Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

I wrote a python script to send an email whenever a particular type of VIX reversal indicator triggers. Basically if the following conditions are met, it will send an email:
* If the VIX index has a NEW 15-day high today and closed below the open, then it suggests a buy indicator.
* If the VIX index has a NEW 15-day low today and closed above the open, then it suggests a sell indicator.

I decided to write this in python since I’ve never used it before. It was a fun learning experience. I was a bit taken back by the lack of statement terminators and the indenting rules, but in all I like it better than perl.

This script runs every weekday at 4:15pm (since the yahoo stock quotes are delayed 15 minutes).

Future enhancement ideas are to include the 15-day chart from stockcharts.com as an inline attachment (I have a bash script which already does this so it shouldn’t be that hard to port), as well as proper cleanup & organization of the code once/if I ever learn more python.

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#!/usr/bin/env python
 
import sys
import datetime
import smtplib
import ystockquote
 
from email.mime.text import MIMEText
 
# ticker to look up
ticker = '^VIX'
# number of days of historical data to fetch (not counting today)
days_back = 14
 
email_from = 'redacted'
email_to = 'redacted'
 
# yesterday's date
end = datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days= -1)
# 30 days ago from today
start = datetime.date.today() + datetime.timedelta(days= -30)
 
# fetch the historical data from yahoo
data = ystockquote.get_historical_prices(ticker, start.strftime("%Y%m%d"), end.strftime("%Y%m%d"))
 
# validate that we have enough historical data to continue
if len(data) < (days_back + 1):
    print 'Not enough historical data available to continue (need at least 15 days of market data)'
    sys.exit(1)
 
current = ystockquote.get_price(ticker)
open = ystockquote.get_open(ticker)
high = ystockquote.get_high(ticker)
low = ystockquote.get_low(ticker)
 
'''
print 'start date is: ' + str(start)
print 'end date is: ' + str(end)
print 'number of days of actual market data retrieved is: ' + str((len(data) - 1))
print 'Current price: ' + str(current)
print 'Open price: ' + str(open)
print 'High price: ' + str(high)
print 'Low price: ' + str(low)
 
# Loop through the previous 14-days of data (the first item in the data array
# is omitted because it is just header information
print 'the previous 14-day of historical data:'
for i in range(1, (days_back + 1)):
    print data[i][0] + ': High:' + data[i][2] + ' Low:' + data[i][3]
'''
 
def isNewHigh(high, data):
    """
    Returns True if the 'high' is higher than any of the highs in the data
    array passed in. Otherwise returns False
    """
    for i in range(1, (days_back + 1)):
        if float(data[i][2]) >= float(high):
            return False
    return True
 
def isNewLow(low, data):
    """
    Returns True if the 'low' is lower than any of the lows in the data
    array passed in. Otherwise returns False
    """
    for i in range(1, (days_back + 1)):
        if float(data[i][3]) < = float(low):
            return False
        return True
 
def isCurrentHigherThanOpen(current, open):
    """
    Simple check to see if the current price is greater than the open price
    """
    return float(current) > float(open)
 
def isCurrentLowerThanOpen(current, open):
    """
    Simple check to see if the current price is lower than the open price
    """
    return float(current) < float(open)
 
buy = False
sell = False
 
# if the current price is higher than the open and today is a new 15-day low, 
# then this is a SELL indicator
if (isCurrentHigherThanOpen(current, open) & isNewLow(low, data)):
    #print 'today is a 15-day low (' + str(low) + ') & the current price (' + str(current) + ') is higher than the open (' + str(open) + ')'
    sell = True
 
# if the current price is lower than the open and today is a new 15-day high, 
# then this is a BUY indicator
if (isCurrentLowerThanOpen(current, open) & isNewHigh(high, data)):
    #print 'today is a 15-day high (' + str(high) + ') & the current price (' + str(current) + ') is lower than the open (' + str(open) + ')'
    buy = True
 
if (buy | sell):
    if buy:
        body = 'Today is a new 15-day high (' + str(high) + ') & the current price (' + str(current) + ') is lower than the open (' + str(open) + ')\n\n====>This is a VIX BUY indicator!'
        subject = 'VIX BUY indicator triggered'
    else:
        body = 'Today is a new 15-day low (' + str(low) + ') & the current price (' + str(current) + ') is higher than the open (' + str(open) + ')\n\n====>This is a VIX SELL indicator!'
        subject = 'VIX SELL indicator triggered'
    msg = MIMEText(body)
    msg['Subject'] = subject
    msg['From'] = email_from
    msg['To'] = email_to
    s = smtplib.SMTP('localhost')
    s.sendmail(email_from, email_to, msg.as_string())
    s.quit()

I took the ystockquote.py from Corey Goldberg and had to extend it slightly to include some additional information:
* day’s high price
* day’s low price
* last trade time
* last ‘real time’ trade + time (this doesn’t appear to be real time after all)

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#!/usr/bin/env python
#
#  Copyright (c) 2007-2008, Corey Goldberg (corey@goldb.org)
#
#  license: GNU LGPL
#
#  This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
#  modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public
#  License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either
#  version 2.1 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
 
 
import urllib
 
 
"""
This is the "ystockquote" module.
 
This module provides a Python API for retrieving stock data from Yahoo Finance.
 
sample usage:
>>> import ystockquote
>>> print ystockquote.get_price('GOOG')
529.46
"""
 
 
def __request(symbol, stat):
    url = 'http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=%s&f=%s' % (symbol, stat)
    return urllib.urlopen(url).read().strip().strip('"')
 
 
def get_all(symbol):
    """
    Get all available quote data for the given ticker symbol.
 
    Returns a dictionary.
    """
    values = __request(symbol, 'l1c1va2xj1b4j4dyekjm3m4rr5p5p6s7oahagat1k1').split(',')
    data = {}
    data['price'] = values[0]
    data['change'] = values[1]
    data['volume'] = values[2]
    data['avg_daily_volume'] = values[3]
    data['stock_exchange'] = values[4]
    data['market_cap'] = values[5]
    data['book_value'] = values[6]
    data['ebitda'] = values[7]
    data['dividend_per_share'] = values[8]
    data['dividend_yield'] = values[9]
    data['earnings_per_share'] = values[10]
    data['52_week_high'] = values[11]
    data['52_week_low'] = values[12]
    data['50day_moving_avg'] = values[13]
    data['200day_moving_avg'] = values[14]
    data['price_earnings_ratio'] = values[15]
    data['price_earnings_growth_ratio'] = values[16]
    data['price_sales_ratio'] = values[17]
    data['price_book_ratio'] = values[18]
    data['short_ratio'] = values[19]
    data['open'] = values[20]
    data['days_high'] = values[21]
    data['days_low'] = values[22]
    data['last_trade_time'] = values[23]
    data['last_trade_real_time'] = values[24]
    return data
 
 
def get_price(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'l1')
 
 
def get_change(symbol):
    return __request(symbol, 'c1')
 
 
def get_volume(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'v')
 
 
def get_avg_daily_volume(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'a2')
 
 
def get_stock_exchange(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'x')
 
 
def get_market_cap(symbol):
    return __request(symbol, 'j1')
 
 
def get_book_value(symbol):
    return __request(symbol, 'b4')
 
 
def get_ebitda(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'j4')
 
 
def get_dividend_per_share(symbol):
    return __request(symbol, 'd')
 
 
def get_dividend_yield(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'y')
 
 
def get_earnings_per_share(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'e')
 
 
def get_52_week_high(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'k')
 
 
def get_52_week_low(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'j')
 
 
def get_50day_moving_avg(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'm3')
 
 
def get_200day_moving_avg(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'm4')
 
 
def get_price_earnings_ratio(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'r')
 
 
def get_price_earnings_growth_ratio(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'r5')
 
 
def get_price_sales_ratio(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'p5')
 
 
def get_price_book_ratio(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'p6')
 
 
def get_short_ratio(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 's7')
 
 
def get_open(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'o')
 
 
def get_high(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'h')
 
 
def get_low(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'g')
 
 
def get_last_trade_time(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 't1')
 
 
def get_last_real_time_trade(symbol): 
    return __request(symbol, 'k1')
 
 
def get_historical_prices(symbol, start_date, end_date):
    """
    Get historical prices for the given ticker symbol.
    Date format is 'YYYYMMDD'
 
    Returns a nested list.
    """
    url = 'http://ichart.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=%s&' % symbol + \
          'd=%s&' % str(int(end_date[4:6]) - 1) + \
          'e=%s&' % str(int(end_date[6:8])) + \
          'f=%s&' % str(int(end_date[0:4])) + \
          'g=d&' + \
          'a=%s&' % str(int(start_date[4:6]) - 1) + \
          'b=%s&' % str(int(start_date[6:8])) + \
          'c=%s&' % str(int(start_date[0:4])) + \
          'ignore=.csv'
    days = urllib.urlopen(url).readlines()
    data = [day[:-2].split(',') for day in days]
    return data

