So this marks the end of the 3rd week at Apple. I'm starting to relax into the position a bit, getting to know the people and my place in the group, etc. It's still annoying not to have root access to anything, it really makes it hard to work on things when I have to constantly bug people to type stuff for me. I realize they have to be careful but come on, have I not proven that I'm not a moron yet?
Otherwise not too much to report. We're working on vacation plans for this year. We've got the dates picked but no firm plans on where to go. Europe is out, not only because of a lack of total vacation time but because of the 50% hit you take with the weak dollar. We may do a week on a few islands in Hawaii, and may take a few days up in Vancouver BC if we can find enough interesting things to do. If Kristen ends up going to some NASCAR stuff for fox sports, I may end up taking the short vacation by myself. I could easily do a tour somewhere not too far away.
So sleepy! I wasn't even out that late last night, but maybe I'm out of practice. We played at a table with only 4 people, and 2 of them sucked (as players) and had really low power characters. I was sure I was dead as I was surrounded by 3 bad guys and lost 50% of my hit points in round 1. Having your cleric be the only healer and playing the role of tank is not a good idea.
The other reason I could be sleepy is the team building event yesterday. We had to shoot baskets, do some strange ski ball game, answer trivia, etc. I sucked at the racing game (I only know how to drive real cars fast, not so good at the video game versions) but I did really well on the trivia stuff which I found odd. Fortunately the machine didn't pick a lot of sports questions for me, and the ones it did pick I was good at guessing at. Knowing the Colorado Avalanche was a real hockey team helped at one point too.
The woman came by for lunch at work today, she liked the campus and all and said there were a lot of white folk around which she thought was odd.
I wondered when it would happen, and the answer is "today". Someone figured out they could go through their ticket queue and toss and the total shit work tickets on the new contractor. I've not got inventory duties as well as host file cleanup. Woo, what fun. Hopefully I'll remember this if I ever find myself in a job with some power/authority/importance and get all cranky and want to leave.
On the plus side my off site backup seems to be running.
I forgot to mention the range trip on Thursday night. Mom did really well, she went through a box of 100 .22s with the rented gun before she switched over to the .357 mag. It was kinda funny watching the punks with their 9mms stop and peek around the barrier to check out mom blasting away with the wheel gun. The ported barrel adds to the blast, smoke and fire that thing puts out. She was getting pretty tired but seemed to be having fun so I let her go until she said she was done. Mostly she stopped because her hands were too tired and she couldn't pull the trigger anymore, not from the recoil.
The Tracker is leaking transmission fluid. I looked underneath and it looks like it's coming from a sensor on top of the housing. Perhaps that's what the error light was all about? I'll have to figure out which sensor that is and see how much it is to swap. Ugh. The forecast looks like it will be conducive to riding all next week so other than driving to/from the gym I can leave it sit in the garage.
Saturday was very busy. We went to Starbucks, and then went to Reeds so I could order that SPS. From there we went to Ikea and the woman got lamps and a rug for her office, and we even found chairs for the dining room. She's worried they may be a little cheap, but they are made of birch which is one of the woods in the table so they match perfectly. I got some glue at OSH today so I'll make sure they're assembled as well as can be. After Ikea (and lunch there) we went to Fry's to get her longer Ethernet and phone cables and some other office supplies. Then we went to Macy's for me to use a gift card I got for giftmas to get some new work shirts. I only got 2, but that's pretty good for me. Fortunately they were both on clearance for over 50% off so I didn't mind getting the higher quality goods. I think that's the end of Saturday, other than dinner and some quality TV time.
Today I went to the gym to get my training session moved, got to the bank and OSH. I also cleaned up the house a bit, sorted through my gaming supplies and updated things from the con last weekend, read a bunch of magazines dad gave me, and got my backup drive ready to take to work. We also spent some time trying to figure out where we would go on vacation this year. With the dollar in the tank Europe is out, so we're thinking DC (so I can check out the Smithsonian), Hawaii or Vancouver BC. We also looked into seeing Chris Rock in Reno, and Kathy Griffin but those are each a $700 weekend with rooms, tickets, food, gas, etc. Not sure it's worth it, every time I've seen a name brand comic live it's sucked. Not sure why.
Made it through my first code review. It's not big (only 560 lines) but it's the largest shell program I've had to deal with. I started with a mostly functional sample and managed to turn it into something that's more robust and a lot easier to understand. You can totally tell the parts I did, there are comments everywhere, variables are things like BACKUP_DIR (vs. things like BKD), and I'm using indenting. Ooh....
