Got a call from Steve over at NVDA. Looks like the corporate windows team just got nuked, Jason (my old counterpart) is now demoted to admin and is reporting to one of the developers. Seems odd that the windows app development team now runs the email servers and corporate infrastructure.... but they'll probably get outsourced before too long. My team just got moved under Decker, the former security Nazi and now the general left-nut licker of George. That's going to be pretty damn funny, so glad I'm not there for that little mess. :)

I got cooked at the ren fair yesterday. It was overcast, foggy and cold all day (it is SF in the summertime after all) yet I got baked. I didn't have a hat on, so my head and forehead are burnt and hurt like crazy. Being bald does have it's downsides. The fair was fun, even if we didn't get to see Janna really fight. They had some sort of disagreement with the people running the thing and for "safety reasons" they wouldn't do a full dress battle. She showed us some stuff (which I took pictures of) but no armor and no real whacking each other. We played a bunch of stupid games, I tried archery (the guys with the real bows were showing off for the girls, I just concentrated on not hitting myself in the wrist with the string) and ate various types of meat off of a stick. Darcy did pretty well walking around with her broken foot. We took her home and then Kristen and I had dinner on the beach (I was being all foo-foo and had clam chowder and a salad after my all protein lunch) before heading home.

Kristen got some sort of "fairy wings" to put on the back of her grandmother's wheelchair. I have no idea.

Pics are here. I let Kristen play with the camera during the joust (I was yakking with the blacksmith) and she got lucky with a picture of a lance actually breaking against one of the knights. It's a blurry pic, but she had it framed OK.

Today we did our Starbucks run and in the paper I saw a thing about a guy giving a Leonardo DaVinci talk. Supposed to showcase his work and talk about his contributions to society, etc. It's on a Saturday night so we'll have to go. After breakfast I went to the range and took the 50 out for a bit. I figure I should shoot it every few years. Journal shows that May of '05 was the last time it was out. I met some dude there who runs the local club who was trying to get me to come out and compete in their local matches. I should give it a go, it might get me out and meeting people. I need more local friends.

Ahh... like summer. We had an early dinner (I BBQed some burgers since we hat the meat defrosted and had fancy little breads available) and then walked to 7-11 for slurpees. We ended up laying around in the shade at the park for a while before coming home.

I harvested the carrots from the box out front, got 1 reasonable 5" carrot, a few 3" and a bunch of stubby useless ones. I think we have the wrong soil and we're not watering regularly enough. Maybe next year's crop will be better. I chopped them up and got enough to take one small bag into work.

OK, gotta stop goofing around and get the toys cleaned and finish vacuuming the house. I started Friday and sorta lost steam along the way. Having zillions of stairs kinda sucks 99% of the time.

I've got the wiring done, I think. There seems to be enough cables of the correct lengths; I guess we'll find out when the gear is moved if I have to run any more. It's unclear what is still to be done with the move or I could make a more educated guess. Anything is better than the way they did it before which was just to run 14' cables for everything. I have a mix of 5', 7' and 10' which reach just to the right spots. Saves on the 100s of feet of extra cable piled up in the back of the racks.

Two more boxes of wine showed up yesterday, and there are 4 or 5 more yet to arrive. I think we'll end up with 10+ cases or something like that. Two are just the champagne for the toast, I think. I'm really not up on the beverage counts.

Picture of today's work. Is that not the cleanest cable bundle you've seen in weeks? Doesn't look like much, but getting all the lengths right and labeling them took 4 hours. I got lazy and didn't want to use the label maker (takes forever) so I just used a marker. The cables are too small to write clean numbers on, unless you use Roman numerals. I can see why they used them, they're just a series of slashes which is easy to write with a sharpie on a cable (or a chisel on a stone tablet). I thought the guys would rail me for being stupid but they liked the idea. Who knew.

