Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Being that it is the first of the month, I checked my website statistics to see what the top five search strings were that led people to my website. They were:

1) “mole removal”
2) “photos of lakes”
3) “anna ruby falls”
4) “tivo statistics”
5) “photos of larch trees and glaciers”

It’s a shame I didn’t have my recent Canadian Rockies trip photos posted because there are a lot more great shots of larch pines and glaciers. I’m also still baffled about ‘mole removal’ being such a hot topic.

Jen needed to get to work early so we woke up a little earlier than usual. She took a shower while I shaved and brushed my teeth, then I took a shower. We haven’t taken a shower together in a long time. I guess it’s more efficient this way.

I packed up my backpack with a change of clothes for my trip to Austin this weekend. I’ll be gone until Sunday. I think this is the longest amount of time in a long time that I will be apart from Jen.

During my drive into work the info display in my explorer showed about 70 miles remaining until empty. Normally this is not a big deal but all of a sudden, the estimated miles remaining dropped to 0! I was on 285 at the time, so I took the first exit that showed a gas station and filled up.

I had a god-awful RFC to do this morning for the ticket viewer component. It needs to be deployed on the three integration servers, and is composed of twelve components. This means that I have to do thirty-six different installations.

It took me all morning to work on this. I really wish I didn’t have to do that sort of work or at least the owners of those components could combine some of them. There is a great amount of overhead for each component and it makes no sense to me for there to be so many of them.

James, Casey, and I went to the varisty for lunch today.

After lunch I worked on some more things. Larry also shared with me his temporary ID and password to terraserver.com. I had great fun looking up different locations. I found my office building and captured an image of it that was precise to 0.25 meter resolution. It was pretty cool.

(The Delta Technology A3 buildling)

I also looked up my house, but it is too new. I found my old apartment building as well as Jen’s house.

My flight was at 3pm instead of 4pm like I originally thought so I went down to the lobby to check-in for the flight using our kiosk. When I was down there Karen, Brent’s administrative assistant, congratulated me on getting married. I have no idea how she heard about it, but I can only assume that women on my floor gossip quite a bit.

James was kind enough to give me a lift to the airport as I wanted to work later rather than wait around for the unreliable shuttle bus. I went through the employee line and boarded as soon as I reached the gate (B34). I was in a window seat (16A) with an empty seat next to me.

The flight was uneventful and I worked on my laptop and read my book.

When I arrived in Austin, Dad picked me up from the airport. We drove back to his place. Tex and Hick greeted me at the door and were quite happy to see me. Dad and I sat outside and talked and just hung out together.

Larry called a little while later. He informed us that his flight from San Diego was late to leave so he and Tucker would not arrive until around 7:30pm.

I helped Dad install Office 2004 onto his computer. I also hooked him up with a gmail account and showed him how to use it.

Larry called a while later informing us that he and Tucker were in Austin and getting their rental car. We made plans to meet at Iron Works BBQ over on 1st street for a late dinner. I was very excited to be going to Iron Works as their BBQ is great!

Dad and I got there before Larry so we grabbed a table and waited. A little while later Larry and Tucker arrived. Tucker was a bit tired, but going great. He looked a lot more grown up. We ordered our food and sat outside on the patio. I had the chopped beef plate. It was delicious.

After dinner Larry got a lens out of the car for me to use. It’s his new Canon 24-70mm L lens. It was in a cool felt bag. Larry and Tucker went to their hotel (the four seasons) while Dad and I went back to Dad’s house. Dad and I sat outside (I got bit up by mosquitoes) and saw an approaching thunderhead in the distance with lightning dancing all around. We talked for a while and then I went to bed.

I woke up at 6:30am this morning, brushed my teeth, and packed up my backpack. I didn’t bother with a shower as I’ll take one when I get home.

Dad took me to the airport. We left his house around 7am and got to the airport around 7:30am. I had a good time visiting with dad and it was nice to see him again.

I checked-in and waited at the gate (gate 6). I got a little nervous when they started calling up many other people but not me. Finally I got called up with my seat assignment (14D).

