2006 December Archive at Jeff Billimek’s Journal

Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Dec 1st 2006

worky work busy bee

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I intended to only work a half day today but ended up working until 6pm anyway! I went to a nice lunch today at ‘Strip‘ at Atlantic Station. Attending were Brian S, Scott E, Brian’s girlfriend (not in a dating sense), Alex D, Casey T, Sameer P, Bob M, James E, Melissa N, and Mallick H. It was a nice lunch.

As soon as I got home I left with Jennifer to go to Katie and Chris’s new house. They closed today and we wanted to show up to give our support on their big purchase. On the way up there we stopped at Willy’s to get some food. Because they don’t have any furniture yet, we ate dinner on the dining room floor. Katie and Chris seemed very excited about their new place.

Jen and I went home and packed for our trip tomorrow. I was up until about 1am.

Dec 2nd 2006

sleeping in st. maarten

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Jen desperately wanted to go running today before we went to the airport so she got up really early and rushed out the door to go to LA Fitness. A few minutes later she came back and woke me up to tell me that her car has a flat tire.
It was really cold out this morning but I put on some clothes and we went out to the driveway to see about using the fix-a-flat stuff on the flat tire. This didn’t work, the stuff just poured out between the seam between the tire and the rim. So I changed the tire and put on the little spare. I told Jen to take a shower while I did this. She was really bummed.

We had an eggie for breakfast and headed to the airport. Once there we went to the new international check-in area. The kiosk machines wouldn’t accept Jen’s passport as it has been amended. It doesn’t expire until 2014. So we have a while to deal with this frustration. At checking we were also informed that employees need to use the new employee travel center when checking in. This is new as of this past summer. We’ll have to check it out the next time we go somewhere.

After checking in we headed down to the gate and waited for our flight to St. Maarten. There were no problems and we made the flight. Jen and I sat next to each other. The in-flight movie was ‘Little miss Sunshine‘. It was pretty good.

We landed and took a taxi to the hotel. It didn’t take long to check in and get to the room to change. I was in a hurry to get to the bar as a lot of big jets land right around the time we land too.

(The departing Delta jet we arrived on)

It was great hanging out by the bar. I had my usual drink: Red Bull & Vodka while Jen tried a few different things. It was a really nice time.

(Jennifer sitting at the bar looking out across the ocean.)

As the afternoon stretched on we drank and watched planes and had a really great time. When the sun finally set and it got dark we talked about going to Bamboo Bernie’s for dinner and watched as the bar grew more and more crowded.

(30-second exposure of an incoming plane over the ocean)

The sushi dinner at Bamboo Bernie’s was fantastic. It’s the best sushi place on the entire island.

(Jen and I at dinner)

After dinner we headed back to the room. I was wide awake and ready to go back out - either to the bar again, the casino, or the ‘Sopranos’ piano bar. Sadly Jen was very tired and didn’t want to do anything except sleep. I couldn’t sleep. There were some power problems on the island so we didn’t have any water or cable. I was really bored.

Dec 3rd 2006

great day in sxm

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We awoke and headed to breakfast. There’s a little Chinese ’store’ which also serves a great breakfast next-door to our hotel. Unfortunately they don’t open until 10 am.

We headed over the grocery store and sat near the beach for a while. It was beautiful and quite relaxing.

(A plane spotter photographing an incoming US Air plane in the morning)

At 10am we headed over to breakfast. We both had a fried egg and toast. I was very eager to head the the beach and tried to rush Jen into drinking her coffee. I don’t think she appreciated that.

We packed up and checked out of the hotel. They were nice enough to allow us to store our bags there. Next we headed to the Sunset Beach Bar to hang out. It was pretty dead in the morning but it was amazing how crowded it got hour by hour.

One of the things people do is stand behind the planes as they depart. Because of the way the winds usually blow, planes nearly always depart facing away from the the beach. This means that they rev their engines right next to the fence and blow a very strong wind of jet exhaust. This is fun and dangerous. Usually the ones who do this have already had a lot to drink.

