Monthly Archive for March, 2006

Mar 3rd 2006

first week in the new job

Published by Jeff 1 Comment

It’s been a full week in my new job. The week has been pretty rough.

For example, it took me until Friday to get my commute route finalized. I didn’t have a problem getting from my house to the Spring Street exit on I20, but after that things get a little confusing. All of the wacky one-way streets and conditional “no turns” or “no turns between 4pm & 6pm except for the day of the week which is a prime number” type signs really messed me up.

Thanks to Google maps and trial & error, I have my route set and finally today I had a flawless commute to & from home with no missed turns or getting lost. I think I finally got the hang of it.

Another good thing is that my commute is about five minutes shorter than it was to Delta. I was under the impression that it would be slightly longer, not shorter - so this was a pleasant surprise.

Things seem to be a lot more structured in this new job. This is both good and bad. It’s good because things are always moving ahead and we don’t deal with bad planning or constantly disappointing the customer. It’s bad in that I’m simply not used to it. I’m used to a much different approach to things. It’ll take some getting used to.

The other negative point I’ve been experiencing so far is that I’m starting as a nobody again and have to prove myself and establish a reputation. I think I had a pretty good reputation and as a result a decent amount of ‘clout’ at my previous job. I’m no longer a big fish and that’ll take some getting used to.

The main thing that I’m most worried about is that I don’t want to fail. I’m dealing with a completely different environment (from a development point-of-view) by doing web development with ASP.NET. While this is something I want to try (I’ve wanted to do .NET development since it was first in beta form back in 2000), I’m so much more at home in a command-line unix environment. The new tools and methodologies and concepts are going to take some getting used to.

Fortunately my manager knows my history and I think he’s willing to give me some time to ramp-up on this, so in that respect it’s a great opportunity.

I felt pretty uncertain about how I would do starting out. But now I’m feeling a little better. I hope next week goes better.

Mar 4th 2006

disc golf

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Jen and I went to Oregon Park in West Cobb to play some Disc Golf (I call it Frisbee Golf). I had a great time because the weather was nice and I just love being outside when the sky is blue and the sun is out.

This was Jen’s second time playing and she did better. It was a good day.

Mar 5th 2006

dine at jen & jeff’s

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We had some family over for dinner tonight. Jen’s parents and grandmother came over. Because Costco has such large portions of food that they sell, we had some pork loin frozen still. I love the pork loin so I can’t complain.

Jen made the wonderful recipe with the pork loin cooked in olive oil, garlic, chopped peppers (red & yellow), and other spices.

It was super-delicious and we had a good time entertaining everyone.

Mar 10th 2006

crackberry

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So the highlight today was when I got issued a blackberry device at work. I’ve never used a blackberry before and only really knew that it was a handheld which allowed you access to email.

I was shocked to see how well RIM implemented this concept. They integrated beautifully with Exchange and the blackberry has (nearly) instantaneously access to email, contacts, calendar, and tasks.

This, when used as a replacement for a pager, works much better. Now email is truly portable.

I hate to admit that I spent way too much time diving as much as I could into learning about the blackberry. When I get excited about something I devote a tremendous amount of time to sucking up as much knowledge as I can on it.

After not even having it a full day, I flashed a new (experimental?) version of the OS and fully-customized it to my liking.

Oh and I’m sure it’ll make me more productive, too.

Mar 11th 2006

party night

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Jen left the house this morning in order to go work out at the gym with her friend from work, Lisa. She asked if I wanted to go (since I recently joined LA Fitness too), but I passed since I didn’t want to interfere with her spending time with Lisa. Later I found out that she was sad I didn’t want to go. I made a mental note of this fact.

