I was late to work today by almost 45 minutes, I don't think showing up early anymore is going to be in my best interest. What's interesting is that the marketing folks weren't there until 10:30 or so. I feel like a bad slacker when I can't even slack more than marketing.

With our CEO calling off my Mac purchase I find myself in a bit of a quandary as to what to buy. I think it's getting clearer though, I'm going to get the black macbook. I've used my P3 Toshiba for 7 years now, so I think I get good mileage out of equipment and it's probably wise to get what I want rather than settle since it's a rare day that I buy a computer. I think the last computer I actually bought was my 75MHz Pentium system back in... 94? 95? I remember Vareck picking out the CPU as he knew which series was best for overclocking. I ran that thing at 120MHz for at least 8 years before giving it to Don.

No rain today, I actually rode in. Nice to be out of the car. Last night sitting in traffic I actually missed the Porsche for a moment. Not that I needed the power/handling of it at 10 mph, but it had a really nice shifter. The tracker with it's broken syncros is annoying in heavy stop and go.

Pretty uncomfortable at work today, Peter announced officially that I'm leaving (not that everyone didn't already know) and now people are coming by to ask why I'm leaving and where I'm going I'm not telling where I'm going though, I don't want to deal with questions. Anthony said if I was embarrassed about where I'm going then perhaps it's a mistake to leave. Very interesting trick on his part trying to play on a person's anxiety about changing jobs. Didn't work, but a nice trick.

It's yet another day of rain, looks like the rest of the week is going to be wet too. When did we get to Seattle???

I replaced the garbage disposal! I majorly cheated though, I measured the old one out and bought the model that is exactly like the one we had. It's the same power, same cheesy construction but it of course matches directly up to the existing mounting flange and existing output plumbing. The only snag I ran into was that I didn't have any wire nuts to attach the old cord to the new disposal, and the old one uses those 1-time use crush-on style wire nuts. Fortunately I have lots of solder on hand, so they're not coming off. I really should get some heat shrink tubing next time I'm at Fry's to toss into my kit. I was at Fry's today looking and external drive enclosures, if only I had known I was going to get motivated to replace the disposal later... and if I could predict the future like that I would be in Vegas right now.

Last night's trivia thing went OK I think. We had 11 people total and everyone seemed to have a good time. I'll bug Lina and Don and see if they were just faking it or not.

With the help of google, I've got the mac using NFS now instead of SMB for my share mounts, have them auto-mounting and have desktop links to all the right places. You can't make shortcuts to folders via the finder thingy, you have to drop to a command line and make soft links. I think that's a bug.

Why is Dennis carrying around Mac laptop adapters??

I really enjoyed the Cisco class, but I'm also very glad it's over. My brain was getting a bit full. I would think that if they went at the normal pace instead of sticking two classes together in one week that it would be pretty slow and boring. At 2x normal pace it was OK, but not for more than a week. How that instructor teaches 3 weeks out of the month is beyond me. Yea, he doesn't have to learn the stuff each week but he does have to deal with a whole new group of students and keep all those lectures together.

Today we went shopping for supplies for 80s trivia night tonight. We actually found Tab, Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers and the woman found a bunch of 80s candy at big!lots (nerds, big league chew, starbursts). Combine that with grilled cheese for snacks (what that has to do with the 80s I have no idea, but she seemed excited about it) and you've ether got a bash or a really sad white trash gathering. We shall see.

We've also really cleaned up the house, it's the cleanest it's been in a long time. I've thrown out a lot of papers and junk, and got motivated enough to start cleaning out the garage cabinets again. Do I really need oil filters for the Montero? the Porsche? the EX500 (which has been gone for what, 7+ years now)? Do I need transfer case shift lever gaskets for the Montero? What about clips to hold the door moldings onto the Saab? Yea, the answer is probably no in all cases. I'm worse than Kenny hording old serial controller boards.

Last night I got the encrypted loop-back file system stuff setup thanks to pointers from Eric, and I did some tests with rsync doing and in-place block level sync. It takes 24 minutes to sync a 10gb file across the wireless and that's with no changes. If there are changes it would take that plus transfer time. I want to run some more tests, but I should give Don a disk tonight so he can take it home and set me up with a space I can backup to. I'm a little jittery not having off-site backups.

