Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Jen and I both slept in today and it was so nice being in our own bed again - we love our bed.  After I woke up I went downstairs and spent some time multitasking on the computer.  I balanced our accounts in MS Money, I updated the current Kelley Blue Book value of our automobiles (to keep up with depreciation), and I began downloading and processing photos from the trip.  Jen’s 2001 Saab is now worth more than my 2002 Ford Explorer.

My right ear was having a lot of trouble.  I’m an ‘over producer’ of ear wax and it is all clogged up and I can’t clean it out, so I need to do something because it is really hard only hearing out of one ear.

While I was donig this, Jen was relaxing in the living room.  I took a break and came upstairs to check on her.  She noted that it was a beautiful day outside today and I suggested that we go running on the silver comet trail.

So we changed into some workout clothes and headed out.  It was a great day to be outside and we went a couple of miles.  We mostly walked at a fast pace and stopped occasionally to stretch or do other fun exercises.  Jen showed me several different kung-fu kicks which I was not very good at.  My butt was really sore still from riding on the horse yesterday.

Once we were done with our walk we drove over to Walgreens so that I could get an ear-wax cleaning kit.  I also got a pack of the ‘5-hour-energy drink‘ that Larry’s been talking about.  Jen bought some things too.

Next we went to Publix and did our weekly grocery shopping.  We bought about $100 worth of items including some tasty vanilla wafers which are my favorite.

As soon as we got home I tried the ear-wax removal stuff and I felt it fizzing and bubbling in my ear but it didn’t help.  I was getting very frustrated with the situation and got a little grumpy.

We had plans to go up to Jen’s parent’s house tonight to celebrate Katie’s birthday.  Jen and I quickly showered, dressed, and headed out.  In addition to Jen’s parents, her grandmother, Scott, Katie, Chris, and the four dogs were there.  For Katie’s birthday dinner we had salad and lasagna (both meat and veggie).  I really liked the meat lasagna.

For desert (and for Katie’s birthday cake) we had pound cake with strawberrys and vanilla pudding.  It was excellent.  Scott gave Katie a brand-new iPod Nano (second generation).  Jen was so jealous!  Jen and I gave Katie some cash so that she can join LA Fitness.

Eventually we went home and just before bed I put more drops in my ear.  It didn’t help.

Jen left the house around 6:30am and I continued to sleep in. My doctors appointment wasn’t until 9:40am so I had some time. Eventually I woke up and logged into work to check on email and make sure that everything was ok. Next I showered, dressed, and headed out.

I decided to take the back-way to the vinings area but in retrospect it was late enough that going on the highway would have been fine. Shortly after I arrived and checked-in to the waiting area at the Kaiser facility I was called to go see the doctor. Once again I was pretty happy with my experience at Kaiser. There was no copay and I didn’t have to wait long.

The nurse took my weight and vitals and had me sit in the examination room for a few minutes while she asked me about my problem. I gave her the whole story about my ear wax problem in my right ear. The nurse checked the computer and said that the doctor was with one patient ahead of me right now and will be in momentarily.

A couple of minutes later the doctor came in and examined my ears. He said that they are going to put some drops in and then irrigate the ears. I suspected as much since that’s what I had done a few years ago when I had the same problem.

The nurse came in, administered the drops and then had me wait about ten minutes. She came back with a large spray bottle with a long tube attached and proceeded to irrigate my ears with a jet of liquid. It is a very uncomfortable feeling to get a jet of liquid squirted in your ears. She did both sides and it seemed to take forever.

Despite the fact that a lot of disgusting-looking ear wax came out of both ears, I still had a blockage in my right ear. They tried to irrigate it some more but no luck. The doctor came in and did some checking and irrigating too. He then produced some sort of pick-like instrument and began poking and prodding inside my ear.

Even with all of that they were unable to remove the blockage from my right ear and he prescribed some drops for me to take twice a day to break it up. I was really sad that I still couldn’t hear out of my right ear.

