2004 March Archive at Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Monthly Archive for March, 2004

Mar 1st 2004

decision

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This morning I called up Kevin the mortgage lender guy to check on specific numbers for an interest-only 5/1 ARM type loan. He ran some numbers and quoted me a rate of 4.625%. Because I would only be putting down 5%, I would need a second loan to make up for the other 15% in order to avoid the PMI fees. He figured about $600/month for homeowners insurance and $2200 for property taxes and came up with what my monthly payment would be. I was very happy with the figure he quoted me.

One of the large burdens for me around the whole home purchase thing was the huge monthly payment I thought I would be facing. This is mainly because I used those online calculators which figure for a 30-year fixed at something like 6.5%. Kevin’s numbers seemed much more doable and so I’m actually pretty excited about the whole thing now that I’m a lot more comfortable with the cost.

For lunch today Casey, Brian, Alex, Susan, Bob, and I went to a new burrito place next to Oz pizza and the east point Marta station. It’s a lot like Moe’s or Willy’s. I had a chicken burrito and it was pretty good. It’s actually pretty small inside the restaurant but I don’t think they can do much about that.

Outside today it was a gorgeous day. It was in the 70’s and sunny. What a nice preview for spring! I’m really excited about the next few months.

Today we completed the server swing task. We took three servers from the integration environment and dropped them into the production environment. This additional capacity should help eliminate the CPU bottleneck we have on our existing six production servers and help identify where the next bottleneck is.

I’m a little upset about the whole process because I haven’t been as involved as I would like to be. With this new first and final project I’m leading, I’ve been sort of cut off from the performance & architecture role I was serving in before.

Before leaving work I stopped by Andy’s desk to talk about branching strategy for our next release. Andy is a great guy to work with and I often enjoy working with him when it comes to release engineering stuff.

We currently have been building branches off of other branches in a sort of cascading or waterfall pattern. I’ve been a little nervous about this because we haven’t gone back to the /MAIN branch in a very long time. I asked Andy about this approach and he suggested that we merge back to main and then branch off main again. Chris V. overheard our discussion and came by to chime in. Chris felt strongly that the waterfall approach was appropriate. I stood back as Andy & Chris debated about the two approaches and got even more confused than I was before I spoke with them. Eventually they both suggested I keep doing things the way I currently do them.

I was in contact with my Realtor, Laura, throughout the day. I told her that I was pretty interested in the second unit we looked at yesterday - the one with all the upgrades.

She did some checking and came back to me that Bernie would be able to push out closing at the end of April instead of the end of March which would buy me an additional month, but I would still have to deal with a double mortgage payment in June (one for mortgage and one for rent). I checked with Post and they didn’t seem willing to work anything out regarding the month of June.

After work I drove back to the Highlands View Townhomes property. I wanted to take another look at #67 - the one with all the upgrades that I looked at yesterday.

When I got there Bernie, the sales guy, saw me and wanted to talk about #67. I told him that I just wanted to take another look at it and he gave me the key and a map and sent me on my way.

I stopped by my car and grabbed my camera so I could take some pictures inside. I didn’t change lenses, electing to keep the 28-135mm lens. I figured that would be wide enough for inside.

(This is a view of the front of the townhome)

I entered from the garage on the lower level and looked around as I worked my way up to the main level. Inside the living room were two laborers who were treating the hardwood floors with some sort of solution (turpentine?) I asked them something about looking around but I don’t think they spoke English, so I just smiled and went about my business.

After looking around, I headed back to the office. I wasn’t able to get any indoor photos because the 28mm wasn’t wide enough (with the 1.6x crop factor). I should have brought the 15mm fisheye instead.

Back inside the sales office, Bernie and his partner were on the phone with Laura, my realtor. She had called them to try to negotiate a lower price for me since I had to eat a month of rent in June. Unfortunately all she was able to do was to get Bernie to pay for one month of my association fees.

Bernie wanted to know if I was interested in #67 and Laura said that she would have to speak with me first and I mentioned that I would like to sleep on it.

As I left the property I called Laura and talked about it with her. She advised me that it is a good deal but suggested I sleep on it.

Back home I called up speakeasy to see if they could check on DSL availability for the townhome community. I spoke with a friendly guy named Jason. He couldn’t find the property address in their database but gave me a website to compute and latitude and longitude for the address. I could then email him the coordinates (33.826075, -084.498958) and he would send it to some people to check and get back with me in a couple of days.

I got a call from Laura who said that it looks like we have to make a decision right now instead of waiting for the morning. Bernie called her and said that he has another person who is very interested in #67 and wants to put a contract on it, but he wants to give us the right of refusal. She apologized to me for having to make a quick decision and reminded me that if we can’t get this one, there are going to be plenty of other townhomes at the property & other properties to choose from.

I decided that I want to do this and told her to call Bernie back and put things in motion. She called back a short while later and we set up a 4pm appointment with Bernie tomorrow to sign the contract and pay the $2,000 earnest money.

Jen invited me over to her house tonight to have dinner and help her study. I left my place around 7:30 and drove over to Jen’s house.

Jen baked a home-made pizza. It had spinach and tomatoes on it with soy cheese. It was very good. The cheese didn’t really taste much different than ‘normal’ cheese too.

Lisa, Jen’s friend, came over and had some pizza with us. We had some drinks and had a great time.

Mar 2nd 2004

under contract

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Last night I didn’t sleep very well. I tossed and turned a lot and woke up many times throughout the night. I had trouble falling asleep. I think I was nervous about the contract signing today. I don’t know why I would be nervous about that though - everything is in order and there should be no problems.

We found out today that our Senior Vice President, Mike Childress, is leaving Delta Technology to take a job with EDS in Texas. It should be interesting to see what sort of upper-management shuffle takes place in light of this event.

We examined the results of the server swing from yesterday. The results weren’t that stunning. We’re now trying to figure out where the bottleneck went, as it doesn’t look like the tuxedo servers are at 100% CPU utilization anymore. Maybe its DB2 CPU usage or I/O somewhere - we’ll find it hopefully.

I went to the 10am core team leadership meeting this morning. In that meeting Alonzo talked about the updated schedule for our 1.3 release. It looks like everything has been pushed back a couple of weeks.

For lunch today about six of us went to a new caf� style place next to the new burrito place we went to yesterday. I had the meatloaf with macaroni & cheese, and mashed potatoes. It was ok.

Mom called today to find out about the townhome. I told her that I’m going to be signing a contract for it today at 4pm. She asked if she could swing by to see it while I was there.

At 2pm I went across the street for the First and Final requirements review meeting. Not everyone showed up yet so I waited with Keith and Sarah (both from Accenture). Sarah told me about the funny Quizno’s commercial with the dancing hamster-like creatures. I remember Jen telling me about that too but don’t remember the commercial.

Steve C. never showed up so we didn’t have the meeting after all. I went back to the A3 building and worked for another hour before leaving at 3:30pm.

I went straight to the townhome place. Laura was already there in Bernie’s office. We sat and talked for a few minutes and then Mom showed up. Bernie gave me the key and I took Mom and Laura over to the townhome to look at it again. Mom really liked it and was excited about the whole prospect.

We went back to the sales office and went though the thick stack of paperwork for me to read and sign. We were there for almost two hours. I signed a ton of papers and handed over a check for $2,000 in ‘earnest money’.

This was a big step for me. The wheels are in motion and unless something bad happens, I should be a homeowner soon. I’m happy with my decision.

The next step is for them to send me a copy of the contract and then I’ll give a copy to my lender. From there we schedule a date for closing - probably April 29th or 30th.

