Monthly Archive for June, 2004

Jen called me at 3am this morning to let me know that she made it back to Atlanta ok. When she called, she was driving my car going towards my house.

When I woke up, I spent some time getting everything packed up in my backpack and ready to go. Larry and I have been planning this camping trip for months. We even timed it such that we would be camping on a night with a full moon. Larry went to REI before the trip and bought about $700 worth of gear for the trip. This was going to be one of the highlights of our trip.

It’s because of this that I was a bit surprised when Larry came by about thirty minutes before we were going to leave and told me that Amy doesn’t feel good about us camping tonight so we’re just going to make it a day-trip instead. Hopefully we’ll be able to go camping next time.

We left around 7am and parked right next to the Kalalau trailhead. The hike started off quite nice. Unlike last time with Jen, we didn’t encounter any rain. It was sunny and clear today.

I took some photos during the hike out to Hanakapi’ai Beach. Most of them were with the Sigma 15mm fisheye lens and polarizer attached to the front. I also took some with the 50mm lens while handholding the polarizer in front of the lens.

(A view of the Na Pali coastline from the trail)

Once we reached Hanakapi’ai Beach, I removed my boots and ate a power bar. We hung out at the beach for a while. Larry and I walked around taking lots of photos. The light was still pretty good and I didn’t see any hints of rain.

I took some fun photos of the incoming surf. To get a better perspective on it, I laid prone on the beach near where the waves come foaming up on the sand. This worked pretty good until a rogue wave came by and drenched me as well as the camera. I was quick to turn it away so only the body got wet.

As I moved on to photograph some other things, I saw that the shutter button stopped working correctly. The ‘half-press’ functionality didn’t appear to be working. I turned off the camera and let it dry out some. After a while it seemed to be working correctly again.

Larry and I switched lenses. He used my 15mm fisheye and I used his 17-40mm L rectangular lens. Not learning my lesson, I went back to photographing the incoming surf. Once again I eventually got caught off-guard by a large incoming wave and got drenched pretty bad this time.

(Milliseconds before I got soaked)

Salt water and sand probably don’t mix well with digital cameras. I turned it off and let it dry out. A while later I tried the camera again and everything appeared to be working correctly. This time I learned my lesson and didn’t try photographing the waves while lying down on the beach anymore.

Larry and I noticed that a once-accessible cave on the right side of the beach is no longer accessible. Something must have happened to re-shape the beach since last year.

We decided to continue our hike and go to the falls (Hanakapi’ai Falls) instead of turning back. Nether of us had gone to the falls before. We’ve always turned back once we reached the beach. It’s about a two-mile hike to the falls.

The hike to the falls was much different than the first part of the Kalalau Trail. The vegetation changed quite a bit. We passed by large clumps of bamboo trees as well as much larger trees not seen elsewhere. It was also more humid and hot with less wind.

Eventually, we reached a stream which was being fed from the waterfall. We got a little turned around and temporarily lost the trail. We finally made it to the falls. They are huge, about 100 feet high. I was very happy that I had the 15mm fisheye lens.

We took a lot of photos around this area. The waterfall was pretty cool because it’s set inside a ‘bowl’ formation with rocky cliffs going up each side. This happens with a lot of waterfalls here – over thousands of years the water erodes the walls, turning it into a huge bowl. At the base of the waterfall is a ‘pool’ that some people go swimming in. You have to be careful because occasionally a large boulder falls from the top and could easily kill someone if hit.

(Hanakapi’ai Falls)

After about 30 minutes we headed back. Hiking back to the beach went a lot quicker because we didn’t take our time. When we reached Hanakapi’ai Beach I was pretty hot, so I removed my boots and washed off in the cold freshwater stream feeding into the ocean.

Now that the sun was in a different position in the sky, I took some more photos. We didn’t hang around for too long and headed back to the trailhead. This also went fast.

(Ke’e Beach)

Back at the car I was glad to have my hiking boots off and my sandals on. I think I got a blister on one of my toes. When we got back to the house, we found out that Jenny picked up a pizza. Larry and I were starving so the food was good.

I called Jen and we talked about her first night of classes for this semester. While I ate pizza, I read through the ‘Ultimate Kauai Guidebook’. There is a lot of great info in that book. I disagree with the book on the restaurant recommendations. They said that Postcards wasn’t good and that Zelo’s was great. My experience was quite opposite of that.

I drove down to the Hanalei church to photograph it in the light of the setting sun. However, I had a problem with my camera. It wasn’t recording anything to the memory card. I was worried that my water-splashing incident might have been the cause.

When I went back to the house (with no pictures), I did some analysis. I was eventually able to determine that the 4GB microdrive was only 2.14GB full. This number was interesting to me because it’s close to the 32-bit addressing limitation of 2.14 billion. However, this shouldn’t be a problem with a fat32-formatted drive (which mine is). I did some more research and was able to determine that the camera was unable to write any more files to it when the capacity was around 2.14GB.

If I manually copied a file from the PC to the card, however, I must have ‘pushed past’ whatever limitation the camera encountered. Once I had a little more space used on the card, the camera was then able to save files as normal. I’m still not sure why this happened.