I occupied myself this morning with installing the Cisco VPN software on my laptop as well as the desktop computer. Some of the things that makes me happy about my new job are:

1) They don’t send you to Abu Ghraib if you run an IM client on your computer.
2) Not every single outgoing port is blocked so you can check your home IMAP email.
3) The VPN client is installable on other computers without having to reverse-engineer the code and break numerous rules.
4) The VPN switch allows split-path tunneling which in essence allows you to communicate with your local network (i.e. see your printer) while connected to the VPN.

These are all things that, in my mind, increase productivity and make me a better worker.

With the VPN installed, I can run Outlook on all of the computers connected to the company exchange server in cached mode. This allows me to basically keep up-to-date and synchronized with my email from any of the computers that I use. The big thing for me is a shared calendar and address book between home and work.

After I did this, I cleaned up my address book and re-synchronized with my cell phone.

Jennifer got home around 1:30pm and took a nap upstairs. I watched a two-hour movie that I downloaded last November titled, ‘Flight 93: The Flight that Fought Back‘ from the Discovery channel. It was a chilling recreation of the events on September 11th, 2001 related to flight 93.

Needless to say it was an emotional experience and I found myself again very angry at the barbaric islamic extremists who take joy at intentionally murdering thousands of innocent civilians. I honestly don’t see how we can ever be at peace with such a group.

I woke Jen up around 4pm and we cleaned up around the house. Eventually we got cleaned up, and dressed for the party tonight. We left the house around 6pm.

We drove up to Costco in order to buy some crackers and wine and some other things. I was drawn to the section with the fun computer stuff and saw a new Microsoft wireless ‘laser’ mouse & keyboard. It was a good price so we bought it. Jen had been complaining about our current keyboard so hopefully this will make the problems go away.

After Costco we went to Dick’s to see Lynne. Jen wanted to look at women’s workout clothes. I was pretty bored.

Next we drove up to the Super Target off Highway 92 (or was it 91?) near Woodstock. We shopped for a long time. We bought a $35 DVD player for the bedroom upstairs so Jen can watch her girly movies while doing stuff in the bedroom.

By the time we left Target I was exhausted from all the shopping! There is only so much I can take.

We arrived at Lisa’s party around 8:30pm. Lisa’s parent’s were there and I had a nice time talking with Lisa’s dad, Arthur, about geopolitical issues. Terri was already there too. Later Katie and Chris arrived as well as Lynne. Some of Lisa & Alan’s other friends were there too. It was a nice time.

Around 11:30pm we headed out and drove home. I was pretty tired and went to bed shortly after we got home.

Mar 12th 2006

sleeping late & lazy sunday

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We slept with the windows opened last night and I think the cool breeze and fresh air helps me sleep very comfortably! I also think the humidity in the air helped too.

I was woken up around 8:30am with Jen standing by the bed. She was holding a plate with breakfast on it! She cooked me a breakfast taco and bacon. That was so sweet of her! The breakfast taco & bacon were delicious. Usually I can smell the bacon cooking but I think I was sleeping so soundly that I never noticed until she woke me up.

Shortly after she woke me up Jen left for Scott’s house. She planned on helping him do some painting today. I probably should have gone too but I honestly hate painting. I think it has to do with me panting as apart of a job when I was in High School. Not that it was bad or anything, but it was work - and work is work.

I settled onto the sofa, turned on some music and read my book, “Adobe Camera Raw“. It was on my Amazon.com wishlist for a long time and Jen’s parents got it for me for my birthday. It’s a great book and I’ve been learning a lot by reading it. Usually technical books like that just put me to sleep.

Jen got home and we both took a shower and got cleaned up. Katie was supposed to come over to spend some time with Jen this afternoon. I continued to read my book.

However, Chris is supposed to be coming over later and we were all planning on having dinner together. Jen realized that we needed to buy some fresh vegetables from the grocery store so the two of us headed out and drove down to Publix. We were in and out in a flash and back home before I even had a chance to whine about shopping.

I helped Jen with some of the food preparation and Katie showed up. We opened up some White wine (it was the white wine that my old boss Carole gave me). We all enjoyed it quite mightily.