Afterwards Mom asked if I wanted to get some dinner. We went over to Papacitos off of Windy Hill road. I had a crown & coke and the cheese enchiladas. It was pretty good.

When I got back to my apartment, I wrote a couple of entries in my journal. I also watched some queued-up TiVo shows. On ‘The Screen Savers‘ from TechTV, they had a cool recipe and demonstration for liquid nitrogen ice Cream. With the liquid nitrogen, you can make ice cream instantaneously.

Liquid nitrogen ice cream:

1. Mix 1 liter or 1 quart each of half-and-half and heavy whipping cream in a bowl.

2. Add a cup of granulated sugar, three eggs, four or five teaspoons of vanilla, and a pound of preserves (strawberry or peach work well).

3. After whisking for two to three minutes, add 1 liter of liquid nitrogen directly and stir with a wooden spoon until the mix becomes solid.

4. Allow excess liquid nitrogen to boil off and serve.

Jen called me shortly before I went to bed. We talked for a little while on the phone which was nice because we haven’t talked on the phone a great deal - it’s usually be online or in person (and there’s nothing wrong with that).

Mar 3rd 2004

confession

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It was frustrating to come into work today only to find out that we were still having the same deployment issues from yesterday. One of the disadvantages to having decentralized processes & groups is that it can take ages to get simple things done.

Yesterday afternoon Ram had some trouble getting an issue resolved with deploying our binaries to system test. The simple process of deploying a binary on a target box involves four different groups: The application team, release engineering, Tivoli support, and mid-tier engineering. Like many other times when we have a problem, we don’t know who exactly to contact. What results is that (to me at least) each group will try to avoid doing any work and tell us that the problem is with a different group. This leads to lengthy and unnecessary delays and is extremely frustrating.

Ram was trying to get help with this since yesterday afternoon and all day long no one was willing to help (other than canned responses) get the problem solved. Eventually I took a look at the problem and determined that a particular staging filesystem (that we don’t have any control over) was too small to hold the package we’re trying to deploy. The filesystem will need to be cleaned up and/or expanded. Finally after Carole made some calls to some other managers were we able to get help and the problem resolved.

It shouldn’t have to be this way.

This afternoon I had another two-hour-long first and final requirements review meeting. It was a little tough getting oxygen to my brain and I had to fight to stay engaged (and awake) but eventually we concluded the meeting.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I want to do for springtime travel plans. There is a lot of cool stuff to do in the spring with everything in bloom. These are the things I would ideally like to do this spring:

1) Washington D.C. - At the end of March and the beginning of April the cherry and dogwood trees are supposed to be in peak bloom.
2) St. Maarten - We stop flying there on Saturday and Sunday mid-april, so I want to make one more trip out there before the season is over.
3) San Diego/Joshua Tree - I already have solid plans to go out there Easter weekend. Spring is supposed to be the best time to go because everything will be in bloom.
4) Zion/Arches National Park - springtime is supposed to be a good time to go because like Joshua Tree, all of the desert stuff is supposed to be in bloom.
5) Skiing in Utah over a weekend - I want to get another day or two of skiing in before the season is over.
6) Canadian Rockies - This is probably very late spring but it’s supposed to look beautiful with everything in bloom.

I left work today around 5:30pm. The UPS guy came and delivered a package from Larry to me. It was addressed as: “Uncle Bags’s Bag” and contained Larry’s old camera bag. I like it a lot more than my current camera bag. Everything fits great and it’s a lot easier to carry around too.

I downloaded and cropped some the floor plans for my (hopefully) future home:

(front ‘elevation’)

(first floor)

(second floor)

(third floor)

This evening I went over to Jen’s house. She is dog sitting her brothers dog Adie as well as her dog Chloe. Adie is a puppy and full of energy who likes to run around and play. Chloe is older and wiser and seems to do a good job of showing Adie what to do and what not to do.

Jen made some dinner for us. She tossed a salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing and prepared some grilled cheese sandwiches (using her George Foreman indoor grill!). The dinner was pretty good.

Lisa and her boyfriend Alan came over for a short while. Jen wanted Chloe to get a little used to Alan since she is a bit weary of strangers. Alan is going to be stopping by her place tomorrow to take care of the dogs while Jen is at work.

Jen and I had a bit of a serious talk this evening and it went quite well. We confessed some things to each other.

Mar 5th 2004

loofah

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Carole was out of the office today so things were a bit quiet due to that and because it’s a Friday.

I got a lot done today. I cleaned my messy desk, I made progress on the clearcase winkin build solution, I created a 1.4 branch view for James, I decided against taking the C# class because it turns out that it’s a week long. I don’t think I can spare a week of time to be in class with the other work going on - as much as I’d love to take a C# class. I worked a little with Bob on the FPS project. He needs Jegan and my help with getting some components loaded to a server. I also looked over some documentation Carole handed me from one of the principals about streamlining things. It was a productive day.

Ram was out of the office today so I had to handle all of the RET stuff. The first thing I worked on was deploying the top-down build from last night. I was asked to pick up a change in contention and build it which was a pretty trivial thing for me.

For lunch today, Casey, Brian, Susan, Bob, and I went to the new Ruby Tuesday off Camp Creek highway. Not many people were in the restaurant. I ordered the chicken strips.

Afterwards we stopped by Linens ‘n Things (since it’s in the same shopping center). Earlier Casey told me that one could buy 600 thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets (as a set) for less than $100. I didn’t believe him. Sure enough, they had a set on sale for $70. The sale ends the first week in April so I’m thinking of getting a set or two for my new bed. There was also a debate about loofahs and bath sponges. Brian and I are of the opinion that those poofy plastic mesh-like things are called ‘loofahs’. Susan and Casey disagreed, citing that loofahs are the dried-out natural ocean sponge things usually shaped in the form of a tube. I think they are right.

In the afternoon, Anil came by and asked that I build a change to proration and the derived data controller. I really need to start training others to pick up some of the build duties. Actually, in fact, I would prefer that all of the developers do their own builds, but I think Carole would prefer if it was more centralized.

I left work early today so I could stop by the apartment leasing office. I wanted to speak with the property manger about my lease, but he wasn’t in the office today. I’ll try back on Monday.

Jen and I had plans for me to go to her place around 7pm tonight. I left at about 6:30 and picked up a bottle of vodka and vanilla-flavored vodka. Traffic going north on I-75 at this time of day was a bit thick and it reminded me of when I was taking evening classes at Kennesaw.

When I arrived at Jen’s house, Lisa was there. We all did a birthday cake shot to finish up the last of the frangelico. A short while later Lisa left.

Jen picked up some Thai on her way home from work. She went to the same place as before: Mama Fu’s. This time I had the Pad Thai noodles with chicken. It was pretty good. We actually ate dinner on the floor in the middle of her living-room. She spread out a blanket and we pretended to have a picnic. It was a lot of fun.

While we ate, we watched an episode of Twin Peaks. This is one of Jen’s favorite shows. I don’t remember seeing it before, but it was a series from the early 90’s. While we watched, I fixed us a Red Bull and Vodka to drink. I don’t think she liked it too much. I had a second.

We went upstairs to mix some CD’s. I brought along the two I had in my car. We didn’t actually make any CD’s but listening to music. Instead, we put together a bookcase she had wanted to assemble. We did it without reading or following the directions which was a bit odd, but worked out great. The highpoint of the evening was definitely working with Jen to do this, we had a great time.

While building this bookcase, we had another drink - vanilla vodka and orange juice (it’s so good). I think we put too much alcohol in it (like half and half) because it started to take its toll on me.