Checkdisk didn’t report any problems with the drive, and I even did a thorough sector-by-sector scan with no defects. I also flashed the latest firmware for the camera, still no dice. I formatted the drive with a cluster size of 32k instead of 4k. With the large RAW files, this should improve write performance.

Jenny went out with her new local friends. Larry and Amy asked if I could please look after the kids (who were sleeping) while he and her go walking along the beach.

From their bedroom, Tucker and Lily opened the door (there was a kid-gate thing in front of it) and said that they needed to go to the bathroom. I don’t have a lot of experience with this so it was a learning experience.

They were both fidgeting around saying that they had to go to the bathroom (fortunately they are mostly potty trained). I asked them who needed to go more, and Lily said she did. I took her out and put her in the bathroom. She started to play around with various objects in the bathroom and said, ‘How about we color instead’. I decided that Lily didn’t really need to go to the bathroom so I asked her. She said, ‘How about we dance instead?’

I put Lily back in the room and placed Tucker in the bathroom. He did go to the bathroom but had difficulties pulling up his underwear. With some encouragement form me, he was finally able to do it. I put him back in the room too.

They didn’t seem to want to go back to sleep. Fortunately a little while later Jenny came back and managed to say something to them which sent them to bed right away. I wish I knew what she said.

Larry and Amy came back and we looked through the photos that I took from the trail today. I went back to my room and took a nice shower. It felt great to be clean. I tried to work on my journal but was too tired, so I went to bed early.

My alarm woke me up at 6am this morning. I packed everything up and was ready to go by 7am.

Yesterday Larry indicated that we would go to Hideaways or Sea Lodge beach early, but this morning it was raining so we didn’t leave until later. Amy wanted to take the kids to the taro plantation place. Larry, Tucker, and I finally left the house at 10:15am for the beach.

I drove us over to the parking area for sea lodge beach. It took a while for us to hike down the long trail to the beach because we had to go slow for Tucker.

The tide was low so there wasn’t any good snorkeling. Instead of swimming, I climbed around the rocks and shot lots of photos.

(Low tide at Sea Lodge beach)

(Larry photographed me sitting on a rock)

Over on the far side of the beach is a nice view of the coastline along the north shore of the island as well as some blue-green water.

We didn’t spend much time at the beach due to time constraints with my flight. We left around 11:35am or so. Just as I was going to suggest to Larry that we have lunch at Tropical Taco, he got a call from Amy who wanted to have meet and have lunch at Hanalei Dolphin.

I didn’t think there was enough time for me to have a sit-down lunch with everyone, get back to the house, shower, change, and drive to the airport for my flight. So I dropped Larry and Tucker off at Hanalei Dolphin and had lunch by myself at Tropical Taco.

After that I went back to the house and took a shower. I changed and packed the rest of my stuff. I copied the photos from today over to Larry’s computer and loaded my bags into the car.

As I was leaving at 1:15pm, Larry, Amy, et al. returned from lunch. I said goodbye and drove down the airport. Along the way I filled the rental car up with gas. I had no problem returning the car to Avis.

I had some trouble checking my luggage at the Lihue airport. They wanted to screen it because I’m going back to the states, but I explained that I’m flying standby on Delta in Honolulu so I think I need to re-check my bag there. The agent insisted that he check the bag through for Atlanta. I went along with this.

The Hawaiian Air flight to Honolulu was short and uneventful. Once in Honolulu I checked in. The Delta agent asked to see my employee ID during check in which was unusual considering I’ve never been asked that before.

I had a couple of hours to burn before my flight so I found a power outlet in the gate area and worked on my photos. I requested a window seat and the gate agent said he would see what he could do. I got an aisle seat next to a guy with a window seat. The flight wasn’t completely full and there were many open window seats (with people sitting in the aisle seat) as well as a couple of completely open middle rows. I’m not sure why I got seated where I did – I’d like to know how they went about clearing the standby list.

During part of the 9.5 hour flight I worked on my journal using my laptop but fell asleep.

I woke up very late today – around 11:30am. My body is still on Hawaii time so it’s nice to have the weekend to get re-acclimated to the six-hour time change.

Jen was already awake and went out running. When she got back we both had cereal for breakfast. While we ate cereal (I had lucky charms with vanilla soy milk), I went to J&R and ordered the Onkyo HT-S770 home theater system. They had both silver and black but I queried Jen who suggested silver. It’s showing up as ‘pre-order’ but I imagine that it will ship within a week or two at the most.

I also did a ton of research on Xbox mods. My plan is to get an Xbox and mod it so I can use it as a media server in conjunction with my stereo. Why buy a DVD player and a $200 media server when the Xbox can do both and you can still play games on it?!

After all of my research this morning I am still unsure what is the best route for modding the xbox. There is a ton of info out there and it’s a bit overwhelming. I suspect that I’ll have to learn more before I can make an informed decision.

While I was doing all of this, Jen spent her time learning about and experimenting with cascading style sheets (css) on her weblog.

Jen and I hung up the ceiling fan in the guest bedroom upstairs. This went pretty quick as it was the same type of fan that we installed in the other bedroom already.

