What a brutal week. Doing two people's job is really hard, especially when you don't have the skills necessary to do one of them. I'm just glad the week is winding down and there don't appear to be any major problems on the horizon.

Yesterday I called the jewelers and they said that the woman's ring was in, so I raced over there and picked it up. It looks just like the picture; they did a good job of duplicating the one we saw. She doesn't know I have it either. :) I couldn't put it in the safe when I got home, or she would have known something was up because I typically don't go into the safe. Instead I just hid it in the loading bench, very unlikely she'll go poking around there.

I called her parents last night, you know, to ask her dad for his blessing and all but he wasn't there. I gotta do it tonight at 5:30pm. After that's cleared up, my plan is to ask her "the big question" at the zoo tomorrow. It was her idea to go to the zoo for her birthday so she must like it. Might as well make that the special place. I'm not exactly sure how to ask though, gotta work on that. The one knee thing doesn't seem like me, but perhaps if I stretch a little I can do it.

I'm going to get a big head or something. The CFO sent me a little thank you email this morning (CCing my boss and the new CIO) for my efforts on saving money on the Netapp deal. Then a bunch of the engineers sent me thank you notes for my work this weekend and finding a way to chop the downtime from 12 hours to 2.5 hours. Man, all these people being happy with my efforts makes me think I am actually good at something. :)

Sunday the woman declared that I could do what I wanted and that we had no official plans. Interesting. I got up early (can't sleep in much past 7am anymore) and spent some quality time cleaning my pistol. It's been through two classes now without any cleaning and it's starting to show it's lack of maintenance. It took about an hour to get it clean, and that was using a lot of that "gun scrubber" pressurized cleaning stuff. Next came a hardware store run to get some more ant control stuff (we're losing the war against the ants) and to refill the propane tank for the BBQ. The little dude at the gas station where we tried to get the tank filled said that the tank was busted and leaking. I didn't think it was and figured it was just a trick to get us to buy do the tank-swap program they have (where they charge you $4/gal instead of $2/gal by giving you a new referb tank that's full in trade for your old one). Nope, he told us to go to Costco and buy a new tank there as they're cheaper. Oh, so he wasn't trying to pull a fast one? That's just not right.

Next we went to Reeds for me to look at toys, and then the used book store, and then to the mall. I wanted a few new shirts for work, and since summer is over in the world of stores all the short sleeve stuff was on sale and the shelves were stocked with sweaters and long sleeve stuff at crazy high prices. Who exactly buys sweaters when it's 90 out? Trying to buy ahead? This is California, it's not like it gets cold here over night. Whatever, I got three good shirts and when I got home I did the 2:1 exchange and tossed out 6 old ones. The woman says I still have too many shirts. I only have about 7 that I can wear to work, and now I have 10. Is two weeks worth of shirts too many?

The woman is really getting into wedding stuff, all these details about invitations. Her mother is already freaking out about who's invited, who isn't, blah, blah, blah. I've not even asked Kristen to marry me and her mom is already causing trouble. What is it with that woman? She obviously needs a hobby. I called the jewelers and the ring isn't ready yet. I wonder what the delay is? My guess is that they couldn't copy the design and are having to buy one from the designer direct, but that's just a guess.

I poked at the Montero a bit, and it looks like the high pressure line on the power steering pump is leaking. I ordered one up from partsamerica.com and it should be here on Wednesday.

Working in the office on a Saturday? What, do I work for MSFT now?

I got the loan check for the land yesterday and dumped it in the bank today. The loan is from Wells Fargo, yet they're still going to put a hold on the check for 7 days. Way to ride the float on your own cash, ass wipes. I put it in my high yield savings account though so it will start earning 3% or whatever right away even if I can't get at it for 7 days (I read that trick in their own manual). It kinda sucks that we'll have made two payments on the loan before the land is even ours.

I hope to be done here in 117 minutes, maybe sooner. It's running about 10% faster in real life than in the test which is a nice surprise.

Whew, I just negotiated a $2.1M Netapp support deal. Got them down from $2.9M, which they assure me was an "aggressive" price. At least no one used that stupid "sharpen our pencils" cliche. Man I hate that.

For the last two days I've been cleaning up the code mess left by our previous Perforce admin. He sure talked a good talk, but if you actually look at the stuff he does, it kinda sucks. It's very hacked together, you can tell he's got the contractor mentality in that it only has to work today, there is no tomorrow. I've done a ton of menial cleanup and made some of the stuff actually work and not need to be babysat. It's still fun doing sysadmin work when I actually get to do it. I like scripting.