The fudge the woman made today is awesome, although after only 3 pieces I feel like my gut is stuffed. How does she make it so thick and creamy? I'm taking it to the office tomorrow. Thursday is dessert day and I'm going to treat this time with the fudge. Friday is beer and wine day, which I can't really get involved in so I'll stick with desserts.

Oh, and some dude on one of the psycho boards sent me a pair of grips for Vareck's 1991. The guy had a zillion of them he didn't want anymore. They're kinda cool looking (especially for free). They're actual wood too, I bet they were expensive when new. If I'm ever in Wyoming though I have to stop and buy the dude a beer. When would I ever be in Wyoming???

My cable order should be at SJ1 today. Woohoo, more wiring for me. I've got to make 3 clean bundles of 40 Ethernet cables... whoa, I wonder if I ordered enough now that I think of it. In theory we should be able to reuse at least some of the cables from the old install, they just won't color match. I always under-order cables though. Apparently I can't add, or just refuse to realize how many we need.

Interviewed a dude yesterday that I think we're going to hire. He's sorta strange in a geeky sort of way, but we're hoping that's just because he's really smart. Having a socially awkward dude around will help, we can pressure him into working more. :)

Psycho class was yesterday, and when we got there we found an interesting surprise. Some real psycho stole a car and crashed the gate at the training place. He burnt down the classroom building (like it was 100% gone, only some steel beams were left), burnt all of the equipment (generators, protective gear, target holders, etc) and crashed the car through the shoot house totally destroying it. The cops caught him, but he claims "god made him do it" so they'll probably end up letting him to into mental treatment instead of going to prison. What a crock. They figure it will take them two weeks to rebuild the shoot house (it's just fake walls and doors and hallways) but the classroom building was an actual building, it will take a ton of time and materials to reconstruct so I don't imagine they'll do that any time soon.

Today I cleaned all the crap up from yesterday's class, and we went to Walmart to pick up some shotgun ammo so I can try trap or sporting clays again. Eric told me to just buy all they had if it was cheap and he would buy it off me. The guy at the counter thought I was nuts when I said "yea, just give me all you've got". Apparently buying Walmart out of 12 gauge is now my new hobby. They did have a bunch of Winchester 12 gauge there but it was more money and Eric says it's not as good as the Federal so I didn't touch it. Still, 2600 rounds of shotgun ammo does amount to quite a pile in the garage...

I also picked up some spray paint (which oddly ended up in the background of the ammo photo) to repaint the Kawasaki. I got black (for the brackets and dash dad made) and green, tan and brown to do the rest. The green matches the stock color exactly, the brown is a bit too dark but the best I could do. The tan doesn't match anything, but if I get creative I can do some sort of camo paint job. :)

I guess we also went to Starbucks this morning, read the paper and then went in the hot tub for a while to try to get my shoulder and knee to stop being so sore from yesterday. I must be out of shape, or old or something.

Not much else going on, just lots of work stuff. We're trying to come up with something to get dad for his birthday. We were going to get him a grape vine to plant on his land where they're planning to grow grapes to make wine from. Just not sure what type to get and what would survive up there. There are lots of wineries around the area so something must survive the winter.

Took today off and we went up to Napa to the county offices to get our marriage license and to meet with the officiant chick. Kristen looks happy, I look like a deer in the headlights:

We also got the pre-nup notarized and stopped by and picked up Kristen's travel band. When we're on trips she won't be sporting the big fancy rock; don't want anyone to get any ideas about stealing it. When we got home, the UPS guy stopped by, not with stupid wedding presents, but with something for me!

The woman got a huge box of "otter pops" at Costco. She said it was a 500 pack and while I don't think it's that many, it is a damn lot of them. We've got half a freezer full of the things. They're good though, I'll just have to work through them all. :)

My re-spawning ssh tunnel worked. I lost the wireless at the house which screwed up the tunnel I was using. I just killed all the active connections and about 5 seconds later the tunnel reappeared as if by magic. Sweet, it's first real test (and success) at dealing with failure.