Jen and Katie went upstairs to do manicure stuff and gossip so I went down into the study to play with the Adobe Camera Raw software.

Chris showed up around 6pm so I stopped my work and talked with him for about an hour. Eventually it was close to dinner time and the girls came downstairs.

I put on the ‘Walk the Line’ soundtrack and we opened up a bottle of Pinot Noir. Lately that’s been my favorite wine varietal.

First we had a salad and then for the main dish we had the juicy and tasty pork loin. To add flavor we made a side dish to put onto the pork which consisted of diced red & orange peppers, garlic, olive oil, and assorted spices. It was really good. We also had rice along with the dinner.

Mar 13th 2006

playing WoW with people you know is fun

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So this evening Scott called me up and wanted to see if I was interested in playing World of Warcraft with him.

He’s got a warrior on the Earthen Ring server where his friend Brad plays. Scott previously told me that he’s around level 8 so a few days ago I rolled up a gnome rogue and leveled him up to around level 8 too.

It’s not as easy starting out when you don’t have an alt to send yourself money to help pimp-yourself out. Nonetheless, I discovered that I can sell a stack of copper in the auction house for around 2g each which is a LOT of money for a char under level 10.

Scott, Brad, and I all hooked up outside of Stormwind around 9:30pm and ended up playing for a couple of hours. The priest alt that Brad brought along was around level 25 so he basically walked around and healed us. Scott and I blew through a bunch of quests near Westfall before calling it a night.

It was actually pretty fun playing with people you know. You sort of know what to expect. Scott was still getting his bearings in the game so we tried to help him along as we went.

Mar 22nd 2006

nice evening together

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After work Jen and I stopped at a wine shop at the Ivy Walk shopping area. The wine shop is called something like “M&T“. We’ve only been there once before and at that time they only sold wine and cheese.

Now, the format has changed a bit. In addition to wine and cheese, they also sell other things including food. They have a small restaurant/café type section as well as a wine bar.

We decided to order some food to go as well as some cheese to have with wine tonight. Jen got a large salad (with beets) and I got a BBQ Pork sandwich with bacon. We talked with the nice clerk about cheeses and he gave us samples of several different types of fancy cheeses. We finally decided on three different types and got about a quarter-pound of each. Some of the cheeses were $40 per pound! Jen wants to go back here some time to have dinner.

After buying food and cheese we went home and opened up a bottle of malbec from the wine cabinet downstairs. We had out dinner and then ate the cheese with crackers and drank the wine. It was quite good.

We began to watch the first couple of episodes of ‘24‘. We have about 13 queued up right now so I figured it was a good time to start. I love watching them in HDTV resolution as well as the 5.1 AC3 surround sound. It’s better than having the DVDs!

‘24′ is great and I can’t wait to see more episodes.

Mar 22nd 2006

offsite training

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Today marked the conclusion of a three-day training class that I’ve been attending since Monday. The course was called ‘Core Web Application Technologies with Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 (2543B)’. The training is conducted by HP (formerly Extreme Logic) in a facility near Perimeter Mall close to where Jen works. A few other people from my company are going to the same class, including my boss.

The class I’ve been going to has been really informative. The building is very nice and seems fairly empty. The facilities are a bit lavish. Our desktop computers in the class are all Intel Xenon processors with 2GB of ram and some crazy RAID setup. They were nice machines indeed. The instruction was such that only about 25% of the class was lecture and demos while the remaining 75% of it was self-led workshops using the book. There were nine different ‘labs/units’ and each one was self-contained in a virtual machine ran from within VirtualPC. It worked out pretty well and seems like a good way to have a clean & consistent way to approach each lab.

I think I learned a lot, but I do think that we were not given enough time to do each lab. The time we were given was just enough to rush through the steps and not really learn anything about it. I’ll need to go over the material again and take my time reading & understanding just how everything is working.

