This evening I did the wiring project in the storage closet in the basement. I but into the long cat5e cable tht runs upstairs and connected two new rj45 terminators to it. I didn’t have any problem wiring the new terminators and was pretty pleased with myself. Next I installed a gigbit switch into the closet and relocated the headless linux server (turing) to the closet along with the new UPS. This gives the linux server an isolated self-contained solution and frees up some room in the study as well as making it quieter.
Monthly Archive for May, 2007
Delta’s post-bankrupcy stock (DAL) is officially listed again on the NYSE. I got a small grant of stock (very small since it was based on my 2006 earnings – I wasn’t working for Delta for over half of 2006). So it was fun to track to see how the stock was doing throughout the day. I can’t decide if I should sell my shares or hold onto them. How will airline stocks do going forward?
Jen woke up way before I did and must have had her coffee because at one point early this morning she came running upstairs to tell me that she loved me and then ran downstairs again.
Eventually I woke up and we got ready to go to the gym. Every Saturday Jen goes to a body sculpting/strength building class at LA Fitness while I run and lift weights. Today I agreed to go to the class with Jen. It was really tough but the hour seemed to go by pretty quickly.
After the class we went to Publix and bought some groceries for our party tonight. I also had a doughnut. It was fun shopping with Jen. We got home and began to get things together for our party tonight. I helped Jen clean up around the house. I also did some housekeeping on the computer.
Jen wanted to listen to music while she did some touch-up painting but we discovered a problem with the XBMC software on the Xbox. The symptoms were that none of the thumbnails were displaying for the albums. I know that all of the music albums have album art and they did indeed display on XBMC before. After about 30 minutes of investigation I realized that the problem stemmed from the fact that there were over 160,000 files in the thumbnail directory and it must have been too large. After I cleaned that out, everything was much more responsive and I was able to re-scan everything and get the album art back.
Once that was eventually resolved Scott came over, followed by Katie and Chris. Scott brought over a bunch of food and supplies, including a big bottle of Rum and two bottles of Tequila: Petrone and Cabo Vavo. I made a pitcher of mojitos and then showed Katie the old ‘Strawberry Shortcake’ Atari 2600 game on the x26 emulator on the Xbox. She loved it.
Others arrived shortly after that and we had a wonderful party. We grilled some fajitas and onions and peppers. We had spicy black beans and jalepenos as well as salas and corn chips. Jen did an amazing job with all of the food and everything. It was a great time.
This morning we went running in our neighborhood area. It was really nice and sunny out. After running I went down to the pool. Jen followed shortly afterward and brought along some chips, salsa, and mojitos. That was really cool of her. Jen had also invited Lisa earlier who arrived and joined us too.
We laid out for quite a while. The weather was really nice. I originally thought that it would be cloudy, but instead it was sunny and nice. We got a lot of sun. While we were out there Dad called and we chatted for a long time.
Eventually it was time to go home. Jen and Lisa went out to go shopping. When she came home she came bearing two new pairs of court shoes for us. We didn’t previously have any proper tennis shoes so this was nice since we are now getting into tennis.
Today was another awesome day for weather. I had a rough day at work due to a lot of problems with DB2.
I met Jennifer at the fancy health club called Midtown at Windy Hill. She signed us up for a special class called ‘Tennis in No Time’ Katie and Chris signed up too. I was looking forward to it because Tennis is my favorite sport and I want her to get into it too. So this could end up turning out very good for us. The club is very nice. I remember thinking about how expensive and overpriced it is when I used to live nearby in the apartment.
Katie and Chris showed up a little late. The coaches gave us all a water bottle and t-shirt for participating. We just began with the basics of the tennis lessons and used foam balls today. It was a nice lesson and I’m looking forward to the rest of the lessons. Jen and I had leftovers from Stoney River for dinner tonight.
I think for the first time ever I wore shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals to work today. We had a morning conference call with the DBAs to discuss options regarding the problems we’ve been having with DB2. We recently migrated some of our application reference data form Oracle to DB2 (C++ code) and used static-SQL which meant that we had to do prep and binding steps with the code. This caused all sorts of problems.
It turns out that the problem had to do with the development and test instance of the database living on the same MVS host. Even though the bind packages lived in separate database instances, there were naming collisions with the package names primarily because they both resided on the same physical host. What a mess! The answer to this problem is to separate the development and test instances to two separate hosts. Unfortunately we got a lot of push-back from the DBAs about doing this.
