Jeff Billimek’s Journal

I was up around 7am. We all took a shower, got ready, and left the condo.

On our way to the theme park we stopped at Chick Fil A for some breakfast.

Katie and Chris drove this time. We went to Epcot and parked pretty close to the entrance of the park. Everyone was pretty excited to be here and so was I.

Purchasing tickets was a bit painful. Katie gave Jen an old one-day ‘hopper’ pass so she was covered. I bought a 1-day park hopper pass and it was around $100. Just for one person for one day.

The first thing we did when we entered the park was to go into the big globe thingy and the ride they have inside there. It was based around the science and technology of communication.

Next we went to a newer ride called ‘Mission: Space‘. This one was really cool. There were signs outside warning people not to go on the ride if they are prone to motion sickness. Katie opted out of this ride citing motion-sickness issues so it was just Chris, Jen, and I.

The way they make you wait for the ride is very cool. Instead of a long line, you go through a series of steps/sections to learn about the ride and safety features. It was a very short wait and seemed shorter yet because of how they handle lines at Disney.

In the ‘briefing room’ for the ride, we watched a video and it was the guy from Apollo 13 giving the speech. We lined up and entered the flight capsule thing. It was supposed to be a ride simulating a space flight up to Mars and then a landing. There were four ’stations’ that one could occupy. They had different controls that we’re supposed to use at certain times when in instructed.

We were also told not to look side-to-side as that may make you feel light headed. I thought this was poppycock and indeed when the ride was going I looked from side-to-side. I immediately got light-headed! The ride was really fun and there were lots of switches and dials and buttons to press. It was a lot of fun.

I said earlier that we were supposed to do certain things at certain times in order to make the ‘flight’ a success. I tried to thwart this by doing things the wrong way but sadly the simulation continued as f I was doing the right thing.

Afterwards we met up with Katie and did the ‘fast pass‘ for the test track ride nearby. We had some time to kill so we walked around and almost went to the ‘Universe of Energy’ place but it was going to take too long so we opted out on that.

By this time it was about time for us to go on the ‘Test Track‘ ride. We didn’t have to wait long at all. Part of this was because we skipped the normal line and went in the ‘fast pass’ line.

The entire waiting area for this ride was even better than the ‘Mission: Space’ ride. It was set up like the inside of a car testing lab with a lot of moving machines and such.

We skipped ahead to the front of the line and were soon in the ‘briefing room’ where we learned about the ride and what it entailed. Soon after that we were on the ride.

The ride itself was pretty fun but seemed short and wasn’t as thrilling as I thought it would be. Nonetheless I had fun.

Afterwards we went to the Soarin’ ride. This was pretty cool. The wait was really long but again the layout was well done and it didn’t seem like a long wait. It was actually pretty cool because all of the employees were dressed up like people working for an airline and the whole ride was meant to feel like an airplane ride with us going to a ‘gate’ for our ‘departure’. I liked that aspect of it a lot.

The ride itself was an interesting way to combine a thrill ride with an IMAX movie and scents. The ride was sort of a floating seat hovering in front of the giant screen portraying scenes around California as if we were on a hang-glider. During the flight they piped scents of the areas that we were supposed to be flying over.

After the ride we went to another attraction that was in a theater that was about the cycle of life on the earth. It was an animation with the Lion King characters presenting the info. It wasn’t that exciting.

It was after lunch time and we were hungry so we walked over to the ‘World Showcase’ area across the lake. There was a great deal of indecisiveness about where to have lunch. Finally after a very long time we finally ate at an Italian restaurant. The people working there were all from Italy and it seemed authentic.

Jen and I wanted to check out Magic Kingdom so we cut out early and took the monorail from Epcot to Magic Kingdom. The place was really crowded. As soon as we entered we made a mad dash to Space Mountain and rode on that. It was really fun and I’m glad we got to do it.

Afterwards we went around to a few rides but the waits were fairly long so we were not able to do a whole lot. One thing I noticed that was a bit disturbing was a few parents were pushing around grown children (like around twelve years old) in strollers.

Eventually it started to rain and our fun was over. We rushed to the monorail station and arranged to meet Katie and Chris at the car. Jen and I got a bit wet.

We were hungry and went straight to the Universal Studios area for dinner. After walking around a bit, we settled on going to ‘Margaritaville‘. Katie was able to secure us a seat quickly despite there being a wait. She’s good lie that.