Jen and I have been carpooling the past three days since we’re both going to the same area. This has worked out pretty well. Traffic was pretty rough compared to what I’m used to. Jen drove every morning and I drove ‘home’ two of the three days.

My ‘Service Engine Soon’ light came on a little over a week ago so Jen was wonderful enough to schedule to have my car serviced on Tuesday. We dropped it off at a nearby Ford dealership on Tuesday morning and $650 later it was ready to be picked up. It was something like $250 to have a sensor replaced. And despite the official Ford Explorer owner’s manual saying that sparkplugs don’t need to be replaced until 100,000 miles (I’m at 66,000 now), they recommended that the spark plugs be replaced: $350. I really hate having to get car work done.

So we dropped the car off yesterday morning and picked it up this morning. This carpooling stuff actually worked out really well for getting the car serviced in time while it wasn’t being used.

Monday and Tuesday I had lunch with some of guys in my class from the same company (including my boss). We ate downstairs in the building cafeteria. The food wasn’t that great and I didn’t want to eat there again today so I made plans to have lunch with Jen. I picked her up and we ate at Roly Poly. Jen was stressing out because she thought that she lost her sunglasses.

Jen also made a haircut appointment for me with Collie tonight at 8pm. I picked her up from work this afternoon around 5pm and we headed towards the Woodstock area. Jen was excited because she called her Mom and found that her sunglasses were at her Mom’s house. We made plans to have dinner with Jen’s parents at the great ‘El Jinte’ Mexican restaurant across the street from Katie’s house.

Jen and I got there first and ordered a pitcher of margaritas (I attempted to order it with top-shelf tequila but they didn’t know what I was talking about). We also ordered some of the tasty bean dip. Jen’s parent’s showed up and we all ordered. Katie showed up a little while later too.

After dinner we headed over to Canton road. I dropped Jen off at Old Time Pottery so she could do some shopping while I had my haircut. I drove over to Three-13 for my $60 haircut. Collie did a great job and I’m glad I got it cut before it got too hard to deal with.

When Jen and I got home I checked on the progress of a torrent I’ve been trying to download since last night. This particular torrent was in high demand and a lot of people jumped on it as soon as it was released. At one point there were about 300 seeders and around 26,000 peers. I’ve never seen a torrent with so much interest before - ever. However I was extremely disappointed to see that my average download speed was less than 10KB/sec. I was under the impression that the way bittorrent works is that the more interest there is in a particular torrent, the ‘faster’ it goes for everyone since there are so many people sharing at the same time. Based on this I’m not sure what the deal is with this torrent.

Mar 23rd 2006

don’t trust fidelity

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Back in 2002 I opened a Roth IRA to put some extra money in. The intention was to use it as a mid-term savings and possibly a place to take money out of when I purchase a house for the first time.

I read up on the rules about early withdrawals from a Roth IRA and exceptions when using the money for a first-time home purchase. I funded it for the next few years using all after-tax dollars and it wasn’t a rollover or anything.

So when it was time for me to purchase the new townhouse in 2004, I had a little over $11,000 built-up in the Roth IRA. I wanted to make sure I did everything correctly so I called up Fidelity and spoke with one of their ‘Tax Advisor Experts’ about how to handle this. The person I spoke with looked at my info and told me that I could take out any amount I wanted because the entire balance of the Roth IRA was funded with after-tax dollars and it could be treated just like any other brokerage account.

This made sense to me and given that this tax advice was coming from a supposed qualified professional working for Fidelity where my account lives, I didn’t have any worries.

In fact, when Jen and I were preparing out taxes for the 2004 tax year, I sent her an email to give to the accountant explaining the Roth IRA early withdrawal and referenced (in summary) my conversation with the Fidelity qualified tax professional. It’s not like I made this up, the conversation did happen and the advice given to me was as I remembered.

I withdrew $11,000 from the IRA and used the entire amount towards the down-payment for the new townhome.

