The holiday went off fairly well, or without any major meltdowns by me getting annoyed by the in-laws. Oh, they were annoying as usual but I just drank more. Yea for drugs to solve social problems!

Dinner was good enough up at my parents and the men folk went to the driving range during thanksgiving day to burn up some time. The woman and I went for a walk and after dinner the women folk went to the casino. Avoidance all around.

Friday we went wine tasting on the way back home (several of the Lodi wineries we had already been to before but new to the in-laws). Saturday I ran errands (game store, gun store, auto parts store with very little to show for anything since the game store and the gun store didn't have what I wanted naturally) and then we had lunch and the in-laws left. Whew. One day of rest and cleaning the house before the return to work.

No pictures were taken at all, very odd.

The in-laws have just landed. Oy. Going to be a rough holiday.

I wonder if I'm taking on too many activities. I've got golf lessons on Monday mornings, stabbin' class on Monday nights, gym class on Tuesday morning, the HAM net on Tuesday nights, gym class on Thursday morning, golf practice on Friday morning and now I'm thinking of trying table top gaming again on Friday nights in Cupertino (much smaller venue than the place I used to go in San Jose).

Don Don closed a few years ago now and was replaced by some Indian place. That placed closed and now this is in it's place. Yea, another stupid Indian place, just what we need.

I was told I was looking "pretty bad ass" at work the other day so I had Kathleen take a picture. Doesn't look all that impressive to me.

This week I went to Ft. Collins to visit a client and since I was by myself I stopped by to visit Phil. I think this was the first time I've seen him in person for at least 13 years, maybe 15 or more. His youngest kid is 17, I can't remember if he was born when Phil moved north? Anyway, it was good to catch up even if we did end up chatting until 2am. I then took a sorta strange route to the hotel using the Hertz GPS but it turned out OK and I managed to get to sleep by 3am.

The customer visit went OK and when I checked into my flight to go home I realized I was in seat 2A. Normally that means first class, did I get a freebie upgrade due to my Platinum status on United??? Nope, it turns out it's just a really tiny plane. 12 rows of 4 and the overbooked and wanted 9 volunteers to give up their seat. They started the reimbursement at $200 which wasn't worth it, but when they bumped it to $300 I was going to take it but some dude jumped up and ran to the counter to claim the last spot.

That credit would have come in handy as we're now trying to book a trip to North Carolina. We're going to check it out as a possible spot to move either before or after retirement. Without the big money of Apple tying me to this spot, or my job as a manager, the motivation to stay is less. Plus, now that I'm not riding the bike anymore the idea of lane splitting isn't as important either. Worth checking it out.

Today I went down to Laguna Seca to the range there with Don and got to shoot at their new 500 yard gongs. Luck was really with me today because we thought it was at 400 yards (although way up hill so the angle shortened the flight time) and I was using some unknown 308 that Seth gave me. So with bogus ranging and unknown ammo I dialed 2.6 mills into the gun and fired, first shot on the 16" gong was a solid center hit. Don to me it was too easy and I should hit the 5" gone, so I switched to that one and ding, a hit with the first round on that one too. I should have just called it a day. :) My 200 yard groups on paper were pretty weak, I need some more work on that but it's been a while since I've put serious time into paper punching.

What doesn't make sense to me is that I had Don dial my 400 yard dope onto his rifle (8.5 MOA as he's not using mills) and it was damn close, off by about .25 MOA. For that data to work the angle to the target would need to be 35 degrees (500 * COS(35)) = 405. It was way up there on the hill, I had to elevate the bi-pod and everything, but 35 degrees? Next time I'll bring all my long range junk and take a reading. I didn't think to take a picture but I found one on the net. 35 degrees? I dunno...

Dinner turned out well on Saturday; elk enchiladas were a hit. Don stopped by to drop off some PC hardware and he stayed for dinner as well as Scott and Lina. At first we didn't think Don liked the enchiladas but then he had seconds so he either really was eating his food separately or he was starving.

The cert for the 2011 contest showed up. I did "win" the country and set a new record too! Damn easy when you're the only one on the island in your class and you're in the middle of the south pacific. :)

The windows VM went down hard today (or yesterday or sometime I wasn't paying attention) and it would not come back. I switched to the SATA based datastore and tried to boot the old copy and it wasn't having it either. The vm logs were full of crazy errors so even though I haven't changed anything software wise I figured it couldn't hurt to clean up some of the errors I was seeing because maybe some of the auto-updates jacked something up.

