Monthly Archive for March, 2004

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 bought a bunch of stuff and I ended up getting a huge 5-pound container of animal crackers. I also got a large container of honey roasted peanuts.

After shopping, we went back to Jen’s house. We were pretty hungry so we decided to make something to eat. I suggested the fun butternut squash soup and Jen was happy wit that idea.

Like before, we had a great time cooking together. The soup was delicious! I really enjoy that soup and look forward to trying other cool things with Jen.

While we ate the soup we read the newspaper. The travel section was pretty interesting. I’m itching to go to St. Maarten next weekend.

Jen wanted to see my new place so we drove down to South Cobb drive (we went in separate cars) to Highlands View. Bernie was in the office and appeared as energetic as usual. He gave me the key and I took Jen to see the house.

As I showed her around the place, I looked for evidence of Ethernet wiring. I couldn’t find any but there is a junction box specifically for cat5 in the garage so I need to look into that.

Jen loved the place and is really excited about me moving in. I’m glad she likes it.

We parted ways and she went to her home and I went back to mine. I spent the rest of the night working on my linux problems while catching up on my TiVo watching in the background. I got all caught up on my normal stuff which was good.

The old HD was so far gone that I couldn’t even copy off everything and fill in the blanks. /usr/bin and /usr/lib were trashed, so there was no point going forward with that plan. I’m going to have to rebuild the base system. I downloaded the latest gentoo LiveCD (gentoo 2004.0) and started a stage2 install before going to bed.

I woke up around 6:30am and got a shower.

This morning I made a big decision and decided to give Jen the spare key to my apartment as well as the remote for the gate. I was worried that this gesture would make her uncomfortable but it turns out that she liked it very much. In fact, she gave me the remote to her garage-door opener. She told me that she was unsure how to give it to me so I made it easy for her. I’m glad this all worked out so well.

The drive to work from Woodstock took a very long time – about 80 minutes. It was pretty rough.

During my drive into work I got a page from Mallick asking about the status of the build. As soon as I got in, I deployed and activated the build.

I went to our 9am staff meting this morning. It was a little different today because we had Mark from data services come explain the DB2 and MVS mainframe environment. It’s a pretty nebulous concept to me so it was nice to have a decent explanation.

As like every other day this week I spent most of my time supporting integration test. I looked over the mem leak analysis from last night. The results were pretty staggering. The pool of processes representing the engines in question was growing at a crazy fast rate.

With this, combined with the full-time tuxedo support, 1.4 duties, first and final duties, RET builds, and everything else, I’m starting to feel pretty overwhelmed by all the stuff I need to do. Jegan is incapacitated with the vendor prototype project so I’m flying solo for tuxedo support of our nine-node production domain, three-node integration domain, system test domain, and development domain. Too many things are happening at once. I need to get it under control.

It was a good thing I took a break for lunch. We went to BBQ kitchen but I was severely disappointed to find that they did not have the usual cucumbers and onions like they usually do.

After lunch I relaxed myself by listening to music. As I was jamming to good music, I engaged in a flurry of activity in Outlook. I started creating many tasks for myself. By breaking up everything into smaller tasks I feel a lot better about getting the work done.

Indeed this seemed to help as I started getting things done. I worked on getting a generic production login for Alex and the rest of the developers to search for and extract tickets without having to wait for me to do it.

I went home and spent a lot of time doing more stuff with my notebook. I cleaned up some of stuff in my music library from Media Player and moved it all over to freeside in an archive.

Around 7:30pm I left my place and went over to Jen’s house. I arrived there a little after 8pm. She arrived from school at the same time, so it worked out quite well.

We had a quick dinner consisting of a salad with tomatoes and fresh mozzarella cheese. We also had the very tasty cheese-stuffed ravioli.

A little before 9pm we left and drove out to Alpharetta to a bar called ‘Cheers’. Jen’s friend Damon is a musician and is playing tonight in an open-mic night.

He greeted us when we arrived and we sat with him at a table. He was dressed like a 70’s rock star, complete with the corduroy coat and sunglasses. Jen and I both had a drink as we listening to the other musicians play. Eventually it was Damon’s turn. He did a great job.

After a couple of hours Jen and I departed and went back to her place.

I missed my alarm again this morning. I finally discovered that it was set for 6pm and not 6am. I hate it when that happens!

I decided that I would try to work from home today in light of the schedule I’ve been working this past week. I called up Carole but got her voice mail, so I left a message indicating my intent and asking her to page or call if there are any issues.

