Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Today was a pretty long day. Jen and I had cereal for breakfast while I worked on her mortgage info into MS Money. It was a pretty frustrating experience but I think I got it to a point where I’m somewhat happy about it.

It feels great to have a complete financial snapshot for both of us and now I can track everything down to the cent.

While I was working on this, Jen was pretty busy cleaning and getting things pretty organized. She got all of the Christmas decorations taken down and it looks a lot different now. She did a great job with this.

It was a beautiful sunny & warm day outside today. I actually wore shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals.

We drove up to Lisa’s Mom’s house and helped her with her computer. She had a new computer and was trying to install a new wireless network card in it. We helped her get that straightened out. It didn’t take long.

Next we were planned on going to Lisa’s house to help her with her own computer problems. We had to go back home first because we forgot to bring the external HD.

When we got to Lisa’s house, Jen and Lisa went to work on the computer upstairs wile Alan and I went to the gym.

We went to the LA Fitness close to their house and Alan was able to get me in for free for the day. He and I worked triceps and back muscles. It felt great to work out again and I’m looking forward to doing that with Jen at a gym nearby our place. We’re currently trying to decide between Crunch fitness and a new LA Fitness.

After our workout I was pretty sore. We went back to Lisa’s house and Jen was having some trouble with the HD not being recognized on Lisa’s computer. We finally got that worked out and then realized that it would be no use because she is running WinME and the HD is formatted for NTFS.

So, we spent the next eight hours (literally) copying 5GB worth of data to our laptops via 256MB flash drives. That was pretty frustrating.

While we did all of this we watched four movies. We finally finished and left around 1am. I was pretty tired.

When I got out of the shower this morning Jen informed me that she saw more water by the refrigerator when she was getting coffee. I went downstairs and saw that it was indeed still leaking on the back. I turned off the freezer and turned the valve on the water line to stop the flow of water.

I went downstairs to dig up the manual and warranty information. The manual didn’t have any info on the specific problem but they had a phone number to call for service. I collected all of the info and will call sometime today when I’m at work.

As I sat down in the living room to check email I noticed a lot of emails from a cronjob I run to update the mrtg stats for my TiVo stats page. The cronjob runs every 5 minutes and queries a special mrtg module within TivoWebPlus. This was timing out. I looked over at the TiVo and saw that the green power light was not lit. I pressed the power button on the TiVo and then suddenly the Xbox powered down!

This sounds like a power surge problem but only the Xbox was running. Plugged into the same wall is the TV and Stereo but those were off. This was quite strange. I powered up the TV, Stereo, and Xbox. The TiVo power switch was unresponsive so I unplugged it and plugged it back in. Now it powered up.

During the boot process I telnetted into the TiVo and looked through the logs. It looks as if it partially locked up around 2:30am. The 7am daily tivo status email was processed and sent out from the TiVo but otherwise the box was dead. I’m not sure what happened but now it appears to be fine.

When I got to work I submitted a warranty service request for next Monday ‘in the afternoon’ so I’ll have to take off from work. They stress that you have to show proof of purchase so I’m not sure how that will work since it came with my house. I guess I can show them the closing papers.

It has been an extremely dreary and rainy day today. It’s pretty depressing.

After Christmas I started noticing that I was getting packet loss every ten minutes or so. I never had this problem before. It got so bad that my ssh connection would get dropped during the packet loss period of time. It didn’t last very long but was long enough to be noticeable. The worse part was that I would get kicked off of World of Warcraft anytime I played because of the periodic packet loss.

I traced it down to something between my router and the gateway to my DSL provider. I did a lot of research and then fired off a detailed email to the support department at my ISP, Speed Factory.

As luck would have it as soon as I sent off the email the problem stopped for the day. They contacted me and said that they could see no problem. The problem was back that afternoon. A day or two later I had an idea on the cause. I was surfing the internet and Jen was making phone calls - _on the new cordless phone_. While she was dialing and using the phone, I got annoyed because the internet connectivity seemed to drop out. It only took me a few moments to make the correlation between the phone and the internet connectivity loss.