After we finished the bookcase I wasn’t feeling too hot. I had that feeling in my stomach that if I move around too much I may get sick, so I stayed pretty still. I told Jen about my predicament and she suggested I lay down, which I did. That was the last thing I remember from the evening.

Mar 6th 2004

Harrisburg

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I woke up around 7am this morning. I took a shower in Jen’s shower. It’s pretty nice. It is much larger than the shower at my apartment and she has a cool custom showerhead which can do the ‘raindrops’ effect like they have in fancy hotels.

While I was getting ready, Jen made some orange-flavored cinnamon rolls. I only had one because I was still feeling a bit queasy from the night before.

At 8am I headed out and drove straight to the airport. Because it was raining, I opted to park at the $9/day airport park-n-ride instead of my usual el-cheapo method of getting on the hotel shuttle bus.

I checked in and headed down to the gate (D22). While waiting for the flight to board, I heard the gate agent announce that they are in an oversold situation and need two people to give up their seats. This did not sound very good at all. I’m standing-by for the flight and they need some of the confirmed passengers to give up their seats so there is no way I can possibly get on the flight.

When I observed all of this, I decided that I would not be going to Harrisburg this weekend and called Mom-Mom to let her know. She wasn’t there so I left a message on the answering machine. Next I called Avis to cancel my car rental reservation.

As I was about to leave the gate area, the gate agent called my name. I was a bit perplexed and walked up to the gate. They had a seat for me! How strange. As I was about to board, the gate agent shouted for me to halt because some people had just arrived and rushed to the counter. I think they were revenue passengers who were running late. It was a family of four. I overheard the agent explain that there was literally only one seat left on the plane so only one of them could go. They opted to stay together and get a different flight. I was then able to board.

After I boarded I called Avis back to re-activate my reservation (that wasn’t a problem at all fortunately). I also called Mom-Mom back to let her know the change in plans again.

The flight was eventful. The first half of the flight was pretty bumpy due to the windy conditions. I read a lot of my book and attempted to sleep some. As we came in to land, we circled around the three-mile island nuclear power plant. I got a great view out of it since I was on the left-hand side of the plane. I regretted not having my camera in hand to snap some photos, but I’m sure I would have been shot or arrested for photographing the site in this age of fear.

When we arrived, I had a pleasant time getting the Avis rental car in the small terminal.

It only took me about twenty minutes to go from the airport to Mom-Mom’s house. Shortly after I arrived, she was serving food for a late lunch.

We had a great-smelling beef stew along with creamy mashed potatoes, coleslaw topped with almonds, and croissant rolls. It was very delicious and there was a lot left over.

After eating and doing dishes, we sat in the living room to talk and watch television. I showed her a photograph from the ski trip with Mom as well as a picture of Jen.

We watched an episode of ‘Modern Marvels‘ that showcased the oil rig firefighters. It was pretty interesting. Following that we watched ‘Capitol Gang’ on CNN, but that didn’t go as well because Mom-Mom started getting upset about Bush. Also on the news I saw a report about a new magazine for men called ‘Cargo‘. It’s made by the same people who make ‘Lucky‘ but instead of girl-type stuff, they have things guys would want like gadgets and such. It even has the same stickers one can use to label things they like.

As it got later, Mom-Mom made some toasted cheese sandwiches which were basically mustard and cheese toasted in bread. For desert we had apple pie with almond slivers sprinkled on top. It was quite good.

Later, we watched ‘Mr. Mom‘ on TBS. It’s been a long time since I’ve seen that movie and it was still funny this time around.

I went to bed around 10pm.

Mar 7th 2004

passing time

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I woke up around 8:30am today. It was nice to sleep in a bit later than normal and the guest bed was very comfortable.

When I came downstairs, Mom-Mom was preparing some breakfast. She cooked fried eggs, buttered toast, buttered English muffins, fried ham, and chopped grapefruit. I had several glasses of orange juice to go along with breakfast. It was nice having a large homemade breakfast again because I haven’t had one in a while.

While lounging around after breakfast I used my photographic device to take some pictures of Sammy, Mom-Mom’s cat with the 50mm lens Larry gave me:

(Sammy)

(Sammy up close)

We read the Sunday newspaper together and I took note of an article in the travel section. It highlighted the peak times and places for the springtime blooming. It confirmed my idea that Washington D.C. is a great place to go in late March/early April. Now I’m even more excited about going.

Originally I was planning on taking the 6:50pm flight but decided to try for the earlier 12:50pm flight instead. I called the Delta reservations office to see what the standby list looked like for the 12:50pm flight. The girl indicated that I had a decent chance to get on, so I decided to try for that flight. I could get a lot done if I managed to get back to Atlanta sooner.

Around 11:30am I left. Mom-Mom was happy that I made it out and I certainly enjoyed seeing her again. I had a nice time and enjoyed her company.

It didn’t take me very long to get to the airport and the car return was a breeze. I didn’t have to pay as much for the car since I returned it early.

When I got to the gate I called Dad and we chatted for a while. I haven’t had a chance to talk to him since I decided to get the townhome. He already read about it in my weblog but I filled him in on some of the details.

I didn’t make the 12:50pm flight and there were no other flights that would get me into Atlanta any sooner than 9pm so I had to wait around until the next flight which wasn’t until 6:50pm. I was pretty bummed about having to sit in the airport for SIX hours.

It was at this point I regretted not waiting to come out here for two more weeks when I would have my notebook. I even saw a big sign stating that they have free WiFi access throughout the airport. If I had my notebook and high-speed internet access, I would have been as happy as a pig in slop.

I walked around a bit and then went into the only restaurant (The Capitol Room). I had a couple of crown & cokes as well as the potato skins appetizer. The waiter let me use his pen and I spent some time jotting down notes for my journal entries for the past three days. For desert I had a gigantic brownie fudge thing with ice cream on top.

After this late lunch I went over to the magazine store and bought two magazines. I saw a stack of ‘Cargo’ magazines that I heard about yesterday so I got one of those as well as a photography magazine. Cargo was pretty good and I actually used some of the little stickers to mark things that I’m interested in. The photography magazine was crap. I have high standards after reading the UK digital photography magazine that Larry gets and this one doesn’t hold a candle.

Jen called me a couple of times and we chatted about tonight. We made plans for her to come over to my place this evening shortly after I get home.

I spent the rest of the time reading my Wheel of Time book since I already went through the magazines. Eventually the plane arrived and they started boarding. The gate agent called my name and I got my seat assignment (2D).

We boarded and took off on time. During the flight I finished my book. Robert Jordan wrapped it up quite nicely. In the last 50 pages he brought a lot of things together and it ended quite well.

The flight was pretty uneventful until we got to Atlanta. We circled around for a while - something I haven’t had to endure that often. It was pretty cool while we circled because we were above the leading-edge of a thin cloud mass. The full moon above made the tops of the clouds glow with an eerie pale light which looked incredible from above.

We finally landed but then sat near the gate for twenty more minutes while they waited for a ground crew to arrive. I was pretty impatient since I’ve been waiting so long today. I snapped a photo of myself while playing with my phone:

(I wasn’t in a great mood at this time)

When we unloaded, I rushed through the airport, got to my car, and dashed home. About fifteen minutes later Jen showed up. We talked for a while and watched ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ together (I had it TiVoed). I think she liked it.

Tonight was a special night because we had a serious talk and our relationship progressed to a new level.

