That went super smooth. We picked up the truck last night and today drove up early to SF, loaded the crap with the help of her friends and brought it all back home. No one hurt, nothing broken. Amazing!

SF still smells like a toilet, and the zombie apocalypse has already struck downtown. In the 30 minutes I was sitting there with the truck I got to witness the endless stream of mindless creatures that inhabit the city wandering by being crazy. Scary.

The dish stuff stopped working as of today. Well sorta stopped. The only channels we get now is the $4 "outdoor package" that I had so if the woman wants to watch anything but the old recorded shows on the DVR she's stuck with the outdoor channel, pursuit and whatever else is in that package that I didn't want. Probably wrestling 24x7 somewhere.

Also, I just ordered 10, 30 round pmags. Why? Because I can. Fuck you California!

Ah, sitting on the floor in a data center. Something very calming about that, even if it's not my datacenter. It's not even particularly big, just a little 30 cabinet setup in a random building at Ericsson, but still comforting.

Today was the last trip to the driving range at Spring Valley.

Watching the sales all-hands at the moment. It used to be a live video webcast thing but now it's all recorded in advanced and I noticed that most the people in the office aren't watching. I gotta say though the production value on this thing is super high. It looks as good as anything on TV. It's done in a parody of the daily show, or maybe Colbert but whatever, it looks just like it right down to the theme music and transitions.

Yesterday I went to a customer event at AT&T park up in SF. We had some good customers there so it was a reasonably entertaining time, and I got to meet famous sportsball people. I got dad an autograph, so he'll probably like that (and know who this guy was).

We got the paperwork for the Apex house and will go sign everything this afternoon. The woman is going to wire the money to them today as well so things can close on Friday when the papers are returned. Somewhat anti-climatic but a significant step.

Also yesterday I went to the doctor for my next follow-up. She said it's likely I'll have to be on the restricted diet forever if I want to keep being normal/not sick all the time. Wow, that sucks but it's better than the alternative. She's also going to schedule another test, this time to look for unwanted bacteria in my upper GI. They'll feed me some sort of sugar sludge (from the face she made I'm guessing it doesn't taste like a slurpee) and then for 3 hours they'll have me breathe into a bag at 15 minute intervals. Apparently if the bacteria are present they'll start processing (eating?) the sludge and giving off gas that they'll detect in my breath. If they're there, I have two choices in antibiotics to try to treat it. One has some potentially bad side effects, the other is newer and doesn't have those but it's covered by insurance. So, risk side effects or pay $400-600 per treatment for the good ones?

A photo the woman took of the rodent on his last day. So sad. :(

Yesterday we went to Jason's retirement party. 20 years of dorking around for the park police and now he gets his spiked pension for the rest of his life. Good gig if you can get it, retiring with no worries at 50. A rarity though, I got someone to take a picture with me in it if for no other reason than to prove I was there. What's interesting is other than being weak I blend in with a lot of the cops there. Tactical pants, vents or fleece jackets, knives, hats and/or no hair.

One advantage to being a cop "protecting the bridge from terrorists" is you get the opportunity to take some crazy pictures. Here is one they've got blown up and hung in the hallway.

Also, iPads mounted in the bathroom is a thing.

This is how you cook for a party, you use your contacts to get a chef and his crew to show up and take care of everything. Fancy.

How did it get to be Thursday already??? This week has been a blur. We've had all day meetings (Wednesday), the rodent was put down (yesterday) and I went to another of those Churchill events (Tuesday). Tomorrow I'm giving my home-made presentation to the IT guys, a bit of a test so they can see if I'm good at anything. Very scary.

We got the survey results for the new place which is a sorta legal requirement in NC. Fortunately the previous buyers still had theirs on record from 2009 so we didn't have to redo it just to see that nothing had moved. Hopefully those survey pins are easy to find, I intend to ensure they're there and well marked.

Wish there was something cool to write about, but really not much happened over the weekend. Went to birthday party I didn't want to go to (and the only food there was all a no-go on my diet so rather than starve I had some and paid the price the next day) and packed. The woman is finally freaking out about the packing and logistics of trying to take enough stuff with us to get the house running before the van gets there. It's not that much, but she's not used to thinking about doing without anything.

I did make 2 large batches of jerky with some "experimental" spices, and wash the cars but I don't know if that counts as cool. It was the last time I'll wash cars at the current house, maybe that's significant?

Troy and his woman have a chicken setup at their place in Aptos and they sent us a picture of their "little coop setup". Um, yea, I hope I can come up with something as simple as he did:

I tweaked the proxy setup on the pi board that's serving my site and made a quick tutorial for Kenny on how to use it so we can both get around restrictive work firewalls. I'm still trying to figure out how to setup my VM arrangement during my homeless period.

Crisis averted, somehow. While the woman and I were checking CL for shitty apartments dad somehow managed to get a spot in that RV park. Whew. No idea how he did it but it's done and that's what counts. The park has an interesting rule too, no RVs older than 5 years old. Guess they don't want junk in their park, but even a 5 year old RV can cost $100k+, but I guess they can't just say "no junk" and expect not to get sued. The park is almost 30 miles from work, so my gas bill is going to go way up but at least I have a nice place to stay without room mates.

My 1 year anniversary with Netapp was today. Interesting. Also, the house officially closed and we got our money deposited so the countdown has begun to extraction. Also also, we're renters now.

Mom's scans came out clean, she's cancer free at the moment. They said it will be back in 3 years or so, likely in the lungs next. That's not going to be fun at all.