Dinner was great. We sat outside and had margaritas and had a good time. Being that we were sitting outside, we had a good vantage point over the whole area. Universal Studios is a lot like the Downtown Disney but seems bit less ‘innocent’.

(Jen and I after dinner)

After dinner we walked around a bit and then went back to the condo. Jen and I had a 5:30am flight out so we went to bed early in order to get a decent amount of sleep.

I was still not over feeling sick from a couple of days ago. This morning I felt really bad so I called in sick to work.

Throughout the day I slept a lot and took it easy. I think it helped.

I also did some work remotely - there was just too much going on that I didn’t want to let it sit.

Jen and I woke up early today and made plans to go hiking this morning at Kennesaw Mountain. It was a very nice day out today so I was happy to be going on a hike.

We drove to the park and hiked to the top of Kennesaw Mountain and then back down. The weather was wonderful.

After hiking we stopped at the nearby Costco. Jen bought some fancy sunglasses and we also got some groceries.

Next we went to Dick’s to buy some new laces for my hiking boots. Lynne was working today so we said hello to her.

We went back home and watched ‘The Village‘. It was a bit of a disappointment when I found out what was really going on.

After the movie I went downstairs to work on photo processing. This went well. While I was doing that, Jen watched the movie ‘Monster in Law‘.

For dinner we had leftovers and they were good. It was a really nice day.

I’ve recently switched-up how I process photos I take with my digital camera (Canon EOS 20D).

I take all photos in RAW mode to give me the most latitude during post-processing. The biggest advantage is that I can process photos in 16-bit mode instead of 8-bit mode that jpeg would give. I can also set the correct white balance after-the-fact.

I dump all of the files from the CF card onto the HD using ‘Downloader Pro‘ to organize them by year, month, and day. When I went to Alaska, I have a folder for all photos taken on August 27th called:

My Documents/My My Pictures/Camera/2005/08/2005-08-27, Alaska

Inside those directories, Downloader Pro would rename the files from the CF card in a superior format. For example, from the above shoot in Alaska on the 27th, one of the files is named:

2005-08-27-185411-3762.cr2

The format is: year-month-day-time (hour, minute, second)-picture number.cr2

This way I always have unique names for all of the photos and they can easily be organized by the timestamp they were shot at.

Inside the directory containing the photos is a subdirectory called ‘edited’ where I place saved copies of all edited photos. This way the originals are preserved.

Because I can easily take hundreds of photos a day, I browse through all of the photos I took using the Microsoft RAW viewer in order to decide which ones I want to edit. I then edit those selected photos one at a time in Photoshop.

Since they are RAW, I use the built-in Abode RAW processor. Some people swear by programs such as C1 and the like, but I prefer the Adobe version. The RAW processor that comes with CS2 has a nifty feature to automatically suggest tweaks for exposure, brightness, shadows, highlights, and contrast. I usually end up with something between the original settings and what Photoshop suggests. I find that I rarely have to tweak white balance but that is probably because I mostly shoot outdoors and the auto whitebalance is pretty good for outdoor light.

I also tell the RAW processor to open the files in Photoshop using sRGB, 16-bit, and the original size.

I’m no Photoshop expert and I rarely find myself doing things like curves and levels adjustments. Instead I now do the following:

- Remove any dust specs with the healing brush. There are a few dust specs on the sensor that show up in photos with lots of sky. It is super easy to remove these with the healing brush.

- Velvia Vision Plugin. This is mapped to F2. Depending on the subject and conditions I’ll set the saturation intensity level to anywhere between 5% and 30%. I also usually let it do ’smart contrast’ at level 1 and ‘add dynamic range’ at level 1 too. I’ve found that this usually gives the best results. I should note that I purposely leave in-camera saturation levels to as neutral as possible mainly so I can play with saturation during post-processing.

- Canon 20D CSpro Plugin. This is mapped to F3. I use this for sharpening. I don’t do much with this except for level 1 or level 2 sharpening.

- Defish (if necessary). I use the PTLens filter to defish photos taken with the Sigma 15mm fisheye lens and even then not all of the time. Sometimes the photo will look ok when taken with the fisheye that it isn’t noticeably distorted.

- Crop (if necessary). If I need to crop, I use the crop tool with the aspect set to 1.5in x 1in for landscape shots and 1in x 1.5in for portrait shots.