Mar 9th 2004

smothered & covered

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I was at Jen’s house this morning with a change of clothes to wear to work today. I had my black slacks but unfortunately left my black belt at home. Jen let me borrow one of her black belts which was barely large enough to fit my waist, that was cool.

Shortly after I got into work today I made an appointment with my doctor (Dr. Feldman) for a physical. That will be in mid April. I also made an appointment for a cleaning with my new dentist (whom I haven’t seen yet) near the end of May shortly before I go on my Hawaii trip.

I contacted Kevin, my lender, to get a ‘good faith estimate’ for my mortgage. He collected some info from me and while we were still on the phone, he emailed me a pfd file with the estimate. It contained a lot of good detailed info with all of the costs broken out. Last week he quoted me a rate of 4.625%, but today it was 4.375%.

For lunch today, Casey, Brian, Alex, Bob, and I went to Waffle House. I had a bacon patty melt with smothered and covered hash browns. It was actually pretty good.

This afternoon I attended a bi-weekly First & Final requirements review meeting. It was pretty painless and ended early.

As soon as I got back, I jumped on a bridge call in progress where all of the stakeholders were trying to figure out where the bottleneck in the system is right now. We can’t seem to identify any point along the flow where a system in CPU constrained. Jegan and I are of the opinion that we may need to tune some of the server settings in several areas but we were getting pushback from the owners of those areas.

Before I left work I had a conversation with Craig about weekend plans. He’s planning on taking a road trip out to Atlanta for this weekend. We should have a great time together.

On my way home from work I stopped by the apartment leasing office and spoke with John the property manager. I explained my situation about moving out in early May but having a lease that goes until the end of June. He said that the best thing he can do for me is to try to lease my apartment out early. If they can do that, I’ll be able to recoup some or all of my June rent.

I wasn’t feeling so great today so I went to bed at 9:30pm.

Mar 10th 2004

winkin

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It felt good to get a good night sleep last night. Aside from one interruption around midnight I had a restful sleep.

The weekly 10am staff meeting went as it usually does, but today Carole announced that Ram is leaving the project to go work with the XP group. I think his contract with us was up at the end of March anyway but because he’s a subcontractor through IBM, they were able to place him somewhere else within DT.

This means that I’ll be doing all of the builds again. Fortunately Carole is letting me train Curtis and Veena to do builds too.

I spent some time today working on my build avoidance project. Using some hints from Chris V. I was able to craft a new Makefile tag that would execute the command,

find /vobs/revenue_pipe/obj/ -name “*.o” | xargs cleartool winkin -r -adirs

This will simply find all object files in the view-private object dir and for each file execute the cleartool winkin command to make the objects shareable. When we do our builds using the RET tool, the objs created are normally not shared. So now I have the build execute with the additional ‘winkin’ tag to accomplish this.

If I can make all of this work, babysitting lengthy builds will be a thing of the past. We should have done this a long time ago.

This afternoon I went to a large performance/bottleneck discussion meeting. Despite adding new hardware to our tuxedo environment and increasing the MIPS capacity of the mainframe, we did not see the types of performance gains that we would like to have seen.

The meeting was a bit frustrating because some of the groups didn’t seem too interested in examining configuration settings despite the fact that no one can point out where the bottleneck is right now.

During the meeting Carole asked me to stay in the same room and attend a short 4pm meeting to discuss the revenue recognition project.

Carole, Casey, Steve, Jegan, and I met to discuss a high level view of where the project will be going for the next year and a half. It was actually pretty interesting and we’re getting involved from a very early stage and at a high level. Unfortunately the meeting went pretty late and we didn’t disperse until 6:30pm.

Just before I left work I kicked off a build to be run in system test tomorrow morning. I’ll have to log in tonight to deploy and activate it.

I went straight to Jen’s house after work today as she was home early and we had dinner plans. When I arrived I finally got to meet her new roommate, Lynne.

Jen and I went to downtown Woodstock for dinner. We went to a Mexican place called ‘La Parrilla‘. Despite being in Woodstock on a weeknight, we had to wait for a table.

We shared a pitcher of margaritas while we ate. I had two enchiladas and a taco.

After dinner we went to Target to pick up a few things. I bought a thank-you card for my grandmother and Jen got an envelope to mail a book as well as a mouse pad with a gel thing for her wrist. We also looked around for a fun gift for Lisa but couldn’t find anything.

Back and Jen’s house, she explained to me the importance of caring for your skin on your face. You’re supposed to use a gentle cleaner when washing your face as well as moisturizer and anti-wrinkle stuff.

I spent the night, but before going to bed I used Jen’s notebook to log into work and finish up the build and deploy stuff.

Mar 11th 2004

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta

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On my drive into work I was listening to the ‘Six Feet Under‘ soundtrack that Jen burned for me. The sound of the intro songs remind me a lot of the music in Simcity 4 - it’s pretty catchy. On one of the songs, they have sound bites from the show. From that I heard a pretty cool quote:

Why do people have to die?

To make life important.

At work I had my headphones on and jammed to two fun songs: “Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta” by Geto Boys and “Tipsy” by J-Kwon. I seem to always work better when I’m listening to good music.

I finally used the $50 gift card for Barnes & Noble that Larry & Amy gave me for Christmas. I purchased two books that I’ve had my eye on for some time now: The Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers and Emily Post’s Etiquette.

For lunch today we went way over to Chrsire Bridge road to a place called ‘The Colonnade‘. When got entered the old-looking place it reeked of smoke. It was also packed with other patrons but they were all senior citizens. I didn’t have a good feeling about this place. The food wasn’t that bad and the bread was excellent. My meatloaf came with gravy instead of a tomato-based sauce. I never knew meatloaf came any other way!

James and I made tentative plans for a St. Maarten trip the weekend of March 27th.

I spent pretty much all day working on the build avoidance project. I also upgraded us to the newest middleware reference model release as well as the latest patched aCC C++ compiler.

The newer compiler caused some problems and I had to investigate. It looks like the new compiler doesn’t like static pointer container definitions in the cpp file once they have already been defined in the header file. Simple removing them solved the problem.

I had another First and Final requirements meeting across the street this afternoon. I didn’t mind because it was a beautiful sunny spring-like day so the walk was quite enjoyable.

As I was walking to the admin building I passed by Brent. He stopped and asked why none of my pictures were up in the ‘art gallery’. Every month they have a different theme and March’s theme is for employees to bring in their photos and stick them up all over the walls. A few other people have also asked why none of mine are up.

Despite having shot about 6,000 photos over the past two years I have never printed any. I decided to look into it this evening.

I left work around 5pm and stopped by the leasing office on my way home to drop of a letter declaring my intent not to renew my lease.

I cleaned up my apartment and filed away month’s worth of financial papers that have been building up. I also did some laundry.

The bulk of my evening was spent with my photo printing project. I went through about two years worth of pictures and picked out the ones that I like the best. I ended up with about 40 shots. I then re-post-processed all of those pictures since my technique & tools have improved over time (although I recognize that I still have a very long way to go). Out of those I found about twenty that I decided to print.

I went over to mpix.com and ordered 8×10 prints on the special metallic archival paper of all twenty photos I selected. It wasn’t that expensive. They should arrive early next week. Of those I’ll find some to post in the DT gallery for the remaining two weeks that the exhibit will be open. I will also have an inexpensive way to put stuff on the walls in my new home.

While I did all of that I had some recorded shows from TiVo playing in the background. One episode of TechTV’s ‘The Screen Savers‘ featured a tip to buy the $200 Creative Labs Muvo 4GB MP3 player. The reason to do this is that inside the player is a fully-functional 4GB Hitachi microdrive. These drives alone cost over $500 normally, so it’s an awesome deal. I placed an order for a Muvo on Amazon, but they are out of stock and don’t expect to get any more for about a month.