Some fun statistics from my photograph library (lightroom) that contains photographs from 2002 through present-day:

48,711 photos total
5,839 with 3 stars (good enough to publish)

—Top 6 camera models used:

• 20,486: Canon EOS 5D
• 10,698: Canon EOS 10D
• 10,429: Canon EOS 20D
• 2,837: Minolta Dimage 7i
• 2,593: Canon PowerShot D=S410
• 512: Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III

—Top 7 Lenses used:

• 8,712: EF17-40mm f/4L USM 8,712
• 7,317: EF50mm f/1.8
• 7,038: EF70-200mm f/2.8L IF USM
• 6,949: EF28-135mm IF USM
• 5,153: 15mm Fisheye
• 3,592: EF100mm f/2.8L Macro USM
• 1,239: EF24-70mm USM

—Top 7 names tagged:

• 6,318: Ansley Billimek
• 5,067: Jennifer Billimek
• 3,191: Jeff Billimek
• 1,674: Larry Billimek
• 1,405: Tucker Billimek
• 1,173: Brinley Billimek
• 1,140: Lily Billimek

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′.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

After sleeping-in from the late night last night, we checked out of the hotel and drove over to the Grit for some breakfast.  It was really good.  I had a breakfast burrito with tofu in it.

Finally we drove back to Atlanta.  Because of us sleeping in late I knew I would not be able to make lunch with Clint & the others so I called Chris to give him a heads-up.  We got home and I showered and took a short nap.  I was feeling a bit queasy from all of the drinking last night.

I drove over to Russel’s house (near Clint’s place) and found all of the guys playing video games.  They had two televisions set up with game consoles.  Clint, Chris, Russel, Clint’s friend Seth, Drew, Joon, Tom, and Tremayne were all there.  I didn’t partake in any alcoholic beverages because I wasn’t feeling good.

Later we went over to Mt. Fuji for dinner.  We met Harold there and had a hibachi dinner.  Afterwards we went back to Russel’s place to play some more games.  Eventually the taxis showed up and took us to the Cheetah in midtown.  All of us went except for Drew, Seth, and Joon.

I had a great time at the Cheetah.  We made sure that Clint got tons of lap dances and had a great time.  As the night progressed Clint had too much to drink and wasn’t doing well.  So we took the taxi back to Russel’s house and put Clint to bed.  The rest of us stayed up and played video games.  I played Gears of War for the first time ever and it was really fun!  I even did pretty well playing on the ‘hard’ difficulty level.

Because I didn’t have anything to drink all day I was good to go and went home.  I got home around 2am and Jennifer was waiting up for me.  She had done to Erin’s bachelorette party tonight as well.

We woke up a little late at 9am and were running a little late.  We originally planned on leaving for the Renaissance Festival at 9:30am but didn’t make that.  Katie and Chris came over and brought some bagels for us.

We headed out to the Georgia Renaissance Festival south of Atlanta.  Tom & Terri met Jen, Katie, Chris, and I there.  We had a great time.  I’ve never been to one before so it was a fun new experience.

(Me and Jen)

(Terri, Tom, Jen, Chris, Katie)

(Chris and Katie)

(me and Jen)

It was a clear, but hot, day outside and we did a lot of walking around.  It was interesting to see the glass blower and the other acts that they had going on.  My favorite part was the jousting competition.  It was pretty crowded.

Afterwards we went back to our place and went out to the pool.  Next we went to Costco to get some groceries and then grilled out at home.  The gas grill ran out of gas so I had to go get it filled up.  For dinner we grilled-up mushrooms and veggies.  It was really good.

We sat outside and enjoyed one of the French wines that Scott gave us, the 1999 Chateau Lalande-Borie.  It was wonderful weather outside this afternoon.

(1999 Chateau Lalande-Borie)

Unfortunatelyit was a cold and dreary day outside today.  Jen and I went to go visit Scott and to also check out the new sofa that he is very proud of.  We also got to see his refurbished kitchen (still under construction) – it looks fantastic!  Scott was trying to figure out where to have the microwave installed.

Jen saw that Scott had ‘Bejeweled’ for his Xbox 360 and wanted to play that.  Scott also demoed ‘Gears of War’ for us.  It looks like a really cool game.  We went home and had lunch.  I had leftover fried rice from last night and Jen had split pea soup.  We also opened up a bottle of the 2003 Pelissero Nubiola.  It was great!  Jen went to the home show thing with her mom.

We are hosting an Easter Sunday brunch at our house today. So we cleaned up around the house and got things ready for brunch. I also added the new Deth Cab for Cutie album to our music library and updated the XBMC music library. I noticed a problem with duplicated songs and think it may be related to the build of XBMC I’m using. I’ll have to upgrade.

People began to come over. Katie, Chris, Sydney, Scott, Adi, and Jen’s parents. We had brunch which consisted of ham, two different types of quiche, French toast, and fruit kabobs. It was all fantastic!

Mom & Jim came over. We hung out and listened to music. Larry called and I chatted with him for a while.

At around 1pm everyone left and we cleaned up. After waiting about thirty minutes we went to the gym to work out. Jen ran on the treadmill and I split my time between the treadmill and lifting weights.

We got home at about 2:30pm and relaxed some. Then we showered and got ready to head back out again. We drove up to the Woodstock area to Jen’s parent’s house for dinner. Everyone was there except for Scott. I brought my camera along and took some photos.

(Katie doing her grandmother’s nails)

(Jennifer)

(Bob cutting the pork roast)

For Easter dinner we had a pork roast with horseradish sauce, wine, salad, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and cake for desert. It was all excellent! Jen and I left around 8pm and stopped by her house to look at the paint job. When we got home Jen went to bed early I stayed up for a while working on the XBMC upgrade.

I was feeling pretty sick today and opted to work from home.  As Jen was leaving for work this morning she discovered that her car battery had died.  I gave her car a jump and then gave her the portable battery jumper thing that we have.

For most of the way I worked on the laptop upstairs in bed taking naps when I could – I really felt like crap.  Jen worked a half-day and had battery died again so she went to an auto parts store to get it replaced.  When Jen came home she got changes and headed back out for painting.  I worked the rest of the day and did some housekeeping in the afternoon.

Jen met me at home at about 5:30pm.  We drove up to my Mom & Jim’s house for dinner.  On the way we stopped at the Crackerbarrel off of Delk road to drop off the audiobook from our 12-hour road trip on Sunday.  It was raining very heavily outside and I got soaked just going from the car to the restaurant.

At Mom’s house we had dinner.  It was really nice.  We had some terrific appetizers, grilled steaks, salmon, veggies, salad, and desert.

We woke up extremely early again today at 4:30am.  After catching a taxi to the airport, we checked-in and headed to the gate.  The first flight out to Atlanta at 6am was oversold and they were looking for volunteers to give up their seats.  This didn’t bode well.  The same thing happened for the next four flights.  It was turning out to be a pretty bad travel day.

I used my cell phone to check flight information and things didn’t look good.  Basically it looked as if we would not be getting to Atlanta by plane today.  So we bit the bullet and decided to drive.  We rented a car from National (no Avis like we would normally do because they were all sold out).  Most of the car rental companies were getting sold out.  For some reason it was turning out to be a very bad weekend for travel.

So Jen and I began the lengthy 12-hour drive to Atlanta.  This is the first time in my nine years of traveling that I’ve had to drive to get home.  We didn’t wait until tomorrow because Jen really needed to get to work on Monday.

Shortly after we began our drive we stopped at a Cracker Barrel to rent an audiobook for the drive.  We rented ‘The Thirteenth Tale‘ by Diane Setterfield.  It was pretty good and made the time go by very quickly.  We also stopped at a staples to buy a USB car charger to charge our cell phones.  And we also stopped for dinner at a little Mexican place I think somewhere in Virginia.  It was mediocre.

Jen actually drove the bulk of the time.  She’s a real champ!  We finally got home at about 2am and went to bed.  Before going to bed I checked the rest of the flights from DCA to ATL and saw that we did the best thing by driving – we would not have made it out today.

I did a little research on activities for our trip to DC tomorrow and found some good food reviews.  I concentrated on the Georgetown and Dupont circle area.  After work I went home and then drove up to a bowling place off of Cobb parkway near Dobbins AFB to meet Jen for a work-related social event.

I bowled with her, her co-worker Lisa, and her boss Viktoria.  Lisa’s husband Chris arrived too.  We all bowled a few games.  It was pretty fun but I’m not too good at bowling.  Lisa and Chris made arrangements to have dinner with Jen and I at Thai Diner.  I love that place so I was pretty excited to be able to go there.

Once we got over there we had to wait about twenty minutes for a table.  Jen had the spicy basil fried rice and I had the pad thai with tofu.  It was all extremely good food.  Thai Diner is my favorite Thai place!