At the time I didn’t think about it but right after Christmas Jen was unpacking and replaced my cordless phone (which was always plugged in but never really used) with hers. I never had a packet loss problem with my old cordless phone and never used a ‘DSL filter’ with it because I never experienced any problems.

I unplugged Jen’s cordless phone and have not seen the packet loss problem since. I’m pretty sure it was somehow causing this problem even when not being used. I haven’t tried to plug it back in and use with the DSL filter but instead I might look at getting a new phone (5.4 GHz) with a mute button and hands-free kit.

All of this crap with the voice line & my DSL reminds me of something that makes me very upset. Jen and I both have cell phones and don’t have a need for a voice line. We don’t need or want a voice line. Unfortunately if we wish to have DSL service we are forced to have a voice line we don’t want. This results in an additional monthly charge of ~$30 for a voice line.

Back in June I got so fed up with this absurdity that I filed a complaint with the Georgia Public Service Commission about the forced-bundling. At the time they told me that they couldn’t do anything about it but would pass my complaint on to BellSouth. A couple of days later I got a call from someone at BellSouth who told me “you must have a voice line due to an FCC regulation and there isn’t anything they (Bellsouth) can do about that“. This is, of course, patently false.

The email said,

Last week I got an email and voice mail from a director over at the Georgia Public Service Commission (PSC) who said that they are going to have formal hearings about this issue due to the large number of complaints they received. That’s great news!

You are receiving this email because you filed a complaint or an opinion with the Public Service Commission in 2004 that appears to be related to the matters that will be addressed in this hearing. Specifically, the Commission will determine:

-Whether it is lawful for a carrier to deny its DSL service to a consumer that desires another carrier’s voice service, and whether this determination is contingent upon the technology used for provisioning of the service (e.g., Integrated Fiber in the Loop - “IFITL”, Unbundled Network Element Platform - “UNE-P”, resale, etc.).

-Whether it is lawful for a carrier to deny its DSL service to a consumer that desires no voice service or an alternative voice service, such as Voice Over Internet Protocol (”VoIP”).

-Whether there are reasonable bases for applying a different standard to incumbent local exchange carriers than competitive local exchange carriers with regard to the bundling of these services.

The hearing will be held January 31 – February 2. The docket number is 19393. You can track the filings in this docket by accessing our website (www.psc.state.ga.us) and entering the docket number.

I checked out the docket and looked through the official documents and saw a lot of really interesting info. I was also invited to the hearing to give testimony but it’s on Jan 31st (a workday) so I will be unable to attend. I really hope that this leads to some change.

This evening Jen and I drove over to a men’s clothing store to return some black shoes Scott gave me for Christmas. I wanted to exchange them for a different style. I found some nice ’slip-on’ black loafers which look great. Jen also helped me find two other pairs of shoes. I got some nice leather (light-brown & darker brown two-tone) casual lace-up shoes. I also got some low-arch brown slip-on loafers. All I need now are some decent slippers to wear indoors and I’m good to go!

After the quick shoe-shopping we went over to Barnes & Noble to get some calendars. I tried to convince Jen that she should wait until April to get a 2005 calendar as they will be super cheap. She isn’t a frugal as I and opted to get one now while they are in-stock and 50% off. She got a cute half-sized wall calendar and I got a ‘1000 things to see before you die’ desk calendar.

Next we went over to Taco Mac for our weekly Thursday outing with our friends. Terry was already there when we arrived. Lynne and Tom showed up later and then Lisa came too. Alan was still in class and couldn’t make it. We had a nice time talking but I found myself getting distracted by ‘Dances with Wolves’ playing on one of the televisions in the background. I wonder if I have ADD?

After a sufficient lazy morning today Jen and I headed out to Crate & Barrel to exchange a few wedding registry items (we ended up with too many of certain items).

On the way there we stopped at Fellini’s pizza near buckhead for some lunch. It was pretty good. I had two slices of pepperoni with onions and garlic.

