I'm so tired of the secret meetings. I've managed to not get pulled into any this morning (we're doing a major rework of our p4 server so doing real work gets me out of meetings) but there are lots going on a people are still walking around being "secret" and whatnot. Just give it up people, we're all either doomed, or we're not, but there is nothing you can do about it now. Just sit back and enjoy the ride. Seriously. Sheesh.

Oh, and Shiv had a camera phone handy when I was being a dumbass in my "red hat" this morning. Linux jokes are hard to pull off:

And yes, that is a stick with a duct tape handle on it in the background. It's my vendor motivation tool.

More secret squirrel meetings yesterday; they're still trying to figure out who our groups are going to report to. Everyone is going to quit (or says they will) if we have to report to George. I can see that, I wouldn't stay if that's the case myself. Apparently the CFO believes this rumor and is working on having us report to someone else. It's such drama, I just wish they would get it done so we can move on with life. I gotta focus on my certification test so I have something new on my resume. :)

Oh, and I thought I should mention a few of the strange pictures in the last camera dump. The first is just the collection of butt cremes that I've been using trying to cure this butt problem I've got. It's kinda gross if you think about it, so I try not to do that. Hopefully the dermatologist can find another something for me to try tomorrow at my next follow up. The second picture is this one:

This is the start of the cake topper for the wedding. It's going to be our "brand" (keeping with the horse theme). This is the prototype and if we like it dad is going to have it cleaned up and powder coated brown and will attach some wires on it so it can be put on top of the cake. He's also then going to make one that is an actual brand so they can brand the steaks or whatever at the reception. I think it's getting a little out of hand but the caterer, cake lady and the site manager all think it's cute. Whatever. I suggested the two different fonts for the two K's but I'm not sure it looks right now.

I wrote the woman a check for $337.50 (I have the duplicate "carbon" in my checkbook still) and the bank only cashed it for $337.00. I wondered how I got off by 50 cents. The bank screwed her out of that 50 cents, I wonder if/when they'll catch it?

I've got a bunch of stuff to put in here, but I've got to finish up my bills and quicken before too long. The woman wants to go get some crap at the mall and I want a taco so I'm going with.

Nice, I got tagged by my own IDS setup. I mistyped my login name and typed the password twice and poof, I'm locked out.

The mall trip was really easy. I got my taco, and the woman couldn't find anything that she went to buy. She's upstairs now ordering everything on-line. Did stores use to carry more stuff before the whole on-line thing became so easy?

My parents came over to our place for thanksgiving since the oven at their trailer is too small to cook anything in. Plus, I don't think we would have survived being cooped up in that tiny box with the cat for so many hours. Mom did the turkey but the woman did all of the side dishes and whatnot and it turned out really well. We've still got some stuffing and a few slices of turkey left (probably have them tonight). Mom stopped by today and took a bunch of the stuff with her and took the carcass to make turkey soup with. That should be tasty if we get some.

Friday we went to visit my great uncle in the recovery hospital he's in. My dad wanted to make sure he got to meet the woman before he died. It's very unlikely he'll make it to the wedding. Before we could visit him though we had to go to my aunt's house to visit (she's only a few miles from the hospital). They had a zillion freaking people over. 4 of her 5 kids were there, with their stupid ass husbands (all ex-jock types with beer guts and low IQs), the 20 or so grand kids and 4 freakin' dogs. What a zoo. Someone buy someone a condom. We were there for at most 2 hours but that was about 2 hours too long. They were already drinking heavily and it wasn't even noon. White trash-o-rama; glad I don't see them but once every few years.

From the hospital we went up to the cabin and stayed there Friday night. Saturday I rode the bike around a bit while dad fiddled in the yard and mom and the woman went shopping for crap at the craft fair. I got a lot of reading done. We came home Saturday night and today we went to Starbucks, the mall as mentioned before and then I spent the day cleaning the garage up after doing bills and stuff. I've got all my systems tested out for my RHCE environment and read about 100 pages of the book. I gotta get a copy of RHEL3.0 from work on Monday so I can start fiddling. Their recommended install method is from images served via NFS (rather than dorking around with the CDs). I'll turn pong into a boot NFS server and the router is already setup to do DNS and DHCP.