After I boarded they announced that it was a full flight which was news to me because when I checked it last Friday it had around 60 empty seats. I guess it filled up.

The flight home was uneventful. I read my wheel of time book (book 10). It’s really getting good.

I was excited to be home because I really missed Jen. I got to my car as quickly as possible and rushed home. We planned on her meeting me there but she wasn’t home yet. I took the extra time to unpack, shave, and take care of my weekly finances.

Jen came over and brought with her two fun new things. She brought a nice framed montage of four photos from our recent trip to Chicago. It looked great and I thought she did a wonderful job. She also brought over a photo album partially filled with photos from our recent three trips. I looked through this and was pretty happy with how it looked.

I was very excited and happy to see Jen and I guess I expected that she would be too, but something seemed wrong as if she was upset about something. This sort of put me off and on the defensive a little. I asked her if anything was wrong but she said everything was fine.

We made plans to make some sandwiches, salsa, and mango margaritas for lunch. It sounded like a great plan and a lot of fun. Jen and I went over to Publix to get all of the necessary supplies and then headed back to my house.

She worked on the salsa and margaritas while I made the sandwiches. I thought that we were doing a good team effort.

The food was great and the margaritas were wonderful. We ate in the living-room and decided to watch the wedding show I TiVoed. It turns out I got the wrong one. I got a season pass for ‘A Wedding Story‘ but Jen was thinking about ‘For Better or for Worse‘. We watched an episode of ‘Star Trek‘ instead.

While watching TV, I also worked on processing photos and burning CDs for Jen. She got bored so I suggested that she go through the two newspapers from the past two weeks. I continued to work on photos.

In my eyes she was still acting in a bad mood even though we ate, so I didn’t know what was wrong. I decided to continue working on the photos while she figures out what is wrong. In retrospect this wasn’t the best thing to do.

She asked about plans for this afternoon and I asked what she wanted to do, which she replied that I’m the one who was out of town so whatever I need to take care of. I told her I was currently doing that (processing pictures).

I took a break from this and told her that I was going to take a quick shower. She began working on cleaning up the kitchen when I went upstairs.

I got out of the shower and dressed only to find that Jen left! I called her up to see what was going on and she was all upset because she said that it felt like all she’s done is made food and cleaned and that we didn’t spend any time together. I explained about my point of view about her being in a foul mood and how bad it felt that I was so excited to se her and she didn’t seem that happy. She also complained that I never listen to her.

We talked it over some more and she eventually came back. After that point we patched things up. I should have said something to her sooner and all of this probably could have been avoided. I’m pretty bad about that and hope to get better.

The rest of the day was much better. We sat upstairs on the bed and looked through her photo album together. We also looked through two mail order catalogues as well as some wedding brochures she sent off for.

We made a plan for the rest of the evening such that it would be a lot of fun for both of us. I would pack some things up for work tomorrow and then we would take Jen’s car up to her place - leaving my car at my townhouse. Once there we would make more mango margaritas and have salsa while watching ‘Dune‘. Tomorrow morning Jen will drop me off at my house on the way to work and I’ll take my car the rest of the way.

Things went great and we have a wonderful time. Lynne came over and the three of us had Jen’s wonderful mango margaritas. We also snacked on chips & salsa while watching the TV-series version of ‘Dune’ on DVD.

It was fun for the three of us to watch Dune because we just listened to the whole, unabridged, book. We saw a lot of inconsistencies and it was fun to point them out.

The margaritas were great and I had a few. This caused me to be sleepy. I started to fall asleep near the end of the first half of the movie. We decided to watch the second-half later like on Tuesday or Wednesday.

I finally have a photo album online from the trip to Canada. It was very hard to pick photos to post. Out of about 600 photos, I picked out about 90 to post-process and out of those I narrowed it down to 7 panoramas, 9 portraits, and 36 landscape shots. It was hard to decide which ones to put online because I thought there was a lot of good one.