When we finished lunch we headed over to Lenox mall. It was very crowded and we had to park in the garage. We went straight to Crate & Barrel to return the items for store credit. After that we spent the next hour shopping in the store.

Jen and I looked at the furniture and I found a nice-looking ‘dining table’ which would serve as an excellent computer desk. It was $1000 though. Larry offered to send his old computer table to me but I need to work with him on getting it shipped out.

We bought some kitchen items as well as four cool new glasses. I got two ‘highball’ glasses to use for drinks. It has a thick & heavy bottom which should work nicely for things like Crown & Coke. I also got two tall & thin tube-like glasses to use for things like Red Bull & Vodka.

The shopping started to wear us both out and we went home. On our way out of the mall we stopped at a kiosk to buy Christen a couple of belly-button rings for her birthday.

Later this evening we showered and dressed and headed back to buckhead. This time I tried to take a special secret route which turned into an adventure. Normally I would take the Vinings exit and take the main road all the way down across I-75 and onto West Paces Ferry road. This time I decided to stay on South Cobb drive and turn left onto Bolton road and follow that all the way to Vinings. This didn’t work as planned and we ended up driving through a dark & ghetto section of town. We finally made it to the highway (thank God) somewhere south of the W. Paces Ferry exit. I was totally disoriented.

Our destination was East Andrew’s Café. We’ve never been there before but it turned out to be a pretty cool place. The crowd was a little older than other places (they were our age), the music was good (again, our age), and it was really nice. When we got there it was still fairly empty (although the restaurant proper was full (you need reservations)).

We sat in the bar area at a high-top table and ordered a bottle of cabernet red wine. We split an order of three appetizers. The skirt steak skewers were absolutely scrumptious and I enjoyed every bite of them.

Eventually Christen and her three friends showed up. They joined us around the table. We talked and generally had a good time. As time went on the place really started to fill up more and by the time we left (around midnight) it was super crowded with people standing everywhere. I had a good time. Christen is moving out to Nashville soon and Jen is sad to see her go.

Jen wants to go back sometime on a Wednesday because they have a special 1/2 off bottles of wine on that day of the week.

When we got back home we gave each other a relaxing massage with some of the special new oil we got. It was really nice.

I was up pretty late last night in a final push to get all of the wedding photos done. Carl the photographer did a great job and I think it was worth the hefty $800 for him to shoot the wedding. I was a bit annoyed that he didn’t switch the ISO more often.

For the low-light indoor shots without the external flash he bumped the ISO up to whatever was appropriate. Immediately following that when we moved outside he didn’t re-adjust the ISO. The result was outdoor shots (with flash even) at 800 or even sometimes 1600 ISO. I know first-hand that it’s not easy to remember to do since the ISO isn’t displayed on the viewfinder on the 20D. I also know that in a wedding shoot a lot is happening at once so it’s hard to keep up with those things.

That was my only complaint and even that wasn’t too bad. NeatImage did a great job cleaning up the noise on the high-ISO offenders. It was difficult for me to put most of the pictures up in an album. I’m usually very picky and set a hard-limit for myself of 9 or 18 pictures per album to keep things simplified.

With the wedding photographs I decided to put up most of the ones I processed. I processed most of the pictures that Carl took. This means I have a lot of pictures up on the website for the album.

I also struggled with hosting the ‘original’ large-sized versions of all the photos. I don’t have enough space on my webhosting provider to store them all so I looked into somehow hosting the images only on my home PC (with plenty of space) but still run the gallery from the webhosting provider. The gallery FAQ specifically states that this isn’t possible. Instead we are going to provide CD’s with all the pictures to those who want them.

All of the wedding photos are online in the wedding photo album.

I was pretty tired today since I was up so late last night (12:30am) doing this. I got into work late and left late.

When Jen got home we did thirty-minutes of yoga together. This put her in a pleasant mood. My fancy $133 slippers arrived too. They felt a bit tight and I’m not sure if I should exchange them for a size 11. I wear a size 10.5 shoe and the slippers come in size 10 or 11. I bought a size 10. Jen suggested that the leather will stretch and I should keep them. I’m still not sure what I want to do.