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Fast-forward to today. Jen and I got a nasty letter in the mail from the IRS telling us that we owe nearly $5,000 in back-taxes because of an undocumented early withdrawal from a retirement account. They imposed all sort of early-withdrawal penalties, interest, etc. This was extremely frustrating to see.

I began to dig through old documents and found the email outlining my conversation with the Fidelity qualified professional tax advisor. I also found the 2004 1099 form which showed the $11,000 withdrawal and noticed that it didn’t show any provisions about what type of withdrawal it was, only that it was early.

Next I called up Fidelity and spoke with another one of their qualified professional tax advisors. I outlined everything that happened, including a synopsis of my original conversation with them back in early 2004.

He basically laughed at me and told me that I was completely wrong and that I was responsible for all of the taxes that the IRS was demanding. Furthermore, he told me that this was a matter between me and the IRS and that Fidelity has nothing to do with it. When I asked him about the contradicting (and now revealed to be completely and utterly _FALSE_) information given to me by the other Fidelity qualified professional tax advisor, he said that he didn’t know anything about that and couldn’t help me.

I was blatantly lied to and misled by the Fidelity qualified professional tax advisor.

Naturally this made me very upset and I demanded to know the name of the person who ‘helped’ me back in 2004. The guy gave me the person’s name and I also asked for the name of that person’s supervisor.

I called up the supervisor who was not in the office so I left a voice mail - and never got a return call. This is how Fidelity treats their customers. I don’t like Fidelity and will never trust them again.

Mar 24th 2006

best buy shenanigans

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It’s been very busy at work the last two days this week. I have some aggressive work assignments and the new guy has some work assignments too.

I ordered the Oblivion Strategy Guide online on bestbuy.com for an in-store pickup. I used a $25 gift card to pay for it. The game just came out and I wanted to pick up the guide tonight on our way to the gym. This was my way of making sure that I would still be able to get it.

A little while after I got home, Jen and I headed out for the gym. We stopped by Best Buy first so we could ‘run in and run out’ to pick up the game guide that they set aside for me.

Well the way ‘in-store pickup’ works at Best Buy is that you need to go over the customer service desk. This is the same place you go if you have a problem, want to return/exchange something, or apply for a best buy credit card.

As usual, there was a very long line of non-English-speaking people trying to return something or argue with the manager about something in a non-English language.

After patiently waiting in line for my turn, I gave the guy the order number for the book and he went over the cage where they put held items and brought over….. The Oblivion PC game!

The problem is I didn’t order the Oblivion PC game, I Ordered the Oblivion Strategy Guide. One item is a piece of software and the other is a book. The guy said that they must have pulled the wrong item. I’m still trying to figure out how it is so hard to tell the difference between a book and a box of software. I guess the people at Best Buy have reading comprehension issues (among other things).

So the guy at the counter told me to wait while he sent some guy (who didn’t look very sharp) to go find the book since they had so much trouble doing that earlier.

I had to wait about twenty minutes while the guy was doing who-knows-what in the store ‘looking’ for the book. He finally came back and said that they don’t have anymore. Well isn’t that great!

Naturally I was quite upset. I ordered the item for in-store pickup specifically because I didn’t want to deal with it being out of stock. I had to waste away about 45 minutes of my life WAITING for Best Buy to realize and admit their incompetence and mistake.

The guy offered to refund my gift card since they didn’t actually have the item that I purchased. Since this was taking so long, Jen went off to go look for some headphones.

After I finished up with the stupid people in customer service I met up with Jen in the check-out line. She found some Sony headphones which were around $15. When she tried to use the gift card to check out, the cashier said that there wasn’t enough balance on it and we would have to pay cash. Say what? The gift card had $25 on it initially and the $20 I spent on the book was supposed to have been refunded.

We threw a fit and were shuffled over to the not-so-helpful customer service desk again. This time we had to wait for THIRTY minutes while a bunch of Best Buy employees were huddled in the back trying to figure out the situation.