- Convert from 16-bit to 8-bit. This is mapped to F4. I do this before saving since I save in jpeg mode and jpegs can’t be saved in 16-bit.

- Save the photo to the ‘edited’ folder with a ‘_edited’ suffix. For example, 2005-08-27-185411-3762_edited.jpg.

- Save a small (web) version. This is mapped to both F6 or F8. If the photo is taken in portrait mode, I hit F6. If it is taken in landscape mode I hit F8. It will automatically resize the photo such that the long edge is 800 pixels and then save it with the _edited suffix in ‘My Documents’. After it saves the photo, it then closes it letting me move on to the next one to process.

I feel that processing photos in Photoshop is like putting on makeup: less it more.

After I have processed all of the photos from the trip, I end up with a collection of smaller versions to go through sitting in ‘My Documents. If I’m going to be putting these into a photo album, I’ll further whittle-down the photos leaving me with only the absolute best from what I started with.

For example: I had 2,111 photos from the entire Alaska trip. Of those, I selected 146 to edit. Of those 146, I put 100 into the photo album.

It’s been a very busy week for me this week. We officially started ’string test’ of the 3.0 release this week and I’ve had a lot of work involved with getting that ready.

I’ve been so busy, in fact, that the bankruptcy news of yesterday didn’t really bother me simply because there has been too much work to do that I haven’t had time to sit around and talk about it with co-workers. Some of the other guys on my team are in the same boat.

I’m actually a bit surprised at the overall reaction to the bankruptcy news. In general, most people I work with aren’t that surprised and are taking the attitude that they will wait and see what happens. I sort of expected there to be a bigger hit to morale.

Before leaving for work this morning I packed up my pelican case for the Austin trip this weekend. The plan was to fly out this evening to Austin on the 6:30pm flight. However as the day went on I realized that this wasn’t realistic because they canceled an earlier flight which added a bunch of people to the one we wanted to take. There were no later flights and as a result there wasn’t sufficient room on the plane for the three of us to go. This was especially problematic considering that Katie was flying on a buddy pass and was pretty much at the bottom of the standby list.

I rebooked us to the 8am flight tomorrow morning and then canceled tonight’s stay at the hotel and adjusted the car rental reservation. I also called Larry to let him know of the changes.

Since I’m going to be out of the office tomorrow, I tried to wrap up everything I was working on and ended up working until around 7:30pm. It was dark outside when I left the office. Despite working late and hard this week I felt great. It’s always such a good feeling to have a challenging task and to get it completed. I love that feeling of satisfaction.

Jen was pretty happy that things worked out this way and we had a relaxing evening after work. I opened up the ‘Dancing Llama’ malbec wine but it wasn’t that good. This isn’t too surprising given that it only cost around $5 for the bottle.

We had a good time sitting in the living room, drinking wine, and talking about our days.

Swimming and hanging onto the tube behind the boat yesterday must have caused me to use muscles I don’t normally use. I slept better last night than I have in a long time and I loved it. It was such a great feeling to wake up feeling so incredibly rested. The Doubletree Suites hotel has some great beds and I’m glad for it.

Jen and I took our time getting ready this morning. We talked about a trip out to Seattle and checked the flight schedule to see what works best. The plan is to leave Thursday evening and return on Sunday or Monday.

Katie told us that she saw a taco-place near our hotel and so we decided to try to walk there for breakfast. We walked over to the place that Katie described but found out that it was closed. This was regrettable.

Instead, we walked back to the hotel and had breakfast at the hotel restaurant. It wasn’t that great.

Next, we got into our car and met up with Larry, Amy, & the gang to follow them out to Pedernales Falls State Park. Along the way we stopped at Target to get some supplies and fishing poles for the kids.

After that we got onto highway 290 and went West for about 30 miles and then turned north on highway 3232 for six more miles until finally reaching the park. It’s actually fairly expensive now. In the past it was a few dollars per car, now it is $5/person.

We drove along in the park until we reached the parking lot for the river access. It was super hot outside today but there were blue skies so to me it was all good.

It took a while to get everything situated with the kids but eventually we walked down the path to the river. We selected a spot in the shade of some cypress trees next to the river.

(Jen hanging out by the river)

I took some photos with Jen’s camera and then changed into my bathing suit to swim around in the river too. It was such a nice day outside today. The almost overwhelming heat made the river feel that much better. I didn’t have any appropriate footwear for the river so I had to go barefoot and it was a bit difficult given the rocky bottom of the river.