Holy crap! So get this. I've been making all sorts of noise around the office about how I love the Ritter Sport peppermint candy and how you can't get it anymore. I thought they quit making it, as all the on-line places couldn't get it and the only place I found one was in Scotland at this gas station and that one was old. I told people if they went through Germany to look for them. Anyway, Tamara (the office manager) called the company and they said that they're making them but not bringing them into the US anymore. She told them the story, and so they shipped her a case of them for free to give to me as a thank you gift for helping with the office build out. A whole case of something I thought was gone. Now that is a cool gift! The other cool thing is that these are "smuggled" in a way. The box says "Ganze Mandel" (whole almond) and that they're US bound. Inside though are German market pfefferminz. I've tried one, they're the real thing. This with a can of real Fanta... now I'm going to puke.

I stopped by the surplus place to see if they had that MS keyboard they had a few weeks (months?) ago. It's gone of course, but I thought I could find something as the regular keyboard I have at work is killing my hands and the only MS keyboards at Fry's are the retard edition (lots of clear cheapie plastic and the whole thing is larger than my desk). I found this sorta curvy old MS one new in box for $10 as a cosmetic second (it's got some scratches on it). It's not as good as my "natural elite" but it will work at home and I'll take my good one to the office. Of course, I just searched and found you can buy the damn things on amazon. Guess it's a good design if it's still around. I do like this new one because it's got a 1-touch key for the calculator, and the email/web browser keys work too. It even fires up Firefox instead of IE. I would have thought for sure they would hard code IE to fire up.

.

ssh inbound to some of our public nets (like where I have my backup server) is blocked so I setup a re-establishing ssh tunnel from my box here to to pong at home. Now I can ssh in from home.... hmm... sorta private VPN. Now I just need to automate the backups.

Busy couple of days. First, we went live with the product at work. We're actually spamming the P2P network for real now, and in theory are getting paid for it. We're partnered with a "large search firm" and hopefully it will work and they'll come out with a press release and make us look legit. Monday we're going live with a 2nd search firm. Very exciting that we've got two companies working with us on this (and giving us money). Wee...

Saturday we went to a wedding and for once I paid attention to what was going on and how it was done. I guess I should have paid attention at Dennis' wedding too, but I was just a spectator that time, didn't know mine was coming up and I should be taking notes. I thought it went pretty well, the woman pointed out some stuff that didn't work and we had to come up with ways around it for ours. She did point out that we can't dance, and better learn before ours. Good to know. We ran into Janna, one of the basketball playing chicks Kristen knew from way back. Now she's some environmental lawyer, but she's also a sword fighter. Real SCA style stuff, she had the scars to prove it. We're going to try to hook up for one of her big tournaments and go cheer her on. Now this is a sport I can get behind. No false pretense of a game really like football, just lots of people whacking each other with swords. The use "live steel" so people to get hurt, and apparently getting stabbed hurts a lot. Janna has been stabbed as well as cut. Crazy. Kristen got to wear her new dress too:

.

Today was mostly an errand day. I went and got some oil and changed the oil in the Sentra, then figured out the oil leak on the KLR (I think) and went for a little ride while out getting some misc tools and stopping by the bank. I got home and found that Kristen had finished up booking about 40% of the hotels and whatnot for the honeymoon which was cool. Then we went to Big 5, Barnes & Nobles and then back to the auto parts store where I picked up some little tiny driving lights I should have bought the first time I was there. My parents came over for dinner tonight and dad and I designed a bracket he's going to make that will mount these lights on the KLR. After riding home from pool on Friday night I realized that the early 80s headlight technology on the KLR is not going to cut it at all. Getting spendy PIAA lights and a real mount is not in the spirit of the KLR, so he'll fab something out of scrap sheet metal. He's also going to try to make a mini dashboard so I can cleanly mount the switch and my little clock/volt meter thingy. It's going to be cool.

