Another nail in the coffin that is the Apple cafe. The pizzas used to be pretty good (I'm sure I've commented on them before) but now they've gotten crappy as well as expensive. You no longer choose your toppings, there are just 3 combos to pick from and none of them have cheese other than big blobs of mozzarella on top. They don't pre-make them, so you still have to wait 20 minutes while the ultra-slow droid makes them which I don't get. They also got rid of the wheat crust. I'm guessing the burritos are next on the chopping block since the burrito line was crazy long today. Guess it's the only 'value' left in the cafe at this point.

Both the packages I ordered on Sunday arrived today. I used USPS express mail since it was the cheapest and fastest and it seems to have worked OK, better than UPS even. Now I've got lots of bike parts to keep me occupied and a 2nd bi-pod for this weekend as well as a shoulder pad. The VTR hurts with factory ammo.

Kenny's journal looks a little weird, it's got what looks like stub entries for some stuff and full entries for others. I often wonder if I should change to different journal tool but all the random crap that seems to happen with the fancy tools reminds me that vi and ispell are pretty solid technologies.

We finished season 5 of Buffy last night. If we were watching these in real time I'm sure we would be bummed about the end of the series, but somehow with 2 seasons of DVDs left I don't think Buffy is really dead. Or maybe those disks are blanks, it's just an elaborate hoax! Probably not. The best part about season 5 was Giles' line "..still she couldn't take a human life. She's a hero, you see. She's not like us." and then he snuffs the guy.

The connection at home is being weird. It acts like it's not connected to the net, yet I'm viewing it via RDP and writing this via ssh, so I would say the connection is intact. Very odd. The other thing I've been thinking about changing in the home setup is actually bringing my full sized XP box back online. The laptop is OK for playing music in the garage but it's kinda poky using it via RDP, the delay in it paging all the time on top of the network delay makes it double bad.

Last night my parents came by and we went to the Muslim Chinese place for dinner to celebrate the woman's birthday. Apparently something had garlic in it because now this morning she's sick after being up all night. Doh.

I sat outside and read for a while at lunch and watched the world go by. There are a group of women in IL1 that seem to move around in a little pack together all the time. They're all dressed like they have more money than class and hobble around on these strange whoreish shoes while sporting sunglasses that look like rejects from 1970s Disneyland. I can't imagine they do anything based on the way they talk when they walk by, so I'm guessing these exec assistants, or marketing/sales droids trophy wives? Or maybe they want to be trophy wives but just haven't been snapped up and taken away from all this? In any case I find it odd.

Saturday we went to the Oakland zoo for the woman's birthday (which is actually Wednesday). It's much smaller than the SF zoo, but whoever designed the Oakland zoo did a really good job. Apparently they're aware that concrete isn't the natural habitat for any animal. It's a 500+ acre site so all the big critters get some space to move around, and they don't house them where they display them so it looks like the pens and the display area get cleaned pretty well each day. The woman gave it her stamp of approval.

The thing about the zoo experience that I found so interesting was the people. There were of course 10000 kids there but oddly they weren't as annoying as kids in the rest of society. There wasn't a lot of yelling or fighting or what have you, and for the most part they didn't try to taunt the animals (the goats in the petting zoo being the notable exception). They could also read apparently (reading the signs seemed to be a popular pastime) and I saw tons of carrots and other healthy looking snacks being carried around. Perhaps the smart parents take their kids to the zoo whereas the entitled breeder crowd hangs out at the mall?

Also on Saturday we went to REI and to get the woman a robe. Not a lot of big fluffy robes available in the middle of summer but we did OK.

Sunday I fixed the leaking sink, sighted in the rifle for the class next weekend, cleaned the house, went for a ride and I think that's about it. Oh, we also went to the store (I dropped the woman off while I went to OSH to get the sink parts and she was done by the time I got back, saved a separate trip that way).

I really should think about getting a replacement camera too. With mine totally dead and the woman being protective of hers (especially now that I'm camera-less and trying to steal hers all the time) I don't get pics of much. I wonder if I can find a used version of mine cheap since I already have tons of batteries and memory for it? Hmm....

Another followup to the ear doctor today and more mods to the hearing aids. The standard programming model for the 'boost' is to try to make the wearer hear what a normal person hears. To me that's sorta dumb, I don't want things to be as loud as they are for everyone else so I had him cut down the max boost. Anything above 80db is ignored. That should get rid of tapping noises, people yelling, etc. I told him I just wanted to hear speech, all the other sound track of reality I can do without.