(A sign warning people about the dangers of the departing aircraft)

(A group of people unaware how powerful the departing engines really are)

I wanted to get some good shots of the large incoming planes but didn’t have a lot of luck as the schedule seemed light and there were no KLM 747’s. I did manage to photograph many of the smaller aircraft, including a cool shot of an incoming American Airlines jet.

(Interesting angle of an incoming American Airlines jet)

By the time we left at 2:30pm the bar was packed. The phone lines were still out from the night before so the lady at the hotel offered to drive us to the airport. The new airport is extremely nice. We’ve never been inside the new terminal (for departing) so this was quite a treat.

When we checked in we found out that computer systems were still down from the night before. So we received hand written tickets. This is the 2nd time this has happened on a St. Maarten trip. It’s kind of cool and old-fashioned. Even with the computer systems being down, boarding was pretty seamless.

Jen and I were cleared for first class and were quite happy. As the rest of the passengers were boarding, there was some problem in the first class cabin. Two girls who appeared to be ticketed passengers were yelled at by one of the other nonrev passengers about their attire?! They were wearing jeans and I can only guess that the other nonrev passengers assumed that they were buddy-pass riders and decided to publicly tell them that they were not dressed appropriately for first class.

There are several problems with this. One is that they were most likely ticketed passengers and can wear whatever they want. The second problem is that it is up to the gate agent and flight crew to decide who can be seated in what cabin - NOT another passenger. The flight attendant told the nonrev lady to shut up (and rightly so) - it was really bizarre.

During the trip back we watched the in-flight movie/documentary titled, ‘The Heart of the Game‘. It was pretty interesting.

We got back to Atlanta at around 9pm and sped through immigrations and customs. It only took about 15 minutes - a record! Soon we were in the car heading home. We grabbed a salad for dinner and went to bed.

Dec 4th 2006

extending link checker

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A while back I created a script to run on cron every five minutes to check the health of my internet connection. I’ve since extended this script to reboot the router after six failed attempts to restart the connection to the ISP. I did this because I noticed at least once that simply telling it to reconnect didn’t work. The only thing which worked in that case was to power cycle the router.

#!/bin/bash
FAILURE_COUNT_FILE='/root/link_check_count.txt'
 
# Send 1 ping to the ISP switch to see if we are really connected...
ping -q -W10 -c5 66.23.230.1 > /dev/null
 
# Check to see if the ping was successful or not
if (( $? != 0 )); then
  # Send a message to syslogger that we have a downed link.
  logger -t link_check FATAL: We appear to have a down link!
 
  # Increment the failure count file
  PREV_COUNT=`cat $FAILURE_COUNT_FILE`
  CURRENT_COUNT=`expr 1 + ${PREV_COUNT}`
  echo "${CURRENT_COUNT}" > $FAILURE_COUNT_FILE
 
  # Log out of the router just in case something is already logged in.
  curl -s -u username:password 192.168.1.1/cgi_logout.htm > /dev/null
 
  # If we have been offline up to 5 times, tell the router to reconnect to the ISP.
  if (( ${CURRENT_COUNT} < = 5 )); then
    logger -t link_check FATAL: Reconnect attempt \#${CURRENT_COUNT}, telling the router to reconnect.
 
    # Tell the router to try to reconnect to the ISP via PPPoE.
    curl -s -u username:password -d "action_melco=wanlinktop&;wanlink=up" 192.168.1.1/apply_post.cgi > /root/link_check_out.html
 
    echo "-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-" >> /root/link_check_out.html
 
    # Log out of the router.
    curl -s -u username:password 192.168.1.1/cgi_logout.htm > /dev/null
 
  # tell the router to reboot itself (6th consecutive try)
  else
    # Log a message that we have to take more drastic measures
    logger -t link_check FATAL: More than 5 attempts to reconnect \(${CURRENT_COUNT}th attempt\) - rebooting the router!
 