I played WoW very briefly. I’ve been trying to get a special dagger called the ‘Toxic Revenger‘ which is really great for my level. After going through the Gnomeregon instance for the first time with Craig, I wanted to go back in order to try to kill the ‘Vicious Fallout‘ boss to get this weapon.

The only problem is that there is only about a 20% chance for him to have this so when I kill him I only have a 1/5 chance that he will have it on his corpse. A few times yesterday and a few times today I went back to that instance solo and snuck all the way to the vicious fallout. I was very careful to pick off a lone guard and then engage him as he walked by so I would only have to fight one mob at a time.

The battles all went fairly well. I started out with a distract followed by a cheap-shot followed by sinister strikes until I got all five combo points and then I laid down an expose armor to allow me to do more damage. I then followed up with five more sinister strikes followed by a kidney strike to stun him. I then drank thistle tea and unloaded more sinister strikes as well as an evasion (and healing potion). When I got five more points I eviscerated and by that time he was pretty much dead.

The only problem is that I killed him three times yesterday and three times today and didn’t get the coveted toxic revenger. I would attempt it and then log off so that it only took about fifteen minutes per try. It was getting pretty annoying to not get the drop. Finally this evening just before bed I tried again, the eighth time. When I killed him I held my breath and clicked the loot button.

He had it! It was a great feeling of accomplishment. I warped back to town and logged off. I can’t wait to see the shiny new dagger in action the next time I play.

It wasn’t until around 8am that Jen and I woke up and got ready. We got a bountiful amount of sleep last night. Jen had some coffee with Dad in the morning.

We considered going out for breakfast but decided to skip it in light of grandma having food for us at 10:30am. Because we planned on seeing Craig in the afternoon, Dad drove separately.

On the way from Dad’s house to the highway we stopped at Taco Cabana for a light breakfast consisting of a couple of breakfast tacos. Jen liked the potato & egg better than the bean & cheese.

The drive to San Antonio was uneventful and sunny. It was in the mid-fifties outside. Jen and I talked about a great many things while we drove towards San Antonio.

Instead of going straight to grandma’s house I decided to go over on a quick tour of my childhood for Jen. We first went over to Taft High School. Following that we drove by my old middle school and my old elementary school. I also took Jen by my old house on Ridge Oak and the other old house on Ridge Hurst.

From there we drove over to Grandma’s house. Dad was already there. The dining-room was decorated with a banner that said, ‘congratulations’ and there were some other things. It was really nice and made Jen and & feel pretty special. We made introductions and I showed Jen all of the various family portraits of people. As time went on more people showed up. Loretta came followed by Tom & Sharon. Chris, Barbie, and Jacob came next. With everyone assembled and Jennifer introduced to everyone, we had lunch.

Loretta brought some brisket from Bill Miller BBQ. She also brought some turkey for Jen. Grandma made a lot of food. She made some terrific pinto beans, mashed potatoes, corn, potato salad, and green beans.

For desert we had several choices. Grandma made some wonderful German chocolate cupcakes, coffee cake, and cookies. Loretta also brought a cake which said, ‘Congrats Jen & Jeff’. It was really nice for them to do all of this for us.

We stayed quite a while. We had a chance to talk with everyone and I hope that Jen was able to get to know these other family members. Dad left early to head back to Austin. Barbie left and so did Tom & Sharon. We left around 4:30pm or so.

I called up Craig to see if he wanted to get together for a bit. He gave me basic directions to his house and we drove over there. I found Carig’s place with little trouble. Craig was still getting cleaned up when we got there. While we waited, Jen and I played a couple of rounds of Halo 2. We had fun.

Craig, Khyla (his roommate), Jen, and I went out to a restaurant called ‘Chuy’s‘. We all had a ‘Mexican Martini’ and some appetizers. It was nice for the four of us to hang out together. We talked and had a pretty good time. I thought that Jen felt a little left-out when the conversation turned towards World of Warcraft (since Craig and Khyla play), but later Jen told me that she had a great time.