Oh, I almost forgot. The woman found me a cheapie tripod at the pawn shop in Jackson when she was out shopping with mom. It should work just fine for holding my chronograph. I would have gone to the range today but it was cold and I wasn't feeling up to it. Hopefully Don will get his new rifle put together at some point and we can go test it out. Shooting by yourself isn't all that much fun.

I've apparently upset XP by trying to copy from two different CDROMs at the same time. My box has 2 CDROM drives (the new DVD fancy one and my shit ball HP 2x CDR from 1999) and I'm trying to copy from both of them to a directory on the PC. I'm not sure how long before it crashes.... although the copy just died with a CRC error. Maybe that was the cause of it's unhappiness.

Saturday was a busy day. First we went to Cal BMW to pick up a windscreen for the RT. They were having a big sale so I took advantage of it and saved 15%. Then we went up to SF and went to the International Auto Show. The woman really liked the CTS-V, and the Aveo but she didn't like the Evo nor the SRT-4 neon. She liked a bunch of stuff but really isn't into cars. That's OK though because we're not in the market for a car and when the Montero dies I'll just replace it with a jeep anyway.

After the show we went and met with a photographer for the wedding (first of 3 we have to meet) and then went to a dinner party at Rowina's (not sure how to spell her name but whatever). Dinner was good and I came in 2nd playing "scatagories". Those damn doctors are smart. Kristen sucks at the game, so I'll probably suggest we play it at future parties. :)

Sunday I went to the range and tested some loads. The owner of Cal BMW was up there too, he didn't know I was a shooter. I told him it makes sense, we're all sorta the same motorcycle-shooting crowd and he agreed. There is a huge overlap in his customer base. I also spent some time setting up the computers in the garage. The first of the dual PIII/1.0ghz systems I got seems to be working. These are "retried" systems that we pulled from production and will be scrapped. In theory they should all still work, but if one was broken yet still mounted in a rack it would have ended up on the pallets with the good ones. I'm hopeful. By the end of the week I should have 3 tested dual-CPU systems to practice on. I saw a pile of 20gb disks in the to-be-scrapped pile, I should grab some to have on hand when I want to do the chapters on all the new RAID and LVM stuff. Setting up RAID on one disk, while possible, is just too lame.

This is so cheesy, but I found it amusing for some reason:

First let me say that the Microsoft terminal services thing is cool. It's not xwindows yet, but it does get around my major complaint about windows. yea, I know it's been available for years but I'm just starting to play with it and like that I can get to my desktop again just like I could with PCanywhere, but faster and more "accurately". I am a little confused at times as to which machine I'm on, and the fact that my desktop mouse is reversed is a little freaky since the laptop buttons now seemingly randomly change what they're doing.

The CIO is meeting with us all tomorrow to tell us our fate. Dennis (the networking guy) met with him alone tonight since Dennis won't be here tomorrow. We're eagerly awaiting his information. I called him and he was walking back to his cube and said he felt "dirty" and would call me back when he was safely on the road and away from the office. Sounds scared, which makes me worry a lot.

So Ed's 1-on-1 with the CIO lasted less than 15 minutes. Apparently the CIO didn't really care that Ed was leaving. Great, that bodes well for the rest of us. He's got a 1-on-1 with the CFO tomorrow and supposedly that will last an hour or so. The HR dude was over today nosing around, I'm wondering if/when they'll officially announce he's leaving. They never did when our old VP left, but maybe they told all his direct reports. I wonder how long it will take them to figure out who to have us work for?

I picked up another RHCE book and dug through the pile of retired farm nodes and found 3, dual PIII/1.0ghz systems that look intact. I brought them home and will try to get them up and running this weekend. I now have my test lab to do all of the RHCE exam practice on.

While at Fry's looking at books I found a mini mac that didn't have a 14 year old girl using it. I got to play with it a little and it seemed kinda slow but the GUI looked nice. They had it locked so you couldn't do anything nor get a terminal window. Some day I'll have to get one just to see what the fuss is about. I should search CL and see if there are used ones hitting the market now that the 1.5ghz systems are out.