I installed VMware tools (which I thought was already there) and because I saw something about the guest trying to update the CPU firmware I updated the CPU firmware tools on the linux host. Now both those errors are gone and although the VM is working again, I still can't see the console anymore. It comes up the correct size but there are no graphics displayed and the log says something about illegal 3d graphics calls. Perhaps one of the latest windows 7 updates changed the drivers or mode? Something else to look into... later, now that I can RDP in again I've sorta backed off the tweaking.

So much for ignoring it, the vm crashed or something while I was briefly away from my desk. I may just have to give up on the windows VM idea at this point and go back to remotely using my radio system. Annoying but not the end of the world.

I've been in LAS all week at a work conference, learning some stuff but ultimately not enough to justify the week away. They had some hands on labs and certifications I wasn't able to sign up for, and that's what the big payoff of these events is. Next year I'll try to focus on that and sign up for those early rather than the breakout sessions which all tended to be too high level.

Didn't take many pictures, but there is the view out the hotel room window (which I had to share with a room mate, but fortunately he was out partying most nights so I could relax in the evenings) and the menu at the SE awards dinner. The steaks sorta sucked, but they did have to do 100 covers for the room so you can't expect it to be too good. This isn't Top Chef.

I've found two cool little monitor apps for the tablet, one that shows CPU/Memory and one that shows network activity. Just like menu-meters on the mac, now I can see what the tablet is doing too. It's surprising how it's always chattering on the network. That would worry me if this was a phone and I was paying for cell data and it's doing stupid update checks all the time. Maybe they're smarter if you're not on wifi?

I saw a SCSI disk error in the log right before the VM barfed, maybe it's reacting badly to the SSD data store in some way? I've moved back to the SATA based data store and we'll try that for a while. One interesting thing to note is that although I can't see the console, I can tell it's waiting for me to do something each time it books, like maybe a disk check? I can tell because it's memory/CPU usage are pretty low and when I click on the console and press return then it suddenly spikes up in memory/CPU and eventually boots up. Just waiting 20-30 minutes doesn't do it, you have to hit the console and press return. If I remember this weekend I'll try to get the console to come up on the console of the linux system, maybe it's some bad VNC interaction that's causing me not to see the 'physical' console?

Way, way too early for my flight to LAS. Everything worked in my favor this morning though, zero traffic, short security lines, short counter lines, etc. If I hadn't had to check a bag I probably could have gone standby on two earlier flights. Oh well.

My windows VM has been crashing pretty regularly over the last few months, it seems every time I connect it's rebooted itself. At first I thought it was just a bunch of patching activity as it's set to auto-install everything but now it's clearly just got issues. Might have to restore from a backup copy at some point if I can't get it alive again.

Golf. Yea. So Ed (my old boss at NVDA and now our customer at Marvell) invited me to go golfing on Saturday with Rod (who's still at NVDA). I couldn't refuse since I've been trying to work my way into being social with him so I told my boss I needed to take some time on Friday to go to the driving range and see if I could still golf. He was fine with that, as well as me paying for everything on Saturday. I'm golfing, at work. Whatever.

The driving range wasn't as bad as I thought and in fact my playing wasn't as bad as I thought. OK my score was horrible but I almost par'ed a few holes and in the grand scheme of things everyone seemed to sorta suck even though they've been playing continuously for the 8 (?) years I've not been playing.

My little orange tree is almost producing oranges. I doubt they'll be edible this year, but they'll make really nice garbage disposal cleaners.

My cube at work, just for the record:

And the new coffee mug I got for the office, which I'm sure no one will recognize:

Oh, and retail is a funny business. I need a coat now that my usual ski jacket isn't suitable for the office anymore so we went to Macy's yesterday to use a coupon they sent. I found a jacket I really liked but it was marked at $495. However, you use the coupon, and their in-store instant discount, pay with your Macy's card (which the woman has one of) and take back one kadam to honor the Hebrew god who's.. well anyway, it gets down to $219. That I can pay for a jacket. Lotta gyrations just to get down to a reasonable price. Would they sell more if they were just that price to start with? Clothes shopping is one of the only times when I can really see how it would be nice to be rich. Before I pulled the trigger on the coat at Macy's we walked around the mall a bit to check out other stores and there was a really, really nice coat at Hugo Boss for $800 and one at Norstroms, for $2500. I dunno about $2500 but you really could tell the quality differences and material differences between the one I got and the one at Hugo Boss. I'm sure most of it is just name but there is still some extra quality in there. I could look pretty good if I spent thousands on clothes all the time. :)

At at a customer site, part of a huge meeting I have nothing to contribute to. Very odd. At least my personal hot spot it working today, wasn't yesterday when I was at a site and actually had need of it.