With this done, we headed out to Target to do some shopping. We went to the one off of East West Connector. After Target we went to T.J. Maxx to look at stuff for my house.

On the way back from shopping, we stopped at Publix to buy some stuff to make for an early dinner. We made the wonderful ‘grit’ salsa as well as some breakfast tacos.

Around 10pm we packed stuff up and went to the Barnes and Noble at Town Center. Jen got some coffee while I looked at magazines. I was particularly interested in the Digital Photographer magazine from the UK that Larry gets.

We met up with Lisa and Alan who previously bought tickets for Harry Potter 3. The four of us departed and went to the nearby movie house to see the movie. It was pretty good – I liked it much better than the second one.

The movie was late and long, so Jen and I didn’t get to bed (at her house) until around 3am.

I had trouble waking up this morning and ended up sleeping in some. Jen woke up, took a shower, and left for work.

Because it was already fairly late, I logged into work to get some things done before going into work – to save time. I requested a code deployment.

Today was pretty busy at work. We went to ‘Oz’ for lunch. I also participated in the integration test for the new code. Carole stopped by and asked if I wanted to work with the IBM consultant guy while he’s here for two weeks.

I loaded and activated the new code into production. It took a long time to do this and I ended up working until 8pm.

When I got home, Jen was already there. We had Salad and Hash-Browns for dinner. I stayed up pretty late again tonight working on my journal. I guess I’m in a situation right now where I’m too busy living life to have time to write about it.

My alarm went off at 5:30am. I woke up at 6am and quickly took a shower and got dressed. I made it into work around 8am.

The first thing I did today was fix a problem with the performance script. It didn’t take too long to do this. I was also told of some new code that needs to be deployed into integration and production.

Bill L. came by and gave out the new laptops & routers for remote support. Only James, Jegan, one other person, and I got the laptops. We have these to support production environments remotely via something called eVPN which is a full-fledged VPN solution which gives full intranet access and not just web access. This type of access will make my life so much easier for remote support.

The enterprise security team at work is pretty paranoid so they only allow eVPN access by way of a company-issued laptop and only when it is used in conjunction with a company-issued physical firewall device. I suspect this is to minimize support costs as they know exactly what hardware you are using. I also believe it is to reduce risk of introducing viruses into the enterprise – however I have some thoughts on much more effective virus/worm prevention which differ from how we currently do things.

The laptop I was issued is only used for remote support. I still have my desktop to use at work which is nice. However I checked out the specs on the laptop and am pretty jealous. It has a Pentium M 1.6GHz processor (the same as my laptop), 1GB of RAM (twice as much as my laptop), 802.11 a/b/g WiFi card (mine is only b & g), and the Radeon Mobility 9600 w/32MB of video RAM (mine is a Radeon Mobility 9200 w/64MB of RAM).

Bill is still trying to get me set up with the eVPN. I need a VP approval to get activated so it should take a few days.

I left work around 5:30pm. Once again Jen was home when I got home. I guess I’m working too late! We had a wonderful dinner which consisted of a salad and grilled sausage. Jen pointed out that the sausage wasn’t 100% veggie sausage. I was under the misconception that it was. I just assumed when it was called ’sun-dried tomatoes’ that it was only sun-dried tomatoes. Unfortunately it also contains pork products.

Jen and I decided to go shopping this evening. We first went to CompUSA off Cobb Parkway. I looked for a $30 APC UPS power strip to use in the living room. It isn’t fair that my TiVo isn’t battery backed-up. I want to correct this oversight and keep TiVo running 24/7. Unfortunately CompUSA didn’t have the UPS I was looking for.

Next we went to Best Buy to look at TV stands. The ones we saw were pretty expensive and too big. After Best Buy we stopped at Brewster’s for some ice cream. Once we finished our tasty treats we went over to Rhodes Furniture to look at a sleigh bed frame on sale for only $300. Something didn’t seem right about it and it didn’t call out to us so we left. Next we went to T.J. Maxx but didn’t get anything from there either.

By this time I was pretty exhausted from all of the shopping – I can only take so much.

We went home and played around a bit with my new Xbox. Today Jen stopped by Costco to pick up the Xbox kit we looked at. It was a standard Xbox along with the DVD remote, an extra controller, and two cheesy games thrown in – all for $190. I’m extremely excited to mod the xbox and will be spending a lot of time researching my options. Looking on the back at the manufactured date as well as the serial number revealed that this isn’t a 1.6 xbox which is a good thing (those can’t be modded right now).

Jen and I briefly played a game of two-player Tetris (she beat me handedly) as well as some Star Wars flying shooting game which I won. Shortly after that we went to bed.

When I got into work this morning I saw an old Nokia phone on my desk. Casey brought in his old phone for me to temporarily use for when I ship off my Nokia 3650 to be repaired. I tested it out with my little SIM chip and it worked great! It’s a pretty cool thing to be able to transport your provider & cell number all on a little chip.

Jen ordered two frames from a website so we can frame two of the 8×10 pictures I had printed out.

I attended an uneventful 10am staff meeting and then spent some more time working with the DB2 integration testing. We got a lot done and I provided the ticket retriever stats to everyone on the call.