    # Tell the router to reboot itself.
    curl -s -u username:password -d "action=Reboot" 192.168.1.1/apply_post.cgi > /root/link_check_out.html
 
    # reset the failure count file
    echo "0" > $FAILURE_COUNT_FILE
  fi
else
  # reset the failure count file
  echo "0" > $FAILURE_COUNT_FILE
fi

Dec 8th 2006

o christmas tree

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I worked from home all day today. It was super busy with the pending ‘4.1′ release to the integration environment (SI). In addition, I had a ton of emails flying around for work today too.

When Jen got home this evening I dropped what I was doing and we went to dinner to Muss & Turner’s. It was really cold outside this evening. After dinner we drove over to Lowe’s off of the East-West Connector to buy a Christmas tree. First we stopped at a lot called ‘Big Ed’s’ but their trees were very expensive. So instead we bought a 6-7′ tree from Lowe’s for $30.

Jen and I got the tree home and set it up. We also put up decorations. Afterwards I stayed up pretty late (until about 1am) doing work stuff.

Dec 9th 2006

moving and jousting

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Jen and I helped Katie and Chris move to their new house. This took pretty much all day long. Katie treated us to a nice lunch at ‘Firehouse Subs‘. Jen and I made it home at around 4pm and proceeded to shower, change, and got ready to head out. Clint was having a birthday party tonight at ‘Medieval Times‘ at the Discover Mills mall area. This is pretty far for us since it is up I-85.

I was pretty excited about going to this since I’ve been to something very similar when I went to Las Vegas with Craig back in 1995 and we went to see the ‘Tournament of Kings’ thing inside the Excalibur casino. That was a lot of fun and I suspected that this place would be similar.

As expected, this was a lot of fun. We sat in the ‘green knight’ section, but the blue knight won the tournament. Clint had a large crowd at his party. The food wasn’t all that great since they were trying to make it match the period. We got a bottle of wine and I had a $20souvenir drink.

Dec 10th 2006

anniversary dinner and blowing a fuse

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I worked all day from home on release 4.1 stuff today. I also chatted a little with cousin John via Google Talk. He’s working hard on his Doctoral Thesis. Jennifer was up at her house cleaning it up since Katie and Chris just moved out the day before.

Jennifer got home and we changed and got ready to go out for dinner. Mom and Jim were treating us to dinner at Stoney River to celebrate our anniversary. It was a wonderful dinner as to be expected from Stoney River. We had a nice time.

Afterwards we went home and investigated the heater problem in more detail. A few days ago I tried to replace the thermostat upstairs in the bedroom and it stopped working. I think I let two of the wires cross when I had it off the wall. I went into the attic and opened up the heater and saw that a little 10 amp fuse was blown.

Because it is very cold out right now, we’ve actually needed to use the heater a little which, thankfully, is unusual for our well-insulated townhome. So Jen and I went to Wal-Mart and bought some replacement fuses. We got home, installed the fuse, and the problem was fixed.

Dec 11th 2006

pushing the date back

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Things were less stressful at work today. Carole and I decided to delay the production date of the 4.1 release until after January 1st. This is to put less pressure on us with the load freezes around the end of the year. I feel better about this as we’ll have more time to test out the new version of Tuxedo in the SI environment.

I also called the rebate company today about my very large Canon rebate ($720). It’s been since October that I sent it in and their tracking website shows that they have not received it yet. When I called them they said that it must have been lost in the mail, but to send copies of everything again as a resubmit. Thankfully I made copies of everything but now I have a bad feeling about this rebate company. This is close to $1,000 that I’m owed so I don’t want there to be any problems.

Tonight was also game night. I did a writeup of the adventure.

Dec 12th 2006

windows vista slow user switch

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I didn’t get much work done today because I was stuck in many meetings today. James E, Alex D, Casey T, Jeff C, and I went to lunch at Smokey Bones.

After lunch I talked with Sameer at great length about the different versions of Eclipse and which one works best for our system and clearcase integration. I also quickly managed my email inbox from 600 messages down to 6.

When I got home at 6:30pm Jen was already there and we had stirfry for dinner. After dinner we watched an episode of Heroes. Craig called and we chatted a bit. After talking with Craig I baked some cookies while Jen worked on Christmas cards.