I went down to the pharmacy and picked up my prescription ear drops. There was no charge for the prescription, I’m really liking this new health insurance!

Finally I could head to work. I didn’t make it in until about 11:30am - just in time to go to lunch with Alex and Casey. We went to the varsity and while we were there saw a bunch of Atlanta Falcons going around signing autographs and handing out little footballs.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful. I spent a lot of time trying to diagnose a problem with public-key authentication not working with one particular login on a server - I was never able to figure it out.

I worked late and did not get home until about 7pm. Jen was already home and had a bottle of wine opened and was cooking dinner. She had a much better day today than she did yesterday. We had some absolutely fantastic vegetable soup along with some cheese and tomato sandwiches.

After dinner we watched a new episode of ‘The Office‘. Next Jen wanted to watch ‘One Tree Hill‘ but I wasn’t in to that, so I went downstairs and completed processing photos from our recent trip.

I created two photo albums on the website:

• Katie & Chris’s Wedding
• Punta Cana, Dominican Republic

Shortly after that Jen and I went to bed. Before I actually went to bed, I tried to irrigate my ear myself and it seemed to help a little. I can’t wait to be able to hear again.

Jen and I left the house around the same time today.  I got to work and got caught up on missed email from yesterday when I was out of the office.  Once that was done I had to run to another two-hour long data modeling meeting.  I’m finally starting to feel like I understand more of what it going on.

Once the meeting was over Alex, Casey, and I went to lunch over to Rolling Bones BBQ.  It was a really nice day outside so we sat outside.  After lunch I stayed at work pretty late doing some housekeeping stuff.  I also did some more thinking about a potential new car purchase.  I want to get something used.  Right now I’m looking at the Toyota FJ Cruiser, Infinity FX35, and Mini Cooper.

When I got home, Jen and I made plans to go have dinner up at Greenwood’s tonight but there was an accident on 285 and traffic was really bad so we decided to stay closer to home.  Instead we went to M&T.  I put on my sports coat since we would be sitting outside and it’s getting cold out.

Dinner at M&T was really nice.  It was cool but fall-like outside and we had a delightful time.  Jen and I ordered a bottle of Syrah and took our time with dinner.

I finally got the rest of my login sessions defined in SecureCRT.  Now my connect dialog has a deep hierarchy of all sorts of different servers to login to - I’m pretty proud of the setup.  I also downloaded and installed Vim 7 - a binary for this was just released for HPUX and I can’t wait to use some of the advanced new features.  While I was doing this I also refreshed versions of a lot of the gnu utilities that I downloaded before.  Lastly I defined all of the screen sessions for the new servers and such that have changed since I left.  Now things feel a lot better from the unix side of things at work.

Today I got an email saying that my new replacement pager is ready to be picked up but I will have to wait till tomorrow because the pager office closes at 1pm and I didn’t get back from lunch until about 1:30 due to us leaving super late for lunch.

I also called a short meeting to discuss the possibility of moving to JDK 1.5 from 1.4.  In all, it was a pretty productive day.  Around 5pm I left work and got home seconds before Jen did.  We talked for a bit but Jen was in a big hurry since she was going out to meet some girls for dinner at Orient Express.

At 6:30pm I headed out to Clint’s house to continue our gaming session.

As I left for work this morning I downed one of those ‘5-hour energy‘ drinks that Larry was going on and on about. It made me feel a little funny. Throughout the morning my tongue felt a bit numb and my stomach felt weird. I don’t think you’re supposed to drink that on an empty stomach maybe?

As soon as I got to work I went to a very long data modeling meeting. After this I went to lunch with Alonzo one-on-one. We talked about work, football, and houses. I treated him to lunch to thank him for how easy he made my return.

Throughout the day I was pretty stressed about this trip to New England. Return flights from Manchester did not look good and Jen can’t afford to miss any work. The stress of this combined with my messed-up stomach was not a good combination.