I spent more time working with white balance and exposure compensation during the RAW conversion process. Most of my post-processing was pretty much the same: For most photos I bumped up the shadows a little if it needed it - for all of the non-portrait shots, I used the digital velvia action to increase the color saturation, followed by an intelligent edge-sharpening action. If the shot was from the 15mm fisheye lens, I would de-fish if I thought it necessary. All processed photos were then converted down to 8-bit and saved as a Photoshop file. The web-candidate versions of those files were created by downsizing them to 800×600 resolution.

For the panoramas, I saved all of the candidate photos as 8-bit jpegs all converted from raw using the same white balance. I stitched them together using Panorama Factory simply because I wanted something quick & easy. I don’t have the time to learn how to use Panotools right now.

After I made it into work this morning I was pretty busy taking care more data glossary build work. I was late to the morning 9am staff meeting. With one exception the meeting was pretty uneventful.

After lunch I got paged again to do yet another build of the data glossary piece. I wanted to put it off because I had a 1pm meeting that I would be late for, but was told that they need it done right away because it’s supposed to be demoed at 2pm.

I made it to the 1pm meeting about forty minutes late. It turns out that we cannot go forward with our MAFI Lite migration in dev until the DAS services complete their migration. The problem is that they are not even migrated to the IR7 reference model yet and it’s supposedly going to take a long time to migrate. I migrated our application to IR7 in less than a week. Unfortunately this means that we will not be able to do any work on this until maybe around February next year.

I got a very nice email from someone who reads my weblog. He saw my recent entry about Jen and I getting engaged. He commented that he’s been reading it for a while and wanted to congratulate us. It’s great to know that there are nice people out there.

This afternoon we had the weekly Network Systems PAT meeting. In the meeting, Gus outlined some new proposals for the enterprise architecture methodology and meetings. He also expressed desire for us to all work together on a portfolio-level inventory & analysis of all existing projects and how they all relate to each other. I think it’ll be a worthwhile exercise.

Jen has been doing a lot of great research on potential wedding venues and forward me a lot of good information. We’re planning on taking a trip this weekend to a couple of places to see what they look like in person.

I got home and opened up all the windows. Jen and I made plans for her to come over this evening and we’ll have dinner together.

Jen came over around 7pm. I opened the door for her as she came up the steps. She really liked this and was very happy to see me. I opened up a bottle of red wine (Jacob’s Creek) and we took our time to enjoy the wine. It was a lot of fun.

I grilled two veggie burgers outside while Jen prepared the toppings and made some garlic mashed potatoes. She se the small table on the deck with two candles and we ate outside. It was another wonderful romantic dinner together and we have an absolutely wonderful time.

After dinner Jen showed me some of the work she’s been doing for her company website. While we were doing this, I got paged by the TCC about some production problems. Jen went upstairs to get ready for bed and I logged into work via the unfriendly VPN.

Everything appeared to be fine and I figured that this was another false alarm from the TCC group. I called them up to report the all-clear. After I got off the phone, however, I checked some more things and saw that there was indeed a problem.

One of the nine servers has crashed about thirty minutes ago (looked like a kernel panic). I brought the daemons and domain back online and called up the TCC to update the status. I also sent an email to Jegan, Jeff, and Carole about what happened.

Once that was all taken care of, I joined Jen upstairs.

This is the first weekend in three weeks that I’ve been in town, so it was nice to sleep in and wake up in my own bed this morning.

Jen and I woke up around 8am. I don’t know why but I was still very groggy and had a hard time waking up. In fact, I felt pretty out-of-it all morning.

Jen made some sandwiches and packed them in an insulated case along with a block of ice to keep them cold. We packed up Jen’s car and drove up to her part of town. We stopped at Publix to pick up some supplies and then stopped by her house.

We dumped some thing off at Jen’s house, printed some more directions, and headed out. We stopped by Chick-fil-A for a quick bite to eat for breakfast on our way.

Jen ended up driving because I was still having trouble waking up & being alert. I guess it was due to the oppressive overcast weather. The drive up to Dahlonega was pretty uneventful. I was grateful that Jen drove.

