I can't find my crypto-widget to VPN into work. I had it with me in India, and remember taking it out of my backpack but it's not here with the laptop. Must have left it upstairs somewhere.

I went to Walgreens and used their digital photo printing service. 29 cents per pic is pretty reasonable. I could go use dad's printer, but I bet it costs more in paper and ink to print the pics and with their little kiosk it's rock simple. No sizing, or worrying about lining paper up or anything, you just tap on the ones you want and come back in an hour and they're done. The woman wants to setup boxes for each years "memories" so we'll be tossing photos, ticket stubs, etc in the box. We did one for 2004 but it's mostly just pictures since we didn't know we were doing this until now. She's got a HUGE box of pictures that are all just thrown together and you can't tell what is what. At least this way we'll have a year to reference them.

One of the Yosemite photos came out really good so I might use that as mom's birthday present. She really likes getting pictures I've taken... I think. She's got them all up anyway.

Quiet at work today; I kept my head down and didn't talk to anyone that could cause trouble. I wanted some time to try to catch up on things. The rest of the week is full of meetings.

I ordered some 50 brass from AZ today (finally!). I spent the extra 25 cents per case to get it de-primed. Normally that would be stupid but because this is military brass and they crimp the primers in (to keep them from backing out in high vibration environments like planes, tanks and other high-speed machine guns) it's worth it. Otherwise I would have to get some fancy primer pocket swaging tool which we would never pay off at 25 cents savings per round. Maybe I can figure out which size drill bit to use and try that, but only on some of the cheep brass we get off the surplus rounds we've stocked up on. That is assuming we ever actually fire any of this crap.

I'm almost back on a regular time. I stayed up on Friday trying to force it back but I still ended up waking up at 3am this morning. I couldn't go back to sleep so I got up and read for a while.

Last night we went to Hayward to the same pub type place that we went on our first date as it's been 1 year since our first date. That's just crazy. It totally doesn't feel like a year.

Today the woman had to go to some class so I went for a ride, and ended up stopping by work to swap out the new (useless, crashes every 3 minutes now) crackberry for my old functional one. Man, I hate that place. Just reading through some email got me all riled up. Sigh.

Now I have to try to figure out all my bills for the month and work on my expense report. The whole India trip cost over $5k from what I can tell.

I'm going home today! OK, not really today, but 2:30am Friday so I won't be going to sleep before I leave. That almost makes it like today. I'll be in the airport by today, that's something. Woohoo, I'm so happy to be leaving. The woman will get home after I do so I'll have time to unwind by myself, and maybe catch a saved episode of Battlestar before she shows up. Ah, to be home again. I sure don't miss work, but I do miss the woman. And cereal.

Sigh, I want to go home. Nothing majorly wrong, I just don't want to be here anymore. I miss the woman, and I'm tired and not sleeping well. Things are progressing, if slowly, at the office. I can now appreciate how rough of a time the first wave of people had trying to get stuff done. Maybe it was better since there were more of them.

They fixed the AC in the rest of the building so it's no longer 60F all the time. It's a comfy 21C they tell me. Sure feels better, I'm no longer shivering and my hands aren't in pain from being exposed to the cold while I type.

The power keeps going on and off. The UPS is holding though, so it's just the lights that keep flashing.

Ram just walked out of the room holding his stomach and making moaning sounds. That's not a good sign.

Work is very frustrating over here. Nothing is labeled, there are no tools, and the natives are horrible about following through on things. Workmanship is horrid. The network panel fell apart when we started plugging things in and of course there is nothing to fix it with so I ended up using my badge to wedge into the side of the panel to hold it. Very low tech. I finally brought some screwdrivers in (got my luggage, yes!) but we can't keep them in the data center for fear of theft. The data center has to stay open since 3 of the 4 air handlers are dead and it will overheat if closed off. The room we're working in is freezing, probably 65 degrees, whereas the data center is a balmy 78 degrees. Something isn't right.

Arun let me take his bike for a spin around the business park [side note, the power just went out but the office UPS seems to be holding the network on]... hold on, now there is a fire alarm going off. Gotta go check it.

OK, no fire anywhere in the building. Walking around is scary, there are no lights on any floor other than the 1st. I'm the only one here with a flashlight, I would expect these guys to have torches or something... maybe that's why the alarm went off?

Anyway, here is a pic of me on the bike. 125cc, kick start, drum brakes. Welcome to 1960.