I called Jen and discussed the situation with her, and decided to abort the trip. It pained me to do so since I’ve desperately wanted to go up to see the fall colors for two years now. I canceled the car reservation and hotel reservation. There were no penalties or problems. I really like the Hilton Garden Inn for this reason. They will get future business from me.

After I got home I was still pretty stressed and upset about canceling the trip. Jennifer did a wonderful job cheering me up. We decided to make the best of it and went over to Nuevo Laredo for dinner.

Surprisingly we didn’t have to wait long for a table. Having some good food made me feel better. We went home and went to bed early - 8:30pm.

As my 2002 Explorer gets more miles on it, I’ve been thinking that it may be time soon to replace it with something else.  So I spent a lot of time today doing research on cars.

Jen and I went running on the Silver Comet trail.  It was really nice weather today.  After we concluded our run, Scott called and invited us to come over.  We went home, changed, and headed over to Scott’s house.

When we arrived we saw that Scott bought a new car.  It’s a 1982 Porsche convertible.  We drove it around the neighborhood.  Because it’s a manual transmission I opted not to drive it but Jen and Scott both talked me into it.  I’m not very good at driving a stick shift.  Scott’s new car has a super tight turning radius – is basically pivots on the rear wheels and spins around.

After the test drive we hung out at Scott’s house for a while.  We saw some of the changes as well as the new doors.  We also checked out his new huge LCD television.  As we were heading out, Katie and Chris came over.

Jen and I went home and opened up that bottle of Kinkler Brick zinfandel and had dinner.  As we ate dinner, we watched ‘Brokeback Mountain‘ which was painfully slow and boring.  The only redeeming part of the movie was some of the awesome photography with the landscape shots.

After the movie I stayed up pretty late doing more car research.  Currently I’m thinking about a new Ford Escape Hybrid, a used Infinity FX35, a Nissan Murano, A Honda Pilot, or something else like that.  All of the choices seem so expensive.

It was really dreary and cold and rainy out today.  At Scott’s insistence, I installed Google Talk.  I like it a lot.  I wish that it would integrate with AIM contacts so I wouldn’t have to run multiple things.  I know trillian can talk to them all but I prefer the Google Talk client itself.

I left work around 6pm and had to stay up all night for a 2am conference call.  We were doing a test on a very sensitive server which can impact flights so we waited until a downtime window (2am) to go the test.  I had a really hard time staying awake but as soon as I got in front of the computer and dialed into the bridge line, I was wide awake.  There were some problems with the failover scripts, but the midtier guy was able to fix it.

While I was on the call I logged into amazon.com and ordered a bunch of stuff: The Canon EOS 5D digital SLR camera, The Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens, and the Canon 580EX speedlite flash.

It was a lot of stuff and expensive - but with the rebate ($720 for all those items), and the sale of the 20D and 28-135mm on eBay, it shouldn’t be too expensive.  I’m really excited about having a full-frame digital camera.

Today the new camera, lens, and flash were delivered. I had them shipped two-day delivery via FedEx and got to unwrap them and unpack the items this evening.

The very first thing I did was put the new 17-40mm lens on the 5D and took a test picture of the wall in the hallway. This is picture #0001:

The second picture I took was with the 15mm fisheye lens as I lay on my back in the study facing the ceiling:

I’m very excited about all of the new gear!

It was a great day outside today so Jen and I went to Kennesaw Mountain to do some hiking.

(portrait of Jen on the trail)

This was a great opportunity to use my new camera! I brought along all my lenses (the new 17-40mm, 15mm fisheye, 10mm macro, and 50mm prime) as well as the new flash head.

(Jen took a portrait of me while we were on the trail)

I found that with the new full-frame sensor, the 15mm fisheye is ‘too’ wide. I never thought that I would say it. The 17-40 @17 is just right. I’m pretty sure I have a new lens to keep permanently attached to the camera. I also discovered that the 100mm macro lens makes a better portrait lens now compared to the 50mm prime.

(a view of the road as we came down the mountain)

Afterwards we had lunch at a Thai place near town center. I had the basil fried rice and it was quite delicious. After lunch we went to the mall and into Express to buy some clothes. After the mall we went to Costco followed by Harry’s.

