At work for another 15+ hours. Woohoo, this is getting old. On the plus side, only 3 more days before I get to go work at a startup where I put in long hours and hope to get paid.

I borrowed a DVD burner and am backing up my web site and desktop system to DVD. Very exciting. Hopefully I won't forget anything. There is no going back.

Guess I'll go play some more nethack while I'm waiting for the work to finish.

Damn, I've been at work for 12 hours so far today. This is my last big push to get stuff done before the end of days. I would rather have had everything go smoothly and have left at 3pm as planned, but no luck.

I did get all my web stuff cleaned up, and transfered over to the laptop at work with the DVD burner to back it up, only to find the laptop DVD burner doesn't actually work. Doh.

The wireless was acting weird there for a second. 1+ sec latency and lots of packet loss. I opened the wireless monitor and it magically started working again.... no, now it's back to 20+ ms latency. Something is really wrong again. I moved the power cord and now it's working again. Hmm....

It's been a busy weekend so far. Saturday we went and picked up my ring and o the way back stopped at two nurseries on the way back through Livermore. Nothing there, they're geared toward landscapers and no so much the home gardener. Next up we went to two Lowes stores to find the shed, generator and plants we wanted. We went to the mall, and a bunch of phone stores to find me a damn phone. I wanted a 1.3 megapixel camera and that was about it. Most phones have MP3 players, TVs, blue tooth stuff, etc. That's fine, but all the buttons and the feature set makes the phone expensive and fragile feeling. I settled on a Samsung ZX-10 or something like that although I didn't like the way the camera "rotated" around the middle (so you can take a picture of yourself I guess?). On a whim we went into the Sprint store and I found the Sanyo MM-7500. It's got a lot of the stuff I don't want, but it does have a good camera and it's been "ruggedized" so it's got all this extra rubber/plastic on it. Seems like it will last a long time. I liked it the second I saw it, even the color scheme (with it's fancy replaceable trim inserts) is pleasing. Sold. The other reason I got it is because the chick told me you could download your pictures with the included USB cable and not have to email them off the phone. Yea, you can do that if you pay another $35 for 3rd party (very buggy) software. I liked the phone enough not to take it back and get one with removable memory. You have to buy your songs on the phone on-line if you want to use the media player, but again I don't want to use it as an MP3 player. It's also not a GSM phone or whatever, I can't take it anywhere outside the US. Actually, for being a brand new phone (new model too) it's actually pretty limited vs. the competition. Glad it looks good and does what I want.

Today we went to Starbucks and read the paper, and then went to Home Depot to get a freezer. We saw small 5 cubic foot chest freezers at Lowes super cheap yesterday and got the idea that we could get one to put all the meat in. That way we can buy more in bulk at Costco and freeze it. We do that now, but the freezer is packed and we can never find anything. Now in the new freezer it's spread into 3 sections and you can find it easily. The chest freezer is very efficient too, it's only 140 watts when it's running. Pong probably draws more power than that. The one we got at HD was $10 more on sale than the one at Lowes but a lot nicer and draws less power. It's also got a temp selector on the front and a "turbo freeze" switch. No idea what it does, but turbo anything has to be good. :)

After getting the freezer (glad we had the truck for the weekend for all this hauling) we spend a few hours cleaning the garage, moving cabinets around and generally tossing/recycling things that desperately needed it. I also got all the computer equipment ready to take back to NVDA. I don't want to have to deal with all of these old PIIIs so I'll take them back and leave them in my cube. I have two more of the tiny Dell systems like Pong I'll bring home. They only have 256gb RAM and a single CPU but they'll work for any linux tests I want to run. if I need real power, I can always buy something made after 2001.

Another day of working two jobs. Being at NVDA is getting harder each day. I care less and less about holding the team together and getting stuff done and am thinking more about the challenges at cRight and how to tackle them.

I talked to HR a bit today as well. My final check will be for my salary, my 28 days of vacation I've got stored up and my ESPP money I won't be using to buy stock. That should hold me over for a while if something happens. Yea, everyone tells me not to worry but if I didn't worry, I wouldn't be me.