The large expansive blue skies with the puffy clouds made for some excellent weather and fun times. We all moved downstream to a nicer place to swim and also do some fishing.

Larry ferried the kids across the river to the bank on the other side with access to a deeper spot to fish from. He caught some grasshoppers for bait and proceeded to try to teach them how to fish. They seemed more interested in the grasshoppers than the actual act of fishing.

(Larry showing the kids how to fish)

Nothing was caught - probably because the fish were too small and as a result the grasshoppers simply got nibbled to pieces instead of eaten. It was still fun and I think generally the kids had a good time.

(Jen snapped a photo of me at the falls overlook)

We didn’t remain too much longer as there was still a lot to do today. We all went back up to where the cars were and packed up. I wanted to see the falls so Jen and I went our own way and drove over to where the falls are. Larry, Amy, and company headed back to Austin.

Jen and I walked down the path towards the falls and stopped at the overlook. Normally I would want to go down to where the falls are but we were pressed for time so we just watched from the overlook.

We headed back towards Austin and I gave Dad a call. We made plans to have lunch together at a Mexican restaurant near Dad’s place. Jen and I got there before Dad and Jill and stopped at the liquor store to buy an inexpensive bottle of cabernet for the hotel room tonight. I also tried giving Craig a call, but only got his voice mail.

Jen and I ordered some margaritas and had queso dip and salsa dip with chips while we waited. Dad and Jill showed up and the four of us had a very pleasant lunch together. We talked for a while and ordered some lunch and then headed over to Dad’s house to see the changes he’s put in place.

We didn’t have a lot of time since I’m supposed to be going to the football game with Larry so we left around 4:45pm. We drove straight to the University COOP bookstore to park in order to meet up with them.

Jen and I met up with the gang in the bookstore. They were buying clothes and stuff. I bought a UT t-shirt and changed into it in the bathroom. Larry and I grabbed Tucker and Lily and headed towards the stadium. Jen and Katie were going to walk around campus and Amy and Cal were going to go back to the hotel.

It was fun walking through campus again - as it always it. Today was especially exciting due to the buzz of the football game and the festive atmosphere. We walked along with a throng of people as thousands of people converged on the stadium for the game.

Our seats were in the upper deck of the alumni section. We took Tucker and Lily and made our way to the seats. Unlike last time, our seats are much higher up. This doesn’t get us as close to the action, but it does give a much better view of the field and everything that is going on. Our seats are still closer to the 50-yard line.

The University of Texas vs. Rice football game was a lot of fun. Rice never had a chance and they got stomped by UT. Tucker and Lily did pretty good. They were excited to see the real-live Bevo walking around on the field. Lily was a bit confused when she also saw the Bevo mascot walking around and Larry had to explain that the walking Bevo was a man dressed up as Bevo.

During the second quarter, Lily started to get a little bored and noted that she wanted to go back to the hotel and see mommy. Larry tried to dissuade her by buying some M&M’s for both Tucker and Lily. This worked for a while until Lily ran out of M&M’s and complained that she wanted more. It was pretty cute when this happened because Tucker offered her his leftover M&M’s.

Around this time Katie called to see if we wanted her and Jen to take Lily back with them to the hotel. What great timing. Larry left the game with Lily to deposit her with Katie and Jen. While he was gone, Tucker started asking about when we would be leaving. I told him ‘not too much longer’, but he was insistent that we leave soon.

Larry came back with some hot dogs and Tucker calmed down. We watched the incredible half-time show. The University of Texas marching band is quite impressive and I always enjoy watching them perform.

Finally around the third quarter (the score was something like 43-0), Tucker started getting very restless so we headed out. Larry, Tucker, and I walked back to the car and drove to Larry’s hotel.

Jen was there with Katie, Amy, Lily, and Cal by the pool. Larry and I joined them. Jen had already ordered me a mojito - so nice of Jen. She also showed me the stuff she bought at the bookstore. She was wearing most of it: A cute pair of comfy short shorts and a white longhorns t-shirt. She looked great. We dipped out feet in the pool and talked while the kids played. It started getting late so we collected them all and headed in.

At the Four Seasons hotel in Austin they have a fire pit thing sitting outside with supplies to roast marshmallows and make smores. Katie wanted to do this and so did I, so we went off and made a smore each. I got my marshmallow nice and golden brown before sandwiching it between two pieces of gram crackers. It was delicious!