Our first destination was a winery called Wolf Mountain Vineyards. After a little confusion over the directions, we found the winery with no problem. As we pulled into the grounds I noticed that everything had a ‘new’ look to it.

The main building was very nice looking and overall the place had a cozy vineyard feel to it. We arrived at noon - the same time the wine tasting is supposed to start.

We entered the building and were greeted by an older guy with a white beard. I explained that we were looking for a wedding venue and also wanted to do the wine tasting.

The guy showed us around and I inquired about dates. It turns out that they are free in all of December as well as early next year, so that would work well with our plans.

Jen and I walked around the grounds and took some pictures. It looked like a good location but we weren’t too hot about the view from the actual reception area.

Next we moved onto the wine tasting. By this time, a few more people arrived. We started out with white wine, then a rose, and finally red wines. Apparently in North Georgia the climate & growing conditions are such that they cannot make wines that are of only one type, like merlot. Instead they take a more European approach and make blends. The portions of the blends can change with each growing season.

Jen and I enjoyed tasting the six different types of wines at Wolf Mountain but weren’t too impressed with the wine.

Next we drove over to Frogtown winery which was about ten minutes away. This was much larger and the main building looked nicer than Wolf Mountain. There were already a few people there.

The inside was much nicer than Wolf Mountain. The ‘bar’ area looked a lot more inviting and it was wider too. The host was talkative and they had sitting out a great-tasting cheesebox & crackers spread.

Jen and I tried six of their different wines. Like the other place, they also make ‘blended’ wines. I really enjoyed their red wines. While we drank, we chatted with the hostess about wedding info. It also turns out that they have availability for our desired timeframe. The problem is that it’s still a bit expensive.

We really liked their red wines and decided to buy a bottle of their darkest red, ‘Propaganda’. We also each got a large glass of one of the other red wines and took a plate of cheese and crackers to a back area so we could sit down and look around the main hall.

It was pretty nice sitting together at the table with our wine, cheese, and crackers. We stepped outside onto the main deck and looked around at the grounds. The view was much nicer. Jen pointed out to me that she likes this place much better and overall finds it very nice.

While we were there, I saw a guy that looked just like Alan Wren from work. He didn’t seem to recognize me so I assumed it was someone that just looks exactly like him. It turns out that he did recognize me and came up to Jen and I to say hello. He was there with his wife and two friends.

Jen and I walked around the place and I took some pictures with her camera. They don’t have rooms for people to stay in on site, but they do have a bridal dressing room area.

Jen and I departed from the Frogtown winery and made our way over to Amicalola Falls. It took longer to get there than I planned but eventually we made it.

It was probably around 3:30pm when we arrived and it was very crowded! First, Jen and I drove to the upper falls. We were lucky to get a parking space as everything else was full. There were a lot of people around the overlook, so we stopped at a picnic table to have those sandwiches that Jen prepared this morning. They were so good!

I took some photos of Jen using my 50mm lens while we ate. We worked our way over to the throng of people milling around the overlook from the top of the falls. The view wasn’t that great because of the crappy overcast conditions today.

(Beautiful Jen)

Next, we drove down to the lower falls and hiked up the 0.4 mile path to the base of the falls. There were a lot of people around. We took some photos and enjoyed the waterfalls.

(Amicalola Falls)

(Jen and I)

After our time at Amicalola Falls, we decided to head towards Dawsonville for some late afternoon shopping at the outlet mall. Shortly after we began this leg of our journey, we passed by a large fielded farm area full of cars. I could make out a large pumpkin patch so we decided to turn in and take a look.

As we pulled into the makeshift parking area, we encountered a huge sign which read, “NO PROFANITY AND NO ALCOHOL”.

We parked and headed to the main area. It was teeming with a lot of people running around pushing wheelbarrows. I think they were all rushing to find the prefect pumpkins before anyone else. We encountered another sign which indicated that you must be at least fifteen years old to operate a wheelbarrow.

(Crazy Burt’s Pumpkin Patch)

It was almost like a carnival atmosphere as we walked around. A loudspeaker was set up and a voice was welcoming everyone to ‘Burt’s Pumpkin Patch‘. The voice also reminded us to not kick, stand on, or fight over pumpkins. It must be serious business!