The photographer put up the track photos, but now it looks as if he's moving them around. There were like 11 of me on there, and now I can only find 1. Glad I saved them to the desktop at work this afternoon so at least I can download the thumbnails to here. I probably should pony up and order the full CD.

I spent the last of my "company store" dollars today. They have almost nothing in stock, so I ended up with a bunch of screwdriver sets (good for the bikes), some golf balls for dad and a 1gb USB key. Fry's has 1gb keys for $20, the company store wanted $80! Oh well, it's not real money and I can't take it with me... there is no company store rollover. :) I would have got more of the microfiber t-shirts or some backpacks but they were out of all of those.

The new company wants me to show up today at 1pm for a network architecture meeting. I'm not sure how much use I can be at that but at least I can know what they're thinking.

I'm pretty much the dumbest one at the new company. I knew it would happen, but it's painful to actually experience.

They gave me some email addresses and logins that I'm supposed to use at the exchange outsourcing company, but I can't figure any of it out. These NVDA laptops are all setup for the NVDA domain and I'm wondering if that's screwing up things. It's very confusing with no one to show me how it works.

Friday was a scary day for me. I signed and faxed back the offer letter, and gave my resignation at NVDA. Two more weeks and the 7.5 year stretch is done. I'm surprised I'm not freaking out more at this point, but perhaps the reality has just not sunk in yet. The new dudes want me to go to the office on Wednesday afternoon to help them figure out the best way to layout the first Netapp (for Oracle). I don't exactly know how Oracle works in a Netapp, NFS and a DB seems like a bad combo but I'm sure there is a white paper that tells me it's OK now.

Saturday Don came up and we went to the range. He had to sit around for a bit because I didn't have any ammo loaded. I started Friday night but brass prep took longer than I thought. I also didn't have any of the moly coated bullets weighed out. After all that work, the loads sorta sucked. I've not measured them yet but I can tell they're not that good. They were also very inconsistent over the chronograph. My last good loads varied by about 10 ft/sec, these seemed to be in the 30-40 range. That's bad. At least the moly made the barrel easy to clean.

Today we did the usual Starbucks run, and then I cleaned the garage, put away all my riding gear, did laundry, etc. Overall a relaxing day. I'm feeling a little sick now, probably had too much cheese today.

I'm stuck in a lame ass IBM meeting, but Ernie (the desktop manager dude) has these new Dell laptops he's testing and he let me play with one. It's got nothing on it, but putty was easy to install and now I can at least journal a bit and play around. I wonder if pong has "hack" on it? Maybe it should.

Nothing from the start-up yet.

Installed nethack on pong. Kinda fun. God this meeting sucks.

The track day yesterday was a total success. I learned a lot, mostly had fun, nothing got broken on the trailer ride to/from the track and I didn't crash. Oddly, I took exactly 0 pictures the whole day. We were either on the track or in the classroom at all times as there were only 2 groups instead of the usual 3 (1 in the classroom, 1 on the track, 1 resting). The professional dude was there, so hopefully he got some good shots of me.

The woman is off getting her haircut and I've got the house to myself. Time to do paperwork and screw around reading. :) I'll do housework later so she thinks I've been productive this morning.

Dad came by and got his bike and headed out to Madera to visit grandma. It's nice to have that space back in the garage, now I can start laying out my cabinet project.

Heard back from the cRight people, or the founder anyway. They still want to make an offer, they've just not had time yet to draft it up. I can't see why he would make that up. If they didn't want me it would have been just as easy to say "we're not interested, thanks for your time" and have it over with. I'll not worry until Monday.