Finally we went home and Jen took a nap. I was excited about the photos I took this morning and processed the photos. My current method for processing photos is a little cumbersome. I download photos off of the CF card using Downloader Pro to rename them into a more meaningful name. Then I convert the downloaded & renamed .CR2 RAW files to the Adobe Digtial Negative (DNG) format. Next I tag photos for editing Adobe Bridge. Once I have all of the photos tagged that I want to edit, I use the Adobe Camera Raw program to adjust the settings and open the files up in Photoshop. I do some more editing in photoshop and export an 800×600 crop of the photo to a jpeg.

There are a lot of steps and it’s a pretty time-consuming process. I did some digging around for another solution and found out that Adobe has a new product called ‘Lightroom‘ in beta development. The promise of what it can be is pretty fantastic and addresses all of the issues that I have. The program is pretty slow and bloated right now but I’m sure that it will be better once it is released.

In the meantime, I’m using it on a tentative basis figuring that I’ll need to start from scratch once it is released for real. It’s helping my work-flow already.

Unusually for my schedule lately, I made it into work quite early - before the sunrise. I took the opportunity to photograph the sunrise out of my window at work:

Today I also began to feel a little sick - I think I’m getting a cold. Alex, Casey, and I met Melissa near downtown today to have lunch at ‘Spoon‘. I had the spicy basil stirfry. It’s very spicy but quite tasty. Every time I have this dish my stomach hurts the rest of the day. Maybe I need to take tums or something? I left work around 5pm and went home.

The special metal dice I ordered arrived today and I was really excited about it. They are gorgeous.

There was no game night tonight so Jen and I went out to dinner with Clint and Erin. We went to Nuevo Laredo. Jen and I both ordered the avocado tacos and they were great. Afterwards we went back to our place and played two games of mile bornes with Clint and Erin. That was a lot of fun. Later they left at around 9pm.

After they were gone I did some photo processing. I decided on a new system for handling photos within Lightroom. I’m going to use the star rating process to accomplish the following:

• 1 star: All photos that are first-cut candidates to be processed. I go through all of the photos from a shoot and give any one that might be good to process a 1-star rating.
• 2 star: I go through all of the 1-star photos and give more scrutiny to the ones that I may want to process. Of the ones that I really want to process I give them 2 stars.
• 3 star: As I process each of the 2-star photos, I give them a 3-star rating to indicate that they have been processed. If I end up processing a photos which requires work in photoshop (i.e. pixel-level editing), a second copy of the photos is made by lightroom so I edit that copy instead. If this is the case, I assign the photoshop-edited copy a 3-star rating.
• 4 star: Of all the 3-star photos that were processed, I assign a 4-star rating to the ones that I want to actually put online in a photo album. This is usually a subset of all the 3-star photos.
• 5 star: And photos that I end up wanting to get printed get assigned 5-stars.

It was a dreary rainy day today and rained all day long. It was actually quite depressing. It was also a relatively slow day at work. I had to stay a little later than planned because of a last-minute build problem.

Jen and I were hosting a dinner party at our house tonight. We did a lot of prep work last night so it wasn’t too stressful today. We had a ton of people over. I usually don’t like it when we have to entertain a large number of people. We had ten people and two dogs here tonight: Jen, me, Jan, Bob, Scott, Chris, Kevin, Jessica, Matthew, and Jennifer’s uncle Chuck.

Shortly after I got home the rain stopped which was a good sign for grilling. We grilled a lot of food: vegetables, portobello mushrooms, and steaks. Jen served a salad and we all ate in the dining room.

(Everyone at the crowded dinner table)

It was all excellent - especially the steaks. My favorite way to have grilled steak is to marinade it first in the KC Masterpiece ‘honey tereyaki‘ sauce. Jen doesn’t like it as much because it is too sweet.