Apparently the instructor has us log into the wrong set of lab gear, so all our work from yesterday got wiped out when the 'right' students logged in restored everything to defaults as their first exercise. Doh. At least we got to learn a bit more about how to quickly reconfigure stuff (in the new equipment set), and since my router had a hardware problem we got to see what that looks like. I'm actually getting a ton out of this class, I'm glad I came (regardless of how cranky my current boss is about it).

But speaking of work, I feel really strange. I'm disconnected from Skyrider, not really on board with Apple, and next week I have to go back to Skyrider for the full week. Just feels weird, and I can't get email responses out of people at Skyrider so I think they've written me off already. Going to be a tough week next week.

My brain is full. I'm learning a lot in this class, but the hours are pretty intense and I'm not eating nor exercising regularly so my body is starting to get slightly off. Not healthy. That, and I'm tired of binary math.

I got my new MSFT natural elite keyboard! Very exciting, it's new in box and everything. The space bar feels different than on my original and the keys seem to have texture, but maybe that's just because this one hasn't been in use since BSDi.

I talked to Peter tonight as well after giving notice. He was upset, but not too much. I think he understands why it's better for me to leave and go somewhere I can learn and use the skills I already have.

Now that was a project, we cleaned out the storage area in the garage and dumped at least half the stuff. I'm running low on college era stuff to get rid of, maybe 4 small boxes left. I bet next year even that will go away and then I'll be junk free. I am rediscovering my hatred of packing peanuts and styrofoam inserts. That crap gets everywhere and I filled 3 large trash bags with it today after recycling all the boxes. If the government wants to ban something, ban that. The boxes with the collapsible cardboard inserts are much nicer and they actually recycle.

My next project is cleaning up my loading area, somehow it's become a disaster too.

Last night we were out past midnight at a dinner party. The food was awesome and Lina (the annoying DBA at work) and her husband are nice people when you get to talk to them outside of a work setting. We'll need to have them over to our place when the table is finished. I don't think I'll be able to top the steaks they made, I can't BBQ steaks to save my life. They gave us a bottle of the marinade they used though, so maybe that's a start.

Some guy brought a hooker to Starbucks this AM. He was some dumpy white guy wearing sandals with socks driving a rental Buick and the chick was this super boobie black girl with really, really long legs wearing a leopard print bra under her white "rock star" halter top, skimpy shorts and crazy 5" heels. I'm amazed she could walk as well as she did. When then went inside, the first the first thing Kristen said was "why bring a hooker to breakfast?". Kinda funny. Wonder if it's one of those macworld hookups they wrote about in the paper? (apparently CL is full of ads for escorts for people in town for macworld).

The worst part of changing the oil in a new vehicle for the first time is not having to figure out what weird position to tweak your body into to get the oil filter out, it's having to deal with the torque these jiffy lube morons use to tighten everything down. I always have to use some huge breaker bar to get the drain plug out, and getting the filter out was equally hard this time. I ended up wrapping a bunch of duct tape around it so I could get a better grip. They always crank stuff down way too hard; it says to go 3/4 of a turn after the seal touches, not 2x around with a huge filter wrench. In contrast, doing the bike was no big deal, the plugs come out really easy. I hate jiffy lube.

I did have to run around and get oil this morning before I could do both vehicles. I wanted to run 10/40 in the bike because it's still so damn cold out when I'm commuting and the tracker actually wants 5/30, not 10/30 like the jiffy lube sticker shows they used. I don't have auto oil that light in stock so off to Kragens I went. I'll have to use up my supply of 10/40 'high mileage' oil on something else. Maybe the woman's car or something. Dad doesn't do his own changes and I have no idea what sort of oil is diesel uses even if he did.

Ugh, just getting home after midnight due to lots of complications in the data center move. It's probably a good 75% done at this point and hopefully we can tie up lose ends tomorrow and Friday before Dan (our network guy) is gone for good as his last day is Friday. He offered to stay on in a consulting role if needed for a few things, like helping me through our firewall and BGP setup, but his boss declined the offer. That would suck if I was staying because I'm not ready to take all that on, and I know no one else there is. Guess that will officially be 'not my problem'.