Later I messed around with Vista some more and grew very frustrated. The microsoft mouse/intellimouse bug really bothers me and the ‘fast user switch’ is painfully slow now. Whenever you hit the Windows Key + L, it takes you to the ‘locked’ screen. You must then click on the ’switch user’ button which takes about 10 seconds to execute because the video hardware is reset (the monitor(s) lose signal and then turn back on). After that you click on the person you want to log in as, type in their password and then wait another 10-20 seconds as the monitor yet again loses signal and reconnects as the video hardware is reset.

Compared to XP this is painfully slow and is a joke to call it ‘fast user switch’. XP’s method was truly fast: You hit win+l, clicked on the user, typed in their password, and instantly you were in their desktop.

Dec 13th 2006

scratchy throat

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I woke up this morning and did a lot. I showered, dressed, flipped the laundry, made the bed, packed up the car with all of the crap, dumped the trash, got gas in the car, went to the post office, mailed the letter, mailed the package, bought stamps, and finally made it to work!

All day long I had a scratchy throat and felt a little sick. I think doing too much domestic work makes me sick. I did some work in the system integration test environment and went to the holiday lunch thing for work.

I was feeling more and more sick and actually went home early – something I don’t do often. When I got home I took a nap from 2pm until 6:30pm. Jen got home and made soup for dinner.

Dec 14th 2006

sickness and OSX

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I was still feeling like crap and took a day off from work today. I still did some work though; it’s hard to keep me away. But it helped a lot to take it easy and take naps.

During the day I watched the first four episodes of ‘Entourage’ at Larry’s suggestion. It’s pretty good!

The big accomplishment today was something I’ve been working at a long time now. I finally got OSX working (nearly) perfectly on the PC! Thanks to a new kernel & patches someone released, I was able to do a clean install with everything working natively. This means that dual monitor (DVI) support works flawlessly. After the struggle I’ve gone through before, this is quite an accomplishment. I really like the Macintosh OSX operating system and think that we need to buy a mac.

Dec 15th 2006

more osx tweaking

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It was a slow day at work today. I left early. A lot of people (management-level) were out for a party at our VPs house. Sadly I’m not currently management level and wasn’t invited.

After work I finished up some Christmas shopping. Other than that, it was a relaxing evening at home. I’m still getting over the cold that I got a couple of days ago.

Jen and I went out to dinner to a great Asian place called ‘Doc Chueys’ at Vinings Walk. Once we got home, I of course did more tinkering with OSX. I’m now thinking about an elaborate file strategy in which my documents are stored on a share on the linux box and used in a shared-fashion between the Vista and OSX installs. I don’t think that Jen likes all of this turmoil.

Dec 16th 2006

delta party

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I slept-in late today. Finally I got up, dressed, and headed out. I stopped Jen off at her house and went to my haircut appointment. Sadly I showed up fifteen minutes late. After the haircut I went back to Jen’s house and we took some stuff to goodwill.

Some people came over to look at the house but they didn’t take too long and were gone by 1pm. It seemed like a lot of work to show the house for such a brief period of time - but that’s how it goes. Afterwards Jen and I packed up the car and went to her parent’s house. Jan and Bob gave us a bunch of china for our anniversary gift.

We all went to lunch to ‘Rainbow Asia’ and stopped at the wine shop next-door afterwards to buy two bottles of wine. After lunch we dropped Jen’s mom off at her house and went home.

A couple of hours later Jen and I got ready and headed out towards downtown for the Delta party thing. We would have arrived at 7pm but traffic into downtown was horrendous: There was a football game and basketball game both starting at around the same time. It took an hour to get through traffic.

The party thing was really crowded. Delta was partnering with the Cirque du Sole performers to put on the party so there were a lot of freaky-looking people walking around who looked at us with their big eyes but didn’t say anything - they just sort of waved their arms around.

The place was packed - there were a lot of people and it was a little overwhelming for me. We got some food (after waiting around in a long line) and had lots to drink. It was actually not as bad as I make it sound. I’m amazed that Delta put this sort of thing on.