Mar 12th 2004

improv

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

Carole was out of the office today and will also be out on Monday. Because of this, it was pretty quiet in the office today. I was actually pretty busy today though. I made a lot more progress on my build avoidance project.

Craig called a few times and I coordinated with him for his road trip. He left San Antonio around 6am EST this morning and is slated to arrive in Atlanta around 9pm.

For lunch today we went to Matilda Bean again. Brian, Kindle, Susan, Bob, James, Casey, and I went - it was a big crowd.

I worked ‘late’, not leaving until around 5:45pm. I didn’t want to leave until I got a few things done with my build stuff. When I left there weren’t many people left on my floor and the parking lot was fairly empty.

My paystub came in the mail today and I was curious to see how much different my take-home pay became. I lowered my 401(k) pre-tax deductions by $250 per pay period. Unfortunately my take-home pay only increased by $175 due to all of the additional tax I have to pay. That really sucks.

Around 8:15pm I went to Umo Zumo’s to meet Jen and her sister for dinner. Lisa also showed up too. We ordered a couple of chef’s sushi platters. I thoroughly enjoy the eel the best. I think I could easily eat a few dozen eel sushi.

Craig showed up around 9pm. I had given him directions to the restaurant earlier. He seemed a buy spacey but that’s probably because he was on the road for the past sixteen hours. We all ate and chatted for a while.

After dinner Jen and Katie left to head over to Dad’s Garage. Lisa went home and Craig and I went back to my place. Craig got a quick shower and changed. Shortly after that we left for little five points.

The show was scheduled to start at 10:30 and we barely made it on time. Jen and Katie saved seats for us in the small & crowded theatre. Lynne also showed up but couldn’t sit with us until after the first act.

We watched an improve comedy play called ‘Scandal’. Apparently it’s a series that runs every Friday night. At first I didn’t realize it was improve and wasn’t too impressed with the acting. Only later did I realize that it wasn’t scripted. Armed with this newfound knowledge I found the play to be much more enjoyable.

During the time between acts, Craig and Katie were engaged in conversation. I had a great time with Jen and it was nice to go ‘out’ with her. I’m certainly looking forward to going out with her again.

The play was over around midnight and we all went our separate ways. Jen has class in the morning tomorrow and Craig was pretty tired. Craig and I went back to my part of town and stopped at Steak & Shake for a late-night bite to eat. Actually Craig wasn’t hungry so he watched me eat a patty melt and have a shake. We caught up and talked about lots of stuff.

Craig gave me a letter that he wrote to me back in 1998 but forgot to mail. It was from when he was at UT and I had recently moved to Atlanta. It was pretty fun reading the old letter. He mentioned a few things about Tara which I thought was amusing. Apparently she just met a frat guy and Craig was upset about it.

Mar 13th 2004

scotch

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We didn’t get to bed until around 2am last night so I slept late. I woke up around 10:30am. It was beautiful and sunny and cool outside - a nice spring day!

I didn’t want to wake Craig since he was probably catching up on a lot of sleep. I grabbed my book and read the glossary to get familiar with all of the terms. It’s amazing how many unresolved threads there are in the wheel of time series. I think there are even some obscure dangling plot threads from as way back as book #3, and I’m now on book #10.

Craig woke up around 11:30am. Previously we talked about playing tennis this morning, but it didn’t pan out today. I showed Craig some things on my computer and he agrees that the monitor looks extremely blurry and I should replace it as soon as possible.

I decided yesterday that we should have a special BBQ lunch today. Craig was ok with the idea, so we headed out to Roswell to have lunch at Swallow at the Hollow. It’s a great BBQ place inside an old barn. I got a bit lost driving over there as I’ve only been to the restaurant two times previously and I wasn’t driving. I called up Brian to get directions but he wasn’t home, so I called 411 to get the number for the restaurant and they were able to guide me. Despite getting there around 1:30pm, it was pretty crowded. Craig and I both ordered the chopped beef platter. I had sweet tea along with coleslaw and baked beans. The sweet BBQ sauce today wasn’t as good as I remember it being from before. The atmosphere was nice and we had a good lunch.

Because we were already in Roswell I called up Jen since she was home from school by now. She invited us over so we drove from the restaurant to her place.

She was burning some music in preparation for Lisa’s party tonight. We listened to music and talked for a while. Craig suggested that we go shopping. Jen and I agreed and we decided to go to the Avenue on Roswell road.

It was a great day to be outside and fortunately the Avenue is an outdoor mall so it was perfect. We went into a few furniture stores long enough for me to get depressed by how expensive furniture is.

We stopped by Victoria’s Secret so I could pick up a special gift for Lisa. We also went into American Eagle Outfitters and Banana Republic.

A lot of time was spent in Borders as we browsed books. Craig bought a few books and Jen had a coffee in the coffee shop. I looked through some ‘portrait photography’ books but wasn’t too impressed.

Before we left, we stopped by Wolf Camera where I purchased a neoprene camera strap that I’ve had my eye on for a while. It was actually recommended by Jace Mouse. I was getting annoyed with the painful rubbing from the stock strap that comes with the camera, so this should be a nice change.

On the way back to Jen’s house we stopped at a liquor store to pick up some fun stuff for Lisa’s party tonight. Craig wanted a bottle of scotch as well as some chocolate liquor and some sort of weird concoction with a large lemon in the bottom of the bottle.

We didn’t stay long at Jen’s because we needed to get back to my place to change and get ready for the party tonight, so we headed out a short while later.

Back at my apartment I got my shower on and changed into some slacks and a short-sleeved button-up blue shirt. While Craig was getting ready, I played with the new camera strap and got it installed on my camera.

On the way to Lisa’s party I called Dad to wish him a happy birthday. We chatted for a short while and caught up on things.

Once we arrived at Lisa’s house (she only lives about twelve houses down from Jen), Jen gave us a tour. The floor plan is pretty different from Jen’s house. I thought she has a cool computer desk in the study.

Lisa’s parents were also at the party for a short while. Craig, Jen, and I chatted with Lisa’s dad for a while. He’s pretty much into all the financial stuff so we talked about the recent market activity as well as politics. That was a fun discussion.

Lisa’s boyfriend, Allen, cooked up hotdog and hamburgers for us. Jen and I had a few drinks and Craig was drinking scotch on the rocks. As the party wore on, Craig was spending a great deal of time talking with Jen’s roommate, Lynne.

I had a great time - especially with Jen because she is so easy going and fun to be around. The party ended pretty early, around midnight. Jen, Craig, Lynne, and I went back to Jen’s house. We hung out in the living room listening to music and talking.

(Craig took this photo with my cell phone of Jen and I)

Craig and Lynne played a long game of chess. During this time, Craig finished the rest of the 750ml bottle of scotch. I think he was the only one drinking it too. He was a bit toasted by this time.

I read out ‘teen trivial pursuit’ questions to the group to see how much everyone knew. Some of the questions are unbelievably easy. Around 3:30am we were all pretty much tired and went to bed.

Craig slept on the futon upstairs in the study. When I went to bed, he and Lynne were still up talking.

Mar 14th 2004

hangover

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This morning Jen confided to me that she didn’t feel too good and suggested that we lay off the alcohol for a while. I agreed.

We woke up late around 11am and went down to the grocery store to buy some coffee and a newspaper. We were the first ones up and had to be quiet.