Stupid vista is pissing me off. Not because I have to use it but because it keeps dropping on/off the wireless randomly on the woman's laptop. I know she's not doing anything weird because she doesn't know how to do anything weird. She logs in and fires up exploder and reads email and writes her articles. Normally it's the mac that acts up but I expect that, I doubt access points are even tested with macs but I expect more from windows. Everyone runs windows, they should test that sort of thing. Maybe the worst part is the damn start-up sound. At least Toshiba put an external volume wheel on her laptop so I can go turn it down after the 10th reboot.

I'm working on my 'life plan', a basic spreadsheet showing now until I'm 55 and what happens at various savings/401k rates. I'm convinced that any gains the accounts make over time will be nullified by taxes and inflation, so I have to plan on 0% effective growth until I'm 55. It doesn't look hopeless as long as I don't buy anything crazy (another house or a 911 turbo) but the odds of that are low.

Hey, I got into the 'precision rifle I' class scheduled for two weeks from now. Hopefully they can teach me some of the basics I'm missing and this will give me a chance to get in to the cool long range shooting crowd.

My plan isn't working. I've been trying to get into the office a few minutes early so I can update the journal but as soon as I walk in I get jumped. That's the trouble having an office in the middle of everything, no way to sneak in. With Grant out I'm unofficial acting manager guy so I'm fielding a lot of questions and dealing with a lot of stuff that he would be doing. It's harder than usual since I don't know all the players yet and don't have the history on a lot of the long standing strange ass setups and problems.

Weekend recap is pretty easy. Saturday was the downtime event at work, lasted way too long, lots of problems and lots of screw ups. At least I'm paid by the hour. Sunday was a long ass game over at Jerry's. 10 hours almost. Crazy. Lots of fun though, the group was pretty up-beat and we didn't have any whiners. Lots of near death action though, kept us on our toes. I've taken myself off the roster for tonight and for the 2 events over the weekend. Gaming is fun, but too much is too much.

We were going up to the city on Friday night to hit one of the restaurants that one of the top chef competitors works at, but we couldn't get a reservation until 8:45pm and that's too late for us old folk. We'll reschedule for the 8th or something, Ellen has some family events that are taking up a few weekends.

Went to the ear doctor and he retested my hearing after 4 years. I now have 'severe' hearing loss. Sigh.

In light of that depressing news, not much else is interesting this week. Plus I'm on call so I'm not sleeping so much and feeling fat. When did I become a woman?

I guess getting the BSG episodes from Dennis to play with the captioning is a plus. Needing the captioning on the other hand....

Friday the guys from NVDA were at the executive briefing center here at Apple, probably getting the hard sell about iphones or some such now that they do exchange stuff. I chatted with them for a bit, got my usual feelings of PTSD/depression/whatever when I think about what I left behind, etc. Not as strong as usual because Decker was there and just being the room with that guy pissed me off and made me remember exactly why I left. Ha! Some mental justification.

Saturday was a game day which I went to just to get enough XP to get my character to 9th level for the game next Sunday. I stayed to play 1 more game after I was 9th and it nearly got me killed. That sucked. I did spend some more time reading over 4th edition stuff, and it is a lot easier to play once you get the hang of it. People at the game day did say that it's lost at lot of that "D&D" feel and while it's a fun game, it's not D&D. I think that sums up the grumbling very nicely. If you're a traditionalist it's crappy, if you just want to have fun it's good. I'm hoping I can fall on the second half of that spectrum.

Also should mention that Saturday AM I got up early to go to the archery range with Seth but we found it closed for maintenance. Doh. Wasted getting up early on that.

Sunday was just a rest and goof off day for the woman and I (the race was Saturday and she got all her writing done while I was at the game). We went to starbucks, shopped at Costco for random stuff (where I found Mexican coke, yea!), watched some TV, read, etc. Basically just a nice relaxing day. I marinated some deer steaks and cooked one small one as an appetizer which worked out well. The other two I'll BBQ tonight after they've had 24 hours to soak. The woman admitted to liking the taste, but she couldn't get behind the idea that the meat came from something Seth shot. She had no problems eating the rack of lamb I BBQed for the main meal (served with corn and whole carrots also grilled). Costco has perfect sized lamb racks for 2 so we got 3 of them to replenish the freezer supply.

The game last night was actually boring. Huh. They tried to convince me to judge on Saturday at the big game day and I pointed out I hadn't taken the judge test or anything and they said it didn't matter and that they would have me run a low APL table. It's an investigative mod which are usually pretty bad anyway, and with low level people they're even harder since they don't have the skills to follow the plot line in the time allowed. If it was a low level combat mod I would have done it. High level combat mods are hard since you have to know all sorts of crazy rules and tactics for the bad guys, but at low levels it's usually a choice between a sword and a bow, not exactly hard to run.