It was a pretty slow Friday. Carole left early. I ordered some stuff from Newegg.com. I got an internal 120GB HD to put in my Xbox whenever I mod it. I also got a 200GB internal HD for Jen as well as an external USB 2.0 enclosure to put it in. Now she’ll have a way to back up her data.

I’m still debating about what to do regarding the xbox modchip. I get obsessed about such things until I find the right solution. I think I’m obsessing about that right now.

I left work around 4:30pm and went home. As soon as I got home I spent the next two hours working on a picture order from mpix.com. I’m a bit of a perfectionist so I converted all of the photos to huge TIFF files (~18MB each) from the original Photoshop files. It took a long time to upload each photo, but at least I know I’ll have the highest possible quality even though it probably won’t be visually discernable.

Jen was sort of upset about me not coming over earlier. She thought I didn’t want to see her tonight which couldn’t be further from the truth but I can see her point of view.

I left my place for Jen’s house around 8pm. During the drive up there I called Dad to catch up with him. Once I arrived at Jen’s we had a late dinner. Once we talked things were much better than before.

While we were eating Lynne came home and we invited her to play a game of SolarQuest. Lynne declined, citing that she had to do homework.

Jen and I decided to head over to Dave’s party. Jen drove (my car). During the drive down I called Craig to catch up on things.

We only stayed at the party for about an hour at most. Jen and I talked with two of her old friends. It was cool when she was introducing me. She said, “This is my boyfriend Jeff, the love of my life.”

Today I woke up early despite going to bed late last night. I had a bad taste in my mouth so I brushed my teeth. Jen got up shortly after that too.

We discussed all of the things that we wanted to accomplish today and decided to start with breakfast. We realized that we didn’t have eggs though. I went over to Publix to buy some eggs and creamer. While at Publix I also got some thank-you cards to send out.

When I got back home and opened the door, the familiar scent of cooking bacon hit my nose. Jen was frying up some bacon! We had breakfast tacos today. Jen fried up the bacon and I got the eggs scrambled. Jen cooked the eggs while I worked on the hash browns. I used the bacon grease to oil the hash browns. The breakfast tacos were great.

While we ate breakfast, I started to watch a tivoed episode of Real World, but Jen couldn’t take it. We watched ‘Modern Marvels‘ instead. This particular episode was pretty good because the topic was the A10 tank-buster fighter jet.

While all of this was going on I finished up the laundry. I also vacuumed all of the floors upstairs using my new vacuum cleaner. It was really cool being able to see everything that it sucks up, thanks to the bagless feature.

Jen and I took a shower, dressed, and packed up our things to go. I spent about an hour working on my finances within MS Money while we washed the towels. Mom called to see if we wanted to have dinner this Wednesday. I checked with Jen and we agreed to have dinner at my place. I’ll probably BBQ something.

We loaded up the car and left for the day. Our plan was to do some shopping and then go to Jen’s house. We went up to Barrett Parkway and towards Town Center mall. We went to the large Uptons furniture store. Even though they had a large selection, we didn’t see anything worthwhile and the prices were quite high. From there we went over to American Eagle. I used my $10-off coupon to buy another pair of cargo shorts as well as three shirts (Jen helped pick these out).

After slugging it out at the mall, we headed down to American Signature Furniture to look at the dining room table we saw advertised. We quickly located it on the showroom floor and looked at it. It was pretty small – no more then four people could possibly sit at it. I think it could easily double as a breakfast table. It’s a dark wood circular table with four wooden chairs.

We looked around and more and located two other candidate dining sets. One was an oval-shaped dark wood & metal table with wood and metal chairs. The metal was dark & silver in color. The second candidate was a nice-looking oval table with four wooden chairs. The wood wasn’t as dark as the others and the chairs looked a little too ‘country’ in style. I think we preferred the ‘mission’ style from the first table.

We debated and looked around, but finally decided on the first table. Along with it, we bought a small low table which could double as a buffet in the dining room, or as a narrow table behind the sofa. We were pretty happy with the decision.

From there we went to ‘Rooms to Go‘ to look at their beds. I’m in search for a dark-wood sleigh bed, but they are all pretty expensive for the style I want. We couldn’t find anything at ‘Rooms to Go’ other than a pushy salesman.

By this time it was around 5pm and we were quite hungry. We stopped at Willy’s and each had a burrito. This certainly hit the spot. By this time I was pretty exhausted. I think getting little sleep and dealing with all of the sales people today wore me out.

We drove up 575 to Jen’s parent’s house so we could check in on the dogs. We stayed there about 1.5 hours and played with the dogs. It was a pretty nice time. We left there around 7pm.

Eventually we made it back to Jen’s house. Jen and I spent a great deal of time ‘working’. She read a few chapters in her information security textbook while I researched xbox mods. I’ve now learned that it may be more worthwhile & safer to mod my xbox using the 007 savegame exploit rather than to solder on a modchip. I’m planning on buying a used copy of the “007: Agent Under Fire” game tomorrow in order to execute the exploit.

After a while doing this, we had some sandwiches for dinner and watched ‘Black Hawk Down‘. I’ve seen this movie before but Jen had not. She was a bit confused about the characters because they all looked the same. It was good to see the movie again. We didn’t finish until 2am and went to bed quite late.