I picked up the final coins from my order yesterday. They couldn't find any more gold eagles, so they substituted Canadian Maple Leaves instead. Gold is gold, right? The Canadian coins are actually pretty cool. The Eagles are 22k gold so they're a little more wear resistant (and they weigh more than 1 oz since they have 1 oz of gold each plus the other stuff to make them only 22k). Apparently 22k has been the standard for gold coins for 300+ years. The Canadians don't care, they make theirs out of 24k, so totally pure. It's not like people are going to use them as real currency anyway, so why alloy them for wear resistance? They're .9999 pure (in theory), and man they look cool. Apparently they're also more consistent. The US coins alloy changes a bit with the year and batch, which is why the colors are all slightly different. I gotta get some Canadian silver too. Now I know why it's the "worlds best". They're slightly more than US coins, so I won't get them in bulk. I'm supposed to be going after base metal value, not collector value.

Total stash is 160 oz silver (not shown), 27 oz gold, 3 oz platinum.

Once my holders get here I can finish weighing and documenting them, wipe any left over prints off them and then seal them for storage. Gold has gone up almost $100/oz since I bought these so the "smart" thing to do would be to sell them now and buy again when the prices tank, but I'm going to hold out a bit longer. I don't want to make money as much as I want to have the gold. Crazy!

LaunchCast is full of commercials now, almost every 2 songs there is the same stupid ad. Change the ads up a bit, will ya? If I didn't want rolaids or whatever the hell the first 10 times, what makes the 11th that much more effective?

I got my first bill from the lawyers. Ouch. The dude only charged me 0.7 hours for our 1.1 hour meeting, so at least he doesn't charge for chit-chat so much.

I'm finishing up with quicken now as I quit doing it earlier today when the woman got home and we went to pick up my suit (which it turns out won't be ready until the 18th). I wonder if I was predicting I would change jobs and/or take a huge pay cut? I say that because I've pre-paid for everything. The track day was paid in full months ago, the tires were paid for before, my psycho classes were paid for the whole year, my magazines subscriptions were either canceled or resubscribed for 2 years (which I don't do very often), etc. I've got gun parts on order which are paid for (.22 conversion for the Kimber to make practice super cheap, magazines and whatnot for the Steyr), I've stocked up on powder, primers, bullets and brass, etc. Long hard winter predicted by my subconscious?

Got the tires back from the dealer today mounted up, and while I was at the dealership I picked up brake pads. Figured they've got 30k miles on them and they're probably worn a bit, even if they didn't suggest changing them at the 30k service. The new ones were 0.2" thick (the pad material only) and the used ones were 0.125"... so about 60% remaining. If I fry these new ones at the track I can always swap the old ones back it. It would take 15-20 minutes, it's actually very easy. Notice the color difference too between old and new:

Met with OUM (the new tax people) today up in SF as well as Bernstein. The Bernstein dudes were pretty positive. Assuming very conservative returns, I could retire now. Sell the house here, take the gains and move somewhere to buy a house for cash and then just be middle class folks with no visible means of support. Obviously we're not going to do that, but retirement at 50 is completely possible and if we do well the next 6 years retirement at 40 is assured with enough income to travel and do the horse crap, shoot and ride motorcycles until 80+. All my being a cheap ass and saving and investing is starting to look like it's going to pay off.

Round #2 with the cRight people is tomorrow evening. They've called both my references, so they're serious about something.

The Mexican place in HK has a web site on their receipt: www.coyotebarandgrill.com. It's not spelled correctly on the receipt, but it's close enough to get the idea across. Why this one receipt is still on my desk I do not know. Hazzard of only cleaning the papers out once every 6 months I suppose.

Doctor visit was a no-op. She gave me a new prescription for the same anti-whatever they gave me last time, and told me to go back to the dermatologist and to get a biopsy. Oh boy.

Got the wheels off the RT to get ready to take them to the dealer for new tires on Wednesday. It was easier than I thought, just follow the included manual and poof, no tires.

Damn that bike is dirty when you get right down close to it. I'll give it a good bath after the track day is over. It will have earned it.

Traffic getting home was a bitch. The Mexicans have 4-5 exits on 680 closed for their "festival". Man, I sure home someone gets shot at that thing and they close it down next year. Who am I kidding, by next year they'll have taken over and driven all us white, Asian and Indian people to Oregon or Arizona.

