Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Once again I woke up and Jen was already up doing homework. She certainly does have a good work ethic! I sat down with her on the sofa and used my laptop to do some stuff for work. We have a large build to get done by Monday that I decided to start working on. It took longer than I thought to get everything prepped and I ended up working on this for a couple of hours.

During that time Jen and I took a break to have a bowl of cereal. Jen noted that she’s almost out of soy milk and will have to pick up some more from Costco.

Around noon we decided to do some work outside. Last night we bought ten large bags of pine bark to spread out in the flower beds and other areas in the front of Jen’s house. I was going to mow the lawn at the same time, but Lisa wasn’t home so we couldn’t borrow the mower.

I helped Jen with the bark stuff. As I was spreading the fourth bag, I bent over to lift the bag and all of a sudden I felt a stabbing sharp pain go up and down my spine! I collapsed in pain to the ground trying to figure out what happened.

It appeared that I pulled a back muscle somehow. This has never really happened to me before so it was a fun & new experience. Well maybe it wasn’t so much fun as I was writing in pain but at least it was a new experience. I laid down in the grass trying to figure out what happened and why. Surely the bags of bark aren’t large and heavy enough to cause me to pull a muscle. I felt great this morning and had no warning that this would happen. Perhaps I messed it up yesterday when I was hoisting my large television around?

I hobbled over to Jen and told her what just happened. She suggested that I take some Advil and lay down. I went inside, took four advil, and gingerly laid down on the bed. A little while later Jen came in and gave me a heating pad to use on my back. This felt great.

While she continued to work outside I propped myself up and continued to work on my laptop. Slowly my back started to feel a bit better. The sharp, stabbing pain was slowly replaced with a dull ache. It still hurt to bend over but at least I wasn’t in great pain just walking around anymore.

Jen took a break and made some veggie burger for lunch for us. We also had some chips & salsa. After lunch I worked on Jen’s laptop to try to get her new Logitech MX900 bluetooth mouse to work with her T30 IBM Thinkpad. The latest version of the bluetotoh drivers from IBM (for the T30) doesn’t give HID support which is necessary for a mouse to work.

I attempted to use a newer version of IBM’s Bluetooth drivers (for the T40) but they refused to run due to a security check to make sure you only use them with the T40. This made me sad. Eventually I had to take extreme measures and install an older, third-party Bluetooth stack and hack the dtsec.dll file to allow for her IBM license.dat file in order to allow this version of the Bluetooth drivers to work.

With the new Bluetooth drivers running, I was able to get HID profile support which, in turn, allowed her mouse to work. When she saw the mouse actually working, she got very excited and kissed me. She spent a great deal of time on Friday trying to get it to work, so she was pretty happy.

After this we took a shower and started to pack some things up. In addition to yard work, Jen went around the house and cleaned lots of things. She did a great job.

We left her house and went over to Target. We bought two 35-inch tall CD/DVD towers to place the rear left & right speakers on. This seemed a better solution than the $80 speaker stands we bought yesterday from Best Buy. Jen also lent me a 30-inch tall wood table she had to use behind my sofa. This is where the center rear channel speaker will go. The wood is a light color so we’ll have to paint it or cover it up with something.

We were planning on stopping by Costco too but it was raining very hard so we skipped that.

Why is it whenever it starts to rain, common sense goes away? On the highway some people put on their flashers while it’s raining. Is this to alert other drivers that it’s raining? Typically I notice that the people who drive down the highway with their flashers on at the first hint of rain are also the ones who slam on their brakes at every little thing. This is a very dangerous and reckless way to drive in the rain, in my humble opinion. Accidents happen when people hit their brakes (for no good reason) in the rain. They either lose control themselves or cause drivers near them to slam on their brakes as well, causing a spinout. I’m very weary to drive near these people with their flashers on.

Before going home, we stopped by Mom’s house. I had some boxes to give back as well as a few other things. We stayed about thirty minutes to catch up on things. It was nice to talk to Mom.

We made it back to my place around 6:30pm. After we unloaded the car I started working on assembling the CD towers and Jen put things away from the store. We also ordered two items from Target (via amazon.com). One is a cool-looking wine tower to put in the dining-room. The other is a small table to place in the entryway. The style and color of the furniture looks like it matches the existing dining-room furniture quite nicely.

This went pretty well and I got them up quickly. Jen heated up left-over pizza for dinner. We also had a great salad she put together. We ate in the echo-filled dining-room. I need to put up some pictures.

After dinner, Jen worked on her paper for school while I began the arduous task of wiring up everything in the entertainment center. This took about 1.5 hours. It was pretty tough to do. When I was finally done, there was a huge mass of wires behind the entertainment center. I wish I could have done a better job of wiring the stuff.

Jen was done with school work for the evening so she suggested that we watch a movie. We watched ‘Mallrats‘. It was a pretty good movie. I was a bit disappointed with the sound. The audio sounded much more ‘boxy’ than before. I think this is caused by the fact that the front speakers are now so close together. I’m going to look into changing the placement of the front speakers.

During the movie we made some slice-and-bake cookies for desert. The cookies were very good. We also had some more of our wonderful water & cranberry drinks.

After the movie was over, I logged into work (I’ve been checking in at various time during the day) and the build from 10:30am was _still_ going on. Something was obviously wrong so I attempted to cancel the build. Unfortunately the build didn’t stop. I grew increasingly frustrated as I realized that I probably wouldn’t have resolution to this problem until at least tomorrow morning. The plan was to have the build ready by tomorrow morning. This isn’t going to happen now.

I fired off an email to the release engineering group asking about the stuck build and then headed upstairs to join Jen for bed. As I was getting ready for bed, a thought hit me about why the build must be stuck. I rushed downstairs and logged in again to take a look. My hunch was correct. We had a ‘bad’ Makefile and that is most likely causing the build to get stuck in an infinite loop. There isn’t much I can do about that right now but at least I now know what the problem is and I’ll sleep better at night.