I slept in this morning because I didn’t have to go into work until later. Jen woke up, took a shower, and left. I got up around 7:30 and logged into work.

Jen let me hang out at her place this morning so I’ll be closer to Barrett Parkway to pick up the furniture. Around 10:30am I took a shower, dressed, and left the house.

As I was leaving the house, I saw a package on the front door. It was my picture order from Mpix.com. I waited to open it until I could look at them with Jen.

I got to American Signature Furniture store around 11:15am. I went over the customer service desk and showed them my receipt. They typed some things out on the computer and told me to drive around to the loading dock in the back.

When I reached the loading dock, I gave the receipt to a guy who told me that they would be out shortly. A minute later the loading door opened and a guy loaded two large (and very heavy) boxes into my explorer.

The box that contained the table and four chairs (they all need to be assembled) weighed 150lbs, and the other box containing the buffet thing weighed 100lbs.

I drove down to my house and opened the back of the explorer. I gingerly tested the weight of the boxes and realized that I would be unable to lift & carry each box by myself up the stairs.

Dismayed, I left the boxes in my car and quickly changed into work clothes. I drove into work and arrived just before 1pm.

Until about 2:30pm, work was pretty uneventful. Around 2:30pm I started to prepare for my presentation – this is the reason I came in late instead of getting the furniture after work.

Jegan and I are doing a ‘deep dive’ presentation to the Network Systems Portfolio Architecture team (which we are members of). I want to make sure we do a good job because I don’t want to look like a slacker in the eyes of the members of this team. Normally I don’t get too worked up about a presentation.

I printed off system architecture diagrams for all of the four releases of the Revenue Pipeline project. I also wrote a short outline of all of the releases, release dates, and major talking-points of each release.

Jegan helped with the 1.4 diagrams. He also printed out the release 1.3 conceptual architecture.

At 3:30pm we headed over to 11East for the meeting. As it turns out, only Ningyu and Richard attended. Joe and Ted didn’t show up. I led the discussion starting out with an overview of the first (1.1) release. Jegan jumped in at various points and expanded or went into more detail. I believe that we did a great job together and made the discussion flow freely with good information.

We concluded at 5pm. In the 1.5 hours, we only covered half of the material, so next week we’ll continue with the presentation. I was very pleased with how the meeting went because Ningyu and Richard were actively engaged in the material. I’m happy with the job that Jegan and I did.

I left work shortly after 5pm and went straight home. While driving home, I called Mom and asked if she could come over later – at 7:30pm instead of 7pm because of all the prep work I still need to do.

I also called Jen who was planning on arriving around 6:45pm. Because I didn’t have help moving the boxes upstairs, I decided to open them up from the back of my explorer and ferry some of the larger pieces up one at a time. This lightened the overall load of the boxes and I managed to get everything inside the house.

While I was moving stuff upstairs, the UPS guy came and delivered my Amazon.com package. I ordered the latest Drizzt Salvatore book, a book on software architecture, and two optical cables for my future stereo.

Assembly of the table itself was pretty easy. I just had to screw in four bolts – one for each leg. The chairs were a little more difficult because I had to install eleven bolts per chair.

Just as I finished the first chair, Jen showed up. She immediately started helping with the assembly. She asked if I could use my power drill to drive the bolts, but I responded that I didn’t have an alan-wrench bit that would fit the bolts. She then produced the bit I need – it came with the table!

(The new table & buffet)

(A closeup)

With the bit securely attached to the drill, we finished assembling the rest of the chairs in no time. I then began work on assembling the buffet. By this time I was 7:15pm. We only had about 15 minutes until Mom and Jim arrived.

Jen started working on cleaning up the house. I worked frantically to assemble the buffet. I was close to finishing when the doorbell rang. Time ran out. It was Mom and Jim. I showed them inside and only then did I notice the wonderful job that Jen did. She completely cleaned everything up, put things away, and got everything ready to start making dinner! She even put out a bowl of chips and the salsa.

I showed Mom and Jim around the house since the last time they saw it was the day I moved in. They brought a couple bottles of wine as well as two pictures for me from their recent trip to France.

I worked on the grill. I grilled some salmon steaks and corn on the cob. Jen already prepped the fish and had the corn husked. I applied butter & salt and put the ears of corn in foil. As I worked the grill and entertained Mom and Jim, Jen continued working on the rest of the stuff for dinner. We also had garlic mashed potatoes, salad, and dinner rolls. She had the brand-new table set – it looked great.

Dinner was pretty good. I overcooked the fish because it tasted too dry. I think that was my first time grilling fish. Dinner was pretty good overall. This was my first time ever entertaining anyone for dinner – this is the first time I’ve had a dining-room & a place to sit for dinner.

Afterwards we sat in the living room and looked through photos from their trip to France. According to Mom & Jim, the French people in the northern part of the country, near Normandy, are much nicer to Americans than those in Paris.

It was getting late, so we concluded the marathon picture-viewing process and had some desert. Mom brought over peach cobbler. We each had some. Mom and Jim departed around 10:30pm.

