, I stopped down the 15mm lens all the way. Unfortunately because it was so bright, the shutter speed was still only slowed down to 1/180 sec.


(shot as I cruised down a blue run)

As I flew down the mountain with the large camera in my hand, a lot of people looked at me funny as I went by. I guess they are not used to seeing people skiing fast with a big camera in hand.

I made it down to the base of the mountain around 10:50am. Mom and Jim wanted to pick me up at 11am so I had about ten minutes to meet them at the parking lot. I called Mom and she said that they were on their way.

It was a great two hours of skiing and I had a huge grin on my face as I sat at the base of the mountain and changed into my hiking boots. It was a bit of a hike back to the parking lot and I was so thankful that I was in regular shoes instead of the ski boots.

Mom and Jim picked me up and we drove into the main town and returned my skis. While in GART Sports, we walked around the store for a while to look for any sales. After that we were off to Denver.

We allocated about two or three hours to get to the airport (traffic, etc), but got there in only about 1.5 hours. Because it looked as if we would be getting there early, I rebooked an earlier flight to Atlanta. I was originally planning on flying out at 3:40pm, but instead booked for the 2:25pm flight.

At the airport I parted ways from Mom and Jim. I went to the gate and requested a window seat. The gate agent was very friendly and assigned me a set right away (in coach class of course). She gave me an exit-row seat and told me that I would have an empty seat next to me.

As I waited for boarding, I called Jen. She was happy to hear from me and wanted to know what time I was getting back into town. When I told her that it would be around 8pm she wanted to know if I wanted company tonight. She gets out of class around 8pm so it would work out perfectly.

The return flight home was fairly uneventful. I read a great deal in my book and also snapped some photos through the window (that’s the reason I requested a window seat).


(flying over Kansas)


(Sunset as we prepare to land in Atlanta)

We arrived in Atlanta about fifteen minutes early. I had little trouble getting back to my car and driving home. About thirty minutes after I got home, Jen came over.

She brought with her this really great frozen ravioli stuffed with mozzarella and spinach. She also brought a bottle of red wine and two wine glasses. We cooked up the ravioli and had that for dinner with the wine. It was a great evening.

When I was showing something to Jen on my computer (I think we were playing music), she pointed out that my monitor was quite blurry looking. Jenn pointed this out to me once before too, but I guess I was so used to it that I didn’t notice. I think I need to get a new monitor or a new display solution altogether (i.e. a notebook computer)

Feb 19th 2004

ground running

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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.

Feb 20th 2004

zt3000

Published by Jeff 0 Comments

As soon as I got into work this morning, I helped with a test in the integration test environment to verify some code. I had some difficulty activating the new code on one of the tuxedo nodes. This frustrated me and set me into a pissy mood the rest of the day.

Casey, Susan, Alex, and I went to the Varsity for lunch today. We haven’t been there in a long time.

Krishna (who helped me out with info for some townhomes) reminded me that Delta employes get a discount with Dell and HP. Since I’ll never, ever use Dell again, I looked at HP. I spent some time researching and did a custom-configured laptop from HP. It’s the ZT3000 series notebook and is really cool. The configuration I got is:

- Intel(R) Pentium(R) M 1.6 GHz
- 512MB DDR SDRAM (2×256MB)
- 80 GB 5400 RPM Hard Drive
- DVD/CDRW Combo Drive
- Intel(R) Pro Wireless 2200 802.11b/g & Bluetooth
- 15.4″ WVA WSXGA+ (1680×1050)
- 64MB ATI Mobility Radeon(TM) 9200

The thing that really sucks is that it won’t even ship until March 19th. I guess they need a lot of time to build it. I’m really excited about getting this new laptop and it’s going to be tough waiting a month to get it.

This afternoon things got really busy. We had to wait a while to get final confirmation from the business to activate the new code in production. Casey was pretty stressed about this because he was trying to get an answer all day long.

Finally around 4pm we got the authorization and I began the activation in production. Immediately I saw some problems that I couldn’t quickly solve. I called on Jegan for assistance and he looked at it with me. I was still in a somewhat sour mood due to the problems from this morning and I think I partially took it out on Jegan. I was whining and not acting my usual self and I think Jegan’s patience was wearing thin.

The problem, it turns out, was some oracle errors from our local oracle reference database. We attempted to page the DBA for that database but couldn’t reach him. Next we tried the oracle duty pager. We finally got in touch with a senior DBA who looked at the database for us.

Initially he said it was probably an application issue (I think this response is a part of DBA training). Later he came back and said that the oracle instance itself was throwing an exception and that he would have to open a trouble ticket with Oracle. This did not sound like something good at all. We were looking for a quick resolution and the way he was talking it sounded like a painful and drawn out process.

He wanted to drive home and look at it from there since we would likely be working on this all night long. I also went home. I left work around 6pm.

About an hour later the DBA paged me back and we talked about the issue some more. He wanted to know how we connect to the database and other detailed application-related questions. This didn’t feel right and I didn’t think we were going down the right path to solving the problem.

I called up Jegan who was still at his desk and asked if he would consider conferencing in with me and the DBA to support a solution. Jegan spoke with the DBA about the issue some more and mentioned that we’ve seen this before but our normal DBA was able to resolve the problem.

Next the DBA did some comparisons between the production oracle instance and the SI instance. He saw one minor difference and changed production to match. We attempted to restart the engine and it made a successful database call. I suggested that we revert the setting back to verify if that’s what fixed the problem. When we reverted the setting back, the database connections were still occurring correctly. This meant that whatever the problem we saw earlier was not occurring now. We’re supposed to follow up with our DBA on Monday to see what the true problem was.

I had takeout Chinese for dinner.

After the database issues were resolved, I spent the rest of the evening activating the code. I finally finished around 11pm.

I chatted with Jen for about thirty minutes on IM before going to bed.

Feb 21st 2004

meet the parents

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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, jalapeņos, 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