Today I got to participate on a conference call with Gartner to talk about Natural & DBMS.  It was pretty interesting and educational.  It’s nice to expand my base of knowledge and do things other than just straight development.

The whole gang and I (Bob, Alex, Casey, and James) went to lunch today to a local Mexican taco place.  Everything is in Spanish and they don’t speak very good English – and the food is wonderful!

I also think that I passed a tiny kidney stone that I thought I had from yesterday, but I’m not completely sure.  I also did a little research on kidney stones and found out that contrary to my prior knowledge, cranberry juice may not be useful to help prevent them.  Some of what I read suggests that cranberry juice can actually help cause kidney stones!

As I left the office today I photographed a car covered in the yellow pollen:

In the Atlanta area every spring the pine trees fill the air with yellow pine pollen and it gets all over everything.  This lasts for about five weeks – it’s pretty horrible!

Jen went to the gym this morning for her weight lifting class and then went shopping with Katie afterwards. I spent pretty much all day working on MS Money stuff while Jen was hanging out at her parents house.

Eventually she came home. I had also finally hung up the seagrass bullitent boards in the study. I think it looks pretty cool:

Later we watched an excellent documentary titled, ‘Who Killed the Electric Car?‘ After the movie we both went to bed. I wasn’t feeling that good and threw up – I think I might be getting sick.

Delta’s bankruptcy plan was unveiled today.  They are basically awarding a cash portion and a stock portion based on your 2006 earnings.  This is pretty crummy for me since I was only with Delta for about six months in 2006, so my awards are half of what they would normally be.  But it is pretty good for everyone else.

This morning Jen made salsa and cookie pizza fruit things. Later she left to go to Katie’s house to help prep for the party tonight.

I went over to Hooters to meet up with Chris, Clint, and Clint’s future father-in-law. We had lunch and then went over to Clint’s house to watch Basketball. Erin’s dad is pretty cool. He gave me some good advice on treating car-seat leather.

Later I went home, changed, and headed out again. On the way up to Katie’s house I dropped some stuff of at Mom’s house. We had a surprise birthday party for Lisa at Katie’s house and it was pretty fun. There was a decent turnout of people.

After work today Jen and I went to the Dollar Store to buy some supplies for Lisa’s upcoming suprise birthday party.  As we drove out there, we passed by the ‘Curry Curry’ Thai restaurant and it made me think about the wonderful Fried Rice we had from there recently.

So while we were in the Dollar store and Jen was shopping, I used the WAP browser on my cellphone to look-up the phone number for Curry Curry just in case we needed to make an emergency order for Fried Rice.

After what seemed like hours of shopping, Jen was done and it was time to go.  I suggested that we order takeout tonight and she was game.  So I called up ‘Curry Curry’ and placed the order.

On our way home we stopped and got the order or fried rice, vegetable stir-fry for Jen, and some basil rolls.  We went home and had this wonderful Thai dinner while we watched an episode of ‘24′.

I slept in very late this morning, not waking up until about 1pm (counting for the clocks being changed). When I woke up I adjusted the clocks. I checked the tivos and noticed that they were still an hour behind. Thinking that they need a software upgrade, I plugged the phone line into them and forced an update. This still didn’t fix the clock. I’m worried that they will not correctly record shows.

Jen and I went to the silver comet trail today at about 2:30pm. It was absolutely awesome weather out today. It was in the low 70’s, sunny, and big puffy clouds. I loved every minute of being outside. We drove in my new car with the huge sunroof open. It was great!

Because Jen is feeling a little sick (She’s getting a cold), we just walked. It was nice walking a few miles each way with Jen outside. We talked and enjoyed the warm sunshine and fresh air.

We made plans to go to Costco to get some groceries for dinner. We had to stop by the house to get Jen’s purse since she is the only one who can enter Costco (I don’t get my own card).

As we pulled into the neighborhood we saw an ambulance driving by. As we reached our little street (Mony Stone Ct.), we saw a bunch of people standing around. I then saw a lot of water running down the otherwise dry street. My eyes followed the water up the street to two large red fire trucks! Uh oh! As I slowly drove up to our driveway, Jen and I surveyed that the grass across the street from us was all black like it had been on fire.

We parked and walked over to where all of the other people were (This was probably the first time we’ve seen most of our neighbors). Jen inquired to one lady about what was going on and we found out that somehow the dry grass caught on fire and spread quickly because of the gentle wind. Part of the plastic white fence separating two of the townhome buildings was melted as well as a telephone box being meted at the base as well. It looks as if the fire may have started at the telephone box actually.

While we were watching this, a guy in a car pulled up and I think he was a fire investigator CSI type person. He was doing ‘investigative’ type stuff.

Jen and I went inside to change out of our workout clothes. I put on some shorts, a t-shirt, and sandals. It’s so nice outside it is great to wear summertime clothes.

We drove over to Costco and bought some supplies for dinner tonight an the rest of the week. We also picked up an already-cooked rotisserie chicken.

After we got home, we fired up the grill and I began to grill a bunch of veggies which included onions, red & yellow peppers, squash, and zucchini. Jen cooked up some rice and we had a wonderful dinner which we ate outside. I loved being able to sit out on the deck in the sunshine.

A little while after dinner I worked on the computer and finished prepping Jen’s laptop with vista. I also began to clean up the study. I went to bed a little while later.

Work was pretty good today.  I actually completed a status report again this week – I’m on a roll!  In addition to other ‘work’, I cleaned out my email inbox and organized my task list.  I have a lot of work on my plate right now.

Alex D, James E, and I went to Blanchard for lunch today.  We drove in Alex’s new 2004 Saab 9-3 convertible car.  He loves it.  I did notice that it’s a lot smaller on the inside than Jen’s 2001 9-5 turbo.

I left work at about 5pm and headed home.  I’m still glowing about my recent car purchase and love driving everywhere.  On my way home Jen called and we chatted a bit.  She barely beat me home.

We grabbed a quick bite to eat and headed out to Lynne’s apartment in midtown.  I already looked up her address in my GPS unit and we used that to navigate us to her place.  It was only supposed to take twenty-five minutes to get there but because of awful downtown traffic, it took twice as long.

Jen and I were the last to arrive and we all settled down to play trivial pursuit.  We randomly broke into teams and I was on a team with Chris and Dana.

Trivial pursuit was fun but it took a long time and most of us were pretty tired by the time we stopped playing (about 11:30pm).  Jen and I went home and got ready for bed.  I stayed up a little later installing Vista on Jen’s IBM/Levono T42 laptop.  It went well and there were no big issues.

I didn’t have to use the alarm this morning and woke up at about 7am on my own. It’s great getting nine hours of sleep last-night and the night-before-last. Before getting out of bed, I used the laptop to reconcile some transactions in Microsoft Money. Jen was able to help categorize most of the transactions which helped quite a bit.

Jen and I had a breakfast of oatmeal with yogurt and strawberries again this morning. Jim and I prepped to go skiing this morning but this time we made arrangements to meet Mom and Jen over at the gondola at the other base area at 10:30am.

(Me and Mom at the top of the mountain)

We were able to only do one run down the mountain before it was time to meet the ladies. We met them at the gondola and all rode up to the summit together. Once at the top we took some photos and climbed to the top of the lodge place and went out onto the balcony overlooking the mountain and surrounding area. Once there we took a bunch of pictures and Jen got a poppy-seed muffin to share along with some hot apple cider. It was really good.

(Jen outside of the restaurant)

(A view from the top of the restaurant)

After this we decided to grab a bite to eat. I had a bratwurst dog which was very Jen-unfriendly. By this time it was close to 12pm and people were starting to pile in for lunch so we decided to head out. Jen and Mom went back down the mountain on the gondola while Jim and I skied down to the Montezuma Express lift.

(An obligatory foot-shot that Jen likes to take on every trip)

After we got to the top again I parted ways with Jim and headed over to the back-side of the mountain where all the fun blue runs are.

Unlike yesterday I wore my fun new fingerless gloves and wore my camera on the outside of the jacket for easy access. So I did many runs listening to Jen’s iPod, holding both poles in my left hand, and my right hand on the shutter of the camera (using the 17-40mm L lens @17mm with the polarizer on).

(Chilling on the ski lift)

It was fun to ski really fast and snapping photos at the same time. I stopped-down all the way to f/22 in order to get some slowish shutter speeds to convey a sense of speed. We’ll see how it looks.

(A cool action shot while skiing fast down the hill – some people thought I was crazy to be skiing with the Canon 5D this way)

(A beautiful grove of trees at the beginning of a black run)

I skied until about 2:30pm at which point I called it a day. I had a voice mail from Jen saying that they were going to go on a sleigh ride and would be at the Keystone Lodge for a wine tasting at 4pm.