Jen and I looked through the photos. I was pretty happy with the results. I guess it helped that I sent them 18-meg TIFFs to print instead of jpegs. Jen was pretty exhausted and wanted to go to bed. I stayed downstairs to finish a couple of things.

I’m sending a framed photo of Larry and the kids from Hawaii as well as a thank-you note to Larry and Amy for letting Jen and I stay with them in Hawaii. I also sent a card and framed photo to Larry & Amy’s friends, the Charneys. The photo was one I took of their two kids. The Charneys were very nice to us when we went over to their house for dinner two nights while in Hawaii.

After getting all of this boxed up, addressed, and secured, I went to bed. Jen was already asleep. She was pretty worn out because it’s been a long week for her. Tomorrow is going to be a rough day because she has to go into work early, work all day, and then go to school until 11pm. I fell asleep snuggling up to her which felt nice.

I am very sensitive to the sound my pager makes. My pager sound is a simple ‘chirp’. That little chirp was able to wake me up this morning. Carole paged me. She noticed that the production throughput rate was low while CPU usage was maxed out. I noticed the same behavior last night but didn’t investigate further.

Because this has been going on since yesterday afternoon, I logged in to investigate. Sure enough, all nine nodes in production were pegged out at 100% CPU usage while the throughput rate was only around 14-15 messages per second. With a sustained 100% CPU usage across the board, we should have seen a throughput rate around 22+ mps.

Fortunately I was able to quickly locate the source of the problem. I loaded up glance and saw one particular cservrunner process consuming about 200% CPU (these boxes have 16 CPUs each). I checked which tuxedo group that process belongs to and saw that it was our dataservices group. The same thing was happening on the other either servers. Yesterday afternoon we had some core dumps come out of dataservices.

I ran a TUSC trace on one of the offending processes and it looked as if it was stuck in a loop somewhere. I’ll forward the trace onto the rest of the development team on Monday.

After bouncing the offending groups, the problem cleared itself up. I paged Carole back with my number. She called a few minutes later and I explained the problem.

Jen and I made plans to go up to the outlet shopping area in Dawsonville this morning. My antics with work made me a bit late but we left around 10:30am. I drove up there.

During the drive Jen discovered that I’ve never seen Clerks or Mallrats. She was horrified at this prospect and vowed to correct it as soon as possible.

We arrived and did some shopping. The first store we went into was Crate & Barrel. We bought more plates to add to the ones I already have. We also got some cool cutting-board mat things.

Next we went into Pottery Barn. This was a grossly disappointing store. Their ‘discount’ furniture was badly damaged and banged up, yet the prices were sky high still. They sold a king-size bed frame with gashes and chips as well as missing side-boards and wanted $800 for it!?

Jen looked at a sofa (which was also around $800) but it too was damaged in a way that it should have only been around $300, in my opinion.

After that we looked in a couple of other stores but didn’t see anything worthwhile. We did stop in Banana Republic and got some fun things there. Jen got a dress, jeans, and a scarf. I got three new pairs of slacks and two polo shirts.

We headed back around 2pm. Jen drove. I helped her study by reading review questions out of the back of her security book. Before long we were close to her house. We stopped at Publix to buy some groceries. We got a lot.

Finally we went back to Jen’s house. I dropped her off at Lisa’s house so she could look in on Lisa’s cat. I drove back to her house and unloaded the car. She came back as I was finishing up. She brought Lisa’s lawn mower with her.

Jen made some wonderful sandwiches with some lunchmeat & bread we bought at the store. It was very good and hit the spot. We debated about going to the pool but decided to mow the lawn first. I mowed the lawn while Jen worked on stuff outside.

With the outdoor stuff done, we changed and headed to the pool. We took some fun drinks along too. It was partly cloudy so we didn’t have sunshine the whole time, but it was nice to relax by the pool nonetheless. I brought along all of my printouts regarding the Xbox mods. My plan is to do the TSOP flash via the 007 savegame exploit (payloaded by way of the HD hotswap). If I mess up, the bios will be unusable and I’ll have a $150 paperweight.

After hanging out at the pool for a while we went back to Jen’s house, took a quick shower, and packed up things to go to my place. I drove us down to my house and we unloaded everything. We seem to transport so much stuff between our houses now. I wonder why we never did the before? I guess we’re getting more and more integrated into each others lives.

We didn’t hang around my place, we simply unloaded everything and headed back out again. Our destination was Lowe’s. We went down to the Lowe’s off of East West Connector and arrived there around 8:15pm. By this time I was a little tired and wanted to make it a quick trip. I think Jen was a bit tired too.

She went to the garden center to look for flowers. I was going to join her but saw the outdoor patio furniture section so I went to take a look. As usual, all of the pieces were pretty expensive but I saw one table & four chairs on clearance for only $130. I showed Jen but she wasn’t too impressed.

This deflated my initial excitement about the find. Jen saved the day by pointing out that a lot of the individual pieces are on clearance. Indeed, we looked around for a while and ended up finding a great deal on four chairs and a nice tile/cement 30″ table. Initially I wasn’t too trilled about the small size, but Jen convinced me that it wasn’t that bad.