We didn’t buy a pumpkin, but we did buy six pieces of butternut squash. This worked out well because we were planning on making our favorite butternut squash soup tonight.

It was a little too hectic at crazy Burt’s farm, so we didn’t stick around too long. From there we drove to Dawsonville and went shopping. We bought some clothes from Banana Republic, looked in a few other places, and then left.

I was pretty worn out. I think Jen was tired too. Before going to Jen’s house, we stopped at Publix to get some fun supplies. We got some things for making the soup and we got supplies to make roasted marshmallow smores.

We drove to her house, unloaded the car, and started making dinner. Jen and I were both quite hungry.

It was fun making the butternut squash soup together. It turned out very good and hit the mark. Lynne came home around this time and had a little soup as well.

We also made some mango margaritas. Those were quite good.

Jen, Lynne, and I went outside to the back porch and I proceeded to try to start a fire in the fire pit thing that Jen has. I felt like I was on an episode of ‘Survivor’ except that I had a lighter, kindling, newspaper, and dry wood. Even with all of this, I had a hard time getting a fire started.

Lynne (who’s spent a couple of months on the Appalachian trail) chipped in and helped. Eventually we got a decent fire going. We roasted some marshmallows and had a fun time doing it. I got mine too close to the flames and it caught on fire.

We made smores by putting the roasted marshmallow into a graham cracker sandwich with a chunk of chocolate. It was so awful bad for you but tasted good.

Lisa and Alan came over too. They joined the three of us out back. The rest of the evening turned out to be a lot of fun. Everyone was in great spirits and we spent a few hours sitting outside in the nice cool night talking and laughing and having a great time.

Around midnight Jen and I went to bed.

I had to leave work early today due to a scheduled meting with the Beazer warranty people at 1pm.

I got home and waited. I waited an hour and no one showed up. I called up Mariah at 2pm to see about my 1pm appointment. She checked for me and called back stating that Travis and the other guy were running late but were on their way over to my place now.

They didn’t show up until 3:30pm. During this whole time I was logged into work doing my work-related stuff. Travis and the other guy (Bob) did a lot of work with the bay window and a garden hose from the outside. They eventually found the leak to be occurring from bad mortar work above the third-story window. They had to cut an even large hole in the dining-room ceiling.

Travis informed me that someone will be out to fix the leak from the outside either late this week or early next week. I’m not going to hold my breath. I’m really getting impatient with the pace at which is work is going.

It’s been 2 or 3 months now since I originally discovered the problem and I’ve encountered a very unresponsive and slow warranty process. It’s pretty disappointing. My dining room is in shambles and I have a humongous gaping hole in the ceiling. The wood floors in the dining room are ruined and I have water damage along the walls too.

I ended up staying online at work all night long and worked until around midnight. I lost track of time and got wrapped up in my work.

It was a fairly quiet Friday today at work. Carole asked me if I would be interested in working on the ‘Ticket Replay’ project for Revenue Pipeline. I’ve had some discussions with Casey about this and it looks to be a fun project so I’m really excited to be doing this.

I didn’t get as much accomplished this week as I would have liked to. I’ll try to work harder next week.

When I left work today I dropped Casey off at the airport. He’s going to be out of the office all week next week.

I got home and cleaned up a little. Jen called. She was out today with her Mom and sister to do wedding stuff. She found & bought a wedding dress, and is very excited about it.

She also found a couple of places that might work for a reception and/or ceremony. One of them is a nice restaurant owned by Lisa’s uncle. When she called, she was on her way to another place to check it out. She seemed to be very happy.

I logged into work and did some more things relating to the release 2.0 build. I also began work on a personal project. For at least a year now (maybe two), I’ve been searching for a way to merge/combine Trillian logfiles. I’ve seen several requests to the Trillain support forums for this feature, but the Trillian developers don’t seem interested in adding any new functionality to Trillian ever since they released the for-pay ‘pro’ version.