Ed send our CIO a meeting request saying "I'm resigning". It was quite humorous. The cat is out of the bag now, there is no going back for him. I'm interested to see the reactions of my guys when I tell them in the morning. I'm guessing that some will freak, some won't care and some will just be confused.

Yep, my boss is totally short timer now, he's not doing anything. I did get him to approve a shameless PO for me. I signed up to take the RedHat engineer cram class and test. True, I don't need a RHCE but according to the cert sites it's the 3rd best to have. The first is some super crazy Cisco one, and the second is a MSFT Security cert. Yea, that's gotta be a tough one to teach, how to you secure a sieve with a GUI? Hopefully no one will think to go back through his POs for the time before he gave notice.

I also talked to the recruiter today. It's odd to talk to the same chick who placed me at NVDA all those years ago. She's got my info and I have to clean up my resume in a serious way, but other than that she thinks she can find me something. I may have to take a pay cut though, but maybe a job I like is worth $10k/year less?

I overheated the shredder today, twice. Guess I shouldn't just pile all my crap up in front of it for 5 months and then try to catch up all at once. I have the whole years worth of filing piled up next to the desk too. I'll probably have to sort that in December when I start on the taxes.

Yesterday we ran around and went to two cake tastings and had a meeting the the preferred caterer. The cakes were tasty, but cake can only be so interesting. The caterer was pretty cool though, every time I didn't like something in a standard spread of stuff she would suggest 2-3 other things they could replace it with. We're going to have awesome food, we came up with at least 20 different things that will be served. Having "heavy appetizers" instead of a real meal opens it up to zillions of things. We'll have sushi, lamb, chicken, beef, cheeses/crackers/breads, tons of fruit, some type of salad I can't remember, mini beef wellingtons, some sort of fancy sandwiches, etc. Everyone should find something they like, and it's actually under budget for once. Somehow that make up for a $525 cake. Sigh.

Today we went to the store and I've been cleaning up. Jo is coming over tomorrow to show off her new truck (she's starting a dog walking business...) and we're going to cook dinner. She's gone from veggie to more vegan and man does that suck for everyone else. I did get some chips and salsa and we stopped by BevMo to look for wine specials (we're buying the alcohol for the wedding over time as things we want come on sale, so far we've saved about 25% doing that). I picked up some root beer of course, even if it does make me slightly sick. I also got a few bottles of Mexican recipe Coke. I liked it in Costa Rica (less sweet than the US stuff) but it's not good mixed with rum for some reason. We're going to some party next weekend and I wanted to bring something different.

I'm going to get some cheese and crackers and then get to my bills. I made us bacon, eggs and tater tots (white trash all the way baby) for breakfast but we didn't have lunch so I'm a little hungry. The woman is watching her race so she's going to be busy until 6pm or so. It's the Phoenix race, if her driver was doing better we would have had to go. Whew.

Pong lives at foo21.no-ip.info using DDNS. Stupid Comcast, I had that old IP for years, if only it hadn't rained and the service hadn't gone out for longer than usual. :(

On an unrelated note, my boss is giving his 2 weeks notice as soon as our a-hole CIO gets back to town. The security director is also quitting and the corporate support dude has already bought a house in Phoenix and moved his family out there so my guess is he's going to move soon too. Two of the networking guys have said they're leaving too. Wow, everyone is coming out of the woodwork announcing they're leaving. I guess I'm not the only one that thought this place was going downhill fast. When they cut our cube walls down to 4' and remove all shred of privacy I can imagine more people will bail. I guess just making life suck and everyone leave is easier than firing everyone.

10:48pm and I'm back at work ready to move some equipment around. It's hard to get motivated to do stuff when you know you're boss is gone and the future is bleak, but whatever. At least I get to sleep in until 8am tomorrow before we go off doing wedding planning stuff.

The woman is somehow excited for me that I'm going to have to get a new job. She says it will do wonders for me to get out of this environment. Humph.

Oh, and one of the corporate IT guys quit today. That sorta got people freaked out. If only they knew what was going to happen next week! That's going to be fun. I talked to my boss about it a little more and got him to destroy all of his HR files on us. I don't want any documents with any sort of performance info to fall into enemy hands. The a-hole will be working to get rid of us fast enough, don't want him to have any documentation he can use to support his decisions.