We ended up buying the table + four chairs. We also got some rectangular hanging metal plant holders to mount from the deck or the railing. Jen found some with the cool brown mossy lining stuff. We also picked up a large bad of potting soil and some flowers to plant in the holders. We also bought a $20 water filter for Jen’s refrigerator.

I used my 10% off coupon and all of this stuff together came to about $200! Not bad!

We drove back home, stopping at Publix first to get a couple of things. We didn’t get home until about 10:15pm. It was pretty late and we still had not eaten dinner.

Jen and I carted the stuff upstairs to the deck and I set out assembling everything. Jen helped with this as well as getting food ready for dinner. We make a pretty good team when it comes to preparing dinner. She also made us a new drink: Vodka (top-shelf), Amaretto, and lime. It was very strong, but good.

I grilled up some apple/chicken sausage as well as a veggie hot dog for Jen. I also grilled up some squash & zucchini. Jen made two batches of this. One was marinated in Italian salad dressing and the other was marinated in olive oil & vegetable seasoning powder. I grilled each separately.

Once dinner was ready we sat outside on the deck at the new table and had a romantic candle-lit dinner outside. Jen noted that this reminded her of our wonderful dinner by the sea in St. Maarten.

Shortly after dinner we went to bed, as it was very late.

It was a pretty quiet day today. I slept over at Jen’s house last night so I had a longer drive than usual this morning because I had to drive from Woodstock down to the airport.

This evening I worked on xbox stuff since I just recently modded it. I managed to replace the default dashboard with Avaluanch instead of EvolutionX. Some of the capabilities are pretty cool.

Jen came over later in the afternoon/evening. We had home-made pizza for dinner. Half of the pizza was mine with pepperoni and tomatoes while the other half had spinach and tomatoes.

I worked some more on the xbox stuff. I think Jen was fairly annoyed that I spent so much time working on that. I started a couple of loads of laundry and around 11pm Jen went to bed. I finished some stuff up before going to bed too.

Work was pretty uneventful today other than a noon meeting (lunch was provided) to discuss the 0 ticket-number problem. We came out of that meeting without a clear idea of when the solution would be implemented to address the problem – at least that’s how I felt.

A while back I sent a complaint to the Georgia Public Service Commission. I was complaining that DSL subscribers are forced to pay for a full-fledged voice line even if they don’t need or want it.

I got a response back a few days later from a PSC rep stating that DSL isn’t in their jurisdiction – but they will forward my complaint over to Bellsouth for me.

When I got back from lunch today I saw that I had two voices mails from ‘Deborah’ over at Bellsouth Internet Services. Her voice mail stated that “you must have a voice line due to an FCC regulation and there isn’t anything they (Bellsouth) can do about that”

Wow that’s weird. I’ve been reading about ‘naked’ DSL (DSL offered without a voice-line requirement) offered in other markets since last year. I guess FCC regulations don’t apply everywhere? Or just maybe Bellsouth wasn’t being 100% truthful?

Later this afternoon I got another call from a guy over at Bellsouth Customer Relations. I guess they take PSC complaints seriously. I inquired to him about the FCC regulation BS I was fed, but he said he didn’t know about that. Instead he said that he doesn’t know why Bellsouth got the complaint because I’m using a third-party DSL provider and they shouldn’t have a requirement to use Bellsouth landline access.

That’s fine, so I asked him if Bellsotuh had a requirement for a voice line for their own FastAccess(tm) DSL service. He said indeed they do that that requirement. I asked him why, and he said ‘due to technical reasons’. I asked him if it made any sense that a person who has no need for a voice line (i.e. someone who uses a cell phone) to have to pay $25 in fees and taxes just so they can turn around and spend another $50 for a DSL line. He said that he understood my frustration, but that’s just how things are.

On that same thread I voiced my complaint that Bellsouth no longer offers metered/measured voice line service. By that I mean a much cheaper line that only allows for 25 outgoing calls a month. Any additional calls are charged per call. This seems like a wonderful solution to DSL subscribers who have no need for a voice line. Strangely enough Bellsouth stopped offering that around the time DSL started to take off. So now instead DSL subscribers are being forced to pay $25/month for a voice line that many don’t even need or want.

Hopefully soon things will change.

At 4pm I left work for a 4:10pm dentist appointment. I switched dentists after my horrible experience at my previous dentist last month.

I didn’t wait long until they finally called me up. The first thing they did was take a panoramic xray of my teeth. They used a pretty modern-looking machine to do this.

Next I had my teeth examined by the dentist. She indicated that I had some inflammation of the gums, indicative of gingivitis. After probing around my mouth for a bit she completed her work. She told me that I had some tarter build-up and a moderate case of gingivitis. I should be able to correct all of this after a full mouth debridment and a cleaning every four months for a while until it gets better.

Strange that she wasn’t saying things like a complete scaling & planning and other such stuff like I heard before. In fact, the cost of the full-mouth debridment was only $35. $35. Last month the other dentist told me that I needed to spend over $1,000 to get my teeth fixed. Something doesn’t quite add up.

I slept in again this morning, and it felt great. When I went downstairs, Jen was already hard at work on a paper for school. She was sitting in the dining-room at the new table. She had a cup of coffee and looked quite scholarly.