Back at Jen’s house I baked some cinnamon rolls for everyone. They were pretty good despite being the low fat version. Jen and I read the newspaper which is a very therapeutic activity to do together. I checked out the sales to see how much monitors cost. If I go with LCD (which I want to do), then I’ll need to get at least 17″, but they are pretty expensive.

I woke Craig up and he eventually came downstairs to share some rolls with us. A short while later (around noon) we left. Jen had a lot of school work to do today and needs time to study.

We went back to my place and changed out of our party clothes. Because it was sunny and warm out, I put on a t-shirt, shorts, and sandals. My shorts still had sand in the pockets from when I wore them last at the beach.

We agreed to have BBQ again today for lunch. I was interested in Smokey Bones, but there wasn’t a location nearby so we went to Famous Dave’s instead. We both had the baby back ribs which were pretty good.

After lunch we went down to South Cobb drive so I could show Craig my potential new home. We had to wait a while to get help from Bernie to get a key. I took my camera (with the Sigma 15mm fisheye lens attached) with me as we walked from the sales office to the townhome.

I took photos all around the inside of the place. I was a bit concerned when I saw that the washer and dryer were missing. When I looked at it last time two weeks ago there was a washer and dyer. Bernie told me that it will definitely be coming with those appliances. Craig pointed out several defects which will need to be fixed prior to move-in.

(’Flex Room’ in basement which will be the study/server room)

(entryway and dining-area with bay window)

(kitchen)

(livigin room)

(master bath)

(master bedroom - this will be my room)

(guest bedroom)

When we left and went back to the office to drop off the key, I asked Bernie about the washer and dryer. He assured me that they will be there and not to worry about it. I also asked him about the contract since it’s been almost two weeks and I haven’t received a copy in the mail yet. He told me that he would look into it.

We went back to my place and Craig wanted to take a nap because he was still tired from last night. While he was sleeping, I made some adjustments to my new neck strap and got it set to just the right length. I also took a short nap.

Around 6pm I woke up, took a shower, and changed (it got colder out). I woke Craig up too. We discussed going to see a movie this evening. We checked the listings and agreed to see Starsky & Hutch. There was a 7:50pm showing that we wanted to go to but we were also hungry, so we rushed over to T.G.I. Friday’s and had dinner.

After dinner we went to the movie theatre on Cobb Parkway and got our seats as the previews were rolling. The movie was pretty good.

When we left the theater, we drove up on 285 to Roswell road to a place called NC-17. Craig wanted to look around and buy some stuff from where which he did.

After that we went over to the same Steak n Shake for a late night snack. We both had patty melts as well as shakes. It was pretty good. After that we went back to my place and turned in for the night.

Mar 15th 2004

busy monday

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I woke up around 7am this morning and got ready for work. I also woke Craig up who packed up all of his stuff. Around 7:45am we were both off and Craig began his long journey back home.

I got into work around 8:15am. I already knew from last Friday that today was going to be a hectic and stressful day. My expectations were correct. Right from the start I was pretty busy.

Today begins the first day for release 1.3 integration test. We had a lot of work in front of us to execute the implementation plans to build up the servers.

Jegan was pretty much incapacitated all day today due to the work he’s doing with Bob on the FPS vendor project. It was up to me alone to be tuxedo administrator today and I was certainly busy all day long. I had to do installs in our domain for apps owned by a different group. This was the first time I’ve done this as I usually only deal with our components. It was a bit frustrating as I was not able to easily diagnose the problems like I would normally do with components that we own. I had to engage members from the other team but they were helpful.

To add to the stress, we were all having problems on our unix development server. Whenever we would try to run a command, we would get an error from the OS about not being able to fork a new process. I called up Chris from mid-tier and he requested that I engage the sustaining engineering group first. I called up the sustaining group and got a bit frustrated when I tried to work with the lady on the other end of the phone.

She told me that the forking problem is caused because I’m running 30 processes. I actively use all of these processes and have never had a problem before. I tried to explain this to her and she kept interrupting me telling me that I needed to kill my processes and the problem would go away.

I managed to get a ‘ps -ef’ up and saw that Casey (who left for Vacation this weekend) had over 1,300 clearmake processes running. Typically a user will only have up to a few at one time. Something was obviously wrong. I tried to explain this to the lady I was working with but she simply ignored me. I thanked her for the help (or lack thereof) and got off the phone.

I walked down the hall and heard Anil and Alex complaining about the same forking problem. I explained to them about Casey’s runaway clearmake processes and suggested that they call sustaining and maybe they will make an impression on them where I failed.

Anil came by my desk a few minutes later and started complaining to me about the lady he spoke with (the same one I worked with). He said that as soon as he told her the problem, she told him that it was my problem and that only I can fix it. He tried to reason with her but like with me, she wouldn’t listen. It was very frustrating. I called up Chris to see if he could intervene. When I spoke with him, he said that he already talked with her and set her straight and that Casey’s processes would be killed in short order. This fixed the forking problem.

I got a few emails from my linux server at home alerting me about my daily backup and sync cron jobs failing with some highly unusual errors about bad permissions. I checked it out as root and saw that I was getting some ‘permission denied’ messages to root’s home directory. That doesn’t make sense and for a brief instance I thought my machine may be hacked. A few moments later I realized that the problem is isolated to just a few files and the ‘feeling’ of the behavior is that there must be some kind of HD seek error.

I tried to fsck the drive but since it’s already mounted writable, I couldn’t easily (comfortable) check it remotely. I’d like to get to the console and switch to single-user mode, remount / as read-only and check it then. In the meantime, I moved /root to /root.old and restored the entire /root dir from my last full backup. It’s a good thing I do backups every day.

I left work and went to the leasing office on my way home. The 20 or so 8×10″ prints I ordered from mpix.com arrived today. I was pretty excited to get these. I opened up the package and took a look. They looked great. Some of the prints from my old Dimage 7i didn’t look as great as the ones from the 10D. In fact on one of the Dimage 7i prints of a plane, I could see jaggies on the wings.

Jen and I made plans to spend the evening together so I quickly gathered all of my dirty clothes and put them in the laundry basket to load in my car. A few minutes later I headed out to Jen’s house.

Traffic was very thick on I-75 as it was around 5pm. I crawled up a few miles when I got a call from Mom. She informed me that she was in an accident and her car won’t start. The tow truck is taking her and the car to the dealership and she needs a lift to the car rental place. I took the next exit and headed back south on the highway. I called Jen to let her know that I’ll be late.

I got to the dealership before she arrived so I sat in my car and read in my book. Mom arrived a little while later and I met her in the office. She complained about a sore shoulder and wanted to go to Kennestone hospital to have it checked out. It turned out that she didn’t need my help after all because arrangements were already made to have her picked up from the dealership.

I made sure Mom didn’t need any help and then resumed my journey to Jen’s house. I arrived around 6:30pm. Jen had stuff out to cook dinner. Because I was so excited about the prints I showed them to Jen. She pointed out the ones she liked best.

For dinner we made from scratch burritos with rice, beans, cheese, and chicken. Jen didn’t have any chicken on hers. We also had chips with salsa and bean & cheese dip. It was a very good dinner and I thoroughly enjoyed making it together with Jen.

After dinner Lisa came over to have some leftovers and shortly after that Lynne came home. Lisa brought her cat over which was a lot of fun. The cat seemed happy to sniff around and explore around Jen’s house. We all chatted for a little while and then Lisa left.

I was gracious to use Jen’s washing machine & dryer to do my laundry. We had a great evening together.