We had dinner with Troy and Kris last night at their favorite Mexican place up in Fremont. It was fair I guess, nothing too exciting. We did get to see the progress on the table though, and it's starting to look like real furniture!

Had lunch with the Apple people today and got to meet my boss and my boss' boss. They seem like good people, not high strung at all. Is all of Apple like that internally? I can't imagine it so, but if my group is more level-headed it will be good thing. No running around sky-is-falling mentality. Then again, they could have just been on their best behavior for lunch.

Finished up the last of the pre-move stuff in SJ1 today. Tomorrow we load the last gear up and basically close the data center. Sad really.

OK, last night was freaky dream night. The woman dreamt that she was being chanced by Darth Vader, and I dreamt that I got killed my Sharon Stone, twice. One with her just stabbing me and other with her dropping a big metal plate covered in spikes on me as I was sleeping. WTF was that all about? And why does ispell think that the past tense of 'dream' is 'dreamed' instead of 'dreamt' (which I looked up to be double sure about)?

I got to try out the new stove today making breakfast. The woman did my traditional job of laying on the sofa watching while I did her job and cooked. Personally I can't tell much difference from the old stove, but it was nice to be able to use the oven for the hash browns without having to coax it into working or freaking out every time it went out. Continuing the cooking theme I made up two batches of jerky using the new spices that arrived. Each pack of cure and spice makes 4 pounds of meat, and if you're making smaller batches they give you all these teaspoon/tablespoon measures to cut it down to the right size along with warnings about not packing down the spices. Bah. Stupid volumetric measurements! Instead of that lame method, I just busted out the powder scale, changed it over to grams and weighed things out. I made a little tray out of a cut up paper plate rather than put the spice mix in the powder tray. I don't think we want spice scented gunpowder, nor gunpowder flavored jerky.

The woman is going riding, and I'll likely ride the bike up and take some pictures of the new barn and then come home and wash and maybe wax the tracker since it's in the 60s and sunny today.

I actually had to drive my paperwork over to Taos' office, the 2nd fax failed as well. Crappy 70s technology. However, if the office fax is on the fritz, it would explain why I have so much trouble with Switch & Data when I claim to fax things to them and they don't act on it until I call and bug them.

Today I spent some quality time working on the Tracker. I'm sure the DPO (Damn Previous Owner) didn't have the valves checked/adjusted just like they didn't do the timing belt so I kept worrying that the valves would be toast. Even though it's lame for any car made in the last 30 years to have valves you have to manually check and adjust, the Suzuki guys were at least nice and made it easy to do. Way easier than the KLR. The manual states you need a 'special tool', but they fail to provide any details on it. On the Suzuki forms none of the other 16v SOHC engine guys have ever seen or used the tool, they just use 10mm box wrenches and screwdrivers. After cracking the motor open and checking the valves only 1 was out of spec, just slightly tight. Whew. It was pretty easy to adjust it back even with my improvised tools. While I was in there I changed the plugs, cap and rotor all of which made a difference in how the engine runs. It is smoother, even the woman noticed the difference. It's always good to have some positive feedback after you work on something.

We ran to the bookstore after the woman got home from the barn, and had In and Out burger to celebrate my success on the car. Any reason for a good burger. :)

Last night we went by the Pakistani restaurant where Vishal was having some sort of family gathering and I picked up the 2000 rounds of .45 ammo that I ordered. Even with tax it was cheaper than you can get on-line, and about 33% cheaper than you can buy locally. Eric was worried it would be the cheap Czechoslovakian made stuff (which is fine with me, it all goes bang and this is just practice ammo) but as it turns out it's 'made in the USA' Winchester police ammo. Vishal's dad is the local Winchester rep and does all the police sales for northern California. Good to know. He doesn't normally sell to civilians, but since I'm a friend of Vishal's he'll make an exception. I'm not really a friend of Vishal, I used to work with him at NVDA and haven't seen him since I left, but Seth hangs out with him so I have 'friend of a friend' status. Good enough.

Great, I fax my paperwork in at 6:40am and they claim to have not received it. Are faxes really that failure prone? I sent it in again at 8:40am (luckily no one is coming in early anymore) and haven't heard back. Better go get a hold of them. Ugh. I thought it would be easy from this point forward.