We used Troy's fancy code scanner on the Tracker last night and got some pretty useless results. It gave us two codes P1211 and P1249. OBD-II is supposed to be a 'standard' which means that some of the codes are standard and some are OEM specific and without the secret decoder ring for your OEM the codes are useless. Great standard. Anyway, there are no codes available for the Suzuki that we could find in the book nor the web page for the scanner, nor that I could find via google. Looking at other manufacturers uses of those same codes was no help. P1211 is mostly used to indicate a fuel pressure problem, so I could have a failing fuel pump, a clogged filter or a failing regulator. That code could also mean my ABS is failing (which I don't have) or a problem with the traction control (which I also don't have). P1249 could mean a problem with traction control, or with the turbo waste gate, of which there isn't one on the Tracker due to it lacking a turbo. The scanner also couldn't clear the codes, so either it or the ECU in the car are non-standard. This morning I tried the ghetto method to clear the codes (disconnect the battery, turn on the headlights, wait 20 minutes) which actually worked. If it comes on again then I'll have to take it to a dealer to try to get the codes decoded and find out what's really going on.
It's really hard to get things done when you don't have access to stuff. I've got sudo on two boxes that I'm using to do my perforce offline checkpointing but I can't really do a test run using the 'real' environment as I can't even create new directories anywhere. I want to at least setup my test box to use the same sort of NFS structure that the production systems will but it's not possible at the moment.
Can't wait to get out of here today, it's been a long day of looking at the screen editing code.
Another night of bad sleep. Fortunately I was able to sleep in this morning since it's a non-gym day and there was no game last night so I was in bed by 9:30pm. Those extra hours of sleep helped even if they weren't that restful. Lots of crazy anxiety dreams and whatnot again.
One of the "cool" kids in the gaming group sent out email last night detailing all of the cons he's going to in the next few months. He's got two trips to Colorado, two to Kansas City, one to San Diego, one to Sacto and wants to find a con up in Washington state since they too are a different 'home' region than us. That pretty much explains why they're advancing so fast, 7+ cons in just a few months. How do these guys get so much time off work??? Anyway, I'm going to sign up for the one in Sacto, it might be huge compared to the ones down here. Hopefully I can get someone to split a room with me up there, I don't want to have to pay big bucks for a room in a big hotel.
It rained a little on me going home last night and a little on the way in today but right now it's sunny outside. Sweet. Let's hope it holds for the ride home.
Is there some rule now that says I can't get a good nights sleep??? I went to bed at 9:30, read and was asleep by 10 and woke up at 6am feeling like crap again. Lots of weird dreams (perhaps watching one of those Sarah Conner Chronicles episodes was not a good idea after dinner) and waking up looking at the clock. Tonight I have no game and the woman is at dinner with Darcy so I'll have the evening to myself to read and relax. The woman won't want me to watch any of the rest of the terminator shows because she claims to not like them but gets upset if she misses one. I think she just likes that River is in them and it reminds her of Firefly. The River chick does a good job acting like a cyborg, I wonder if she's always going to be typecast as a crazy person or non-human?
Light rain today, I rode in anyway. It wasn't raining when I got here and I've got my rain gear packed on the bike so there is no reason for it to rain on the way home. :)
Got my 1 week review today. The input from the team was pretty positive, the only negative comment was that I asked a lot of questions about Macs that could be found with google. I guess that was true, when they gave me the crashing Mac I was asking around because I was really confused and thought it might be a good way to break the ice with my coworkers. Oh well, as far as reviews go it's not too bad.
I'm going to need a weekend just to recover from all these full weekends. I think I would be better rested if I just worked all weekend instead of having fun!
Both Saturday and Sunday were consumed by the con, I played a total of 5 slots in the two days which is just about enough for me. The last game on Sunday night was really lame, but at least it ended early so I could get home by 10pm. Some people were complaining about the 8am start time for the first slot, but it's better than an 11pm estimated stop for the last slot.
I finally figured out how people get these crazy powerful characters and crazy amounts of games in. There are a couple of ways you can basically buy ARs (adventure records). The marketing guys who make the games and run the campaign are geniuses for getting people to pay actual money to buy stuff in-game. I'm not doing that which explains why I'm not advancing as fast as everyone else. I basically do it the old fashioned way of playing once a week and getting 1 AR. This weekend I played 5 and got 5, whereas other people did all these optional (pay) things and got 15 ARs. I guess if it's your main hobby it's worth it, but to me it's just a game and a distraction.