(Jen cleaning up after dinner)

After dinner everyone moved into the living room and the kids played on the Xbox. I took some photos using the 580EX flash and love it. I find myself using it primarily to bounce the flash off of the ceiling and the photos look so natural and well lighted. I used to not care for taking indoor photos because, even at 3200 ISO, there simply wasn’t enough light for a non-flash photo and with the built-in flash (from the 10D or the 20D), everything looked way too washed out and there were harsh shadows. This is not so with the external flash (especially bounced).

(Everyone in the living room)

I had a good time despite the huge crowd. Chlo and Adi weren’t too much trouble either.

(Adi near the kitchen)

By 9:30 everyone headed out. I had to do some more deployment stuff for work. I finished the build but it would not deploy - I think there are some space issues with the staging area.

We got up really early and dressed in layers since it will be cold this morning and warmer as the day goes on. Next we headed out and drove over to the parking lot of the Chick Fil-A at Windy Hill. Once there we met up with Kevin, Lara, their two friends, Jan, Bob, Jessica, and Matthew. We waited for Scott who arrived a little while later. He showed up and collected Matthew (who was not going with us today). Lara and her friend volunteered to ride with Jen and I.

Next we drove down to the Atlanta Motor Speedway. We followed Kevin who led us to a parking area where we paid $20 to park for some tailgating fun.

This part was a lot of fun. We drove further away in the parking area (a large field) and staked out a spot to spread our stuff out in. Kevin hauled a gas BBQ grill down from Illinois in his truck specifically for this purpose. He had a lot of fun gear for tailgating.

(Kevin grilling up some pork chops)

We grilled up some pork chops and vegetables. It was all really good. Jessica and I played a game called ‘corn toss’ which was also a lot of fun.

The weather was awesome and I walked around and took some pictures. We came really prepared for drinks too. I had a couple of crown & cokes and Jen popped open some white wine and shared that with the ladies. Jessica and I threw the football around - she’s got a good arm!

(photo of the area near where we were parked in the field)

Finally after about five hours of tailgating, we walked to the racetrack. Bob stayed behind with the dogs at the cars. There were a lot of people. Apparently our seats were really good. The race was very loud. Even with Jennifer and I wearing earplugs, it so so incredibly loud.

(Our view from the bleachers)

In addition, the majority of the fans seemed to be stereotypical ‘rednecks’. Sitting close to use was this creepy older guy giving a teenage girl (who was obviously not with him) a beer and then rubbing her neck. Nascar just isn’t for me.

I sat with Jennifer, Jessica, Jan, and Chuck. Kevin, Lara, and their two friends sat in other seats even closer to the action. We left after about 250 laps. It was so incredibly loud.

We headed back to the cars. It started to get a bit cold as the sun dipped below the horizon. Bob was waiting for us at the cars. Kevin, Lara, and their two friends were not back yet so we had some food and waited for them. They finally came after the race was over.

Jen and I needed to take Lara and her two friends to the airport. We left the parking area at 7pm. My explorer wouldn’t start. Apparently having the liftgate open all day while we were tailgating caused the battery to die. I was able to quickly get a jump off of Bob’s car and we headed out. Traffic was extremely bad. It was really bad. We were heading back to Atlanta with about 50,000 other people. It took a long time to get to the airport.

Even with that we managed to get them to the airport in time for their 9:45pm flight. Jen and I then drove home and then went to bed. It was really nice of Kevin and Lara to invite us along and give us great seats, but Nascar just isn’t for us.

I worked really late today. Part of that was getting LDAP functionality fully working the mediawiki software for our project. It works perfectly now. I’m quite proud actually. Users don’t need to create an account as they authenticate directly against the company’s LDAP server and then their real name and other info are already populated in their account. That way people don’t need to keep track of yet another password.

When I got home Jen and I carved a pumpkin and put it out on the front porch. I was really surprised and a bit disappointed that not a single person came by for candy tonight. I guess times are different now.

Late this evening I also listed the Canon 20D DSLR and Canon 28-135mm lens on eBay.