Jen and I headed out and went back to our hotel. We were both pretty tired. Jen and I laid on the comfortable bed and talked. I was quite relaxed lying down and Jen was occupied with her knitting. I was quite dirty from the river and then the football game so I took a shower. It felt great to be clean.

We turned in for the night and I slept like a rock.

Jen and I made plans this weekend to go to Stoney River tonight for a wine tasting. We invited some friends but only got responses from Terri and Lynne.

Just like the past few months it was another long day at work today. I cut out a little early (5:45pm) in order to head up to Jen’s office. Traffic wasn’t that bad and I made it up there quicker than I thought.

I picked up Jen from her office and together we continued up GA-400 towards Stoney River. When we arrived at the restaurant, Terri was outside waiting for us. We all paid our $10 tasting fee for the wine tasting and headed over to the tasting area.

For some reason I thought the wine tasting would be at a table, but instead it was a tall table set up with people standing around and the wine distributor guy pouring glasses.

The tasting was advertised as ’boutique wines from Napa Valley’ but out of the four wines we tasted, only one was from Napa. The other three were from Oregon and Washington state.

We started with a white wine, followed by two reds (one of which was a pino), and finished with a Cabernet. The Cabernet was my favorite. It was from Basel Cellars from Columbia Valley in Washington Sate.

Jen and Terri talked a lot and enjoyed their wine. Lynne called Jen to let her know that she was on the way. I put our name down for a table since it was about a thirty minute wait.

While we waited for Lynne I asked the wine tasting dude if he could give us a refill on the cabernet - he did. Lynne showed up and we all got seated.

When we got situated at our table I ordered a bottle of 2003 Sterling Cabernet for us all to share. It was good wine.

Every single time I’ve been to Stoney River in the past (and it’s been about a dozen times), I’ve always ordered the exact same thing: mixed greens salad with honey mustard dressing and the ribeye steak.

Today I wavered from that path and got a new steak that is marinate din coffee grinds. Normally I am completely disgusted by coffee but the waiter assured me that this particular steak has absolutely no coffee taste and that the coffee marinade only gives it a sweet flavor.

My steak was pretty good and sure enough, there was no coffee taste. I do think, however, that I prefer the ribeye or the lodge filet. I think that next time I’ll get the filet.

We all had an absolutely wonderful time. It was fun to talk to and catch up with Terri and Lynne. It was also apparent that Jen had a wonderful time too.

It was pretty late when we left.

As a result of being up so late last night doing the production activities for work, I slept in late. I didn’t feel so bad since it’s a Friday and Carole is flexible.

When I woke up, I paged Carole to let her know that I would be in late today. She didn’t have a problem with this. Before leaving the house, I quickly set up iTunes under Jen’s account on the computer downstairs. She has off from work today and wanted to do some work with the music library if she has time.

My day pretty much consisted of working on things related to the string test for our 3.0 release. We’re supposed to enter system test on Monday so we scrambled to get things ready in time.

I left work around 5:15pm and stopped at the hair salon near Publix to get a hair cut. Unfortunately they close at 6pm on Friday so I couldn’t get a haircut today.

When I got home, Jen was finishing up a move she got from Netflix called ‘The Wedding Date‘. It was a girly movie and she loved it.

Jen and I had plans to go out tonight with her old friend Heather and her husband. Jen and Heather were friends when they went to school together back during elementary school and middle school.

We made plans to meet at a restaurant called ‘Watershed‘ in Decatur. I printed out directions and we got ready and left around 6:30pm. We were supposed to meet Heather and Elliott (her husband) at 7pm.

Traffic wasn’t too bad and we made it to the restaurant in time. At first we couldn’t find the restaurant because of how it is placed next to a dry cleaners place, but we eventually found it and got the last parking space near the entrance area.

Heather and Elliott were running late (they telephoned the restaurant to let us know), so Jen and I took a seat at the bar and each ordered a glass of malbec red wine.

While we waited, we talked and had a nice time. The restaurant looked like a fun place. Apparently there are quite a few non-chain restaurants in the Decatur are and so it is appealing.

Heather and Elliott showed up and we all sat at the bar while we waited for our table. It was fun to meet Jen’s childhood friend. Heather was more attractive than I imagined (not sure how one comes up with a pre-conceived notion about how someone is going to look), and her husband was nice too.