The campaign world which has been running for 7 years now is closing out sometime this year after they release version 4.0 of the game system. That will put all of us on a level playing field at least for a little while. I pre-ordered the 3 basic books for v4.0 since I know I'll get them anyway and the pre-order was at 20% off. Might as well save the money. There are lots of rumors and preview stuff running around, I'm just ignoring it all. The game will be what it is, and we can learn about it once it's ready to run.
I'm starving for some reason. I had a muffin this morning and an apple I had on my desk (not the iMac, ha ha) but that's not enough on gym days. I've ordered some protein bars from Amazon that should be here soon. Amazon scares me some times, it's just too easy to find stuff I like; they carry lots of niche products and when you can lump them into an order with books to save on shipping it's a scary combo.
Traffic was really light today, kinda nice that the upcoming holiday makes it easier on those of us who are not getting the time off.
My new commute is pretty demanding. It's not that it's all that much longer (maybe 10-15 minutes more) but that it's very technical. Lots of merging on/off freeways and some really high speed sections that get slow in a hurry. Last night took me 45 minutes to get home, but so many people cut out early to v-day that the freeways were a mess. Kinda funny how everyone leaving early means that everyone gets home late.
Walking around the campus after lunch it's pretty clear that there are no battleship class SUVs kicking around the parking lot. A few jeeps, a few 'crossover' type SUVs, a few minivans and a whole crap load of sedans and hybrids. Lots of really high end cars too, I don't even remember the parking lot of NVDA having so many $100k+ vehicles driven on a daily basis. Mac people seem more image conscious. I guess there is no surprise there. I've also seen 1 guy wearing flip-flops with socks and a trench coat, and two guys in kilts just today. The developers in building 2 are kinda freaky. Must be fun to be so smart that you can get away with being so weird.
I talked to mom this morning for her birthday. She got freaked out by some truck coming up the driveway and looking around; she says she's really not enjoying living in fear all the time. I wonder how long before she wants to move, or tries to force dad into retiring so she's not alone? She is coming down next week to pickup some boots and take a fly tying class so we'll go to the range while she's here. I hope we get enough .22 practice in before she touches off that .357 mag. Oy.
Nothing too new to report other than I got stuck between the security gate and the little arm thing that goes up/down in the parking garage. My bike is light enough to trigger the gate, but not the arm so when the gate came back down I was stuck. Fortunately someone else came out behind me in a car and it opened. I'm going to have to be really careful of the timing.
I feel totally unsuited to being here, the environment is strange and I don't seem to know how anything works, and am not feeling like I'm contributing. I think I felt the same way when I started at Skyrider, I need to check the journals and find out.
I'm starting to feel sorta like the 5th wheel around here. I want to do stuff, but don't know how yet. I've talked one of the developer dudes into giving me the perforce projects, not because I love perforce or anything but at least it's something useful that they want done that I know how to do. Right now though I'm plowing through a book on "OSX for Unix Geeks" to learn about all the ways that Apple totally screwed up the lovely BSD underpinnings of OSX. It doesn't say why they've done it though.
I did just learn about the resource fork stuff again (vaguely remember it from '96) and the 'apple double' format for non HFS+ file systems. I looked at my box at home and sure enough the shared document directory has ._* crap files all over it.
Last night's game was a quick one, it only took us 1.5 hours to blow through the mod and we totally kicked butt even though there were only 3 of us at the table (other other table had 4). It was an easy intro mod, people just wanted to play it before the con because there was some sort of special access in it that would be useful later in the con games.
Dad talked to his guy at work that was selling off some hunting rifles and they're all gone already, so I'll have to buy my hunting rig at the store like everyone else. He did bring the scope down from the house though, so when I get the rifle I'll already have the scope ready to go. This should make the hunt a lot easier (not carrying around a 20lb rifle all day long that's too long and gets caught in bushes and trees all the time).
Still alive at Apple. Feeling pretty lost on what I should be doing at the moment. Reading up on docs and installing applications from a list is all fun but when will they want me to do something cool other than attend a few meetings??
One important thing I got to change was my login. "kellyander" is pretty lame, but their name space is very full. Fortunately "alexank" was open. The legacy continues.