The rest of the day was much better. We spent the whole day outside to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Delta Technology. They catered in BBQ from Williams Brothers. There were a lot of people and fun activities. There was horseshoes and volleyball. I played a round of horseshoes with Casey and two other people.
In addition to the BBQ, there was also cake and ice cream. It was a nice diversion from the normal daily work schedule. Eventually we went back to work. Before I left for the day we managed to get some test tickets run through the test environment but some more issues were discovered.
I left work and went home to change before heading to the Midtown athletic club for our ‘tennis in no time’ lesson. Today we learned about backhands. After the lesson Jen and I had dinner over at Curry Curry.
It was a productive day at work today. I got a lot done and worked through many issues in the test environment. We had a long conference call this afternoon with IBM and the DBAs to talk about our recent bind problem. We finally settled on the idea that we need to have our development instance in a seperate subsystem than the one where the test instance lives. I spent the rest of the day working on various issues and got a lot done.
After leaving work around 5:30pm I got home to find Jennifer and Katie home. Katie brought over her new dog, Jackson. Actually it’s not her dog. She is a foster family for a collie rescue program and Jackson is her first foster rescue dog. Katie left to go to a wedding rehearsal thing while Jen and I watched Jackson. We watched an episode of The Office as well as Survivor. I ordered a bunch of stuff from REI. Katie and Chris later came by in the evening to collect Jackson on their way home.
We were up at 9am and dashed off to a group exercise class at LA Fitness. It wasn’t as hard as last week. Afterward we went to Publix to do some shopping. We went home and Jen made us some tuna fish sandwiches for lunch. I made a batch of mojitos and then we went down to the pool where we laid out for about two hours. It was another nice day.
After getting back and cleaning up, we ran down to the shoe store so Jen could get some shoes that would match her dress. We were running a bit late so I quickly changed into my suit and we drove over to the church for the wedding. It was at that huge cathedral-looking church called the ‘Church of the Apostles’ that some people name ‘Six Flags over Jesus’.
Clint and Erin had a very nice wedding. The inside of the church was grand and cathedral-like. They each had size people standing with them including Chris and Tremyne. After the wedding we went to the reception over at the Marietta Conference Center. It was a really fun time. I had my camera and took a lot of pictures. We got home around 11:30pm.
Katie hosted a mother’s day brunch at her house. We had mimosas, bloody marrys, fruit, hand-made cinnamon rolls, hash-browns, and a pastry egg salmon avocado thing.
The first thing I did after waking up this morning was to log into work and check email. Alex needed a build for a code change, so I worked on that. A deployment issue came up so I worked on that next. Next there was a major issue with the reference data so I worked on that. I got on a long conference call – by the time it was over, it was 11:30am. I decided to just work from home today instead of driving in since it was already so late. I worked all day and worked through lunch.
Jennifer got home at 5:30pm and we went running on the silver comet trail. Afterwards we did some grocery shopping at Publix. I had chips & queso and Jen made salsa and burritos. It was a nice evening.
Clint, Erin, Chris, Katie, two of Erin’s friends, and I went to see Spider Man 3 in the theater tonight. Jen was supposed to come but she skipped out because she was having a bad day and not feeling well. I ate way too much popcorn and felt sick afterward.
After working hard from home today I ’stopped’ a little early and went to our gym at 4pm. Jennifer rented a ball machine for us to practice with. Katie and Chris showed up a little later. All four of us used the ball machine from 4-6pm. It was great practice and the machine worked very well.
Once that was done we all went up to the Woodstock area to have drinks with Lisa and Alan. We didn’t stay long. Next we went over to Jen’s parents house and had dinner with Jen’s parent’s and her aunt Sandy. There were some problems with the grill. We had burgers with organic beef and they were pretty good!
We got home around 11pm and I stayed up a bit late getting things together for our trip to St. Maarten tomorrow.
As Jennifer and I got to the airport this morning, it took a little longer for us to check-in because of a new place for employees to check-in for flights. Normally we could use the kiosk even for this international flight, but Because Jennifer got her passport before we were married, it doesn’t match to her new last name and it must be manually checked. Maybe it is different now but I don’t understand why when the passport is amended with a new name, they can’t reissue it with the correct name instead of just some text slapped onto the last page.
After wading through a longish security line we got to the gate as they were boarding. It was a pretty full flight but we got cleared to board. We were not able to sit together but ended up near the front of coach which is nice for deplaning quickly.