I’ve grown frustrated with this hole in functionality. I have a version of Trillian running at home and a version running at work. They share the same contact list, but each individual version contains its own set of logfiles for each contact. This leads to big problems when I want to review conversation logs because I sometimes desire to view a conversation log from work when I’m at home and vice-versa. Simply copying one set of logs over another isn’t an acceptable solution either, because I lose whatever unique conversation info I had for the log I’m overwriting.

I sat down and drew up a quick design for a standalone win32 winforms app which will combine two sets of Trillian logfiles for each contact into a combined view of both files.

Sadly, The only time I’ve created a winforms application was in school using VB (ugh), so it’s going to take a bit of self-learning to get it done. Fortunately Visual Studio.NET makes it so incredibly easy to develop a GUI app. I’m going to call it the ‘Trillian Logfile Combiner’.

I also came across this great website. It was fun to look through code fragments and I had quite a few laughs reading some of the entries. I think The Daily WTF will be a daily reading (like Slashdot) for me from now on.

Jen showed up around 8:30pm. I had already eaten dinner (so did she). She was in an incredibly good mood. I love it when Jen is this way. She was excited about finding the perfect dress as well as the prospect of an affordable place for the ceremony and reception.

We opened up a bottle of wine and looked through the info together. We had a nice time and I really enjoyed Jen’s positivism. Before bed Jen gave me a back massage - it felt great.

Today I slept in until around 10:30am. It felt good to sleep late.

I don’t know where the time went this morning but eventually Jen called and she was ready for me to come over to her house. I took a shower, packed up some things, and prepared to leave.

Because both cars were at my house and because I needed to take my car up to her place today, I had to shuffle the cars in my one-car garage & driveway.

On my way to Jen’s house I stopped at the Publix grocery store near her place to pick up some food for lunch. I got boars head honey coated maple glazed ham, boars head cracked peppermill turkey, and boards head baby swiss cheese. I also picked up a loaf of the terrific mountain bread. Mom called and wanted to know if we would like to go over to her house for dinner.

When I got to Jen’s house I told her about potential dinner plans and she was warm to the idea. We had lunch and she told me that her Mom was coming over. A little while later her Mom came over and had a sandwich too.

Next, we all piled into her Mom’s car and drove around looking at different potential wedding venues. I guess it’s like shopping for me because I got really tired. We stopped in an area of downtown Kennesaw for some ice cream.

We looked at several places, including red top mountain state park. Eventually we made it back to Jen’s house. She did some cleaning up around the place and I helped with the vacuum cleaning.

I got a page for work so I logged in to work on that. Jen went through the Sunday paper to clip coupons.

Around 6:30pm we left her place and drove over to Mom’s house. We visited with her & Jim and had dinner. Mom collected a ton of wedding info for Jen and me. Some of it looked pretty interesting. Dinner was great and it was nice to see the house decorated with all of the fall colors and autumn décor.

After dinner Jen and I went to my house. We brought some things over from her house to begin a slow transition process of moving Jen into my house. Going slow like this may be a good idea as it won’t be a big rush & a lot of work in a short period of time.

Before bed, Jen and I had some hot tea and watched an episode of ‘Smallville‘.

I had two strange dreams last night. The first one was where I received an early-morning call from work. It was from James E. and he was calling to let me know that someone from corporate security was walking around our floor checking everyone’s computer. He thought it necessary to tell me as if I had something installed on my computer which I should remove before the security guy checked mine. I remember frantically trying to uninstall stuff on my computer via remote desktop over the VPN and getting frustrated that it all went too slow. I’m not sure why I had that particular dream. I know why I had a dream about getting woken up early since it happened yesterday and I also know why it was frustrating to be so slow since that also happened yesterday. I don’t know why James was in it.

My second dream was about me taking helicopter flying lessons. I vividly recall knowing most of the basics of flying a helicopter from my younger days when I played the helicopter simulation on my old monochrome 8086 PC. I’m not sure why I had that dream either.

Jen and I were slow getting up this morning and I paid for it later. I didn’t leave her house until 8am. Traffic was horrible on I75 and it took me about 1.75 hours to get to work. That was not fun.