After dinner we went back to Craig’s house. I brought my laptop in to show him some addons for WoW that I use. He seemed pretty excited about them.

Jen and I drove back to Austin and got in around 9pm. We were pretty tired and stayed up with Dad for a little while watching a fascinating show about battleships on PBS. I checked flights for tomorrow and set my alarm to get us up at 5am.

So I’ve been slacking a little in my journal-writing. I just got behind.

Today was a pretty crazy day. On Thursday night Jen and I decided to get out of town this weekend on account of the forecasted bad weather. I checked the flight to St. Maarten and it was oversold as of Thursday night but yesterday it looked better. On Friday night we decided that we would try to go to St. Maarten today.

We got up at our normal weekday time and took a shower. I was pretty excited to pack because packing for St. Maarten is a lot of fun: a pair of shorts, a t-shirt, sandals, and underwear: all thrown in my backpack. I love it.

A bad ice storm moved into Atlanta last night and Delta had already canceled about 150 flights yesterday and around 800 today. I checked the news this morning and they were reporting that Delta ended up canceling about 90% of all flights today in and out of Atlanta on account of the ice storm. They also said that the roads were all iced over. Even with all of the canceled flights, the St. Maarten flight was still scheduled to depart today at 10am.

Everything was iced over today. My explorer (which was sitting in the driveway) was encased in ice. We decided to take Jen’s car (safe & sound in the garage) so we had to switch the cars. I had to lean out with my door open to maneuver the car because the ice was so thick on the windows. In fact I had a hard time opening the door due to the ice.

The drive to the airport was pretty treacherous. They did not do anything to the roads, even on the highways and overpasses. We ended up driving around 35mph the whole way. Jen’s Saab has a ‘weather’ mode and I suppose it helped because we didn’t spin out or loose traction too badly.

We went to the airport park & ride and got to the terminal with little problem. The airport was like a ghost town. The only part where we saw number of people was the international check in line. This makes sense because probably the only flights not getting canceled were the high-value international flights.

When we checked in, the ticket agent was visibly jealous. We were going to sunny St. Maarten and the flight was completely open with about 14 seats empty in first class and around 100 seats open in coach. It went from being overbooked to wide-open probably because of all the canceled flights preventing people from getting to Atlanta for their connection.

As we walked to the train to get to the E concourse we saw the arrivals and departures screens. They were mostly all red from so many flights being canceled - it was surreal. Before going to the gate we stopped at a Starbucks to get a bagel and banana to share while we waited at the gate.

Our gate (E35) was at the end of the concourse and quite cold. I guess the heat was turned off down there. The gate area wasn’t too crowded (probably due to the flight being pretty empty now). We got our seat assignments (3A and 3B in first class). Jen and I were pretty excited about our impending trip. It was so nasty and icy here in Atlanta it is going to be great to lounge on the sunny 80-degrees beach.

The gate agent announced that we were still waiting for a pilot and that the flight would be delayed. The pilot finally showed up but then they wouldn’t board the flight. The agents informed us that Delta operations is suspending all flights from Atlanta for the time being because the earlier flights were freezing up again by the time they got de-iced and taxied out to the runway.

About ten minutes later the announced that the airport was officially closed but our flight was not canceled yet. As time went on we waited around the gate area. I wasn’t sure how long we should wait before giving up and going back home. The more the flight gets delayed, the later it will be when we finally get to St. Maarten. Because we’re only there until tomorrow afternoon, it will get to a point where it’s not worth it to go.

I heard an announcement across the entire concourse instructing all delta Agents to check the IROP page. A few minutes later the gate agent came on the intercom and informed us that the flight had been canceled. What a mess! We were so close I could almost taste it. I would have loved to gone to sunny St. Maarten this weekend but it just wasn’t in the cards.