As the boarding process was almost done, a gate agent approached me and asked if Jen and I were ok being split up. I thought that he meant that one of needed to be pulled from the flight (many a ticketed passenger showed up late and they needed our seat). I said that we both need to go together or we can’t go at all. He said ‘You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?’ and asked me to come talk with him in private in the galley.
It turned out that there was one seat available in first class. I immediately told him that Jen should have it. I went back to my seat and he went over to Jen and asked her to collect her things and go with him. She got worried – thinking that she was getting pulled from the flight. As she was led towards the front of the plane and passed my row, she called out to me. I just smiled at her. It was pretty funny. You probably had to be there.
So Jen got the hot-towel treatment (that’s what they give you when you fly first class). The flight was great. I watched the in-flight movie titled something like ‘Music and Lyrics’ with Hugh Grant. When we got to St. Maarten we deplaned quickly and blew through immigration and caught a taxi and got to the Maho Hotel. We managed to go from the plane to the hotel in less than 15-20 minutes which is nice. Unfortunately it always takes a long time to get checked-in to the Maho hotel – but we don’t have many choices.
As soon as we got our room, we quickly changed and headed out to the sunset beach bar. It was unusually hazy and very hot outside! I guess it’s because it was May and there wasn’t much wind. We sat in the shade. It was definitely much hotter than I remember from prior trips.
We were hungry and got a fresh tuna sandwich along with some fries. There wasn’t much airplane activity today so we decided to hit the hotel pool. I neglected to pack a swimsuit so we bought one from a little store near our hotel. At the pool we got a drink from the swim-up bar and laid out by the pool while a while.
As the sun was going down we changed and went back out to the sunset beach bar to watch the sunset. Afterwards we had an early dinner at the wonderful sushi place called ‘Bamboo Bernies’ We ordered a large sushi boat – it was fantastic!
After dinner we went back to the bar and hung out for a bit. I wanted to get a timed exposure photograph of an incoming plane (it looks really cool like an incoming fireball) but nothing ever showed up. Both of us were pretty tired. However unexpectedly Jennifer was up for going out later in the evening (for the first time ever in St. Maarten), but we decided to go to bed instead.
The sun seems to comes up very early in this morning time time of year in the caribbean. Jen and I slept in late, taking our time. Eventually we woke up and ambled over to the ‘Dragons Gate’ Chinese eatery/store for breakfast. They have outdoor seating and it’s really nice and half as expensive as the crappy hotel breakfast place.
After breakfast we planted ourselves at the boat bar which sits on the other side of the beach as the sunset beach bar. It’s nice to see the beach & incoming planes from a different vantage point. We took some photos and enjoyed the warm morning.
Later we went back to the hotel because Jennifer wanted to lay out by the pool. Eventually it was time to change and check-out. Jennifer wanted to go back over by the pool so I used my 100mm macro lens to photograph the planes coming in over the bay. It wasn’t a great spot to photograph.
Finally we went over tot he boat bar and hung out for about 2-3 hours having some drinks. It was a nicer more friendly atmosphere than the sunset beach bar. A couple of German guys were there too also plane-spotting. One of them, a travel agent, had a schedule of all arrivals so he gave me a heads-up before each plane was due to arrive.
The Delta flight came in a little early so we hopped a taxi and went to the airport. Literally in about 5 minutes after leaving the bar we were checked-in, through security, through immigration/customs, and at the gate. It was crazy-fast!
The flight was pretty empty and we sat next to each other. We watched a movie on the flight back. When we finally got home and got to the car, Jen was hungry and grumpy. We went home, had something to eat and finished laundry. I uploaded photos and went to bed. It was a great trip!
After getting home early today before Jen, I noticed that it was really nice outside. I had flashbacks to when I used to live alone in the apartment and decided that it would be fun to go out to the pool and lay in the sun. I quickly changed and went down to the pool. I took along a bag of kettle-cooked jalapeno flavored chips and listened to my audiobook as I laid in the sun.
I ended up eating too many of the chips and got really full. Jen and I made plans to meet at the gym for a workout class this afternoon so I dashed over there to join her. During the class I started to feel very sick from the excessive jalapeno kettle-cooked chips. As a result I cannot eat those types of chips anymore.
Chris and I rented the ball machine this afternoon for an hour or two. It was a great way to practice. I got to try a lot of net and baseline shots.
Later Jennifer and I grilled out some salmon fillets. It was gorgeous outside so we ate outside on the deck and had a lot of fun. I love evenings like this!