Monday at the team meeting the boss lady announced my 'promotion' to 'technical team lead'. Same pay, same responsibilities but now I can sorta lean on people to get them to do stuff because I'm the lead. Some people said I shouldn't have the 'technical' part in there since I'm not the top technical guy and I agree, but I didn't make up the title.

Oh happy day, we survived another Vegas trip. Photos are here. We managed to go to both of Tom Colicchio's restaurants, 'wichcraft and craftsteak (details here) as well as Bouchon which was the woman's favorite until we went to craftsteak. I wasn't interested in going to a steak joint, especially in Vegas where the trend is for $200+ cuts of funky Japanese beef, but it was the only place I could get a bit of steak and some scallops. We ended up going with their cheap tasting menu which was incredible. Had we been wanting to stand out as yokels even more we would have taken pictures of the food but as it is we just snagged one of the menus. :)

The quail and the corn were the best parts of the meal, and oddly enough the steak was the worst. If the rest of the menu wasn't so awesome we would have said something about the 'outback' quality steak but the waiter was pretty cool and let us try some of the wine pairings free so we let it slide. The woman also ordered some sort of fried zucchini as another first course so we had way too much food. Desert was some sort of blueberry tart, a chocolate filled chocolate almond cake and 4 types of home made ice cream and gelatto as well as fresh raspberries and pineapple. We ended up taking some of the chicken and steak with us figuring to give it to one of the homeless guys we had seen on the bridges but the cops had hauled them all of by the time we got back outside.

Oh, and speaking of the cops they were cracking down on the illegal water vendors on the street. It was 110+ and even if it's a dry heat that's still crazy ass hot. There were people with coolers selling iced bottled water for $1 and everywhere they showed up a crowd formed trying to buy. The cops would see the crowd and come to ticket them (and take the water). That seems kinda shitty, but I guess they can't have those water guys competing with the casinos and their $5 water...

We also saw two shows. First up was "Spamalot" (based on Monty Python's Holy Grail movie) which we both liked. The woman had never seen the movie but it didn't seem to matter. The show is closing in a few weeks so we were lucky with the timing. She got a 'bunny with big nasty teeth' plush toy and was carrying it around in her purse the whole trip. Freak. The second show was "Zumanity", the 'erotic' cirque de soleil show. It was entertaining as well but in a totally different way. I was hoping for more acrobats, but there was more dance and quasi-erotic stuff. The folk from Arkansas behind us had some issues with the guys kissing on stage, but otherwise they kept their redneck comments to a minimum.

We tried to rent a scooter and zip around, but it didn't work out so well. We got the scooter easily enough but the little 50cc scooter couldn't go over 30mph with the two of us on there and was only going 10mph as we climbed the ramp up and over I15 to get to the Palms (to go get our comp passes for the clubs). The woman was getting pretty freaked out so after we got the passes we just took it back and I ate the cost of the rest of the 4 hour rental. Oh well. I saved a lot not being able to rent the Lotus or the Cayman, both were out for the weekend.

We combined our club nights and went to the Playboy club, Moon and the ghost bar all in one night. The passes we got worked at all of them so we figured we should see what each had to offer. The Playboy club is a lounge, the ghost bar is a bar and Moon is a dance club and they're each very different. I like the Playboy lounge the best, mostly because it was quiet and comfy. The other two were noisy with lots of hard surfaces to bounce sound around and crazy loud music. The clubs both had open patios though so I managed to get some good shots of the strip from the side. There were a few hotties at each club, but most of them were employees. The patrons looked to be 75% heifers from the flyover states (except at Playboy). Shouldn't have expected anything else but I did, I guess all the time with Lydia must have given me a different idea of what clubs should be like.

Glad to be home with a day off still. I found a 20gb drive in the spares pile so I can rebuild the laptop (ooh... what fun) and maybe get some range time in.

Had a review today with my Taos pimp. She agreed that me taking a permanent management job if I was offered it was the best move for me. Even though I don't like working here it's still a big name and getting a management slot at a big company can open doors for me later. Yep. I figure if I can tough it out a year or two I can try to move to a different group that's not so annoying.

We're headed to Vegas tomorrow morning, I still have to figure out the last of my stuff to pack. It's kinda cold here again, back in the 60s. Moving into 100 degree temps is going to be a shock.

I really miss having my remote laptop connection. I can't leave browsers and whatnot running at work like I can on my home box. I gotta come up with something.