So I made my way to the condo and took a shower and changed. Then I went over to the Keystone Lodge just in time for the 4pm wine tasting. The bartender (Doug) poured two whites and two red wines. One of each was an ‘old-world’ wine from France and the other two were from Napa.

Overall it was great. In addition to the four wines, there was a wide selection of cheese, crackers, and fruits. I had a great time.

Doug told us about a great restaurant that the locals like. It’s run by the former head chef at Keystone. He gave us some rough directions and we headed out. The place is called ‘Food Hedz’.

It looks very unassuming from the outside and the style is such that you order first and pay and then they bring the food out to you.

I had a really delicious pork & cornbread type entrée. I would go back there. After dinner we made our way back to the condo. Jen wanted to play another card game. This time we played Rummy 500. We opened up the bottle of pino from yesterday and I drank more than anyone else. I still prefer to play Skip-Bo.

Before bed I used the laptop to take some notes for my journal.

Jen and I woke up at 6am and got ready to head out for the airport. We left the house at 6:45am and made it down to the ‘Parking Spot’ twenty minutes later. Checking in for the flight and checking our bags was not a problem. Neither was getting through security. We made our way to the gate and things looked grim. Despite me listing us at an S2, we were still at 5th and 6th place on the standby list. There were only two seats unclaimed on the plane, but eleven sold seats not checked-in yet.

As they went through the boarding process things did not look good, but at the last minute the eleven non-checked-in seats started decreasing the the unclaimed seats increased. Jen and I made the flight. I assume that there were some mis-connects or no-shows which caused this to happen.

We were seated together in the rear-part of the plane. The flight was pleasant enough. The in-flight movie was the ‘Rocky’ movie. It was very slow and boring.

The flight was on-time and we landed in Denver at 10am. I coordinated with Mom and Jim and they picked us up outside after Jen and I claimed our bags. They were driving a mini-van so there was plenty of space for our bags.

We drove towards Denver and stopped to have lunch and also so I could rent some skis. We ate lunch at Red Robin and I rented skis from Sports Authority (formerly Gartt Brothers).

Next we drove west on I70 to Dillon, Colorado where Keystone resort is. Once we left the highway we stopped at a local grocery store and bought a bunch of food and supplies to keep in the condo. We got checked-in to the condo and drove over to our building. It was in a great location and the accommodations were great. It was much like the place we stayed at in 2004.

We unloaded the car and unpacked. I turned on the laptop and discovered that there is an open WiFi access point which gives me Internet access. I also verified that the OpenVPN works.

Jim was interested in hitting the slopes this afternoon so we suited up and walked over to the base. Our condo is so close that it’s not too long of a walk to get over there. We each bought a night skiing lift ticket, put on our ski boots and headed up the mountain.

It was approximately 4pm and still quite light outside. We went up and down a couple of times before Jim wanted to call it a day. I continued to ski for a little over another hour until it started getting too dark. Despite the lights being turned on, it was still a little too dark for me, and it was also getting cold.

I put my hiking boots back on and hiked back to the condo. Once there I changed out of my ski gear and we went out for dinner. We drove over to the River Run Village area, parked, and walked to the restaurant. Tonight we decided to have dinner at a place called ‘Fritz Alpine Bistro’. It’s a tiny French-themed place. We ordered a bottle of wine. I had the meatloaf and it was pretty good. After dinner we went back to the condo and went to bed.

I got up early with Jen and we both left at the same time today – what a nice change of pace to get to work earlier than usual.  I had a few meetings and also talked with Alonzo about progress with the promotion effort and things are going well.

Since late October I’ve been doing a ton of research on getting a new car and did a little more research today and found out that a Ford dealership in Union City has two Edge models in stock that has the configuration that I’m most interested in.  I decided to drive down there after work and do a test drive since that’s what I’ve been wanting to do for a while now but never got around to it.

So after work I drove down to Union City and went to the dealership.  A salesman named Paul greeted me and I told him that I wanted to take an Edge on a test drive.  I told him that I was interested in one with the ‘vista roof’.  He said that they didn’t have any of those, so I took another SEL-Plus out for a test drive.

I’ve done so much research on the Ford Edge that I already knew pretty much all there is to know about it.  Test driving let me get a feel for the car and I definitely liked it.  After I got back from the test drive, Paul told me that a car carrier just pulled up with some more Edges on it.  We went over and took a look as they were rolling off of the truck.

To my delight, one of them was the exact same one that I saw online – it had the same VIN number.  I was pretty happy about this and took that one on a test drive too.  I love the vista roof sunroof.  It’s so huge.  So we went back to the office and he showed me the invoice sheet along with the ‘X-Plan’ price.  It was as I expected it to be.  So I wanted to know what I could get for my Explorer trade-in.

We went over to take a look at it and he drove it over to the service center to be checked out.  He came back and told me that they could give me $8,000 for it.  I said that I was actually looking for $10,000 for it.  He had to go talk to his manager and then had me come outside with him where the manager was looking at it.  The manager guy went on and on about some paint stains on the running boards and wheel wells.  He seemed really upset by this and said that it would need to be repainted.  I don’t know about it.

So we went back inside and Paul told me that they could go up to $8,500 – maybe $9,000.  When I checked the trade-in value on Kelly Blue Book, it valued in at about $9,250.  I knew about the paint problem and the cracks on the rear hatch so I expected to get a little less.  So I decided that if I could get $9,000 for it, we would have a deal.

I called Jen and she was excited about it and was on board.  So I made the deal.  After a lot of paperwork, all was completed.  They had to take the new car to get cleaned up since it was fresh off of the truck.  I transferred all of my stuff from the Explorer to the Edge and was on my way!  This deal was nice because I got a brand-new car (purchase) with a $60-less car payment.

When I was leaving I called Jen and she invited me up to Marlow’s Tavern where she was having drinks with Rashmi.  I drove up there and the valet guy asked me what kind of car I was driving because he’s never seen it before.

I had a nice time with Jen and Rashmi.  For being an Indian woman she seems really independent but maybe I just has a poor notion of how Indian women should be.  We hung out there for a couple of hours and then headed home and went to bed.

I slept in today which was pretty stressful because it made me late for work.  Work was fairly uneventful except for this afternoon when I met with Ningyu to talk about a mentoring relationship.  We tossed around some ideas and then discussed an enterprise-wide problem to be solved.  He wants me to do my own research into it and share my findings with him.  At that point we’ll compare notes and he can give me pointers on how to improve.  I’m looking forward to it.

There were no meetings today which was awesome.  As I was leaving work I got a killer headache.  So when I got home I took some Tylenol and laid down.  Jennifer got home about fifteen minutes after I did and was really nice and gave me a temple massage.  I drank lots of water, grabbed a bite to eat, and headed out to Clint’s house.

I gave Clint the very belated birthday present from Jen and I and participated in our weekly ‘game night’ session.  For the first time, we moved down into the basement since Clint’s fiance Erin is moving in.

Jen was over in Woodstock all day long shopping with Katie and her Mom.

I moved the old 400GB HD to the linux box and reallocated the /home partition over to that drive since the old one was running out of space.  I house all of the mp3s and downloaded stuff on shares in the /home partition.

Next I cut up the new 500GB drive such that there is a 100GB partition for OSX (hackintosh) and then the leftover 400GB for the photo archive.  Once that was done I worked in Adobe’s Lightroom.  I was pretty disappointed with the speed, but I think that could be related to the slow AMD Athlon 3200+ processor in the machine too.  It took twenty hours to generate standard-size previews for all images in the large archive library consisting of approx 27,000 photos.  The photos themselves consume about 100GB while the library database file and previews consume about 28GB.  That’s pretty hefty.

Today was pretty busy with work I was doing on the PCI encryption effort.  Jen had plans to hang out with Katie after work and I got a call from Clint and Erin to go with them to a Georgia Tech basketball game.  They drove.  It was a lot of fun and I’m happy they invited me along.

When I woke up this morning it was bright and sunny out. I was excited to get outside and enjoy the day. I rinsed off in the shower, changed, and we went out. It was pretty deserted this early – I guess because today is a Monday. I’ve never been to St. Maarten on a Monday before.

Jen and I were hungry and wanted to eat breakfast at a cool local place run by some friendly Asian people called ‘Dragon’s Gate’. Sadly it was only 8:30am and the place doesn’t open until 9am. So we killed some time by walking around on the beach and watching the waves.

(shadow self-portrait of Jen and I sitting next to the beach)

Finally we had some breakfast which for me consisted of bacon, eggs, toast, and orange juice. After breakfast we went to our hotel room to pack, change, and check out. We left our backpacks with the front desk. Next we went to the bar and had some drinks.

(Me back from the bar bearing two fresh drinks)

(Self-portrait in Jen’s sunglasses)

I tried taking some photos of the incoming planes from different angles as I think all of my existing St. Maarten pictures are starting to look the same. I was really happy with one particular photo of an incoming American Airlines jet.