They are both lawyers and honeymooned in Kauai (the north shore). Heather watches MTV’s “Laguna Beach” and “Real World“, so we had some things to talk about. It was also a bit refreshing to speak with people who know you work for Delta but don’t take that as an opportunity to tell you everything they hate about Delta. Instead they confessed to being loyal Delta customers.

Dinner was great. We had a lot to talk about and I had a nice time. The food was good too. I had a ‘BLT’ salad followed by an entrée called ‘Fried Okra Pancakes’ with veggies too. It was very good and I would have it again in a heartbeat.

After dinner we headed out and drove over to the Fernbank which is just down the street. We bought tickets to the 10pm showing of the IMAX film ‘Mystery of the Nile‘.

The actual event was called ‘Martinis & IMAX‘. Inside the Fernbank IMAX lobby were a ton of twenty-something’s who were all nicely dressed sitting and standing around in small groups with drinks in their hands. A line began to form shortly after we purchased our $10 tickets for the movie.

We got in line and I went off to a table selling drinks to buy Jen and I each a glass of cabernet sauvignon. Everyone was allowed to bring their drinks into the movie which was fun.

It was a full house and we had to sit fairly close to the front of the large screen. The movie itself was interesting and educational. Because we were so close to the screen, I got a bit of motion-sickness during parts of the film.

After watching this movie about the Nile River, I’m ok never going down the Nile. In particular there are sections along the river in Sudan where locals like to shoot at people in the river for fun.

The movie wasn’t that long - only about an hour. After the movie we went out separate ways and went home. It was fun to go out on a ‘dinner and movie’ date with Jen.

Once we got home I was up fairly late doing some things for work. I’m running a script to collect performance stats and it needs to be checked periodically due to a bug where it crashes and stops collecting stats. I worked on this.

Jen wanted to do some painting today so shortly after waking up, she did some touch-up painting in the upstairs bathroom.

Around 11am we went over to J. Christopher’s to have a late breakfast with Mom and Jim. We also gave Mom a late birthday present that we’ve been trying to give her for a long time now.

After breakfast we looked around inside Micro Center (next-door). I bought three CD cases which hold 40 CDs each. They were only $3 each and we need a place to store all of the DVDs we burn.

Jen went to the shoe store she liked (Foot Prints) and bought a pair of brown shoes. Afterwards we went to Home Depot to get a gallon of paint. It is pretty cool to watch them mix the paint with the fancy paint-mixing-machine.

This particular Home Depot had improved shopping carts with little LCD screens on the handle getting ‘live data’ and displaying current sales and such in the store. I wonder what type of wireless protocol they use to transmit the data and what the range is. The displays must be battery powered too and there were no indications of a way to recharge them - quite interesting.

We got home and did some work around the house. I did work mostly around laundry and some picking up. I also did some work-from-home today. Jen was working on the desktop downstairs and reported a problem. I went downstairs to help diagnose it.

She was getting a BSOD with a strange STOP error code. I did the usual power cycle a few times to see if it had staying-power, it did. I was able to boot into safe mode which is a good thing.

After booting in Safe Mode, I rebooted and got a different BSOD. This persisted too so I booted back into safe mode and proceeded to uninstall the video driver completely.

This seemed to solve the problem until we got the original BSOD again. This time I powered off and disconnected the old HD as well as the broken CD-R drive. After I did this I booted back up and did an exhaustive memory test. Everything looked to be ok now.

With the computer now booting without error, I installed the latest Catalyst drivers for the video card Sapphire ATI Radeon x800 PRO and everything seemed to be good now.

Scott came over bearing some food. We made some last-minute plans for a family dinner tonight. There will be eight of us. Jen did most of the work getting everything together (I was fixing the computer at the time).

Jen’s parents, her grandmother, Katie, Chris, and Scott were having dinner with us today. When they all arrived, I showed them photos from Orlando, Austin, and yesterdays hiking trip on the XBMC.

We all snacked on chips, salsa, guacamole, as well as cheese and crackers.

I grilled up a huge slab of salmon and we had that on a salad with onions, fresh mozzarella cheese, and tomatoes. It was a very good dinner.

After dinner we had some fresh brownies (Jen’s Mom brought those) with ice cream and celebrated Katie’s birthday.