I guess the other fun thing was that the mac pro they gave me was busted. It was some sort of tester unit and it kinda worked, but kinda didn't. That ate up a few hours as we tried to debug the thing before just swapping it out. Now I've got a 24" iMac which isn't all that unpleasant to work on. The display is nice and takes up most of my field of view. I managed to hang onto the little 20" display off the mac pro, so I can run two screens just like everyone else here. Most have a iMac, a mac pro and a powerbook pro 17" on their desks. Seems like a lot of systems.
Had lunch by myself at the cafe so I could look around and see what's going on. I managed to get a burger and some onion rings and a banana for $5, so that's good. I can eat 'real' food for only a bit more. It seems way better than I remember the NVDA cafe food being, but I think because you actually have to pay for it they can't make it suck or people will just go elsewhere.
We got skunked on the hunt, didn't even see a pig, much less get to shoot one. We're schedule for a re-hunt (free of charge even) in June. Basically I spent the weekend riding around on a quad. Guess it could have been worse. Pics are on the front page, and most are pretty bad due to the low light conditions in the early morning when we were out.
First day at Apple today too, got my badge and everything.
Long days on the road... the Tracker sucks ass as a road trip car. It's so light it gets blown/bounced around all the time and it's not that comfortable. Basically, it's just like a Wrangler as far as on-road manners. I shouldn't be shocked.
First up I went to visit mom and get her computer squared away. She's got this new sewing machine that does embroidery stuff automatically which requires you to have some fancy software package. You make designs in the software, transfer them to the machine via USB and then it embroiders the design while you sit and watch and swap out thread colors when it tells you to. The software package is crazy. First, it's $900. Yea, that's USD. Next, it's got an activation key and a USB HASP hardware dongle. What, is this some CAD package? Who's going to be pirating this software? Little old ladies that steal one of the sewing machines? At least it installed easily as mom has XP on her laptop. The Vista 'errata' sheet was a 4 page (funky A4 sized paper) booklet of things you might have to watch out for, mostly related to USB stuff and the dongle. Glad we didn't have to deal with that.
After the PC work was done, mom shocked me by asking me how to use a gun. Apparently there are some shady characters cruising around the neighborhood offering to shovel driveways. I guess they're not kids looking for money, they're 'creepy' guys in an old pickup who 'look like they're up to no good' (mom's words). The first time they approached her she said she was very uncomfortable and was glad when dad came down the drive with the snow blower. The second time they drove by dad was gone and they slowed down and watched her before they took off. She was afraid they now knew dad was gone (since his car is parked at the bottom of the drive due to all the snow it's obvious when he's there). She said that for the first time she was afraid to be out alone at the house. There is no 911 service (and only 2 cops for the county and they're usually busy giving speeding tickets to the skiers) and even if there was she's 20 minuets from the sheriff's office. She was afraid they might come back, and no one would hear her screaming or help which is pretty valid since you can't see any neighbors from their place. Privacy works both ways.
Anyway, I went though the 20+ guns I've got stored there and found that she could easily work the smaller of the .357s. By smaller I mean a full framed Taurus 8-shot with a 4.5" ported barrel. It's not my Lord Humungous S&W, but it's still big. Mom has pretty strong hands from all the years as a physical therapist, gardening and crafting. I figured she's not going to get the hang of a semi-auto very quickly and the wheel gun is point and shoot. If she can't solve the problem with 8 shots, a reload is not going to help her. We spent over 3 hours going over safe handling, loading, unloading, grip, stance, sight picture, etc as well as a little about home defense tactics, fields of fire, some legal crapola, etc. She's got it easy in that if she has to shoot the house is surrounded on all sides by at least 1000' of trees before you get to any other house, and the backside is all mountain. No way she's going to accidentally hit someone. I'm surprised how fast she picked it up. I realize she's not a moron or anything, but she's been anti-gun for her whole life. Funny how getting freaked out motivates a person. She also understands that if anyone comes in, she's going to have to start firing. Nothing she is going to say will make the bad guys leave as fast as gunfire. If she just stands there and tries to intimidate them she's going to lose. It's obvious she's not a warrior and may not have the guts to pull the trigger. Once she opens fire, they won't be wondering if they can bluff her or rush her and take the gun. After I demonstrated a few ways I could close on her from the front door and disarm her in a few seconds she was pretty much convinced. Next time she's down here she wants to go to the range to practice. I'll have to rent a .22 wheel gun for her to try, I don't actually own one. We'll have to work her up to the .357, I think it's going to scare her worse than the bad guys if it's done incorrectly.