We left as we saw the Delta plane approaching and got a ride to the airport. Once there we checked in and got to the gate with no problem and plenty of time to spare. Once at the gate we waited a while. We didn’t get to sit up front in first class but we did sit next to each other with an empty seat so it was all good.

(Departing such a fun place – that’s the bar we hung out at on the beach below)

On the flight back to Atlanta we watched the in-flight movie, I listened to my iPod, and read my magazine. Jen was in good spirits.

We arrived into Atlanta with no problem, breezed through immigration and customs, got to our car and went home. It was a great trip.

When we got home I noticed that Lightroom was finally released! I downloaded the trial and began to play with it. It’s a great photo organizing/processing program.

I woke up very early this morning and checked the flight to St. Maarten.  It didn’t look good so I decided that it wasn’t even worth trying and told Jen.  Instead we slept in which was nice.

Jen went to the gym to meet Katie for their workout class.  I called the hotel in St. Maarten and canceled tonight’s reservation.  When Jen got home we had some lunch and later went running with Scott on the Silver Comet Trail.  It was really cold outside so I didn’t run a whole lot.

After our run we went home, showered, changed, and went to a place called ‘Bistro VG’ where we had dinner with Mom and Jim.  It was a trendy French place and the food was great.  Later we got home and went to bed.

Today was a big milestone for me – I turned thirty.  It was a bit hard to accept the fact that I’m no longer in my twenties.

Jen and I went for a run outside on the silver comet trail today.

Afterwards we went to dinner at Jen’s parents house to celebrate my birthday where we had ham, cheesy potatoes, and for desert a wonderful angel food cake with strawberry shebert in the middle. It was really good. After dinner I opened a few presents.

Jen’s parents gave me some money, Scott gave me six bottles of fancy wine from France, Italy, and other places like that. Katie and Chris gave me a fun ‘cookie sutra’ book, hiking book, and gorilla pod (still being shipped).

It was a really nice time and I feel so fortunate to have such a nice extended family.

This morning I sent an email to Carole asking if I can work from home today.  She sent a reply within minutes and said that it wouldn’t be a problem.  So I sent out an email to the team explaining what I’ll be working on and how to reach me.

My work was mostly focused around the daylight saving time change initiative.  I also participated in three different meetings by dialing into a conference system.

Jen and I made arrangements to meet up at Costco after work.  I drove over there and arrived before she did.  We met up inside the store and proceeded to do a lot of shopping.  We went a little crazy and bought things like a new set of sheets and a new pillow.  Jen was also starving so I went over to the concession stand and bought us a frozen yogurt (vanilla) to eat while we shopped.  Jen wanted a vanilla chocolate mix and voiced her complaint.  While we were shopping Jen and I ran into one of Jen’s Russian coworkers who was also shopping there.

After we checked out and were leaving I saw Greg N. walking in.  I went over to him and chatted for a minute or two.  I rarely see people from my office on this side of town.

As always, it was really wonderful to sleep in today.  Shortly after I eventually woke up Jen conscripted me to help paint the stairway between the main floor and the lower floor.  This took a very long time and we ran out of paint.  I was starving and made a smoothie for lunch.

We made a plan to go work out and go to Home Depot to get an extra gallon of paint.  We went to Home Depot first and forgot to bring along the name of the color paint that we want.  I tried to use the little Behr paint kiosk computer thing to look up the color but was unable to do so.  Jen finally found the color (Oat Straw – 740C-3) and we got a gallon along with a couple of foam brushes.

Once we were done at Home Depot we went over to LA Fitness and worked out for about an hour.  I didn’t run that long, opting to hit the weights a little longer today.

After working out we went home, showered, and headed up to Jen’s parent’s house.  We were invited to go spend the evening over there to watch the Super Bowl.  It Aside from Jen’s parents and four dogs, Katie and Chris were there too.  We snacked on some chips, homemade salsa and also had some home-made chili and great pork chops for dinner while we watched the game.

I admit that I’m not a huge fan of Pro football but the beginning ten minutes of the game were exciting.  After that, there wasn’t a lot to get excited about.  Jen and I left a little past halftime and went home to go to bed early.

As I was about to walk out the door on my way to work this morning, I got a page about a production problem.  There was a conference bridge in-progress so I called-in.  It turns out that there was a problem with some awful queuing problems with the tuxedo server. Jegan and Kumar had been working on it all night.

I worked with Jegan and Kumar to discuss the problem and we weren’t able to nail down the cause of the issue but we did know the symptoms.  Jegan theorized that the problem might be related to a replay TCN file that we dropped into the system last night.  I came up with an idea on how to identify the problem.  We worked through my idea and were able to successfully catch the poison transaction.  It turns out that some of the transactions were being issued in exchange for a dummy ticket (number of all zeros) and we had hundreds of these zero-numbered tickets in the database with about 1,000 coupons each.  Normally a ticket had on average around 3.2 coupons per ticket.

So the result was a transaction message that was so large that it was choking the system.  We worked on getting these tickets cleaned out of the queues andbrainstormed a few ideas for a permanent fix.  I worked from home the rest of the day, babysitting the production environment.

I also ripped an audiobook so that Jen and I can listen to it on our iPods.  The canon rebate thing finally worked out.  Contacting Canon directly was the solution to the problem.  I will be getting the entire rebate that I’m due which is $720!  I’ve never had a problem with rebates in the past and am still quite disappointed with Young America trying to scam me and others.

Jen and I had plans to head up to Katie and Chris’s for dinner.  However Katie contracted the flu and canceled.  So I suggested that Jen and I go out to dinner.  We settled on takeout from a Thai place down the street that we haven’t been to yet.  We’ve talked about it several times because we drive by it all the time.  So I picked up the food and met Jen at home.  She had the spicy basil fried rice with tofu and I had Pad Thai.  It wasn’t as good as the Pad Thai from the other place.  As we ate we watched an episode of the office and then Jen left to go get a pedicure.  I worked on my journal notes as I’m very far behind.  I also worked on some DST testing stuff tonight, read my wired magazine, and went to bed.

I’m really fed up with the Canon rebate thing.  After waiting a month, there was still no update on my rebate status.  I called them again and this time they tried to tell me that the UPC code was invalid which is totally untrue.  I know for a fact that I mailed in the correct UPC code.  In fact, I mailed in everything that looked like a UPC code from the box.

So I did some research and found several threads on the dpreview.com message boards from other angry Canon customers experiencing similar problems with the Young America rebate company.  One guy discovered that he was able to get positive results by calling Canon directly – bypassing the rebate company.  I called Canon using the phone number that this guy provided and was immediately connected with a helpful girl who took all of my information and promised to call me back in 2 business days.  With Young America, they had me call them back after 4 weeks.

Jen and I went to the group class at the gym this morning.  Katie met us there.  Afterwards we had lunch with Katie at Jason’s Deli at Cumberland Mall.

Afterwards we parted ways with Katie and Jen wanted to do some shopping.  I was low on gas so filled up at Costco while Jen went into the mall.  I met her inside at Express. Shopping is a very boring activity for me.  Next we went to a little jeweler shop to get Jennifer’s necklace fixed.  While we waited, we headed over to a shoe store where some Asian people had a kiosk set up advertising massages.  To entice people to buy a massage, they were giving free ten-minute massages.  Jen and I  both got one.

After the mall we went to Costco and dropped a lot of money on groceries and other household items.  Then we went home.  I did a lot of stuff for work during the day today.

In the evening we had dinner with Tremayne and Tracy for Tremayne’s birthday at a Japanese place nearby.  They wanted to go rollerskating afterwards but Jen and I passed.  Instead we headed over to Erin’s condo where we met up with Clint, Erin, and Denise.

We had some drinks and played Guitar Hero for the first time.  What a fun game!  Later we switched to a karaoke-style game called American Idol.  Because Jen and I cannot carry a tune to save our lives, this wasn’t as fun.

Eventually we went home.  It was a nice night.

Today Jen left early without me.  She headed up to the Woodstock area to meet with Katie so they could go to the gym together.  She was also going to take a few things to her house because the real estate agent is having an open house.  She’s going to be up in that part of town all day and I’m going to drive up later to meet her at her parent’s house this evening.

At around 6pm I left and drove up to Jen’s parent’s house.  We’re all having dinner up there tonight to celebrate Jen’s Dad’s birthday.  Everyone was already there when I arrived.  Scott was in the garage changing the exhaust system on his Porsche and then we had dinner.

I worked from home today partly because I’m battling a cold and want to take it easy. It was actually a very busy day. I finalized the release 4.1 implementation plan with James E. and we got the RFC approved, so hopefully everything will go smoothly on Monday. I also crafted a unit-test strategy for the daylight saving time change. I collaborated with some of the other developers and we came up with a battery of test suites to verify if the DST patches work.