At work today we had out weekly staff meeting. In it Carole explained that with the drastic cost-cutting measures that Delta is taking, some outside consultant groups are going to be coming in to observe and find things to eliminate. She reminded us to act professionally and be on our best behavior as we are all going to be watched very closely.

I went to lunch with Brian, Bob, Alex, and Susan. We went to Rising Roll. It’s pretty expensive there just to get a sandwich.

After lunch I took a check for $500 to the local Wachovia bank to deposit into Jen’s account. She gave me a deposit slip to fill out and I put her account number on the back of the check and wrote ‘for deposit only’. When I took the check in to deposit, the teller refused, stating that Jen would have to sign my check in order for me to deposit it into her account. This made me pretty annoyed because I needed to get that money into her account and now I couldn’t. I called up Jen and we decided to have her sign it tonight and deposit it via ATM at a nearby Wachovia.

This afternoon we had a meeting with the MAFI Lite team to talk about tasks and dependencies for the DTMI upgrade. We in revenue pipeline are ready to go but must wait on the DAS group to first upgrade to the IR7 reference model (they are aiming for the end of February), and then they must upgrade to DTMI. I shudder to think how long that will take.

With this knowledge, I was pretty set on the disappointing fact that we can’t do anything until probably summer of next year. Fortunately the MAFI Lite team came up with a solution for us which involves a simple beanpolicies change which will allow us to invoke the required DAS services running in an existing Tuxedo domain. This means that we can begin our migration path immediately.

I set up a time tomorrow for Madhu to work with Veena in I on the beginning stages of this task.

Sometime after this I popped my head in Carole’s cube to let her know the good news. Bill L., Jeff C., James E., and Alonzo were there. Carole took the opportunity to let them know that I was engaged.

Today’s PAT meeting was canceled. I went home and worked on my finances. I got my monthly American Express statement. Just as I expected, the charge from Uncle Wong’s had not been reduced. I’m going to have to dispute the charge.

Jen came over around 7:30pm or so. We had a glass of wine and then drove over to the nearby Wachovia to deposit the check.

Next we went to Publix to get some supplies for dinner. On the way I got a call from Larry. He wanted to know what time our wedding would be and what the dress code was. Unfortunately I didn’t know the answers to either of those questions yet.

At the grocery store we picked up some supplies for dinner as well as a couple of other things.

We went back to my house and made dinner together. It’s always so much fun making dinner with Jen. Tonight we grilled out and made veggie burgers.

During dinner we watched ‘Smallville‘ and went to bed early. I was all for that especially after dealing with the traffic this morning.

Like yesterday I woke up early around 5:45am. I took a shower, dressed, and prepared to leave for work. Jen don’t work Fridays on account of her working four, ten-hour days instead. She was awake when I left.

The drive into work was very pleasant. I had my audio book to listen to (Angels and Demons by Dan Brown). I made it to work in about fifty minutes which was pretty impressive time due to where I was coming from.

In what always seems to be the case, I got a lot of work done early on today mainly because I arrived so early (6:30am). I think it has to do with there not being any distractions or meetings to break up the time.

At 9am I went down to the 3rd floor for a meeting that Gus set up. He gave us (members of the Network Systems PAT) a presentation of mobile devices at Delta. Some of the technologies they described were pretty cool, mainly the presence-aware techniques being presented. I think the ideas require a lot of technology maturity before they can be realized, but at least we’re heading down the right path.

One thing that frustrated me a little was that he encouraged us to be thinking outside the box and to give any ideas we have about other future technologies. This, in itself, isn’t frustrating but in the past I felt like I’ve been shot down for trying to do the same thing.

Back when .NET was new, I was pretty excited about the technology and the potential benefits from it. I tried to suggest the .NET as a future platform for consideration. I presented this to the appropriate people in charge and was basically yelled at for wasting their time with such a stupid idea.

Ironically enough now we’re heavily using .NET and those same people are touting .NET as such a wonderful platform that can solve all of the problems. So, it’s hard to get excited about thinking outside the box given the past experiences.