Mar 16th 2004

tech support

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I was checking FedEx periodically for my notebook shipment because nothing was showing up in the tracking system. Finally this morning around 10am I saw an entry that it left from Shanghais, China around 9:45pm March 16th. The odd thing was that the scheduled arrival date was before 10:30am on March 18th which seems much too early. I read a lot on the forums about people complaining that their shipments got stuck in customs for quite some time.

Zeh (the sweet girl on the testing team) brought over chocolate for me and James this morning. It was good German chocolate too.

I spent some time this morning working as a Tuxedo administrator again for integration test. Jegan is pretty much swamped the entire week as he’s working with Bob to get a prototype done for a vendor product. They have an extremely tight schedule and a lot to get done, so he’s pretty busy.

We had an error situation in integration which occupied a lot of my time because I had to contain it and get the error files over to development and coordinate with the owners of the affected code so they can help analyze the problem. Fortunately I work with such a great team that we were able to get things done quickly. It’s really quite nice that after all this time we are so comfortable around each other and have trust & respect for each other that things get done the right way and on time.

I also brought my photos into work today and went down to the lobby to hang some up. I selected four photos to hang up:

1) The one of Buster and Coco running through the snow when I was at Mammoth last fall with Larry.
2) The colorful boathouse & canoes taken from the Key Bridge in D.C.
3) A shot of a Corsair 747 landing in St. Maarten.
4) A very colorful shot a fall forest from New Hampshire last fall.

For lunch today we went to the ‘Chinese in a Box’ place as I like to call it. It is basically a mall food-court Chinese place but in a standalone building. It wasn’t that good today and I think it’s blacklisted for a while now.

Pretty much all day I was busy with supporting Integration test. I’m worried that this is taking up too much time and I’ve been neglecting my other duties. Specifically I’m supposed to be training Curtis and Veena to do RET builds and I’m supposed to be leading the First and Final project which I haven’t done anything with yet. It sort of sucks too because we have a lot of people who are idle right now and looking for something to do. I, on the other hand, have been so busy that I can’t even take the time to delegate some of the work since I need to train.

Before I left today around 5:30pm I had some difficulties deploying binaries to the development box so that was frustrating. I sent out an email and will deal with it tomorrow.

I was going to get a haircut and do grocery shopping before going home but traffic from 285 to 75 was so horrible I decided to wait until tomorrow.

This afternoon I researched getting a 20-30″ print from Mpix. I also looked into frames and finishing services. I emailed them to inquire about the difference in some of the things and got a response back in less than 5 minutes. I’ve been pretty impressed with Mpix!

The UPS guy came today and delivered my books. I can’t wait to read through them. I did spend some time looking through the Emily Post Etiquette book though. I specifically read up on how you’re supposed to conduct yourself when traveling by plane as well as tipping rules.

Because I skipped out on the grocery store I had a frozen pizza for dinner. I also played the role of tech support for Larry. He got his phat new Voodoo PC laptop with the red paint finish (I think it even comes with wax so you can keep the shine). He was having trouble connecting it to his Apple ‘Airport’ wifi base station. I tried to help him and only got so far. Fortunately it was enough to get him along his way and he got it working eventually.

I got a bounce back email from Road Runner when I tried to send Larry an email. I run my own SMTP server on my linux box and apparently Roadrunner doesn’t like that so I had to switch my outgoing email server to the one that 1&1 has set up.

I noticed some more problems from my Linux box with the failing HD. This evening is spontaneously rebooted itself. I really need to address that problem soon but I’ve been so busy. Maybe I will get around to it another night this week.

Mar 17th 2004

new toy

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I skipped the 9am staff meeting to participate on the integration-test conference call. I was supporting integration-testing pretty much all morning long.

We had a problem in integration but Sameer has been working on it all morning. A fix is pending. I’m thankful that Sameer is so quick to identify and correct bugs.

Carole came by my desk and called me into her office. She had a letter for me.

Chris A. from Mid-tier got all of the disk-space issues with the /ESD filesystem cleaned up. It certainly is a joy to work with Chris. He’s always bending over backwards for us and is constantly professional. I can hardly believe that my first impression of him a couple of years ago was that of an over-controlling system administrator. It goes to show that you shouldn’t pass judgment on people so quickly. Chris gets things done quickly and is always willing to help.

Shortly before lunch I attended a meeting with middleware about the upcoming IR7 patch release of the reference model. We discussed potential dates to patch the remaining three severs in production.

For lunch today we went to ‘Slice’. It’s a nice pizza place but I can’t stand it when they have Jerry Springer on the television.

I had fun tracking my notebook today. It moved quick and tracking showed it as already at the local FedEx office waiting to go out on a delivery truck, but still showed a scheduled delivery for tomorrow morning. I called up FedEx to see if I can pick it up at the local office. They told me that it’s already out for delivery and I should get it tonight before 5pm.

Around 4:30pm I left work. I stopped by the leasing office right away but they didn’t have any packages for me. I waited around and prepared for the new arrival by archiving some stuff to my external HD to use as a ferry for large data.

The FedEx guy finally showed up around 5:45pm with my new notebook! It was like Christmas. I unpacked the box and got everything ready:

It came with XP Home and one of my first tasks is to reload the OS with XP Pro. First I made sure everything worked correctly by getting WiFi working as well as Bluetooth. I was pleasantly surprised at how seamless my Microsoft Bluetooth optical mouse paired with the notebook’s proprietary internal Bluetooth device. Unfortunately the mouse can only be paired with one computer at a time, so if I want to start using it on the desktop again, I have to re-pair it there.

I had a problem with the super strong WPA AES security. My router supports it, but the Intel PROSet 2200 802.11b/g wifi card doesn’t seem to want to do that. I can only do WPA TKIP encryption.

The rest of the evening I was up very late reinstalling XP Pro and loading on all of my software and configuring things.

Mar 18th 2004

offline folders sucks

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Because I was up so late last night I had a very difficult time waking up this morning.

From home, I deployed and activated the code that I built last night. This time I did it all from my new notebook as I sat in bed. It was pretty cool to be wireless for the first time.

As a result of taking care of this from home, I got into work late.

I planned on going to the first & final review meeting directly this morning, but as I was driving in, Carole paged me and told me that I didn’t have to go.

As soon as I sat down at my desk, I dove into the integration test support role again.

Melissa had previously scheduled a lunch outing to Virginia Highlands at a great Thai place called Surin. I was really looking forward to this, but I had to cancel because Carole scheduled a lunch meting to go over revrec stuff.

The meeting was very informative and quite overwhelming. The scope of what we need to do is so wide that it’s hard to get a handle on it all. Fortunately we made a lot of progress in the meeting and I’m pretty excited about the whole project. There should be some interesting times ahead.

Immediately following that meeting I left to go across the street for my bi-weekly afternoon first & final requirements review meeting. As I was walking over, I saw Casey at the drive-through for the credit union. He was going to the same meeting and gave me a lift.

Fortunately the meeting was nice and short, so I went back to the office and got some work done before going home.

I stopped by the leasing office on my way home from work. I picked up a box from UPS that Larry sent. He shipped out a lot of clothes for me to pick through to see if there is anything I want. I didn’t get a chance to go through them this evening.

This evening I spent a lot of time cleaning up my apartment because Jen is coming over tonight.

I’ve been thinking about a good way to handle backup and synchronization of my important data in ‘My Documents’. Microsoft recommends using ‘offline folders’ in which you map a network drive from the desktop over to the notebook. In my case I mapped freeside’s documents folder (freeside is my desktop) over to the notebook and set that as my notebook’s ‘my documents’ folder.