The issue is that for the first time in over twenty years, the date that daylight saving time occurs is different this year. Instead of being on the first Sunday in April, it will now be the second Sunday in March. This change (a law enacted in 2005 and beginning this year) requires patches to the operating systems and java. JDK/JRE 1.5 is already complainant, but anything older than JDK 1.5 needs to be patched. We came up with a series of tests which show when DST occurs this year for the following scenarios for our HPUX environment:

• Java 1.4.1
• Java 1.4.2
• Java 1.5
• C++ Standard Library
• C++ RogueWave Library
• ‘date’ shell command

I wrapped them all up into a script and have it packaged in a tar file that we can deploy on whatever server we need to test the patches on.

I also dealt with a lot of emails and worked with Vasu for a couple of hours getting his Makefile changes incorporated into our master Makefiles which are included by all other makefiles. He is working on a small project to convert our dataservices from using Oracle to now be using DB2. We do a pre-compile step that needs to be modified. Currently we use the proc compiler from Oracle. Going forward we will be using the DB2 precompiler (the C++ equivalent to sqlj). My changes seemed to work so it will mean that there will be minimal changes to the local makefiles for each project being rebuilt.

One thing I always push for is to eliminate duplicate code & redundancy, so instead of having all of the same ’stuff’ in all of the local makefiles (we probably have over 100), we have as much as possible up in some master makefiles that are included and used as templates. It’s something I came up with years ago and we still use it today. I’m actually pretty impressed how well the approach has held up considering that I didn’t know a single thing about makefiles when I did all of this – I just learned as I went.

I stopped working around 6pm and took a shower and got dressed just as Jen got home. We worked together to get the house ready for our ‘Game Night’ tonight. We’re having a bunch of friends over to play Pictionary. I wish I was feeling better, but can’t do anything about that.

(The dining room with all of the food)

We had a great time. Katie, Chris, Lynne, Tremayne, and Tracy came over. Jen put some large sheets of whiteboard-type contact paper on the windows that we used dry-erase markers to do our drawings. We played three games (broken out into two teams each time and mixed-up the teams after every game).

Jen also prepared some horderves and drinks. It was really nice. At the very end we decided to come up with some really difficult things for the opposing teams to draw. My team (Katie, Chris, and I) came up with some things like: “Abstract, Oxymoron, & Personality”. The other team came up with some words like: “Mozart, & Tai-Chi” for us to draw. It was extremely difficult but fun. I’m looking forward to the next ‘game night’ which should be hosted by Clint & Erin.

(Jennifer looking happy)

After waking up semi-early we loaded the old Christmas tree into the car and dropped it off at the recycling place at Home Depot. Next we went running on the Silver Comet trail. It was a beautiful day – sunny and warm.

Once we finished we went back home to shower and change. Later we went over to Jen’s parents house for dinner. It was an awesome dinner. We had salad, bread, lightly breaded moist chicken, a meatloaf that Sandy made, and a turtle desert that Jen made. It was all quite delicious.

After dinner I used Bob’s laptop to log into the home machine running Vista to finish reading an article I was looking at before we left the house. After a while Jen and I went home I stayed up a bit and discovered a DNA problem withbillimek .com. From what I could discern, it wasn’t working correctly since about 2am this morning. Once I discovered it, I was about to sent atrouble ticket to site5 tech support, but as I was typing out the ticket, the problem was fixed – great timing!

I worked from home again today. I couldn’t do the release 4.1 install of our code because management wanted to keep testing another fix in the SI environment. So instead I created a new tuxedo domain to host the enterprise reference services in development. This moves us away from an older shared domain and will hopefully keep things more stable since this is a dedicated domain for the references services. It’s a long-overdue change.

Also today I completed the quarterly backup. I’m now using unison in conjunction with the encrypted hard drives to do ’smarter’ backups instead of just copying a bunch of files. In theory, unison will check both the local HD and the encrypted backup HD to determine what needs to be copied. I have turned to unison in order to do the actual backup. I tried rsync at first but like the flexibility that unison provides with excluding certain files and paths and following links on a case-by-case basis. For example, below is the prf file that I use to backup the mp3s. They are housed on a share that another computer serves up, but that is encapsulated with a symlink in my unison home directory (/home/Jeff/unison/mp3s). The same is true with the encrypted HD mount which is also pointed to a symlink (/home/Jeff/unison/mp3s-backup):

# Include the contents of the file common
include common

# force local root to win out
force = /home/Jeff/unison/mp3s

# Roots of the synchronization
root = /home/Jeff/unison/mp3s
root = /home/Jeff/unison/mp3s-backup

ignore = Name .DS_Store
ignore = Name .localized
ignore = Name $RECYCLE.BIN
ignore = Name desktop.ini
ignore = Name Thumbs.db

One of the main reasons I went this route is because the built-in backup utility in Vista is a complete piece of garbage. it’s a huge departure from the limited functionality of the XP-based backup utility. The new Vista backup utility gives no control or choice. It decides for itself what files you want backed-up – you have absolutely no choice in the matter.

Jen’s Mom and aunt Sandy came over at around 5:30pm I served them something to drink and fed them cheese and crackers until Jen got home. We all went out to dinner to M&T. Jen got a glass of red wine that we both didn’t care for. I ordered the $26 meatloaf and while it was good, it wasn’t $26 good.

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)

(Katie excited about all of the fireworks)

(Jen took this photo of me)

(Jennifer with a sparkler)

Eventually we went back inside and played some more games. Finally Jen and I left at around 3:20am – she was pretty tired.

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.

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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#!/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

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.

By Wednesday (yesterday) I had already put in 40 hours for the week, so I was working a lot of overtime this week.  I worked late again today.

When I got home, Jen fixed me a mojito and I fired up Skype to call down to St. Maarten to make hotel reservations for Saturday night at the Caravanserai hotel.

For dinner we made steaks in the oven with the broiler.  We also had butternut squash soup along with a salad.  Dinner was actually quite tasty.

After dinner we watched an episode of ‘Heroes‘ and went to bed early.

Jen left early this morning to go show her house to an old lady who expressed interest.  I stayed home and worked from home pretty much all day long.

Jen came home and painted the kitchen as well as finished painting the dining room.  She’s done a lot of painting recently.

After the painting and dinner we watched ‘Thank You for Smoking‘.  It was actually a very good movie.

Like yesterday, Jen and I went up to her house this morning to do more cleaning.  Jen’s parents came by to help out a little too.  Part of the reason we spent so much time cleaning is that Jen has interest from someone and is going to show the house to them this afternoon.

We left at noon and went to Jen’s parents house to have some lunch.  Jen and I decided that only she would be there to show the house and that I would stay away at her parents house.  So at around 1pm Jen left to go show the house.  I took a nap and listened to my audiobook.  At about 2pm Jen called and asked if I could check her email because the lady never showed up for the appointment.

I checked Jen’s email and it turns out that she had an email from the lady canceling the showing.  We were both pretty bummed because we put a lot of time and effort into getting the place cleaned up for the showing today.

Jen came back and we hung out with her Mom for a little bit.  We went back home and I watched the UT vs. A&M football game.  It was very disappointing.

Later this evening Jen and I watched ‘Mission: Impossible 3‘.

I worked from home today.  I got pretty involved in my work and ended up skipping lunch and worked pretty late.  It was a long day.

A little while ago I installed Vista on the desktop.  Things had been working fairly well although I still dual-boot between XP and Vista.  So today I wrestled with three Vista problems:

1. Vista will not go to sleep on its own.
2. There are problems with Remote Desktop not working correctly.
3. The ‘Microsoft Wireless Desktop 6000′ set does not work correctly.

It turns out that #1 and #3 are related.  Disappointingly, there is a bug with the Microsoft Mouse, the Microsoft Vista Operating System, and the Microsoft Mouse Drivers.  Apparently, the newer non-bluetooth-based wireless mice from Microsoft will prevent the computer from detecting an idle state.  This means that the screensaver will never turn on, the display will never go to sleep, and the computer will never go to sleep.  It is outrageous that Microsoft could allow such a thing to happen since they control every aspect of this particular situation.

Jen got home later in the afternoon and we had a salad.  Jen wanted to put some of the leftover chicken on the salad and it was actually really good.  We watched an episode of our favorite show, ‘The Office‘.

Next we headed out for another fun night on the town at Eclipse Di Luna.  Scott invited us out again this week.  More people showed up this time: Scott, Jen, myself, Katie, Chris, Amber (Katie’s friend from work who she wants to set up with Scott), Dan, and Elizabeth.  Scott showed up late due to a problem at work.

Chris wasn’t feeling very good and looked miserable.  I felt bad that he had to come out.  Jen had a glass of ‘Funky Llama’ red wine and she hated it.  We have a new rule that she shouldn’t order wine by the glass, and also that she shouldn’t order any wines with livestock on the label.