Eventually they all left and I did some more work for tomorrows system test start. Sameer had some last-minute code changes late on Friday so I built it and got everything ready for a deploy.

While I was doing this, I watched two-and-a-half episodes of MTV’s Laguna Beach. I’m pretty convinced now that the show is scripted.

I don’t know what got into me but I woke up at 5:30am and was awake and alert and ready to begin the day. As a result I made it into work by 6:30am.

Because of the early arrival time, I got a lot of work done today. I planned on leaving early so I wouldn’t work too much overtime. However, this plan did not work and I didn’t get out of the office until around 6:30pm.

Over on the gallery website someone started a thread about integrating the photo gallery with Google Maps. At first someone came up with a theme for Gallery that harnessed google maps. Later, someone came up with a module and I downloaded the initial version of this and played around with it.

Since it was in a very development stage, I had to learn a lot about how the google maps API works and tweaked the module to fit my needs. Initially the module didn’t work with Internet Explorer, so I researched and found a way to make it work correctly.

It didn’t take me too long to look up the GPS coordinates for many of the locations the various photo albums were based in. A great website called lat-long.com helped a lot. I didn’t assign GPS coordinates for all of the albums because many are repeats of the same location, and having pushpins on a map for the location would only mean that some albums are masked by the multiple albums. So, instead, what I did was work from current-day and move backwards.

For example, I’ve been to Hawaii four or five times. Each time was to the same place, Kauai. If I had entered the same GPS coordinates for all five Hawaii photo albums, they would all simply be stacked on top of each other on the map and it wouldn’t be useful. Instead, I only entered GPS coordinates for the most recent trip. This doesn’t seem like the best solution because I’m going to have to change old albums as I create new ones with the same location. I’m not sure the best way to handle this going forward.

I also modified the original design to allow for an automatic-resize of the map width as well as keyboard navigation like at the normal google maps site. I’m pretty happy with the result!

It was another late day at work today. It’s been a long week and I’m looking forward to the weekend.

Tonight I finished up most of the work related to installing the new HD. I had everything taken care of with the XP desktop and moved on to the linux box.

Everything went great. I got the old 250GB HD installed on the linux box (It’s an SATA drive). I already had kernel support for SATA drives and, in particular, for the SATA Promise 376 (PDC20376) controller on the P4PE motherboard.

So I was pleased to see the HD be recognized as the /dev/sda1 device. I had no problem partitioning it with fdisk and formatting it as a ReiserFS partition. I copied everything over from the old /home partition with the command,

rsync --progress --stats -a /home/* /mnt/new_home

This went with no problems. I then unmounted the old /home partition and remouted it on the new /dev/sda1 device. Everything worked great. Satisfied, I replaced the old /home entry in /etc/fstab with:

/dev/sda1               /home           reiserfs        noatime                 0 1

In hindsight, I should have rebooted to make sure it all worked ok, but I was pretty confident with this so I formatted the old HD that used to house the /home tree and got it ready to receive the root partition. For this, I booted into the Gentoo LiveCD and mirrored the existing drive (/dev/had) to the old home drive (/dev/hdb). I used the dd command:

dd if=/dev/hda of=/dev/hdb

This took a while but went through with no problems. After this, I ran the cfdisk command to delete the old root partition on the new HD (/dev/hdb3) and recreate it larger to fill up the new drive. Then I ran resize_reiserfs to expand the filesystem on the recreated partition.

After this I rebooted to the new setup and encountered a problem. To m surprise the problem wasn’t with the moved root partition - that all went fine. It was with mounting /home. For some reason, during bootup, the system couldn’t find /dev/sda1. This was entirely perplexing.

I spent a couple of hours trying to diagnose the problem and finally came up with a fix to the problem. It seems that the kernel configuration I had would detect the SATA drive but only after a couple of minutes - it was sort of a delayed detection.

This was very strange indeed and googling wasn’t much help. I finally found an obscure reference to the problem being related to additional kernel parameters enabled relating to SATA devices and Promise controllers. I found these and enabled them. This did the trick, and the next time at bootup it found the drive finally.

(from dmesg):

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libata version 1.11 loaded.
sata_promise version 1.01
ACPI: PCI Interrupt Link [LNKH] enabled at IRQ 11
PCI: setting IRQ 11 as level-triggered
ACPI: PCI Interrupt 0000:02:04.0[A] -> Link [LNKH