Once you have a folder mapped, you can tag it as being ‘offline’ What that means is that XP will keep a local ached copy of every file in that folder, so when you go ‘offline’ you can continue working with that file as if it was local. When you reconnect to the remote machine/network, XP will automatically synchronize the changes for you.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way in practice. Instead, the synchronization never happened and I had to continually baby-sit it to make it sync. It also refused to deal with .pst files (from Outlook). I’m not sure what I’m going to do about this.

Jen came over a little late this evening because she was studying with a classmate. We went out for dinner. We drove over to Vinings and had dinner at a place called Orient Express. We both had the ‘General Tofu’ which was quite good.

After dinner we went back to my place. We didn’t do anything specific, but just hung out together and ended up having a nice evening. I’m really glad that Jen came over tonight.

Mar 19th 2004

closing confusion

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I woke up around 7am this morning, got a shower, and went into work. It was a very relaxing and calming morning and set the pace for the rest of the day. I arrived around 8:15am.

As I was driving into work, John paged me about the deployment to integration. I checked into it but didn’t see the code ready yet. John made some calls and got the code deployed. I activated the code in integration at 9am. There were some snags with the activation (there always are it seems) but finished by 10am.

While I was dealing with the activation, I got a call from my lender, Kevin. He said there was a problem with the closing! According to him, the closing attorney’s office called him and said that closing will take place at the 26th of _this_ month and not April! I assured Kevin that there must be some sort of mistake and that I would look into it.

I tried to get in touch with the closing coordinator at Beezer but she was in a meeting all day long.

The rest of the morning I supported the integration test. Fortunately the new code fixed the problems and we didn’t have any more errors. The rest of testing today was smooth and we finished early. That was a nice change.

Today was BBQ day for lunch. We had a vote between Smokey Bones near southlake or Pig & Chick up in buckhead. We ended up going to Pig & Chick. I drove - it as a long drive. I had the windows down part of the way because it was another beautiful sunny spring day in Atlanta. The ribs today weren’t as good as before. I really wish we went to Smokey Bones instead.

This afternoon was pleasantly slow in the office. I went through a lot of email and got things cleaned and organized.

I also called Bernie from the Highlands View townhome property. He assured me that closing was going to be at the end of April and not this month. There was a mix-up with the closing coordinator and now everything is taken care of.

I also called USAA to check on homeowners insurance. They were quite helpful and quoted me a premium lower than I thought it would be. They asked me a lot of questions including how many feet the nearest fire hydrant is and how many minutes it takes for the fire department to get there.

Before leaving for the day I spoke with Carole for a little while about what needs to happen next week. It was a good discussion. I left work around 5:30pm.

On the drive home traffic got really heavy so I took the vinings exit and went over to the car wash place on Cobb parkway. I got the $16 car wash and went inside the waiting area.

While I waited, I busted out the notebook and worked on my journal. I saw an open wifi network but it was the t-mobile pay service and the signal strength was weak.

I went home, got cleaned up and then Jen came over around 6:50pm. We left for Mom’s house for dinner shortly afterwards because we were originally supposed to be there at 7pm.

Dinner was pretty good. We had beans & rice along with a chili cheese dish, and corn bread. Mom also baked a ’sock it to me’ cake for desert. She always cooks great dinners.

We spent about an hour visiting with Mom and Jim after dinner. We had a nice time talking and I think Jen wasn’t too uncomfortable.

Around 10pm we left and went back to my place. We took a short nap but ended up falling asleep for about two hours. Jen woke up and went home since she has class early the next morning.

When I got up with her, I had a second wind and ended up staying awake for a long time into the night working on my notebook. I installed & configured some games.

Mar 20th 2004

hardware woes

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I woke up very late today due to the fact that I was up so late last night. I did some more work on my notebook. I like to send a lot of time learning all about it and feeling out what it can and can’t do, so that’s why I’m spending so much time tweaking it instead of just using it.

For whatever reason, I couldn’t access my router website from the notebook. I tried a hard-reset of the router which fixed the problem. I also shifted the port-forwarding of the emule ports from freeside to wintermute (wintermute is the name of my notebook).

However when I started using emule I noticed some problems. I had persistent BSOD’s in my wireless network driver (Intel’s w22n51.sys). This is quite disappointing. Google didn’t yield any info. Reverting to an earlier version of emule appeared to correct the problem.

I finally dumped the WinXP ‘offline folders’ crap and decided to look for another backup strategy for my notebook. I think I’ll keep all of the ‘My Documents’ files local and then install some sort of intelligent sync software that runs in the background and constantly syncs the files with freeside.

I’m also pretty sure that the notebook will play a primary computing role and that my existing desktop will remain for server purposes (remote desktop rocks in this regard) or maybe I’ll dual-boot into linux instead of the old P3-800 I currently use.

It appears that I should not have put off the HD problems in turing (my linux box) for so long. It rebooted itself and now won’t boot at all. The critical boot areas of the disk are so far gone that I can’t even get booted. I’m going to have to put in my spare 60GB HD and migrate what files I can over to that. I sure am glad that I moved my website over to 1&1 because I would be down right now until I get my linux box fixed.

TiVo crashed while I was getting ready to leave. Today just hasn’t been a good hardware day for me.

I took a shower and left for Jen’s place around 4:30pm. I took along my notebook, camera, change of clothes, tennis racquet, tennis shoes, and my photoshop book. It was a lot of stuff.

When I arrived, we shared some rose flavored pumpkin seeds that she got from the Korean area off Buford highway. They were pretty good.

We didn’t wait too long before heading out to Dawsonville. It was a longer drive than I expected and took about an hour to get to the outlet mall. We were both hungry so we stopped for some food at Chick Fil ‘A.

At the large outlet mall complex we went into several stores: Pottery Barn, Crate & Barrel, Eddie Bauer, Banana Republic, and Gap. Jen is in the market for a sofa and looked around for some good deals. She didn’t find anything that she wanted though.

I bought two short-sleeve shirts and two pairs of slacks from Banana Republic. Jen helped me out by not letting me get stuff that doesn’t look good. Jen got some stuff from there as well as something from Gap. We had a good time shopping together.

A while later we drove back to her place. It was dark by the time we started driving back.

We went upstairs into her study and had some wine while she studied and I wrote in m journal. It was a nice time.

Jen registered my MAC address with her router which is really great because that must mean she really likes me. Registering one’s MAC address to your router is like giving them the garage remote. I felt really special.

We went to bed around midnight.

Mar 21st 2004

five pounds of cookies

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We woke up around 8am and went over to the grocery store to buy some supplies for breakfast as well as a newspaper to read.

For breakfast we made french toast. Actually Jen made the french toast and I sliced strawberries. It was a great breakfast and the company was even better.

I took a shower and then we went upstairs so Jen could work on a paper for school. I worked on my journal. I’m getting to behind in my journal. It’s Sunday and I still don’t have anything for the previous week. All I’m doing now is keeping notes from each day so I can come back and flesh it out.

At noon we stopped working and went out to Barret Parkway. We went to Galyan’s and saw Lynne. They are having a special promotional outdoor thing today. Unlike yesterday which was hot and 80 degrees, today is cold and windy. At least the sun is shining still.

We went inside Galyan’s and looked around. The rock-climbing wall looked pretty intimidating despite some children using it.

After Galyan’s we went over to Costco. The only other time I’ve been to Costco was with Larry and Amy a few years ago in San Diego. We had fun going through the store and looking at the gigantic-sized items they had. Jen