This morning Jen made a wonderful breakfast consisting of eggs, bacon, and hash browns.  I went car shopping with Scott while Jen ran some errands.  Because it is a Sunday, not many dealerships were open.  I hate car shopping and appreciate Scott being a good sport to go with me.

We went to a Honda dealership which was open.  I test drove a 2007 CRV as well as a 2007 Pilot.  The CRV seemed a lot smaller compared to the explorer.  I definitely liked the Pilot more than the CRV in that it was larger but also felt more refined.  Unfortunately the Pilot is ‘too’ large in that it has three rows of seats – I’m looking for something with two rows of seats.  It was also really expensive.

Next we went to a Toyota dealership which was also open.  I test drove the new FJ Cruiser and was sorely disappointed.  It looks cool from the outside but it really plasticy and cheap-feeling on the inside.  In addition to that, the visibility is crap.  I felt like I was looking out of a tank when driving that car.  Maybe that’s the point, but in this case it was a plastic tank.  For kicks, we also test drove a Prius.  As expected, it didn’t have any pickup, but I really liked the fact that you didn’t have to insert a key to start it.  Before we left, Scott and I looked at the other Toyota models, and I wasn’t too impressed.  Everything seemed a little over-priced.

After that we stopped at the Mazda dealership (which was closed) and I looked at one of the CX-7’s on the lot.  It looks really cool.  This car is on the same platform as the upcoming Ford Edge.  After that Scott wanted to swing by the closed Porsche dealership to take a look at the fancy expensive cars.  They all looked sweet.  I was personally interested in the Cayenne SUV-type car from Porsche.

Scott and I parted ways and I went back home to help Jen prepare for dinner tonight.  We had Jen’s parents and Scott come over for dinner.  We tried an Indian-themed dinner – complete with Naan bread.  Not having a lot of bread making experience left the Naan bread highly lacking.  I wonder how the Indian’s make it so good?

I was extremely busy at work again today.  I like being busy.  In addition to making the day go by really fast, I have a good sense of accomplishment.

Alex D, Bob M, Casey T, Sameer P, and I went to the local Mexican restaurant for lunch today.  After lunch I met with Ningyu this afternoon to talk about wiki stuff.  I showed him what I put together for our group and pitched the idea that we make it more official than what I have running on my PC.

I worked late today and thought about a weekend trip to St. Maarten this coming weekend or the weekend of December 2nd.

It was a hard day at work for me today.  I scrambled to get things completed so that the system test migration will proceed smoothly.  As a result, I worked pretty late today.

So as soon as I got home, Jen and I headed out to miami circle.  Scott invited us to have drinks with him and some of his friends at Eclipse Di Luna.  When we arrived, it was Scott, his friend Russell, and two of Scott’s other friends.

We had a few pitchers of mojitos and lots of different tapas items.  It was a great time.  I really like going to that restaurant.

I went to bed shortly after we got home as I was pretty tired.

When I finally woke up this morning around 9:30am, Jennifer was downstairs in the study working on the desktop computer (freeside).  She was using Photoshop to manipulate photos of Tucker, Lily, and Cal to create ‘coloring-book’ style pictures.  Jen had the idea that we could create a custom coloring book for our niece and nephews and send that as a Christmas present this year.  Unfortunately we couldn’t get good results from our efforts and after a couple of hours wrestling with a few pictures; we decided to drop that project.

Also during the morning, I installed Office 2007 and Firefox 2.0 on all of the computers.  I used to run the portable version of FireFox (PortableFireFox a.k.a. FireFoxPortable), but decided to switch to the ‘regular’ version after getting impatient on waiting for the portable version to be released for 2.0.  I think 2.0 was released over a month ago and still no portable version was out.  I don’t even use the features of the portable version anymore since I’ve installed the Google BrowserSync extension.

I also made use of this time to clean up the machines by uninstalling old & unused programs from each computer.  While I was doing these activities, Jen was upstairs ironing and watching a movie.  Scott came over a little while later and the three of us went running on the Silver Comet Trail.  Actually Jen and Scott ran while I rode my bike.

Afterwards we went home, changed, and drove up to Jen’s parents house for dinner.  We had salad, chicken soup, and an ice cream & fudge desert.  It was a nice family dinner.

Eventually Jen and I went home (I drove).  I stayed up pretty late to install Vista on the desktop and at the same time installed Ubuntu on the old laptop (the HP zt3000).

I made it into the office late today.  Today I was in meetings pretty much all day long that I didn’t get any work done.  As a result I didn’t get home until later this evening.

Jen was home and had cooked up some tofu stirfry for dinner.  It was really good.  Fresh crisp vegetables are so tasty!  Jen and I watched Koyaanisqatsi but I didn’t communicate effectively to Jen what it was.  As a result she didn’t enjoy it very much.

Afterwards I installed the old Sierra game, ‘Colonel’s Bequest‘ on the computer downstairs to run under Dosbox.  She played that while I played Neverwinter Nights 2.  We were up pretty late.

I got Jen up very early this morning in order to go on a day hike somewhere in North Georgia. After consulting many resources, I finally decided that we would head to Raven Cliff Falls. We’ve been there multiple times before but it is such a great trail.

We left the house a little before 7am and drove up GA-400 to Dahlonega to the Winfield Scott Lake area. This was a side trip I wanted to make because I was inspired by a photograph someone took of the lake during the peak fall foliage colors.

Once at the lake we explored a little as we walked around the lake and I took some pictures. I imagine that it would look nicer had the trees been more colorful.

(Winfield Scott Lake)

Shortly after this we drove up to Raven Cliff Falls and hiked that trail. The weather was great and the trail wasn’t too crowded.

(Portrait of Jen as we hiked along the trail)

As we hiked in, there was a cleared-out area with a grove of trees. I was experimenting with the external flash and took various photos of Jen sitting on a fallen tree in the distance.

(Jennifer sitting on the tree in the distance)

I also made great use of my tripod to photograph the various falls at a slow shutter speed. When we finally made it to the falls, I climbed up to the top while Jen sat below. We had a bite to eat for lunch. While we were eating, Jen took the obligatory photograph of our feet.

(Slow-shutter speed photograph of some falls)

(Jennifer photographed our feet)

We hiked out much faster than it took to hike in. We left the trail area and headed back towards home. As we were driving back, still in North Georgia, I saw a hillside with some brilliant fall colors so we stopped along the side of the road so I could photograph this. As I was sitting up the shot, a group of people on horses rode by which made the picture even more enjoyable.

(Photograph of horse-riders with fall-colored hill in the background)

It was still early enough in the day that Jen and I wanted to stop at the Frogtown winery. It was really crowded but we managed to get a table outside and ordered the Sunday brunch. It was pretty filling. They brought out a plate of various breads, followed by a puff egg thing, and then shrimp pasta. It was a wine-pairing brunch so they also brought out three different types of wine (two whites and one red). Following all of this they also brought us desert. Jen and I really enjoyed their sangiovese wine so we bought a bottle of that to go.

On our way back to the Atlanta area we stopped at the outlet mall place. Jen bought some stuff from Banana Republic while I waited in the car and listened to my audiobook. Once Jen was done shopping we headed towards Katie’s house.

We wanted to photograph the house to use for the website in our attempt to sell it. The sun was setting too fast and we didn’t arrive until well past sunset. I wasn’t discourage, however, and used my tripod to take some 30-second exposures of the house at night.

(Long-exposure of Jennifer’s house photographed at night)

Chris let me use his laptop to check my eBay auctions for the Canon 20D and 28-135mm lens. We went out to a restaurant in Kennesaw called ‘Caper’s‘ for dinner. I got ribs but they weren’t as good as other places. Jen got lemon thyme chicken. She liked hers quite a bit. The restaurant and atmosphere was a nice change of pace.

Finally we headed home and Jen went to bed early. I stayed up to check my eBay auction. Both completed but I was pretty disappointed with the results. They both ended for lower than I thought they should have. I won’t offer free shipping in the future – it didn’t seem to make any difference. I packed up the packages to ship tomorrow and went to bed.

As I was leaving for work this morning I noticed that the battery was dead in my explorer.  I guess I had warning from this past Sunday when I had trouble with the battery then.

So I decided to work from home after getting approval from Carole.  I spent the first part oft he day getting the new wiki finalized and then rolled it out to the team.

Jennifer came home for lunch and I made us pizza.  It came out really bad.  She jumped my car and I drove over to Autozone to have my battery checked out.  They said that it was dead and I needed a new one, so I bought a new battery.  I didn’t have the proper tools and wasn’t able to remove the old one so they helped me.

Once that was done I went back home and continued to work.  Jen got home at around 6:15pm.  We went out to dinner to the nearby Doc Chuy’s.  I had the pad thai and it was great.