Went up to the cabin this weekend to put the Montero into storage again. Dad's pretty excited it's up there now; he's going to start riding his bike up there and then using the Montero to haul stuff once he's there. While at the cabin we went to the "Pioneer Pow Wow" as part of mom's mother's day stuff (yea, it's next week by she's working then). Mom thought it was some sort of art festival, but mostly it was a bunch of strange freaky people selling rocks, crystals, etc. The snow cones were good, and parking and admission were free so you can't fault the freak festival too much.

Today I got the Suzuki fired up, but the battery won't hold a charge. I guess four years of abuse and improperly storing the battery has taken it's toll. The fuel stabilizer worked very well though, the bike ran just fine with no evidence of gunk in the carburetor. I'll have to get a fresh battery for the next trip up. After fiddling around with that, and taking pictures of the woman raking pine needles, we came back down home to go to another Sharks game. The woman said I could start turning tickets down again, she's not that big of a fan. These were from HP and since the place is called the "HP Pavilion" we figured they would be good. It was a club level luxury box, so way better than the penthouse boxes for actually being able to watch the game. The food was kinda crappy, but it had it's own bathroom. The Sharks won again too, so that was an unexpected bonus. We also had a visit from Sharkie, the mascot:

Pictures of the house and game, and a movie of the opening of the game where all the players skate out of the big sharks head, are on the main page.

Back at work for only a few hours now and already I have a huge ass headache. Been pretty good all this week, then suddenly poof, I can hardly keep my eyes open. My neck is tight and my hands hurt. Doesn't seem like it's the monitor, unless it's the monitor, keyboard and chair. Or it's just this place, but come on, nothing has happened yet today.

This weekend we're going up to Pioneer to put the Montero in storage, and to go to "Pioneer Days" with mom. It's cheesy and stupid, but it's close to mother's day so we'll do it and be happy. The gourds vines that we're growing for her are doing well, she'll like those. If she gets them in the ground soon maybe she can have her own home grown gourds for her fall craft projects (what you do with gourds I don't know but she seems to buy a lot of them).

My platinum coins are in, dad went by and got them while I was in class. I think I was supposed to call him to setup a time to get them... Doh.

I've decided not to take the test on Friday. I'll just schedule to take it later. Too much firewall stuff at this point and I can't remember it all. I did come in and manage to do a lot of the logical volume stuff from memory. We're doing the apache and squid stuff right now... that stuff I know.

Quick update. Everyone in class is bailing on the test on Friday, so the instructor now gets to go home early. That's funny.

Day 2 of class. I got my ass handed to me again today, but no so in the automount, NIS and networking sections. Stuff I actually use I'm pretty good with. Stuff I've never done, like creating logical volumes on raid devices via the command line, I'm not so good at. Taking the test still looks like a mixed bag at this point, but I must try. I'll forget all this crapola in a week, so best to cram somehow and take it now.

In the RedHat class now, just finishing up lunch. Nice that they provide it for us instead of making us wander around the valley looking for food. I didn't see any choices on the way to the class other than Taco Bell, and while I like TB I wouldn't want to eat it more than once every 6 months or so.

Tunneling http through ssh is cool, and very handy on the open student network. Should have learned that trick a long time ago.

I've forgotten how much I don't really know about being a linux admin. I'm having to figure out things the hard way, and since they don't let you use manuals or the web or anything it takes longer to blunder through stuff. When will they ever devise a test that doesn't require you to be locked in a cave with no access to anything and being asked to do strange admin tricks? Guess it's good practice. Still, I have serious doubts about me passing the test Friday... and it's only Monday.

When I went to throw out the rest of the un-sprouted peat pots, I found that over 16 more sprouts had grown. In the dark, somehow. That stuff was sitting in the garage waiting to go into the trash and suddenly things are growing. I planted as many as I could. They're pretty weak a sickly looking, but maybe they can grow up to be real carrots?