The build server was finally fixed so I kicked off the top-down build again. It pains me that it will probably not be ready until late afternoon. I composed an email to all concerned and sent out an update.

Even though I wasn’t at work, it was an incredibly busy and stressful day. Like Ice Cube eloquently said in one of his songs, ‘I almost got capped cuz my beeper kept beepin’, my pager was blowing up as it was going off so often. John needed my help in integration because of the memory leak problem. The 1.4 development branch would not compile, and production was stopped.

I don’t know what happened, but at some point a decision was made to stop the production flow. As the primary, sole support person for the application, these are the kinds of things I need to know about. Instead the only pages I get are the STUPID INFORMATIONAL PAGES THAT NO ONE CARES ABOUT!! I had to get that off my chest.

One of the developers paged me and asked me to call him at his desk. I was on speaker phone with him, Jeff C., and Carole. They were having some serious problems in production with double tickets and everything was failing. We had a similar problem once before in integration and could never determine the cause. It was suggested that the server patch might have caused this and they wanted me to restart the entire domain. I contended that we didn’t have these problems the other half-dozen times we patched the servers, but they were insistent that I do it since we stopped processing anyway, we had nothing to lose.

I immediately began the task because of the critical nature of production flow being stopped. I shut down everything except for the bridge process on the master node. I didn’t know if it was bad to stop that. I called Jegan. Fortunately he was at his desk and we discussed the problem and both came to the conclusion that we should leave the bridge process running and that we would bring back up the admin processes on the other eight nodes. After all of the nodes were running with just their admin processes, we booted all nine in parallel. This saved us probably four hours and it was a good call.

Some of the developers were still deciding what we should do next. During this time, John was hounding me about the memory leak problems in integration.

Things were so busy that I had to cancel my lunch plans with Jen. We made tentative plans for me to meet her for lunch.

I was at a pretty bad point. There was just too much going on at the same time and I was extremely stressed out. I never wanted to do this, but I put something in my status report to Carole about how overwhelmed I am with all of the tasks. It wouldn’t be quite so bad if Jegan wasn’t incapacitated with the vendor prototype project. There are just too many heavy responsibilities on my shoulders at the same time and I feel like I’m being pulled in several directions at once.

If I was doing only the tuxedo stuff I could deal with it, but I’m supposed to be leading the F&F project – I haven’t been able to touch it yet, and yet there are people needing to get things from me for the project that I simply can’t devote any time to. I put all my thoughts and concerns about this in my status report to Carole and sent it off. Surprisingly she replied back almost instantly and gave me some comforting words. The F&F work can be shelved for the next couple of weeks while we try to reach our production date for the 1.3 release. I can handle that.

I reflected on the difficult previous week and saw that I was extremely agitated and snappy towards many of my peers. I took out a lot of my frustrations and stress on them as I tried to cope with the pressures. I made a mental note to apologize to some of my co-workers on Monday.

To my great surprise, when we turned the flow back on, the double-ticket problem went away. We continued to observe for n hour and then turned everything else back on. I was on several conference calls during the day as w coordinated replaying all transactions from last night at 8pm. It looks like the major problem is resolved.

The build finally completed and I deployed and activated it in system test. The testing team will have to work late but they should be able to finish today which was the goal.

On my notebook I started getting BSOD’s in my Intel 2200bg driver (w22n51.sys). I discovered that it happened whenever I tried to browse a certain email on the IMAP server on turing. If I put outlook into ‘offline mode’ I can browse the email with no problem. It is a very bizarre problem. Previously I got BSOD’s with this driver when using emule. The only thing I could find in google was an obscure reference to this driver when used in BSD. Someone discovered that it takes up too much memory in kernel space. There may be a relationship. Finally I rolled back to an earlier version of the driver. I’m currently running the latest one – 8.0.12.9000 (1/2/2004). I rolled back to 8.0.11.0 (11/26/2003). Once I did that, the problem went away. I was elated to discover this as it was a throne in my side.

Late this afternoon I got an email from Anil. He found the huge memory leak that we’ve been searching for. I immediately kicked off a build and will try to get it built and deployed before Monday morning. It will be tough since I’ll be out of town this weekend.

I spent the next four hours writing journal entries. It as crazy how far behind I was. I wrote a total of ten entries tonight.

After I did this, I cleaned my apartment and Jen came over around 9:30pm. Shortly after she came over we went out for a later dinner. Because it was so nice outside and also because I was coped up inside all day long, we went to a Mexican-food place called Don Pablo’s near the movie theatre.