At least my workout was good this morning.

Wow, lunch did not agree with me. I went to the Vegas taco place with dad and only had 3 small tacos but man do I feel stuffed 4+ hours later. Hope it's not some funky food poisoning brewing, but I think that is more violent and faster.

I got my paperwork from Taos, the Apple offer came though so Feb 11th will be my first day at my new job. Whew. I am so incredibly relieved that I got a [seemingly] good job before Skyrider totally died. I wouldn't have wanted to get desperate and jump at anything just to keep a paycheck, and I'm afraid I would have done that if I was actually unemployed. The Apple people were willing to let me wait until after my Cisco class before I gave my 2 weeks notice. They said the Cisco knowledge won't be very useful in my current job, but that it would be good to have for the future. I would have skipped the class for them if needed.

The stove was delivered today, it got there right after I left. The woman is pretty happy now, although she's not cooking on it tonight. Light irony. She is kinda upset that there were only 2 delivery guys just like last time, but these guys were willing to actually lift the stove up over the rail to get it into the house.

Whoa, I read through the employment docs from Taos tonight and if I work more than 80 hours every 2 weeks , I actually get paid for every extra hour. How freaky.

After some encouragement from the woman, I went ahead and installed the microwave while she was at the barn yesterday. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, mostly due to my lacking proper tools. A 3/4" and a 2" hole saw would have made life easier, as would screws not made of tinfoil. I managed to strip the heads out of two of the huge wood screws I was driving into the studs. Fortunately I was able to dremel slots into the heads and use a large flat blade to finish the job. I feel bad for the guy that needs to remove those. :( At least it's in solid and level. I did have just enough of my aluminum duct tape left over from the KLR project to properly seal the exhaust fan ducting. I think that's the first time in history I've used duct tape to actually seal a duct.

Other than that, and vacuuming the house and emptying the dishwasher, I don't think I did anything useful. I did watch the first episode of 30 Rock, the torrent finished. I'm still just amazed that the rain didn't kill the modem.

Last night for dinner we went to the German place to use the gift certificate the woman's parents got us for our anniversary. Tonight I wanted spaghetti but we didn't have anything to make sauce with so I went over to the Asian market to get some pre-made stuff. Never been inside there before, but it does manage to smell worse inside than it does outside. Phew.

I signed up for the gaming con on Feb 15-18 which is over a holiday weekend I think. I'll only play the weekend, I'm not hard core enough to start taking time off work to go to conventions.

Man, what a waste of a day off. We got about half way up to Williams and the guide called and said that the road to the ranch was gone; totally flooded out. He said that he made it out this morning but the water was about 1" from going over the hood of his truck and he didn't see the county truck following him make it out. He thinks it got swept down the river (kinda doubt that one myself). We'll try on February 9-10th.

I've wasted the whole day watching TV for the most part. Not really motivated to do much else. I did have to fire up bit torrent to get the first season of 30 Rock, hulu only has season 2. Should have it by tomorrow if the rain doesn't kill the cable modem. Perhaps I should have installed the microwave today but since they didn't deliver the stove on Wednesday as planned I've got time.

We've had two people quit this week. Dan, the network guy/developer gave notice (he's just going to hang out and look for opportunities, he doesn't have a job in mind at the moment) and one of the full time developers gave notice. I didn't know him at all really, but Dan I'll miss.

Last night GK was open until 1:30am... because we were there playing until about that time. There was a semi-impromptu game and it was a crazy long module and we were not exactly focused until around 11pm when suddenly we realized we weren't even half way through it. Doh. Good thing I didn't have to focus on work so much today.

After yesterday's big update there isn't much to say this morning. Mostly I just wanted to rotate the logs and cleanup the picture indexes (and in the process realized how fewer pictures I'm taking these days). Oh, and I'm totally stealing Kenny's idea of putting a line between entries.

I guess I did pull the old microwave/hood assembly out, it was easier than I thought. If the back mounting bracket thing is the same on the new one, the install should take about 5 minutes depending on how much the vent ducting cooperates.

Oh, and we made it to at least 11:30pm last night before giving up and going to sleep. Woo. We're such the party hounds.