We decided that we are going to cancel our LA Fitness gym membership. I did a bit of research and read a lot of horror stories about people having a difficult time canceling. So I printed-up a cancellation letter & cancellation form. I mailed off the cancellation form as a certified letter with a return receipt. It was sort of expensive but I don’t want any trouble at all. I also faxed the letter to the local location that I go to. It was very hard to track-down their fax number – almost as if they are trying to hide it.
Tonight at Midtown Athletic Club we had our last session of the tennis lessons and then got to play some doubles. Afterwards Jennifer and I signed-up for membership. It’s going to be very expensive but this is a very nice club, Jennifer loves it, we have disposable income and no kids.
Next we went over to Blue Moon Pizza with Katie and Chris. I had a pizza with the candied bacon & pepperoni. It was awesome! I was up late working on stuff for work. I also ordered from B&H the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS lens – the holy grail of Canon lenses as far as I’m concerned. It’s amazing how much of a difference is with the quality of images captured from that lens vs other lenses.
It was quiet at work this Friday and I worked on system test ’string testing’ (connectivity) items. I also met with Ningyu today and feel that this promotion thing is an uphill battle.
When I got home I was pretty tired and took a quick nap. Jan, Sandy, and Scott came over for dinner. We had salad and grilled salmon with fresh-baked cookies for desert. It was a nice time.
Later in the evening I set up openvpn on the laptop and published photos from the recent St. Maarten trip.
It was a pretty busy day today. It started out with Jen and I doing a step class at our gym. Once we finished that we went home, showered, packed up, and headed over to the Barett Parkway area to do some shopping. Jen returned some items to T.J. Maxx and I got a haircut with Tami and Studio 8 Salon. She did a great job as always! Once that was done Jennifer and I looked at court shoes at DSW but didn’t see anything that we liked.
Next we went over to Katie & Chris’s house. They are out of town and we are dogsitting for them. I helped Jennifer hang some shelves and then played Gears of War for a while. Later we went over to the neighborhood tennis courts and played some tennis. It was very hot outside but still fun. We played three sets.
Lisa was having a party tonight so we went over to her house. The party went from 7:30pm till 11:30pm. I had some hotdogs. We went back to Katie’s house where I proceeded to stay up very late playing Gears of War on Chris’s Xbox 360. I don’t have one so this was a fun treat.
Sydney woke Jennifer and I up this morning – we aren’t used to that. Jen started to freak out because she couldn’t find any coffee in the house and had to leave right away to go find some. She came back a little while later with some coffee and some doughnuts for me. How nice!
We sat outside on the back deck and talked. It was a nice morning out but there was a lot of smoke in the air form the huge fires in south Georgia. Jen made plans to go over to Scott’s house to help him paint. She asked that I stay behind and keep and eye on the dogs. I’m all for that!
So I played Gears of War again for hours and made it all the way to act 4 but then got tired of playing. So I switched over to Guitar Hero. All day long the dogs slept. Is that all they do is sleep all day long? Next I worked on the laptop some. OpenVPN works great – it’s like I’ve never left my home network (only that access is slower).
I packed up and went home. Jen was still at Scott’s house so I worked on laundry and did some work on the PC downstairs. Jen got home and we went out to dinner. First we tried to go over to M&T but they are closed on Sunday so instead we went to Marlow’s tavern in vinings. It was nice out so we sat outside.
Because it is Memorial Day, Jennifer had off from work. I didn’t. She was still in bed when I left this morning at 8:30am. It was very quiet at work today. This evening I spent a lot of time working on a unix server patch failover. I ended up working from 11pm until 3am. Kumar helped too.
When I got home from work today I took a nap as I was very tired. I went to bed at 10pm and woke up at 1:40am to do more work on the server migration. There were issues and it took longer than expected. I didn’t finish until about 5am. I went to bed but then was paged an hour later. There were more problems.
I worked on this some more while Jennifer woke up, showered, dressed, and left. I continued to work until about 7am at which point I went to bed again.
So after I went back to sleep this morning I got a call a couple of hours later from my director. Aparantly there were some problems with the sever and he needed my help. I worked on this until about 6pm. I worked from home all day today.
Jen had taken my car to work today and brought it home washed. It looked great and I was so excited that it was nice and clean! She also had gone shopping and bought some new tennis shirts for me and some new tennis skirts for herself. I made tofu rubens for dinner tonight. Jennifer thought that I was a little grumpy but I explained that I was just tired.
I’m a terrible cook and managed to make the tofu chewy. This is something that Jennifer has never seen done before. After dinner we watched an episode of ‘24′.