After dinner we went back to my place and I showed Jen some of my silly movie clips, and then we watched ‘Catch me if you Can‘.

We never set an alarm and I woke up at 7:30am which was pretty amazing since St. Maarten is an hour ahead of Eastern Time, so it was only 6:30am to my body.

We lounged around for a while and eventually got up around 8:30am. We dressed and went down to the outdoor hotel restaurant place for breakfast. Jen had a bagel with cream cheese and coffee. I had two eggs, bacon, hash browns, toast, and orange juice.

Over breakfast we talked about the things we want to do today. We decided to get some towels and go down by the beach.

After breakfast we headed back up to the hotel room and changed into our (still slightly damp from last night) swimsuits. We also packed our bags and checked out of the hotel. After checking out we left our backpacks with the bellhop to pick up before going to the airport this afternoon. I took along my camera and camera bag.

We got a couple of beach towels from the hotel staff and headed down to the beach.

When I checked the weather forecast on Friday it said that today (Sunday) would be cloudy with thunderstorms. Fortunately that wasn’t true. Instead it was very sunny with just a few clouds. It was actually a nice sunny & hot day today.

We staked out a spot on the beach and sat on our towels for the next few hours. During that time I went over to the bad and got some drinks for us. We each had more Pina Coladas.

(The ocean is such a cool color)

As planes would land I snapped photos with the 15mm wide-angle lens from the beach underneath then. I got a cool shot of a little prop plane landing with Jen standing in the foreground:

It was quite a pleasant time spending the day with Jen on the beach outside. At one point we walked around in the surf as the rough waves come crashing up on the shore.

Eventually we got hungry and migrated over to the sunset bar where we ordered two bbq chicken sandwiches with fries. The chicken was a bit dry but the marinade on the outside was good.

Jen has been really cool this trip by picking up the cost of pretty much all drinks and the (expensive) dinner last night as well as lunch today.

(Jen and I)

As we sat at the picnic table under the umbrella, I noticed some bad sunburn starting to set in on my legs, feet, and lower arms. I can tell already it’s going to be painful over the course of next week.

We each had a couple more drinks as we sat at the bar area watching the cool planes come in and land. A group of loud German girls sat behind us for a while.

I was pretty impatient for the giant 747 Corsair plane to land. I also got a bit worried because I didn’t see our Delta jet land. That’s usually a good indication to head to the hotel and get ready for the airport.

(An AirFrance AirBus plane landing)

Finally around 2:40pm we headed back to the hotel to prepare to leave. We returned the beach towels, got our bags, and a key for the ‘hospitality’ room where we could change.

Jen suggested getting a quick shower in the room to clean off – that sounded like a great idea. However, once we got there we noticed that there was no shower curtain and no towels either. We did our best and I washed my legs and feet off which still had sand from the beach. I used my t-shirt to dry off.

I still felt pretty grungy after I put on my airplane clothes. I’m sure Jen didn’t feel much better – but it’s what we have to do.

We managed to catch a shuttle bus to the airport – every other time I needed to get a taxi so that was nice.

In the St. Maarten International Airport, we checked in with no problems. As always, it’s a pain in the ass to go through customs and security because there isn’t much room, the lines are long, and it’s hot. Sometimes (we’ve seen this on multiple occasional) without fail French people (and it’s always only the French people) like to cut to the front of the line and then pretend that they don’t understand English when people yell at them.

Once we got through the customs and security lines, we found ourselves in another packed line to gate 1 (that’s our gate). It was so jam packed with people that we had no choice but to wait as the line slowly moved forward.

When we finally reached the gate, I checked in on us sitting together since we�re booked under separate itineraries. About ten minutes after they started boarding, we got our seats: 25B and 25C.

We walked outside to board the plane because St. Maarten uses the cool retro staircase boarding thing instead of a jetway.

The plane was actually pretty full, more crowded than it was coming down here. That was odd because the flight looked emptier when I checked on Friday. Unlike yesterday we didn’t have the row to ourselves and there was a guy sitting next to the window. He was pretty fascinated by the fact that there was a dead moth in between the two panes of glass in the window.

It was a long four hour flight. The movie was ‘Lost in Translation‘ but we opted not to watch it since Jen has it on DVD and we want to watch it the first time on something more high quality than the little airplane monitor and crappy headphone sound.

Instead Jen and I spent some time making a list. Jen had a little piece of paper and we both came up with fun and exciting things to do together. We ended up with about sixty-five items. I’m very much looking forward to all of the great times that Jen and I will have together going forward.