This also means that I can get her a good flashlight for her birthday. She was impressed with my fancy fighting flashlight and saw how it makes a handy blinding tool as well as something to ID your target with. I never thought my mom would want a surefire. Crazy world.
Wednesday morning I left and went up to the land to run the pump and check on things. Everything was exactly as it was before, the insulation on the pump is still good and the shed is looking good after the snows. There was some water inside the shed from the roof leaking a bit, but it's on the side away from the generator and tank so it didn't do anything other than get my large tarp wet. Perhaps this summer when we check it then I'll caulk the gap in the roof peak to make it more water resistant.
I went to Taos yesterday and did all the paperwork for the new job, and then went to lunch with the Apple people. They're a weird bunch, that's fore sure, but I guess that's what you would expect from Apple employees.
While running around yesterday I checked out gyms and joined 24 hour fitness. They were really expensive in their brochure during the high pressure sales pitch but I got the 'web deal' for $40/month with no contract and no stupid sign up. Basically the same deal I got before at my existing gym. Since I can go to all 24 hour fitness places now I went to the one by the house this morning. It's huge, with lots of people and better music. The people are also actually working out, not just standing around with their fancy coffee talking to their trainer. Makes for good motivation when the people around you are working too.
Reading other foo21ers blogs about cold temps is funny. It's in the 40s or so today; we went for a walk just to get outside a bit and it didn't rain on us. That's good. While walking by the apartments next to us we think we determined that the Evo club must be having a superbowl party. There were at least 15 Evos in the back lot. It's amazing how much customizing those guys put into those things, no two were the same.
I made waffles this morning using the new 'whole grain' waffle mix the woman found at big!lots and since you put in your own eggs and oil it's a lot better tasting than the boxed all-in-one mix. They came out really light and fluffy, so even if they're good for you they're worth eating.
I should mention that I'm unemployed, on my break between Skyrider and Apple. Sure, it's obvious now but when I re-read this stuff in 30 years I'm sure I'll want to know.
So far the break has just been like a regular weekend, except that since I had to return the mac I have no PC upstairs. I'm not going to bust out the old windows box just yet. Gotta figure out what I'm doing first.
I've been cleaning up the garage and the office and putting things away that have been sitting out so long they're covered in dust.... like the CDs I pulled out of the Montero. I had just the disks so I had to go through the bookcase and find the cases. The woman put them all in alphabetical order, but she filed Brittney under Speers, took me a while to find it buried in with all of the Sisters of Mercy crapola in there. :)
My hostname (foo21.no-ip.info) tried to expire again. I really should just register a domain with godaddy and use that. I kinda want to have a 'bucket' account to send all email to from on-line purchases to see who is selling my address out to the spammers.
Ooh... I'm using the woman's laptop. It's kinda nice and very light and they keyboard isn't so bad. The only annoying part is the fan keeps coming on and off all the time. I wouldn't think putty would load the CPU enough to require the CPU to be cranking but who knows how much if it is text scrolling vs. whatever Vista is up to. I wonder if this thing is running that Aero environment I've heard about. Looks like XP with transparent borders and some cheesy fade in/fade out windows.
We went to the unfinished furniture store after the woman got done riding; I didn't want to waste all day tomorrow by having to run around looking for chairs. We found some stuff she liked, but it was discontinued and there weren't enough chairs to make a set. This could suck trying to find modern chairs that she likes. Most the stuff we've seen is crap, just like the selection of tables and sofas around here. I hate to think that the pottery barn stuff is the best we can do.
Here is my unofficial list of things to do next week:
The roofer dude came on Friday to check out why we have water soaking through the wall above the front door. I heard from other people that the builder left out a bunch of flashing around windows and doors and only in the last few years has it started causing problems. I guessed that they didn't install any between the porch roof and the front wall and it turns out they didn't. The roofer stuck some in there and cleaned out some leaves and stuff that had built up and said that should take care of it. When it drys out inside I'll repaint. Maybe on one of those ??? days.
I also tested out those tools I had dad cut down for me. They fit in the little pouch I found much easier now. So without spending a fortune on custom axle wrenches I've got a 'lighter' set for repairs on the road now: