Jeff Billimek’s Journal at billimek.com
Top ten things that people came to billimek.com from search engines for:
Wow there were a lot of searches for the desert eagle last month that brought people here!
While Jen was at home today she finished up the website that she's been creating for Katie and Chris as an engagement gift. I took a look and noticed some missing html tags. Since I've been doing a lot of HTML-related work recently for my job, I picked up on it pretty quickly and got the tags fixed. I didn't want to do too much since this was Jen's project.
I did work on their photo gallery. Since Jen requested that I customize it like mine is customized, I knew what to do. I also enabled email forwarding for Katie and Chris at their new domain.
After I got home Jen informed me that there were still water header problems. I spent probably too much time this evening researching the problem. I should have expected it, but there are at least two very active discussion boards for all things related to plumbing. I found this fascinating.
Once I did enough research I concluded that our water heater problems are related to the thermostats on the water heater itself. Probably only one of them is broken but to be safe I should replace both of them (top one and bottom one).
Later this evening Jen and I watched a couple of episodes of Alias that we had saved.
As per our routine, Jen and I went to the gym this morning. I worked out on the treadmill while Jen was in her class. I also lifted weights. After we got home I made a smoothie.
Jen took a shower and noted again that we are still having problems with the water heater. I better get that fixed soon.
I somehow managed to get out of work and got to stay home today while Jen left to go help set up for Katie and Chris's engagement party this afternoon. I took the opportunity to get some things done for work. There was supposed to be a lot of things going on this weekend for work but it was actually pretty quiet.
Around 4pm I left for the engagement party up in Canton near Jen's parent's house. It's actually at the clubhouse place in their neighborhood.
I was there early and did get put to work doing some various tasks. I brought my camera and Jen asked that I get photographic documentation of all guests. I selected an area outside where I would take the mugshots.
The party was pretty fun. A lot of Chris's family and friends were there too, so it was a lot of people I've never met before. Jen looked great with her green shirt.
Brad was there too so I talked with him about World of Warcraft. I also had an interesting discussion about politics with Brad, , Tom, and Dan.
Jen and I didn't leave until about 10pm. I was tired and went to bed shortly after getting home.
I slept in late today and didn't wake up until about 10am. It felt great!
After waking up, I drove over to the Home Depot and bought two new thermostats for our water heater. When I got back home I shut off power to the water heater from the circuit breaker box and took off the panels exposing the thermostats and heating elements. It wasn't too difficult to replace the thermostats except for one of the wires was barely long enough to reach and I had a hard time getting the connection to stay.
Once I got the new thermostats wired up I replaced the panels and turned on the power. Everything seemed to be working fine. I certainly hope that this fixes the problem.
Jen watched 'Memoirs of a Geisha' while I worked on some things on my website. I think I fixed a bug with the livesearch. I also updated Wordpress and K2 to the latest SVN version.
Next I added in a fancy graphical calendar tag thing for the date of each entry instead of a textual date. After that I went though all 115 of the rotating banner photos and added an anti-aliased 'billimek.com' text tag to the graphics. After spending a great deal of time doing this I decided that I didn't like the look and reverted back to the graphic banners without the text. I still want to do something with it but am unsure right now what I want to do.
Once all of this maintenance work was done, I opened up a bottle of Fetzer merlot and took the opportunity to add all of our wines to my cork'd profile. I love corkd.com but one thing that bugs me is that is doesn't seem to have any enforcement on the wine naming convention. For example, id you search for 'Silver Oak Cabernet 2001', you'll find entries for "Silver Oak Cabernet 2001", "Silver Oak 2001 Cabernet Savuingon", "Silver Oak 2001 Alexander", etc. They are all different 'entries' in their system even though they are all the same wine. It's really frustrating.
Lastly Jen and I watched the last two episodes of 'Alias'. This last season was really lame.
It's been only a little over two weeks since I switched over to 'gmail for your domain' and already its caught over 1,000 spam messages! That's crazy.
Last week my manager, Jeff H., gave me two tickets to the braves game. They are fancy dugout-level seats great parking too. After work today Jen and I headed out to the game. Our seats were great and I've never been so close to the field before.
Despite being May, the weather outside tonight was awesome. The sun had just gone down and it was cool and clear out. I really enjoy nice weather. Melissa N. and her friend (and my old co-worker) Beau were there too sitting next to us.
We bought some bad-tasting margaritas, a $7 bag of peanuts, and a funnel cake. I used to love funnel cake and was extremely excited to have some tonight. I don't think it's that good for me anymore. I could only eat about a quarter of it and I felt sick from the little amount that I did eat.
The four of us had a nice time even though we're not very big baseball fans. Jen and I left after the end of the 7th inning.
Today was a type of offsite 'team-building' exercise for the Enterprise Applications group. We were all to meet at Six Flags at 9:30am (just before opening). They paid for parking and admission into the park. It was really nice of Turner to do that for the IT department.
I was assigned to a team with about ten other people. There were about ten teams total. One of the the people in my team was the senior vice president of my group. We were all supposed to complete a scavenger hunt. Most of the questions were fun facts about the park such as 'what is the oldest wooden roller coaster in the park', etc.
Sadly, our team did not win the scavenger hunt. In fact we came in second-to-last. After we finished, they led us all over to a pavilion place to have some lunch and give out rewards. A lot of people remained behind to go on the rides. My stomach wasn't feeling too good so I decided to pass. Besides, we had a lot of work to do today anyway.
I went home, logged in, and began to work from home. I worked from home the rest of the day.
Finally, around 6:30pm I left the house and drove over to Clint's place for our weekly gaming session. It was a lot of fun tonight.
It was a very long day at work. We've been pushing to get things coded and completed so most of the developers all got together and worked late together in one of the conference rooms. We ordered pizza and worked until about 8:30pm. It was actually a lot more productive than I thought it would be.
While we were working I thought I saw Chuck C. out in the atrium. He is a manager over at Delta Technology so I couldn't figure out why he would be here. I thought I was mistaken but it turns out that he left DT and joined Turner just recently - it was him.
When I got home late Jen was super nice and had some food waiting for me as well as a crown & coke. She's so nice!
Jen was doing a lot of driving around today and was very tired and a little grumpy. So when I got home I suggested that we have a relaxing dinner out at Muss & Turners.
I drove us over there but it turns out that they are closed tonight due to a private event. This was highly disappointing but we tried to make the best of it.
We went back home and made something quick for dinner, opened up a bottle of wine, and watched 'The Chronicles of Narnia'. It was a nice evening.
Work was uneventful today. I had to leave a little earl and drove up to the canton area. Jen is a bridesmaid in Lisa's upcoming wedding and we are invited to the rehearsal dinner tonight.
Lisa's uncle owns a restaurant (called Winchesters) and was hosting the rehearsal dinner. Jen and I got to sit next to each other and had lots of wine and the veggie plate. It was really good and we had a great time.
Eventually we went home and got ready for bed.
I recently acquired Heroes of Might and Magic 5 and began to play it 'just for a little while' tonight. I sort of got sucked into it and was up playing way too late.
(Jen and I entering the reception hall after the wedding)
Because I was up way too late last night I slept in until about 11am. When I woke up I got ready to go out because Chris was coming over to pick me up so we could go to a Georgia Tech baseball game.
Chris came over at noon and we headed out. I showed him the secret back way to GA Tech. It’s a fast route but you have to go through a really scary Mogadishu -like area in south-central Atlanta.
We went to the baseball game and sat in the bleachers. It was incredibly sunny and hot out today. I neglected to wear sunblock and as a result I got some sunburn on my knees, neck, and arms.
After the baseball game Chris and I stopped by his apartment so that he could pick up his suit for tonight. Once we did that we headed back to my place so that we could both shower and dress for this afternoon.
We had a couple of drinks and munched on some chips and fresh salsa that Jen made before we left. Eventually it was time to go and we headed out to the church for Lisa & Allen’s wedding.
Chris and I were waiting in the parking lot for Katie and her Mom. They were a bit late so as a result we were late to the wedding and had to sit in the back in the upper balcony. Jennifer was one of Lisa’s bridesmaids and she looked great. The wedding service itself was very short - only about fifteen minutes. The minister was an Irish chaplain and had quite a sense of humor.
Once the wedding concluded, Jen and I drove over to the reception which was at the Marriott hotel near Windy Hill road. We got there a little after most of the guests since Jen was doing some stuff with pictures after the ceremony.
(Tom and Lynne)
The reception was really nice. First, we were outside having drinks (open bar) along with some cheese and crackers. Some of the crackers in particular were really good.
(Jen’s Mom, Katie, and Chris)
It was nice that some of our friends were there. Tom, Terry, Lynne, Tracy, Tremayne, Katie, Chris, and Jen’s Mom were all there. I snapped some photos (with Jen’s camera) of some of them before we headed inside for the reception.
(Tracy and Tremayne)
There were lots of tables and I got to sit at the head table along with Jen. After the wedding party came in we got our food. It was very good. I also really liked the open bar. I had some wine and mojitos but the mojitos weren’t as good as the ones we make at home.
As the evening wore on Jen and I hung out at the other table with all of our friends. There was dancing and drinking and just a good time. Close to the end of the evening, Katie must have had a lot of wine because when the DJ played a rap-like song, Katie wanted to demonstrate how people dance to this type of music.
She ran out onto the dance floor (dragging Jen and Lynne) and proceeded to do a bootie dance. The funniest part about this is that as soon as she started, the two photographers bolted over to the dance floor and began to snap photos frantically. At the same time, the two videographers did the same thing. This scene really made me laugh.
(Katie dancing)
Jen and I got home around midnight and went to bed.
Jen and I both slept in pretty late today since we were up last night carousing at the wedding. We cleaned up around the house and then decided to go catch a movie.
We decided to see Xmen 3 and went over to the movie theater off of Cobb Parkway (the one we usually go to). I liked the movie but according to Jen, the plot didn't match up with how things went in the comic-book.
After we got home we had some dinner. Jen wanted to watch our Netflix movie, 'The 40 year old virgin'. I worked on the computer downstairs.
Things have been really crazy at work today and they are expecting to be busy all week long. It was decided that all of the developers would bring their laptops, keyboards, mice, and (in some people's case) monitors to a special conference room that we have all week long. In there we will all work together on getting the code complete for our NewsDesk project.
The idea is that we can bounce ideas off of each other and have quick turnaround on problems. I got a lot done this first day and worked late along with everyone else.
Jen went to Costco today and bought a bunch of supplies. When I got home we made tofu rubens. They are so good! We also marinated a bunch of steaks to have for dinner tomorrow. We have plans on having a bunch of people over for a father's day dinner for Jen's Dad.
Today was another synergied day of development work in the 'war room'. Scott E. made the time more pleasant by running some 'top 10' games. He would pick topics such as, "name the top ten grossing movies of all time", or "name the largest countries in land mass". It was pretty fun.
I worked until about 5:30pm and didn't get home until 6pm. Jen and I were hosting a father's day dinner for her Dad and a lot of people came over. In total there were eight of us. I grilled the marinated steaks and they came out great. The K.C. Masterpiece honey teriyaki marinade is the only way to go in my opinion - it rocks!
After a lengthy evening, everyone left and I went to bed by 11pm.
Today was a pretty rough day. I was working with the other developers in the 'war room' all day long. In fact we ate lunch in the war room (management had lunch brought in). We also had dinner in the war room. I don't think I really left the room at all during the day. We also worked very late. I didn't leave until about 9:30pm. Being outside on a weeknight in downtown Atlanta at 9:30pm is a little unsettling.
When I got home Jen had a crown & coke waiting for me which was terrific. Having a drink was a great way to take the edge off of the long day.
I was up really late last night and slept in until 11am today. I felt great when I finally work up because I was caught up on a lot of missed sleep. For some reason I was also in a great mood. I think it had to do with the clear, sunny, and nice weather outside. The quickest way to make me sad it to see it overcast or dreary. Deep blue skies and sunshine really make my day.
Jennifer was outside on the deck sunning herself. She was listening to her iPod and knitting. She was also in a good mood. I played around on my laptop and got caught up on some RSS feed reading.
Jen came inside and we decided to go shopping for a new dining-room table. We got dressed to go out and packed up a bag of workout clothes for when we go to the gym later. Our destination was the Town Center area where all of the furniture stores are. We looked in American Signature Home Furniture and found a nice table, but it was too tall. It wouldn't work with our existing chairs. We looked in the other furniture stores but didn't find anything we liked.
As we were about to leave the area, I was whining to Jen about me needing a haircut. I hate getting a haircut and instead like to complain constantly about how my hair is too long. I think Jen doesn't care for this. She pointed out a new-looking hair salon called 'Studio 8' and strongly suggested that I get a hair cut right now. I reluctantly agreed.
I usually have a bad experience with getting a hair cut at any place other than Three-13 with the 'international grandmaster stylist' Collie (who charges something like $70 for a cut). But the girl who cut my hair today did an excellent job and I was quite pleased with it.
Next we returned some things to Michael's and then headed back towards home. Before we went home, we stopped at L.A. Fitness and worked out for about an hour. When we got home, I made a smoothie. Jen took a short nap.
After she woke up, we got dinner ready. We grilled some fresh salmon and had it over a salad. It was spectacular! After dinner we watched three episodes of '24'. I'm really enjoying this season. For pie we had some fresh pie that Jen baked yesterday.
Later this evening I stayed up diagnosing a problem with Firefox and the Google browser sync extension. I use PortableFirefox on all of the computers I use. I prefer to use the portable version so it is easy to keep the same settings and extensions mirrored across all of the computers. I keep everything in sync with some unison scrips and it works quite well.
However I noticed some issues with Google browser sync not recognizing that I switched computers and keeping both browsers 'online' at the same time. After some investigation though the spidery javascript I realized that my installation of the Google browser sync extension was sharing the same 'SID key' among all of the computers. This means that there was no way to uniquely identify each computer and it was confusing everything.
I quickly fixed the problem by excluding certain files from being synced with unison and then reinstalling the Google browser sync extension on all of the computers (to ensure that they all have a unique SID key now. This seemed to fix the problems somewhat.
Jen and I went up to Lake Altoona this morning. We encountered some very thick traffic on I75 due to an accident and it took a long time to get there.
We had a great time. We were there all day long and went out onto the lake on a boat. We also had some sandwiches for lunch and then grilled some steak for dinner. It was a really nice day.
After work today Jen and I went to M&T for dinner. We've been wanting to go ever since we tried to go previously and they were closed. To our pleasant surprise we discovered that on Monday's all bottles of wine are 30% off!
Given this excellent news, we splurged on a more expensive bottle of wine. We sat outside and had some cheese and crackers for an appetizer. It was really nice sitting outside. Jen ordered her favorite salad and I ordered the 'Swifty's Dream' sandwich which had pulled pork BBQ, coleslaw, and bacon on top. The weather was nice for this time of year (it wasn't too hot) and we had a great time.
After dinner we went back home and watched an episode of '24'. Jen served up a piece of pie for desert.
Later, I did some looking at Cork'd again. In my wanderings, I came across another website called 'Cellartracker' which is a lot more advanced. It isn't nearly as pretty ('web 2.0') as Cork'd, but it seems to be a lot more complete. I really like the fact that the way they handle wine entries prevents duplicates like I was complaining about earlier. They also have a cool feature where users will suggest the most optimal time to drink a particular bottle of wine.
Thinking about this, I came across a really thoughtful article about some of these problems. I sent an email to Cork'd suggesting that they work on a way to prevent unsightly duplicates issue.
I made arrangements to work from home today since Jen and I had plans to meet with an accountant regarding our tax issues.
Our appointment was at 1pm so we had lunch first. We went to Umezono for some sushi and it was great. Afterwards we drove up to the office and met with the accountant guy for about two hours.
The final outcome was a little more expensive than I thought but at least we got it all taken care of. I don't want to have to deal with that again.
We got back home and I continued to work from home. Jen made me a fantastic BLT sandwich for dinner which I devoured. It was really good.
Chris called and canceled tonight's game. But I went anyway because we were all going to create new characters to have as backup since Chris has been killing Joon's guys so much this campaign.
Now that I've been playing some more, I have a little better grasp of what would be fun and the options available. I created an archer-type of character and am pretty excited about playing him.
It was a pretty busy day at work again today. After lunch we all got together in the 'war room' and worked together coding and getting things done for the upcoming release.
As is the case when we work together like this, most of us stayed late. We got a lot done. Although after working together in the conference room nearly all week last week, I think some are getting tired of it.
This month's book was 'The Alchemist'. It wasn't my favorite book, but it was decent nonetheless. This month Jen and I hosted the book club meeting. She prepared some really good sandwiches and other snacks.
We had wine and ate and talked about the book. It wasn't as large a turn-out as earlier but we had a nice time. Afterwards we all voted on the next book and agreed to read, 'The Devil Wears Prada'.
This morning we went to an 'all-hands' type meeting for Turner in the Georgia Aquarium. It was pretty nice to have it in this venue. We were in the main ballroom area and it was packed.
What followed was the typical big-corporation meeting thing where they talked about how things are going and they value feedback, etc. They had some light breakfast type food along with water and coffee. I went with Allen M. and Julia H.
With it being a Friday before a holiday weekend, we were able to leave early today. It was nice to get home early after working long hours the past several weeks. It was also nice to see an email on my blackberry after I got home telling us that we will have July 3rd off in addition to July 4th. That's great!
Jen got home shortly after I did. We went shopping. We went to Target, followed by Hobby Lobby, and then the dollar store. Later, after we got home, I was up playing with allofmp3.com and purchased a lot of music.
(Katie the painter and Jen the prom queen)
As is usual for Saturday, Jen and I went to work out at the gym this morning. After we got home I fixed myself a sandwich.
This afternoon Jen and I went to a 'p-party' that Katie was hosting. The concept behind a p-party is that you dress up as something that starts with the letter P. I was a photographer and Jen was a prom queen.
We left the house around 6pm and headed up to Katie's house. Since I was dressed as a photographer, I was able to take a lot of pictures.
(Erin and Clint as parrot-heads)
Jen and I had a great time and it was fun to see everyone else's costumes.
(Chris as a puppet)
I slept in late today. After I woke up, Jen was watching one of her girly movies. I was in the mood to do some serious photoshop work today so I went downstairs and began to do some photo processing. I’m pretty happy with the system I use and it’s pretty efficient to process photos. Of course, I probably put way too much time into it, shooting RAW and then doing all of the work in Photoshop – but it’s fun for me.
A while later we went to the gym to go work out. It was a good workout. After we got home, we took a shower and changed.
Chris needed to move out of his apartment today and is moving in with Katie. I guess it’s a good thing that they are going to get married. Jen and I volunteered to help a little. We drove over to his apartment. It probably wasn’t a smart idea to do a lot of weight lifting at the gym and then turn around and move furniture. I wasn’t sure if my arms would give out. Fortunately Chris didn’t have a lot of stuff.
After we loaded up the car it only took one trip to Woodstock to get most of his things. After quickly unloading the car at Katie’s house, we drove back to the apartment. It began to rain pretty hard. We were originally planning on taking the queen-sized mattress and box-springs, but they would not fit in the back of my explorer and with the rain, they were not going on top. We had to leave them behind. Chris was musing about making alternate arrangements for his bed.