We saw Steve C, Kay V, Casey T, Jegan M, Carole G, Bob O, Jeff C, and Mallick H. A lot of us danced and Jen had a wonderful time. We didn’t leave until about 1am. Casey and Rebbecca invited us to an after-party a someones house nearby. We went over there but Jen was feeling sick so we left and went home. Jen went straight to bed and I stayed up a little while sorting out some iTunes issues.

Dec 17th 2006

OSX terminal issues

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Both Jen and I slept in pretty late today given the night we had yesterday evening. Jen wasn’t feeling very well today and didn’t do much. I did some work in OSX - playing with the terminal program. I use SecureCRT heavily within Windows and haven’t found anything that compares. Even iTerm isn’t as good as ScuerCRT. My main issue are pool terminal handling when using ’screen’.

Dec 18th 2006

two year wedding anniversary

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Today is the two-year wedding anniversary for Jen and I. I got home early and Jen stopped by Whole Foods to get some fun food for us to have tonight. She also bought me a new pair of sunglasses from REI. They were the cool Native Eyewear Hardtop series sunglasses that I like so much.

We opened up a bottle of the 2001 Chateau Montelena Zinfandel red wine to have with different types of cheeses, a salad, and special wine chocolates. It was a great evening of celebration and fine wine. I gave Jen a card and a delivery guy showed up with a flower arrangement from mom-mom. That was certainly unexpected!

Dec 23rd 2006

christmas holiday party

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With Christmas just a few days away, we embraced the season with a festive holiday party. Unfortunately that means that most of the day was spent cleaning and setting up for the party. The party included the usual suspects - Katie, Chris, Lisa, Alan, Jan, Mom, Tom, Terri, Scott, Lynne, Kathleen, Viktoria, Dennis, Brad, Dan, and Elizabeth. We had tons of food set up in the dinning room. I reused a trivia game that she made for work and we ran that on the TV. It made for fun background. We started the games with holiday charades. Everyone put in their favorite Christmas song into a hat. The teams then drew from the hat and had to act out the song. It was pretty funny.

Keeping with the charades theme we moved onto Hilarium. If you have never played Hilarium I encourage you check it out. It is an extremely chaotic game. The basic concept is that you draw 5 cards and start acting out 1 of the scenes on 1 of the cards. While acting out the scene you scan the room to find someone else acting out the same scene. Overall it was a lot of fun, however Jeff was not happy with game and felt it lacked structure. This was probably in part to the fact we didn’t read all of the rules.

Katie finished off with a drinking game. The game didn’t have a name but I think it could have been called “Clean out Katie’s liquor cabinet”. Katie poured 6 different alcohols into tiny cups and you had to match the sample to one of the available liqueurs listed on your sheet. The game was a lot of fun and included some obscure liquors that I wasn’t too familiar with. I mean who drinks vermouth straight.

Dec 24th 2006

christmas eve

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I don’t know what it is about the day before Christmas but even as an adult the excitement feels almost palatable in the air. Taking advantage of the time off from work both Jeff and I slept in. I did my civic duty to the marital arts world and exposed Jeff to Mortal Kombat. I was shocked when he told me he had never seen the movie. Not to worry I will make it one of my personal goals to educate him in kung fu moving watching.

After the movie we headed over to the Silver comet trail I completed my best 10K yet. The Nike+iPod is amazing. I love being able to track all my runs. The rest of the day was spent working around the house. I did some cleaning and Jeff worked on the computer fixing a problem with turing. Apparently the firewire over ethernet module was interfering with the eth0. He removed this and rebuilt the kernel to fix it.

We headed over to Katie’s house for dinner at 5pm. Katie did an amazing job creating a gourmet dinner with an apple & cinnamon theme. She also made her signature dish of green tea cheesecake. We ended up getting home pretty late and immediately going to bed.

Dec 25th 2006

christmas day

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With everything going on today Jeff and I opted to start early. We go up around 7am and headed downstairs to exchange presents. Jeff was incredibly sweet and gave me some beautiful earrings, express slacks, brown boots and fantastic coach purse. I gave Jeff a personal groom kit with travel razor, jeans, brown sweater, a book titled, ‘60 hikes within 60 miles’, and a subscription to wired magazine.