Jen and I headed back to the car and drove home. It was still treacherous driving conditions so I drove slow again. The problem is that the temperature wasn’t going about 31 degrees today and it was still raining and freezing wherever the rain fell.

We were originally planning on going to Chateu Elan tonight for a romantic getaway in case things didn’t pan out with St. Maarten. Because of the bad road conditions we decided to stay inside and rent a movie and cook a special dinner instead.

The movie rental store was closed as well as the liquor store so we had to settle on the wine selection at Publix. We got some pork chops and snacks and two bottles of wine.

When we got back home I ordered ‘The Princess Diaries 2‘ PPV from the DirecTV website and worked on our wedding photos to get them printed from mpix.com. I uploaded the full-sized images and because we had about 160, it took a long time.

I made some tomato soup for lunch and Jen made some absolutely delicious avocado sandwiches which I love. I tried to TiVo the movie but discovered that we had no satellite signal. I went outside to check and saw, to my horror, that the dish was encased in ice!

Because of the freaky nature of the ice storm, I documented it by taking some pictures of the area.

(our deck & furniture all iced over)

(pansies out front all encased in ice(taken with Sigma 15mm fisheye lens))

(macro of pansy)

The power went out for about thirty minutes but I was still able to do stuff online with the pictures because of the UPS’s and the laptop battery. I opened a bottle of wine and we enjoyed our leisurely day together.

In the evening we got dressed and made our special dinner together. The pork chops weren’t perfect but then again it is always very hard to make good pork chops. Jen and I retired early.

Today was a pretty normal day. I was pretty productive at work and also managed to get a few journal entries posted.

I’ve been spending some time looking at migrating away from MovableType to WordPress. I’m impressed with a lot of the things that WordPress offers. I’m really excited about the ease of installing new ‘themes’ and that everything is php-based. It makes a lot more sense to me than the massive perl mess that is Movable Type. I’m also completely sick of spam. I don’t know if I would get the same with WordPress.

I looked and looked at WordPress but there are still some things that prevent me from migrating.

Jen had a day off from work today and ended up having a horrible day. She relayed some of the problems to me: She got dressed up in her brand-new workout clothes, got ‘Sex & The City‘ loaded up in the DVD player, her water bottle was all ready, and she climbed up on the machine only to discover that it didn’t work!

After five seconds (literally) the machine would shut off as if you weren’t using it. She called up their 24-hour help line but they only took down her info and promised to call back within a day. She was pretty frustrated with the whole situation and it sounds like the machine is broken.

This afternoon I had a meeting across the street to go over the farebreak change requests. We usually get a lot accomplished in these meetings. After the meeting, I headed straight towards home but stopped at Starbucks in vinings.

I ordered a mocha with caramel and one of those tasty chewy cookies. I looked through some paperwork from work while I waited. I was supposed to meet Noel at 5:30pm to talk about a business opportunity.

Back when I first got the house Jen and I were shopping at the Home Depot in vinigns and while we were in the fans section another couple close to our age struck up a conversation with us and that was the end of that.

A couple of weeks ago when Jen and I were at the Publix in vinings a guy approached me and told me that I looked familiar and asked if I went to GA Tech. He did look somewhat familiar and later I realized that it was the same guy from Home Depot months ago.

Again we talked a little despite me not being the guy he thought I was. He asked about what I do for a living and then mentioned that he has some friends who do similar work. He said that if I was interested in doing some work on the side, he could put me in contact with his friends. It sounded harmless enough so I gave him my business card.

About a week later he called me up and asked if I wanted to meet him for coffee to talk about it some more. And so here I am today.

Noel showed up and gave me his speech on what it is that he was talking about. It sounds like some sort of affiliate marketing thing but with a pyramid-scheme twist in that you get paid higher commissions depending on how many people you have under you.

He invited Jen and I to go to a seminar thing next Tuesday.

When I got home Jen and I cooked dinner together. We made our favorite curry tofu dish. Having this put her in a better mood (the wine helped too). Together she and I printed out her boarding pass for her flight tomorrow.