During the flight I slept a little and spent some quality time reading my book. Jen did the same.

We touched down in Atlanta around 8pm EST. We went through Immigrations together. I wasn’t sure if we should go through together or separate since we’re not family. I was also worried that they would be suspicious that we were out of the country for only one night. Fortunately we didn’t have any trouble.

We had to wait about fifteen or twenty minutes to catch the shuttle bus to my car. We drove home to my apartment.

Jen laid down for a few minutes while I unpacked and answered a page for work. Shortly after that she left.

Jen is certainly a great person to travel with. She has such a great attitude about everything and is laid back and easy going. I’m certainly looking forward to our next travel adventure.

I was up until about 12:30 doing stuff for work. The deploy I kicked off yesterday morning didn’t compete successfully, so I had to finish it up by hand. I then activated the code in system test and sent off a deployment request email to sustaining engineering as well as a status email about all of this to the testing teams.

My sunburn really hurts.

Sometime last night the power went out. I actually woke up because the APC UPS connected to turing (my linux server) was beeping. In my sleep-induced stupor, I first didn’t know what was going on. It took a minute for me to realize that the power was out (it was deathly-quiet except for the whirling from the linux box). This annoyed me but I went back to sleep not even caring that my alarm clock wouldn’t wake me up.

Even though I had my bedroom door closed, the beeping from the UPS was loud enough to bother me. I went back into the living room and fumbled around with the unit, intending to shut it (and the computer) off. I lamented about this because I couldn’t shut the computer off locally due to it being heedless (it would have been too much of a pain in the ass to connect the monitor to the UPS). I couldn’t use my notebook to shut turing off remotely due to the router needing power as well – in retrospect; I should connect the router to the UPS too. Instead of shutting the UPS off, I actually muted the warning beeps which was fine with me. I went back to sleep.

When I woke up this morning the power was back on and the linux box never lost power. I’m pretty impressed with the little UPS because I think it lasted quite a while without power.

Before I left for work, I installed Counter Strike: Condition Zero. I’m looking forward to playing the single-player mode of the game. I also answered some old emails that have been sitting in my inbox for a long time. I’m pretty bad about not answering emails, hopefully I can change this behavior.

I got a call from Kevin (my mortgage guy) this morning. He emailed me a cool 10-page PDF appraisal of my new townhome. It had cool detailed survey stuff as well a color photos and comparisons to other townhomes in the same community as well as one in a competing neighborhood.

Armed with the new info, I called up USAA to finalize the homeowner’s insurance application I started with them last week. I had the fire department info they needed as well. I was really happy with the yearly premium they quoted me.

I had to skip lunch today because I was so busy with the activation of code in integration. I spent pretty much all night last night building, deploying, and activating code to fix a memory leak (too bad I don’t get paid overtime). We were pretty rushed to get the code installed before 1pm today so I scrambled to get it done before that time. I would have had it installed much sooner, but I had a horrible time with the install script.

In fact, I was having so much trouble with the script that I had to open two defects against it in ClearQuest. John and I spoke about it and he’s going to assign it to the middleware group. I hope they get it fixed because right now it’s worthless and I have to do things by hand which takes longer and is more prone to error.

Also around this time I was pretty busy doing two performance tests in parallel. I worked with Lee to do a small performance test in the system test environment, and I also ran a performance test (against the new code) in integration.

Even after I finished the code install, I had to postpone lunch further because I had a 1pm meeting across the street to discuss our reference data strategy. That meeting lasted until 2:45pm.

After the meeting I ran to Wendy’s and got a burger meal to take back to my desk. I ate while I worked on continuing the performance test in the two environments.

At 3:30pm I had another meting which lasted an hour.

Finally when I got to my desk, I spent a great deal of time analyzing and presenting the data from the performance tests. I created an excel spreadsheet with the data as well as graphs and emailed it out to all of the necessary parties.

I didn’t leave work until 6pm. I went home, relaxed for about 45 minutes and then went over to Jen’s house.

Jen cooked dinner tonight which was one of her favorite dishes: spinach salad with fresh tomatoes, mozzarella chunks, and grilled salmon steaks. It was really good.

After dinner we had a craving for strawberries so we drove over to Publix. The strawberries they had in stock didn’t look very healthy so we got some slice-and-bake cookies instead.

We went back to her house and cooked six cookies and had them with soy milk. It was pretty good.

For the rest of the evening we watched television and I gave Jen a back massage.