The finally said that we had to wait a day or two for the money I was just refunded to show back up on the card.

So I tried to buy something that wasn’t even there (due to their fault) and now that money for the non-existent item is tied up for a couple of days before I have access to it again. Something doesn’t seem right about that.

Jen and I were very upset with the whole situation and we’ve been stuck in this accursed store for almost two hours now. We complained and requested to speak to a manager and then they were somehow able to credit the gift card immediately. I wonder how that happened.

We got the headphones and got out of there. I really, really hate Best Buy.

I still wanted that game guide so we stopped by CompUSA down the street. They have several copies in stock. We bought one and finally headed to the gym.

Mar 25th 2006

a day away from home

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I was very tired still from staying up last night. So when Jen woke me up this morning to go to the gym with her to work out, I opted not to go. Instead I slept in more.

Later, after I was awake, Scott called and wanted to know if I was interested in going over to his place today to help with his television. He recently bought a new flat-screen LCD display from BrandsMart and was unhappy with how the computer-driven display looked so he wants to return it and look for something else.

I headed over to Scott’s house and helped him taken down the TV from the wall mount and box it up. We headed over to BrandsMart and returned the old unit. This went surprisingly smoothly and it was impressive how efficient the whole return process is.

We looked around the store to see if there was another brand or model that Scott may like. I’ve never been in a Brandsmart before and it had a very strong resemblance to a gigantic electronics store in the Shinjuku district of Tokyo. We didn’t find anything that Scott was looking for so we began a trek through all of the other nearby electronics stores.

We went to Frys, Hi Fi Buys, CompUSA, and HH Gregg. It was an exhausting day going to all of these electronic stores. Scott was still unable to find a television that he was looking for.

What he really wants to do is be able to drive his computer/laptop on the television display but at a decent resolution. Right now for displays larger than 40″ or so, it seems the max you can do from a PC input is around 1024×768.

I dropped Scott off at his house and headed home. Once there I quickly got ready for the wedding tonight. I wore my fancy new suit and Jen wore a new dress. She looked amazing.

We drove through Atlanta to the East side of town to a Baptist church. We sat for the wedding (Jen’s friend from work, Rom, is the one who is getting marries). There were about 200-250 people in attendance and they had a huge video system set up.

During the ceremony there was a lot of singing and it was pretty nice. Ron and Trisha both had a lot of people in their bridal party.

After the ceremony we headed out to the reception which was at an old train depot place in downtown Atlanta, across the street from underground Atlanta.

It was a really nice setup. We started with some appetizers, kool-aid, and a chocolate fountain. There were a lot of tables, but Jen and I were the only ones who showed up at our table (assigned seating). I think most of the other people at our table were some of Jen’s other co-workers who didn’t show up.

However, the table next to us had some more of Jen’s co-workers and two came over to sit next to us. They were about the same age as us. So we had a nice time talking with them.

After some introductions and reception-type stuff, we got to eat. I had a salad, fried chicken, green beans, and sweet tea. It was all fairly good except for the green beans.

Once we finished dinner we had cake, but I thought it was a little dry. But then again, it was a wedding cake and I think they aren’t supposed to taste great.

Jen and I headed out and Jen called up Scott, who wanted to hang out. We drove up to Scott’s to pick him up and go out to a wine bar.

We went to the same wine bar that we’ve gone to before near Ashford-Dunwoody. It was a nice time. We talked and drank wine and had some fancy chocolate.

Later we went home and headed to bed.

Mar 26th 2006

meet the girlfriend

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This evening Jen and I met Scott and his girlfriend, Kristina, for dinner at Umezono (an authentic Japanese Sushi restaurant). Dan and Elizabeth were coming too.

We’ve never met Kristina but we’ve heard a lot about her from Scott. So it was fun to finally put a face to a name and see the girl that Scott has been talking about for a long time.