After exchanging gifts we headed over to Mom and Dad’s. Mom had her usual spread of fantastic breakfast goodies including the traditional quiche. To keep us entertained while we waited for everyone to arrive Mom created words search based on our names. It was pretty fun especially when we discovered that Mom managed to leave out Katie’s name from the game. Katie wasn’t particularly happy about that and consequently Katie and Chris came in last place in the game. The idea was the loser of the game would have to play Santa pass out the Christmas presents.

The living room was filled with presents making Katie and Chris’s task of playing Santa quite daunting. We spent the next few hours opening presents. Scott loved the 20″ LCD monitor we got him. Katie and Chris gave Jeff a cool new camera bag that he wanted, headphones, cookie monster cookie jar and few other things.

Jeff also got some nice REI fingerless gloves, skullcap for cold weather from Scott. Dad had great fun buying tools for Jeff and he ended up with a tool set, drill bit set, and cool portable car charger.

I also surprised Jeff with one other small item: a brand new loaded Herman Miller ‘Mirra’ task chair! I think he really enjoyed it. Jeff proceeded to set it up after everyone was done opening presents, used a torque wrench (13mm) to tighten the bolts to the correct amount.

The rest of the afternoon was spent playing games and grazing on the wonderful spread of food. Mom started to make dinner around 4 and I was heart broken that we had to leave. We grabbed some ham on our way out and snacked on it in the car. We then headed over to Kathy and Jim’s for dinner. We visited for a little bit and were joined by Jim’s daughter Stephanie’s family. After exchanging presents we had nice dinner and headed home.

Dec 26th 2006

back to work

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Since Christmas fell on a Monday this year we both had to drag ourselves out of bed to get to go to work today. It just felt wrong. I was extremely sad to miss out on all the after Christmas sales.

I brought my new running shoes with me to try at the gym and was quite annoyed to discover that the shoes were two different sizes.

I headed over after work to Dick’s to exchange the shoes. They did not have the correct shoes so I ended up returning the shoes and getting some running clothes instead.

Dec 29th 2006

presents for jen

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I got home early today - before Jen did. When she got home I gave her some ‘corrected’ presents for Christmas. She got some new pink New Balance 755 running shoes as well as a new fancy coach watch. She was really excited about the watch. Apparently she’s wanted this watch for quite some time.

We had leftovers for dinner and watched ‘The Da Vnici Code’. It was just ok.

Dec 30th 2006

hiding wires

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Jen and I went to the mall and then Costco this morning. We returned some pants for Jen at Express. Jen bought some news clothes and I got a white button-up shirt. At Costco we bought about $250 worth of stuff, including a new set of electric toothbrushes.

We got home and unloaded the stuff. Later we went to the gym. Jen got to use her new running shoes. We didn’t stay too long - and then we went home to shower and get dressed.

Jen’s parents came over. We invited them for dinner and to have Bob help me with hiding the wires for the television and speakers. We used fish-lines and went to Lowes to get some wall plates and utility boxes. It looked great when we were done.

(The completed project - no wires!)

For dinner we had some great rosemary pork dinner that Jen made. It was fantastic.

Dec 31st 2006

new year’s eve

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We went to Katie and Chris’s house at about 5:30pm today. They had a lot of new and different furniture in the house - it’s coming along nicely!

(Sydney on the new sofa)

Katie prepared a full-fledge dinner. We started with martinis and then followed with a full seven-course dinner. This consisted of a really good English ‘pudding’ with bacon. We also had some sort of expensive rib roast with mashed potatoes. With dinner we also had both white and red wine (at different points). It was a wonderful meal.

After dinner we played a game of ‘Mille Bornes’ with Katie and Chris. That was a lot of fun! Next, we went outside in the backyard around midnight to sip on champagne and shoot off some fireworks and light sparklers. It was great fun.

(Jennifer having some champagne)