We did, however, load up some items for goodwill and dropped it off at the goodwill location on South Cobb drive. After this Jen and I went home.
For the rest of the day I worked on photo processing. I created two new photo albums: Katie and Chris's Engagement Party and the recent P-Party.
The big thing at work today was that I was assigned to work on a special project dealing with shared assignments. As a result I was in a late meeting with Jeff H., Charlie N., and Elisabeth discussing what needs to be done. I’m pretty excited about working on this.
Today Jennifer mailed off some packages to both of my grandmothers. The big thing is that we are keeping Katie’s dog, Sydney, for a week. Katie and Chris are going out of town so we offered to keep Sydney at our place while they are gone. We’ve never had a dog spend the night before so this was pretty fun.
Sydney is a sable collie and is very well behaved. It was fun having her tonight. She even slept on the bed with us. During the middle of the night she barked once but other than that there were no problems.
It was another late work day for me. This afternoon Charlie N. asked if I wanted to listen in on a conference call with the business about the new functionality that I’ll be coding. Of course I was very interested but he told me that I wasn’t to talk – only listen.
This evening Jen and I finished up watching the last season of ‘Lost’. It’s interesting that despite having a TiVo, we don’t watch our shows on the TiVo, instead we download the HDTV versions (via Azureus running on the linux server) and watch them via the Xbox running XBMC. The HDTV version is much better to look at compared to the regular SDTV version.
Tonight Jen went out with Lynne and they had dinner at M&T. I didn’t go with them as it was a ‘girls-only’ type of thing. However Jen brought some food home for me which was very nice of her. She brought my favorite dish from there: Swifty’s Dream – a pulled pork BBQ sandwich with bacon on top.
Lynne came over too. Recently Lynne went on a trip to Chile and brought back a bottle of ‘El Diablo’ malbec from Argentina for us as a gift. Tonight we opened up the bottle and drank it. It was pretty good and Lynne was so proud of herself for getting a good bottle of wine.
Tonight Jen and I went to Houston’s for dinner. I really like Houston’s. Tonight when we went we noticed that they didn’t have the usual valet parking. I was pretty happy about this because it actually takes longer usually to get inside the restaurant with the valet parking since it gets backed up.
After dinner I was up pretty late working on Jen’s laptop. One of the deals she had from leaving her job was that she could purchase her work laptop. It’s a nice IBM T42. They wiped it and I spent some time looking it over and installing some of the apps that we use most often.
The really cool thing about her laptop is that it has a fingerprint reader (biometric) built-into the keyboard so you can login simply by swiping your finger across the reader. It’s really cool.
One of the requirements for the special project that I’m working on is that it needs to perform fast. The nature of what I’m doing is mostly all SQL work and the functionality that I need to implement is nothing too easy so query optimization is a must.
I made a breakthrough in my work on writing this new SQL. I had been struggling with it all week so it was a great feeling to get this working fast. I had been trying several different approaches and measuring the execution time in an excel spreadsheet (I had a lot of experience doing performance metrics from my last year at Delta). Getting the query to run fast was really nice.
Turner has a policy called ‘Summer Friday’s’ in which people can leave work early on Fridays in the summer. I took advantage of this, in part because I made a breakthrough and was at a good stopping point, and left around 2:30pm.
I made it home before Jen and fixed myself a crown & coke. Today is Jen’s last day of employment with her company so it’s a pretty big deal. She was in good spirits.
When Jen got home, she made us each a Mojito and we got ready for dinner. Jen’s Mom came over and joined us for dinner tonight.
We grilled some beef fajitas along with some onions and peppers. I love grilling onions and peppers – they taste so good. For desert we had brownies that Jen’s mom brought over. They were also very good.
Later, after Jen’s mom left, we flipped the mattress. I like to follow a strict schedule for flipping the mattress. At the beginning of ever even-numbered month we flip it along the long-axis. At the beginning of every even-numbered month we flip it along the short axis. This ensures that the mattress gets even wear on all sides.