Kristina is a dancer (no, not that kind) from Minnesota who seems very nice. Scott seems absolutely smitten with her. She never really had sushi before so this was a fun introduction to the food for her.

We exchanged stories, and Dan told a couple of embarrassing stories about Scott (to Kristina’s delight). They also asked me to relate my story about the CNN webpage thing that I did a long time ago. Even Kristina remembered seeing reports about what I did from when she was living in Minnesota - what a small world!

Mar 27th 2006

goodbye wow, hello oblivion

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This morning I logged into World of Warcraft and canceled my account.

When you cancel your account, they ask you to give a reason why. I gave three reasons:

  1. There isn't much content for players once they reach level 60 outside of raiding. It isn't appealing for me to have to group with 39 other people on a schedule (like a job) to experience any more of the game.
  2. PVP is fun except for the upper bracket because of the equipment disparity caused by the high-level people who raid all of the time. There's basically the 'haves' and the 'have-nots' when it comes to equipment. The people who go on raids every night for months end up with really awesome equipment and those that don't have 'normal' equipment that creates a huge gap in PVP. The high-level PVP game is really frustrating and disappointing as a result because the 'raider-equipped' people steamroll over the non-raid equipped people.
  3. The continuous server instability has been exhausting and tiresome. Since the launch back in November of 2004, there were queues to log into most of the realms. At the time we were promised that the issue was temporary and it would be fixed soon. Still, today 17 months later, there are queues to log in. That is simply unacceptable.

Jen was out at her parent's house this evening so I occupied my time playing Oblivion - it's a lot of fun!

Mar 28th 2006

kids are hard work

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Kevin and Lara came over shortly after I got home from work today. They brought Matthew and Jessica with them along with their dog Duchess.They were at the

Jen had gone to the store and got some fresh mint so I made some

The house was pretty crazy with the two kids (very well behaved kids I might add) and a dog. We had the Pork loin for dinner. I love it but we've had it a lot so I'm ready to take a break from it for a while.

Jen's Aunt Sandy (Kevin's Mom) flew in from Seattle this evening so Kevin and I hopped into my car and drove down to the airport to pick her up. It was the first time I've been down there since I left Delta - I got sort of nostalgic.

We collected Sandy and drove back home. They didn't hang around long after that. Once everyone was gone, Jen and I relaxed. We were both pretty tired out. I'm really not sure how parents with kids get anything done - it's a lot of work.

Shortly after they left we went to bed.

Mar 30th 2006

photo processing and book club

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Yesterday evening I worked on processing photos from the St. Maarten trip. I tried to apply some of the techniques I learned in the book that I've been reading.

One of the things I did was set the colorspace within the RAW processor to 'ProPhoto RGB' because the book insisted that it was the best thing to use with the largest gamut (larger than Adobe RGB).

I don't think that this was actually the problem because when I loaded up Photoshop it complained that my monitor color profile as corrupted. I think I just ignored the error and went on.

Because I wasn't coming from sRGB in the RAW processor, I added a step to one of my conversion actions (the one that goes from 16-bit to 8-bit at the end of my workflow) to assign the color profile to sRGB. In retrospect this was a mistake. I should have converted to sRGB. There is a difference between simply assigning and converting.Anyway, throughout my processing the images looked fine. In fact they looked fine when I browsed them with the native jpeg viewer in XP. However once I uploaded them to my gallery and flickr, they looked like crap! They looked washed out (desaturated and the colors were a little off). Because I was very tired by the time I finished I thought that perhaps I've just lost my touch and have been taking really crappy pictures. So I went upstairs to get ready for bed.
While I was brushing my teeth I continued to think about it and something didn't seem right. It dawned on me that I might have screwed up the colorspace (I've never had any problems with colorspace before). I went back downstairs and did a side-by-side comparison of the photo that I had on my computer with the one that I have online. The differences were quite noticeable! It didn't take me long to figure out that I needed to convert to sRGB. I also fixed the 'corrupted monitor color profile' problem by assigning a generic sRGB one for my monitor.Once I had the fix in place, I put it into an action and fixed all of the photos in batch mode. Once I did that, I re-uploaded them and now everything is good.I have a photo album online from the St. Maarten trip.