I had to dig my passport out to get the inter-island flights booked. I'm not a world traveler like Vareck is, but I've still got some stamps in this thing. Two visas from India, who can top that? Who the hell would want to?

Hard to believe the Germany trip was 3 years ago. Wow.

Oh, the other big happening thing is that I got this "sinus flush system" at the drug store. Basically it's some saline packets that you mix up and put in this bottle that you stuff up your nose and then flush your sinuses out. Yea, it sounds gross and it feels really, really funky (like when you try to stop a bad nose bleed and your nose and throat fill with blood). However, doing it an hour before bed cleans me out and lets me sleep through the night without snoring. Way better to do this than to use some sort of sinus meds for my allergies.

I gotta get a better keyboard at work. Using the laptop keyboard is killing me, and using one of those crappy regular keyboards isn't much better. I so love my old school small format MSFT keyboard and rodent. The new MSFT keyboards are HUGE and not as comfy. Bummer.

Lots of work going on, we're supposed to launch (yea, right) the real production system tomorrow. Last time we were waiting on the business people to green light us, and this time it may be technology that keeps us down. The spun a release last night, and we had to scramble to get it onto the production systems today. It's not looking so good just yet.

Some dude is supposed to come buy the Montero tomorrow. I'll believe that when I see it. Damn flaky CL people.

Going to go play pool with some of the NVDA crowd tomorrow. I've been getting all the dirt on what's going on. People are just not happy over there. It's kinda fun to watch... from the outside.

Thank doG, Kristen's mom and grandma are GONE. Whew. They were in town for Kristen's shower and to do a bunch of wedding "stuff". I had no idea there was so much stuff to do. Mostly it involved driving around and around and around wasting tons of money on gas to buy 99 cents worth of wrapping paper on super-duper-closeout sale and then constantly bickering for hours on exactly how to do everything. I so don't care about any of that stuff.

Saturday dad and I went and got some epoxy to fix the molding on the car door, and some metal sand paper so I could finish fitting the new parts to Vareck's old .45 that I'm working on. I'm pretty much done now other than replacing the grips with a set of stock ones. It went from a creepy 9lb trigger to a clean 5lb trigger, and the military thumb safety was replaced with a decent extended one, and the military grip safety was swapped for a decent beaver tail that's a lot more comfortable. It doesn't look like much, but it took some work to get the parts filed and sanded just right to work.

I also washed the car and got the Montero cleaned out and put over at All West where a lot of people can see it. The bike shop delivered the KLR to me Saturday night as well, so while Kristen was getting a bunch of useless junk at her shower, I got a really cool gift of my bike back.

Today I went up and shot trap with Erik and Elana. They're really into it now, even going so far as to buy fancy $5000 shotguns. I'm not sure those make you shoot any better, but they do make you fit in at the club. Trap and skeet shooting is really a "gentleman's" sport, and by "gentlemen" I mean rich folk. It's mostly retired husband/wife teams in really fancy SUVs shooting really fancy shotguns with lots of gold inlay and spiffy wood. Not my scene at all, but I had to try it. After shooting I came home, had an early dinner with the soon to be in-laws and then while they went off to the airport, I went for a ride up Mt. Hamilton to make sure the bike wouldn't explode again. So far, so good.

Now it's time to start thinking about packing for work tomorrow. Man, I sure could use a few more days off.

The Montero passed smog... barely. I let it idle for 10 minutes before the smog test and when the smog dude started running it on the dyno it put out HUGE clouds of smoke. I don't know how hard he was running it or what exactly was going on, but it filled the entire test center with smoke. He shouldn't have passed it (and obvious visual pollutant violator) but he bought my story about it sitting for a year and not being run so he let me through. It did pass every other test which is good. Now I just need to sell it before it explodes or something.

I had something else important to write in here yesterday, but I can't remember what it was. I was in a hurry and couldn't rotate the journal for the month which is why I didn't put it in. Hum....