I took this time to get on the internet and do some research for television stands. I looked at places like Target, Costco, Best Buy, and Home Depot. Target and Best Buy looked to be the most promising.

After a breakfast of cereal, we headed out to do some quick shopping. I was determined to make this a quick outing because I’m getting a bit tired of shopping every weekend.

We drove up to the Cumberland Mall area and went to Target first. We didn’t find anything there except for a cool-looking frame that Jen saw on clearance. We got that.

Next we went to Best Buy. Right away we found a television stand/entertainment center that would work perfectly. We also looked at speaker stands and found a pair that might work. We also got those.

Back at my place we worked together to get the TV stand put together. It didn’t take too long. Before putting all of the electronics back on it, I attempted to widen the hole in the bookshelf to allow for more wires to pass from above to below. I didn’t have the right tools for the job but did my best. The hole looks pretty jagged.

I wanted to come up with a rear-speaker solution right away and assembled the speaker stands. Jen wasn’t too excited about the look of the speaker stands and suggested that I put the speakers on some sort of bookshelves instead. I still didn’t know what to do about the center rear speaker. I wanted to mount it on the wall with one of the speaker-mounts from Wal-Mart, but it didn’t seem to look good if I tried that.

Jen and I went over to Lowe’s to buy some more stuff. I had the 10% off coupon so I was excited to use it. She got 10 bags of bark to put down in her yard. She also got some flowers to plant at her place. I picked up some silicon-based lubricant to use indoors instead of WD-40. I also got a 3/4″ drill bit to properly widen the hole for the wires on the bookshelf’s entertainment center.

I went over to the power-tools section and picked up a DeWalt flashlight since I don’t have a flashlight right now. I also got a DeWalt wired reciprocating saw. It was on clearance for $90. When I went back out to the gardening area to show Jen, she asked what I would use the saw for. Other than widening the hole in the bookshelf, I couldn’t think of many practical uses. I put the saw back.

After Home Depot, we went back to my place and I continued to work on the speakers & entertainment center stuff.

While I was working on all of this, Jen ordered a pizza, online, from Papa Johns. On one half she got pepperoni & bacon (for me), and on the other half she got tomatoes and spinach.

It was really frustrating to come up with something for the speakers. I wanted to get everything wired up today but it just didn’t look as if that was going to happen.

It was pretty late by now so I reluctantly decided to call it a day and put off the entertainment-center stuff until tomorrow. I packed up some stuff and we drove back to Jen’s house.

We got there fairly late. We had some ice water with a splash of cranberry juice. That combination actually tastes quite good! Jen suggested that we market the drink because it’s so good.

We climbed into bed, watching whatever was currently showing on TLC. I worked on my computer and we both fell asleep.

Today started out like a typical Monday morning. Although, Jen spent the night last night so this morning wasn’t terribly typical. We’ve been spending a great deal of time together so we’re actually at the point now where it feels ‘weird’ for us to spend the night alone since that’s the exception.

It was fairly uneventful today at work. A group of us went to lunch at the BBQ Kitchen. The food today wasn’t as good as usual.

I managed to get a lot done today thanks to my lists. Task lists are a very good thing for me. When I create tasks for myself I find that I get more work done.

When I got home from work I saw that my new American Express ‘Blue Cash‘ card arrived. It looks pretty cool and I’m looking forward to getting some cash back on my purchases. Now I can get rid of my crappy Chase MasterCard. I was getting so sick of their awful website interface. They made it very hard to use their website. Plus, I don’t have any advantages to using my existing cards. They don’t give any incentive to make purchases on them. My new card has a cool feature in which they will automatically extend the original manufacturer’s warranty by a year. This would have been great to use when I bought my laptop.

I looked around my living room for ideas for placing the front three speakers. I’m very displeased with the ‘boxy’ sound they give off right now crammed close together in the entertainment center. It may look good but it sounds like crap. I may have to do some wall mounts.

Around 6:30pm I headed out to Jen’s house. Traffic wasn’t that bad until I hit 575. It started to rain and things got backed up. Jen wasn’t having a very good day so I did my best to cheer her up.

We went to the grocery store to get some stuff for dinner. We had fun going through the store picking out things to buy. As we left, it was raining very hard so we got soaked getting the groceries loaded into my car.

It seems that this summer has been very rainy. It’s been almost every day that we have passing thunderstorms in the afternoon. This isn’t so fun for rush-hour traffic. It’s too bad that the only ‘nice’ times of year are in the spring and fall. I can’t remember the last time we had a day in which one could actually see blue sky. Usually it’s this constant gray overcast filmy sky which is awful.

When Jen and I got home we made rice & salmon for dinner. We started with a salad. Jen wasn’t feeling too good and laid down after dinner. I read though my AMEX card member agreement and then joined her in bed. She was fast asleep.

It was nice to sit by her while she slept. She had the television on and tuned to A&E so I got to watch part of a ‘Law & Order‘ marathon. I also eventually busted out my laptop to get some work done.

A few times Jen stirred and woke up, but quickly went back to sleep. Eventually, around 11pm she woke up and I suggested that we go to bed. We got ready for bed and both went to sleep. I hope Jen feels better.