Nick Triantos' last day is today. He's one of the original software guys. I had a 30 minute conversation with him and he told me what he's going to go do and talked about what I might want to do with myself. The guy has a lot of balls to go out on his own. Sure, he's got zillions of dollars in the bank to fall back on, but like a lot of the other guys here they say they don't have enough to retire on. I guess I'm the only cheap bastard here. I could easily retire on $4M, and most all of the old timers have got at least that much. Or they did anyway, if they cashed out any of it and/or didn't blow it all on stupidly big houses and cars and whatnot. I guess being cheap would be helpful if I was them, but as I'm not as aggressive, I don't think I will end up like them. Kinda odd when you think about it. If you're brave and reckless, you can make a fortune. But, if you're brave and reckless, you're not content to have just a fortune.

So my doctor wasn't in and I got to check with the "on call" guy about the next step in my wonderful sinus thing. He gave some mild something or another, and if that doesn't work then I can fill the prescription for the heavier stuff. He has the same attitude I do about over-doing medication which is nice. What was really weird was that the receptionist at the office, the nurse, the doctor and the two pharmacists... all Indian. They also all spoke perfect English. That's a nice change.

This morning the new CIO dude gathered the managers together and gave us an introduction to him and what he's going to be doing. The guy is a really good speaker, unlike like our last clueless CIO type, this guy was articulate and seemed to have both experience doing the job, and some ideas on how it should be done here. He must have talked to a bunch of people behind the scenes. He announced a re-org will be happening in August. That's amazing, he actually told us before it happens. Usually those sorts of things happen and then people learn about it as the movers come to shuffle cubes around. I don't think it's going to have any impact on our side of the department, but I guess you never know. Even if he outsources us (which is says he likes to do, he thinks 30% of us can go off-shore) it will at least be for a reason. I guess I don't mind as much going if there is an actual reason (other than "it's the thing to do").

Another busy weekend. Saturday Kristen went to ride the horse and so I went out for a motorcycle ride (after watching Battlestar, she recorded some new episode for me) and ended up at her barn to take some pictures. Her lesson ended early so I didn't get to see her doing the new water jumps they've installed, and she was pretty pissed about some barn politics thing so I didn't really want to keep her there while I looked at jumps. Sorta a wasted trip.... other than I found that they closed Alpine road. Seems that someone bought the land between Skyline and Portola Valley and must have bribed someone at the county to close Alpine road north of the city. Now there is a big gate blocking the road. That leaves only 2 ways on/off the mountain now.

Sunday was another psycho class. They really, really punished us in the morning, I swear we went though 700 rounds before lunch. After lunch we did a lot of take down work and simunitions. I did much better this time, I didn't do anything stupid and I hit everyone I shot at. I'm even getting better at moves that will score me a role in a John Woo movie. I managed to fall backwards, fire at (and hitting) a guy running at me while I was in the air and land (on the mats) without hurting myself. Now I just need to work on the two-gun stuff. :) It would be tough to do this stuff in real life, but they want you to at least know how to fight while falling since falling down is a good defensive move. It's hard to explain.

Monday I placed a WTB ad on one of the BMW sites and got myself one of the older style RT seats for $60. It showed up today, and man what a difference. BMW started shipping all of the RTs in '02 and on with the "comfort seat" which is this really huge padded thing. It's nice on the butt, but makes the bike really tall and fat which is hard for us shorties to deal with. The old seat is way lower and thinner and with the seat in the lowest position it's actually too low now. In the middle it's just about right. That's cool as I'll be more confident at low speed when I've got Kristen on the back if I know I can get my feet on the ground. She really wants to try riding on the back, or at least she says she does.

I just saw about 15 termination alerts go by, looks like we just axed all of our Indian outsourcing guys that have been sitting in our office for the last 9 months. Wonder what's up with that?

I'm back from Scotland (actually back yesterday) and the pictures are on the main page. I also replaced the leaking "transfer case inspection panel" on the Montero today and only crushed one finger doing it. Why the hell do the skippies at the transmission place use so damn much torque putting the fill plug in? It's just sitting there, no reason to use over 100 ft. lbs. of torque on it (I used the torque wrench as a breaker bar so I could measure how much it took to get off there). I noticed 3 leaks, the output shaft again (which they said wouldn't hold so I'm not too surprised) and the power steering pump. Doh.

I just checked my on-line banking and Wells Fargo charged me $5 to use that ATM in Scotland. Damn that's way too high of a fee. At least I got a quasi-good exchange rate. What is nice is that they have the canceled checks available on-line now, you just click and it gives you a .gif of both sides of the check. If only I wrote more checks. Looks like the state and feds cashed my quarterly tax payment checks. Good to know they got them.

BTW, paying $7.50 USD or so per gallon of gas was really kinda annoying.

I filled out and have to send in my WorldCom Victims Trust paperwork. I may get a portion of my losses back. I also should fill out the registration on my 50 BMG rifle so I can register as a good little sex offender with the state.