As soon as I woke up at 7am I ran downstairs and logged into work. I spent the next two hours trying to get a component deployed to our system test server but there were a lot of problems. It turned out to be an issue with a lock in HPs ‘swinstall‘ program, but we got it resolved eventually.

I went into work and spent some more time working on the new Wiki software. I managed to get some CSS coded up such that documents sent to the printer will look nice. I’ve also been trying to figure out how to change the MediaWiki authentication such that it hooks into the company’s LDAP server instead of storing all user accounts and details locally. Jennifer gave me a few ideas on how to make this work so I might play with that tomorrow if I have time.

Alex, James, and I went to lunch at Panda Express. Despite what Jen says, I think it’s a great fast food Chinese place.

When I got home I had a salad with Jen and then headed out to Clint’s house for game night. I did a writeup of the event.

Afterwards I got home, had a cookie, and joined Jen in bed.

It was a really nice day outside today and I wanted to do something. I wanted to go up to North Georgia to photograph some of the fall colors but Jen wasn’t up for that. So instead I suggested that we go to car dealerships, but she was not up for that either. We wanted to do something but couldn’t agree on what to do.

So we packed up the car and headed out with no destination in mind. I let Jen drive since she was the one being indecisive. Somehow we eventually ended up at her parent’s house.

Knowing that we had a full day tomorrow, I wanted to get something done so I dropped Jen off so that she could go do her pedicure thing and I went over to Studio 8 Salon off Barrett Parkway to get a haircut. Once that was done I went back to Jen’s parent’s house.

I went with Bob, Matthew, Chloe, and Toby to the dried-out lake-bed of Lake Allatoona. It was fantastic. The sky was a brilliant blue and the weather was perfect. I took a lot of pictures.

(Toby running around)

(Flower in the foreground with Chloe running around in the background)

Afterwards we went back to the house and celebrated Jen’s Grandmother’s birthday. We had a pretty full house – probably about 14 people total.

(Chris)

(Me)

I had a wonderful time taking photos with my new flash indoors. The bouncing effect works so well!

(Jen’s Dad, Jen’s Grandmother, and Jen’s uncle Chuck)

Katie was having a lot of problems with her contact and had to wear an eyepatch. She looked really funny with her eyepatch on and we all made fun of her. She had a lot of wine so was a good sport about it.

(Katie the surly pirate)

Jen and I had a really great time and stayed late.

When I got to work this morning I used my 17-40mm f/4L lens to take a photo of my desk and work area.

(my desk at work)

Alex came by and showed me his new Canon 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6 DO IS USM lens. It’s a really compact & light lens due to the fact that it uses the new defractive optics technology. I used it to take a photo @300mm of a distant Delta building:

(Taken with Alex’s 70-300 DO)

Aside from this, work was pretty uneventful and I worked really late again today.

I slept late today given that it was a Sunday. A little while after waking up Jen and I went to the gym and worked out. After Jen completed her running (I split my time between running and lighting weights) we did a bunch of lunges afterwards. That really makes my legs sore.

Jen wanted to stop by Pier 1 after we left the gym. We went over there and I stayed in the car listening to my audiobook while Jen went inside to do some quick shopping. After this we went to Publix and did some grocery shopping.

Finally we got home and I finished listening to book five of the ‘Wheel of Time‘ series. It was great! Later Jen and I got ready for dinner tonight and a little while later people began to arrive.

(Scott and Katie at dinner)

We had a birthday dinner for Scott at our house. Scott, his great dane Adie, Katie, Chris, Jen’s parents, and Jen’s grandmother all came over. We had a nice dinner and afterwards presented gifts to Scott.

(Everyone at dinner)

(Scott opening a gift)

After dinner I helped Katie set up her new iPod Nano. We found some songs that she likes and added them to a special Katie playlist. She seemed pretty happy to have some new music ready to go.

Everyone left by 9pm and Jen and I went to bed around 11pm.

It was very cold outside today. We had a team celebration lunch out in the pavilion so that event was also quite cold. I brought in homemade brownies and they were pretty popular.

Aside from that, work was pretty unproductive today. Jen and I tried to coordinate plans with Katie and Chris for dinner tonight but they fell through. So instead we agreed to just meet for desert.

I took a photo of my desk at work today since I was itching to use the new camera. A lot of my co-workers are envious of the dual-monitor setup as most in the building don’t have this.

(My desk at work)

I got home at around 6pm today and a little while later Jen and I went over to Greenwoods in Roswell for dinner. Katie and Chris met us there. Jen and I ordered dinner while Katie and Chris ordered desert. The food was pretty heavy so Jen and I probably won’t be going back. We were too full for desert so we ordered a blackberry pie to go. I love blackberry pie.

Today I worked from home – mainly because I was up so late for work stuff last night Carole let me sleep in and work from home.

I met Jen for lunch today at Umezonos.  We both ordered Yakisoba but I also ordered a couple of eel nigiri.  What’s the point of going to a sushi place if you don’t also eat some sushi?

The new 5D camera shipped tonight at about 9:30pm.  I’m really excited about getting the new camera, lens, and flash!

Today I was thinking about buying the Canon 17-40mm f/4L lens and selling my 28-135mm.  I checked eBay to find out the going prices on the 28-135’s and they were pretty good.

While I was doing this research I also noticed that Canon released a set of rebates just the past weekend.  If, in theory, I bought the 5D camera and 17-40mm lens, I could get $690 in rebates.  That’s awesome!  I think I’m going to talk with Jen about this.

When I got home, Jen had leftovers from lunch waiting for me.  It was an avocado taco and was really good!  She’s so nice.

At 6:30pm I headed out to Clint’s house for game night.  Afterwards I wrote up an entry on the events of the game.

When I got home, Jen had food waiting for me from M&T.  She went there with Lynne tonight and picked up a ’swifty’s dream’ BBQ pork sandwich for me to have tonight.  That was really nice of her.

I stayed up pretty late doing yet more research on cars and requested online some quotes on a few cars.

Jennifer was in a super fantastic mood this morning. I think it was the coffee.

We drove over to Katie’s house to do some yard work. I trimmed the tree in the front using my tree-trimming skills I picked up from working summers with Craig as tree trimmers.

Jen planted bulbs in the front. Chris was home alone (I think Katie was off at some volleyball thing) and he began to furiously clean the house shortly after we arrived.

We collected a bunch of brush to dump so we drove over to Jen’s parents house to put it in the compost. No one was there when we arrived.

Next we drove up to Cagle’s Dairy Farm to go in the corn maze. There were a lot of kids everywhere. It was actually entirely geared for kids so Jen and I felt a little out of place not having kids with us like all of the other adults did. Nonetheless it was quite an experience.

After this we drove back over to Jen’s parents house again. Jen’s Dad took us out with Chloe and Toby to a section of Lake Allatoona that is dry this time of year.

(The dry bed of lake Allatoona)

It was a really cool walking around the dry lake-bed. It was a wide flat field of wildflowers. Some of them looked a lot like the fireweed that I remember seeing in Alaska.

(Chloe among the fireweed-looking plants)

Next we went back to the house and collected Jen’s mom. We went over to Rainbow Asia for lunch. I had the general tso’s chicken and hot & sour soup. After lunch we walked next-door to a wine shop. They happened to have a free wine tasting going on today so we participated.

The first four wines were just ok – nothing too exciting. However the last wine was a Zinfandel from a Californian vineyard called ‘Klinker Brick’, and it knocked my socks off. It was really good! I usually don’t care much for Zinfandels but this was outstanding. We bought a bottle of this along with a bottle of a malbec. I also noticed that they had a merlot from Pride Mountain – Larry would like that.

We went back to Jen’s parent’s house so Jen could do some Mary Kay makeup stuff with her Mom and then we left. On our way home we stopped at Costco and bought a lot of stuff.

Finally we made it home. A little while later Scott came over and brought with him Adi as well as the movie, ‘Just Friends’. The three of us watched the movie. It was pretty good. Shortly at the movie Scott went home and we went to bed.

I decided that we would fly up to New England this coming weekend.  Reports indicate that the fall colors this season are awesome.  The weather forecast for this weekend is sunny.  It all looks good.  We’re going to Manchester, NH.

I finalized the arrangements.  I booked a car reservation, hotel reservation (Hilton Garden Inn), and put us on the standby list for a flight tomorrow evening to MHT.

This evening we had a wine tasting party at our house.  Jen loves to host these types of things.  We had a nice time and it was a lot of fun.

After everyone left Jen and I packed for our trip.  I also prepped her laptop to take along and had some problems with it.  The network wasn’t working and it would lockup anytime I would try to repair the drivers.  It was actually quite frustrating.  System restore didn’t even work!  I finally fixed the problem by using the built-in ‘restore from backup’ feature which comes with the IBM Thinkpad.  It had been doing automatic periodic backups to the same HD, so I got lucky.  The restore took about 40 minutes, but it fixed everything.

I didn’t get to bed until 3am – very late!