An old manager from DT that I used to work with in Revenue Pipeline, Bob T. joined Turner this week. He used to be the 'system test' manager. Now he's a senior project manager in the same group I work in - what a small world! We went to lunch today to the good Chineese restaurant called 'Hsu's'. I had the beef fried rice.

I took a back-way home from work today. Scott E. from my group told me about this secret route that he discovered. I can't figure out if it is any faster than the way I normally go. There are some rough parts of town that I didn't know existed until I went this way. I definitely won't be going this way at night or if I think I'll have any car trouble.

Katie started a book club that meets on the last Thursday of every month. Today was our first meeting. It was supposed to start at 7pm. I took a nap once I got home and didn't leave the house until 6:15pm.

Unfortunately for me there was an accident on I75 near Windy Hill so it took me a very long time to get there. I didn't arrive until about 7:20pm.

I was the last to arrive. Counting me there were twelve people there (Katie, Chris, Jennifer, myself, Tom, Terry, Jen's Mom, Jen's Aunt, Lynne, Dana, and two other of Lynne's friends) Katie had a wonderful soup and soda bread for everyone. She also had an ample amount of wine.

While I have having some of my soup and some of the other people were talking (we had not actually begun yet), I got a call from James W.

James and I talked a little while about our new jobs. I had to cut the call short when Jen gave me a look that said it was time for me to get off the phone and join the rest of the group.

I've never been to a book club before so this was a new experience for me. The book we were discussing is titled, 'The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time' by Mark Haddon. Jen and I actually listened to the book via the Audio Book CD version. This, in my opinion, was a great way to experience the book (especially with everyone having British accents).

Katie had a list of discussion items and we all discussed them together. I think we all agreed that it is very tough to be an autistic person and it is also very difficult for their loved-ones.

After the book club discussion everyone sort of broke off into different groups to talk. Eventually I made my way outside where Lynne was having a smoke with Tom and one of her friends.

Somehow the conversation turned to the Georgia Aquarium and Lynne's friend mentioned something about going over there to do a shoot. I asked about this and found out that she is an aspiring photographer who is currently assisting right now.

We talked shop about cameras, lenses, and other fun photography stuff. It was pretty cool to talk about all of these things with a 'real' photographer. When I talked about how difficult it looks to photograph food, she mentioned that she was recently at a Chick-Fil-A shoot and it took eight hours to shoot a single tray of fruit!

Around 10:45pm Jen and I headed out and went home. I was very tired and couldn't wait to get to bed.

Mar 31st 2006

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Published by Jeff 0 Comments

Work was pretty stressful today and this week as I had a deadline to meet. I ended up working late to get all of the coding done. I know I wanted to do more coding but I certainly hope that this job entails more than just straight coding all of the time.

When I got home I was pretty grumpy because of bad traffic on I285. I was also upset because as soon as we got home we had to head out right away and drive all the way up to Woodstock to participate in yet another family activity tonight.

Jen offered to drive which was nice. She also did a great job cheering me up. When we arrived at Jen's parent's house, everyone was there: Jen's Mom, Jen's Dad, Jen's grandmother, Jen's Aunt Sandy, Jen's Cousin Kevin, Kevin's wife, Lara, and their two kids, Matthew and Jessica.

Also present were four dogs: Chloe, Sydney, Toby, and Duchess. It was a little chaotic but not as bad as Jen described from Monday.

We visited with everyone and then had dinner which consisted of a salad with bacon on top (I loved it) as well as some really good spaghetti.

Eventually we headed out and went home.