Hey, Eric fixed it so I can send email to foo21 again. He had done something tricky with his router to make nvidia.com traffic go through the cable modem (to download some drivers) and it broke mail. Traffic would come in the DSL line and then try to go out the cable modem. Since the packets didn't start with them (Comcast) they would drop them. Undoing the fancy routing worked.

Last nights lecture by Stephen Hawking was interesting. It was a little too simplistic, he really should have assumed that everyone had at least some college level physics under their belt and gone into some more detail. Oh well, my mom and Kristen's mom really enjoyed it. Mom is getting his new book so I can read that when she's done.

I'm still waiting for the election results to be posted. I didn't get to vote, my permanent absentee thing didn't work, they didn't send me a ballot (the woman got hers). Bummer. Some day they'll put it online I hope.

WHEW!!!! I thought the laptop died, but playing around with a meter showed the power supply died and not the main unit. Fry's had generic supplies that replaced the 6 year old on on this notebook so I'm OK. I was going to get a generic DC hobby supply and just solder the tail I cut off the dead one on and call it good but Fry's doesn't carry generic hobby power supplies anymore. Oh the humanity. New supplies are rated in volts and watts, my old one was in volts and amps. Wonder why they changed the labeling method? Also, I think it's kinda odd how all my electronic stuff is starting to crap out. Who knew this stuff died? I guess most people replace stuff a little more frequently than I do. For a moment I thought this would be a good time to get that powerbook, but then I realized I don't have MS maps for the Mac, nor Photoshop and I'm not interested in dishing out for them. Maybe I'll see if Kenny/Dennis can get me a version of maps for the Mac, and I'm sure I can find some freebie photo software out there.

While driving to lunch on Wednesday, Wellington told me that the Montero was smoking pretty bad (he was following me). I checked the oil today and found that it was a quart low, but checking the records shows it's not burning more than usual. The records also show I've driven 3225 miles this year. Most of that was road trips I think: Shasta a few times, property searches with Griffith, etc. Some short trips like today, I still like driving it around but no commuting to work which is cool.

Kristen and her mom are out looking at dresses so I've got the rest of the day to myself. Too bad I had to waste a few hours fixing the laptop. At least I got the garage clean and all the stuff dad brought over sorted and stored. My little loading area in the garage is once again clean.

I was going to start burning all my photos to DVD but damn, there are a lot of them. Maybe 20 CDs worth of stuff. Maybe the DVD burner at work would be a better idea.

Oh, and I can't believe Kenny is just now converting his TiVo to use Ethernet instead of a phone line. Even I've had the Replay using Ethernet for a year now. :) OK, so it's just because I don't have a phone line but still, I was finally ahead of someone in some technology area.

This new power supply runs much cooler than the old one, and it's probably 1/3 the size.

I got some ammo loaded and two rifles cleaned before the woman got home. I can totally sympathize with Kenny. Having the mother in law around is frinkin' annoying. Kristen's mom sure cooks with a lot of oil, butter, fat, etc. I'm BBQ-ing the pork loin but all the side dishes are going to make me sick.

Oh, and the D-link crap seems to be working better now that I've got all the trick stuff turned off. It's only dropped on me once today (that I've noticed).

I installed a few browser skins and "fasterfox" on the laptop. So far, I really like the skins and the faster doohickey seems to be helping out. The laptop is very disk bound.

I can only type for 10 seconds between lockups. This d-link is such shit! Keeping a ping running seem to help, but I don't see why. Every keystroke sends packets through the net... why does pinging help? Who cares, as long as it keeps working.

My order from Amazon came in yesterday, so I've got 4 new books to read. Amazon shopping could get addictive.

The woman is sick, and I'm not yet. That's unusual. Her mom is coming in to town this weekend.... oy.

I've turned off all the fancy features, no extra range, no "dynamic G" and definitely no "dynamic G with turbo". We'll see if that makes it more reliable. I don't need 108mbit, I just want to type and surf some porn. :)

Oh, and after seeing Serenity we've borrowed the Firefly DVDs from Steve at work. Even the woman admits she likes the show, too bad we only have 11 left.