Holy crapola, I can actually ssh to pong. I'm not sure why that surprises me, it just does.

I'm in India, my luggage is in Germany. It's supposed to show up in the next 24 hours, there is apparently only 1 flight per day from Frankfurt. As long as it gets here intact with all my clothes and tools, books and food I'll be happy. I can suffer for a day in nasty underwear.

So far I've not eaten local food yet, I'm using the rations I had in my carry-on. I have some really nasty beef stick in there; I'm not sure that's better for me than the local stuff.

If the USB reader is still in my bag I can try uploading pictures of my travels. So far, I've gone all of 300m from the hotel to the office. Not a lot of exploring. Maybe I'll go for a walk after I get some clean clothes to change into, it's really dusty out there and so far I'm still mostly clean.

About to head to the airport for the big adventure. Oy.

So much new hardware today. They gave me a travel laptop (a Toshiba that's just as large as my old crusty one) and a travel crackberry that's supposed to work in India. Combine that with the travel cell phone and I've got a whole new arsenal of things to keep my connected. I had to get a USB serial port adapter as these new ones don't have serial on them anymore. Too bad the filers and other equipment still want a 9600 baud serial terminal for a console. At least it's standardized, and carrying the laptop is easier than carrying a VT100 terminal around. We have two WYSE50 terminals to lug around the data center.... yea, how old school cool is that?

I spent all of Friday getting my visa for the India trip. I went up just before 9am and got in line and they took all my paperwork and told me to come back after 2pm. I didn't want to sit around for 4 hour so I rode home and then back up again. Over 220 miles of riding up and back from SF twice in the same day. Beats working. There was a typo on the letter that I submitted, and I hoped they wouldn't notice that I forgot to change Ed's name to mine in one place. Apparently not as they gave me the visa. The part that was sorta scary is you have to leave your passport with them for the day, then they give it back.

Saturday I rode up to the woman's new barn to watch her ride for a while, then went to the gym. On the gym scale I've lost 6 lbs due to not working out and being sick. That's not good. I hope I can get my strength back in the next few months. Sunday we went and got books (for my trip), a belt (my current one has finally split in two) and other misc stuff. The travel book says you need at least 20% deet bug spray, I found REI had 100% deet. Take that malaria carrying mosquitoes.

This horse she's on is worth like $60k. Glad he's not for sale.

Been super sick for the last 4 days. You would think I would have more time to journal but I've not been in the mood to type.

The master cylinder arrived a few days back, it's sitting nicely in the dining room. Someday I'll have to get with Troy and install it.

I ordered a new master cylinder for the Montero (since the current one is leaking fluid like crazy) and a new windshield washer pump as well. Won't it be cool to have brakes AND be able to wash the window? Man, this car is getting all fancy like.

Ran into a strange problem with the house today. The outlet in the guest bathroom just stopped working. Pong's UPS started beeping and when I tried plugging a little night light into that outlet it didn't work either. It's one of those ground fault style with the little breaker in it and I tried testing and resetting it to no avail. Never seen a outlet just "go bad". I got a new one and when I pulled the old one out it was still very warm.... that's not good as nothing was plugged into it. The new one works just fine, and has a little light on it showing that it's getting power. Probably the best outlet in the house and it's in the room no one ever goes. Oh well, pong is enjoying wall power once again.

Today I also setup "psycho corner" in the garage with my new workbench (soon to be loading bench once I get the rubber mat to put on top of it as sparks + gunpowder == bad) and other misc items. I'll mount the press next weekend, I gotta get a nut and bolt large enough to hold it down. I also should order some brass since Don struck out on his Oregon run last week.

Holy crap my main page is getting out of hand. I gotta spend some time and clean it up.

New years was pretty low key. Ribs for dinner, then a quick visit over to Paige's place where we met Mr. Wonderful's parents, his dad is the old CEO of serris logic (sp?). We were home by 10:30pm and sat down to watch one more movie before crashing for the night (I at least made it to midnight this time).

There were a total of three movies this weekend. First, Bullet because Don got it for us as a gift. It was slow, but the car chase was sorta good. Second was Napoleon Dynamite which was the woman's pick. What a POS that movie was. Third was Dodge Ball which was mildly funny. I liked all the bit parts by various people (Shattner, Hasselhoff, Chuck Norris, etc).

The woman said I should mention the ants too, the kitchen got over run with the little bastards last night.