We went to the Caribbean place for lunch. I had the Caribbean jerk boneless chicken. As always, it was spicy but quite good.

After lunch I went to a test readiness review meeting in a tiny conference room. There were a few questions but we got it all resolved.

I had a one-on-one meeting with Carole this afternoon. We talked about my career plans and what I want to work on over the course of the next year. It was a good meeting.

I left work around 4pm and drove home. When I got home I took care of some work and uploaded some photos from my camera. Jen called wanting to know where I was.

I changed, packed up an overnight bag, and headed out to Jen’s parent’s house. On my way up there, Jen called to inform me that she was out at the moment to pick up her grandmother.

When I arrived at Jen’s parent’s house, no one else was there yet other than her parents and her sister, Katie. Katie let me in the door and we briefly chatted about her first week of work.

Jen’s Mom had the house cleaned up and decorated quite nicely. It looked as if they put some work into getting things prepared so I really appreciate the effort. There was even a large bouquet of roses on the dining-room table.

I poured some wine for everyone and then sat outside with Jen’s Dad. We talked about the problems at Delta. Jen came over shortly after that with her grandmother. Jen also brought along a dish we both talked about: The cheesebox. She made it in the shape of a heart which was such an excellent touch.

We sat outside on the deck and talked and ate the cheese and crackers. The cheese was wonderful. It was a nice night outside and the temperature was just right.

While we were outside, Mom and Jim showed up. They joined us outside and shared in the food. Jen’s father and Jim talked about stuff at Dobbins AFB. Jen, Katie, and my Mom talked about wedding stuff.

Lisa and Alan came over around this time too. They joined us outside and engaged in the conversations.

Before I knew it, we were all seated at the dining-room preparing to eat dinner. We started with soup as an appetizer. We had the wonderful butternut squash soup. Next we had a salad, followed by the main course.

The main course consisted of pork chops, green beans, and mashed potatoes. The green beans were especially good.

Alan was in good spirits and was quite lively at dinner. He was talkative and engaging. It made the evening quite nice.

For desert, Jen and her Mom got us an ice cream cake. It was the shape of a heart with icing flowers. On it was written, ‘Jen & Jeff’. Jen and her Mom had a funny story about the cake because they asked the 16-year old clerk to write something nice for our engagement cake. The girl didn’t know what to write so all she came up with was ‘Jen & Jeff’.

The cake was really good. I don’t think I’ve ever had an ice cream cake before. Lynne showed up around this time (she worked late). She got some food and joined us at the table.

Lisa and Alan brought Jen & I a gift which was a bottle of nice cabernet wine. Mom and Jim also brought something for us as well. They brought a pair of very fancy crystal candlesticks. Jen’s grandmother gave us a cookbook from her church.

Maybe I had too much wine - I’m not sure, but I was pretty sleepy. Mom, Jim, Lisa, and Alan left. A short while later Jen, Lynne, and I left too.

We went back to Jen’s house and I immediately got ready for bed. I vaguely remember laying in bed half asleep while Jen tried to talk to me. I don’t think I gave her any coherent responses.

Jen and I spent the night at my house last night. We got up early this morning in order to get to work at a good time.

Unfortunately we had a bit of a crisis this morning as we headed out of the house. Jen couldn’t locate her keys. We frantically searched everywhere for them. We didn’t know where they could go.

After about thirty minutes of searching, Jen finally found her keys inside one of her shoes that were sitting in the living room.

I didn’t have any meetings today. For lunch today a few of us went to an Italian place off Camp Creek road.

After lunch everyone got an email about an across-the-board 10% paycut for everyone at DT. There was a lot of grumbling.

I was actually highly productive today. I also called up both the log cabin church and another church in Kennesaw. The log cabin church called me back and I made an appointment to look at it this afternoon at 6:30pm. I also made a haircut appointment for 7pm on Thursday.

After work I stopped at Publix and bought some supplies. I went back home, laid down for about ten minutes, and then headed out to the log cabin church.

The caretaker of the church, Kathryn, met me there. Sh