With all that good news there had to be some bad news.... and it's that there is no where for me to park the RV. The space didn't open up and in fact there are 4 people still ahead of me in line for no spaces. They've also raised the rent to $950/month for those spaces when they open up. So, I'm going to have to come up with plan B. Or C. Or something. Is this the answer, I do not know: Plan R.

I found a bit of trickery that makes RDP work better with a left handed mouse. On my work mac I have a left handed configured mouse and when you use RDP to attach to my windows VM, it does the right thing. On my MBP and the woman's air that do not have mice the track pad sends the wrong click in the VM. There is no 'left hand' version of a track pad since there is no button so you can't swap anything. What I found was that if you briefly attach a USB mouse, swap the buttons around and then remove it the track pad continues to work correctly in all cases including in RDP. I find that interesting. On the VM console it doesn't work, even with the physical mouse there so I remapped the left button to be the right button in the VM control panel. Now all buttons are the right one and if you want alternate-click you have to press control when you click, or maybe it's option. In any way it works well enough for the little I use the actual console.

Kathleen kept saying I earned a gold star, but I hadn't seen it. Last night during craft time with her kids she made it. Now I can proudly display my awesomeness in my cube.

Might hear something back today around Micheal getting transferred to Denver and his RTP slot opening up. The account rep requested to connect on linked in, so that's something. Maybe he's checking me out (although he's got my resume too).

Now that we have an E100 account on our list I get to do all sorts of stupid ass extra paperwork and go to extra bonus meetings. That's all the downside, the upside is that I get to go to an extra 8am session at Insight on Monday morning. Why would an extra early-morning pre-conference session be a good thing? It's good because I get to fly in Sunday instead of Monday, which means I have all Sunday afternoon with nothing scheduled meaning I can wander over to Gold and Silver Pawn! Woo!

Word on Michael is that there is no word today. At least they're keeping us updated.

Buyers of the Milpitas place are signing paperwork today as I type and the money will be wired from escrow to us by tomorrow. Looks like it's happening...

Thursday night there was a speaking event at the Four Seasons and Netapp bought enough tickets to fill two tables... since the CFO of EMC was the guest speaker. The guy was actually very interesting to listen to, and it's fun seeing the storage industry from another point of view. I think everything went pretty well until they asked a few stupid political questions around immigration and taxes. Listening to the boring PC responses was a waste of 10 minutes and really detracted from the event in my opinion.

Yesterday using a powered dolly, a winch, 2 crowbars "borrowed" from the SAFE cache and a bunch of ratchet straps we got my green safe moved up to my parents. I bribed Lane (the neighbour) into helping by giving him the old grey safe. He's happy, I'm happy and no one was hurt. Yea for tools and leverage! Feels very, very strange not having all my guns in the house anywhere. All that's left is what's in the wall safe and what I'm going to keep in the RV (that being one slightly pimped $200 mossberg 12 gauge). Guess when the going gets tough, the tough get a shotgun.

Friday we opened new checking/savings accounts at Wells Fargo since Chase doesn't have any branches by the new house. I'm spending this morning moving my direct deposit around, linking things to etrade, moving magazine subscriptions the woman didn't move, etc. She's off at the barn so I have most the day to myself to fiddle around, probably end up doing laundry and whatnot. First though, I think a slurpee is in order. :)

Whoa, I was freaked out then pissed for a little while today. I've moved my old MBP into a place I can actually use the console of it and was working away when Excel stopped responding. For a second I thought I lost the master document I had been working on, but then I found that anything I touched with it would just hang, even no document at all. Going through the MSFT debug stuff is worthless, they keep getting the mac and PC version confused in their documents, and "restarting with extensions off" hasn't been in the mac vocabulary for a long time now. Deleting all the .plist files and stuff didn't help, and since I can't boot into safe mode by pressing F8 before the windows screen comes up like the useless document told me to do I wasn't sure where to go next. I next thought it might be the SSD dying which would suck. After rebooting a few times (per the KB article) I happened to notice something about an NFS mount not responding. NFS mount? WTF? So apparently there was a legacy NFS mount hanging around somewhere in the bowels of the MBP's config and absolutely everything had been ignoring it for months/years... except today excel decided it was time to hang on that mount every time it tried to do anything. Using the NFS control panel I installed forever ago I ripped that mount out and now life is good again for excel. Whew.

In between laundry and cleaning I took a short ride up to the barn to the woman's going away party. Same old people talking about horses. Boring, but the ride was really nice. It's been a while and I had forgotten how fun riding is.

These guys showed up to the party after I left:

Last night we went out for a team dinner and they picked a place called "Red Hot Chilli Pepper". As you can imagine the food wasn't that good but it was stupidly hot. I declined to sign the waver or eat most of what was served. The fried rice wasn't bad and I had some corn soup which obviously wasn't anything like that at Station 1 but still better than most of the other food served.

I'm having lunch with Troy today and we're going to the good Dim Sum place so that makes up for the crap last night.

We signed the closing docs on the Milpitas place today, and after the slight delay on the lender docs due to our shitty HOA causing problems we should actually close by the 12th now at the latest. Fortunately we don't have to sign anything else and we've given them our new NC bank account number so they can wire the money direct. It's very close, but not quite there yet. Would have been nice to actually have it close on time today so we could cross that item off the list.

The woman is going nuts moving everything she can think of to the new address. Magazines, memberships, etc. I wonder how long before stuff starts showing up?

The safe for the new house is on order, should arrive slightly after we do:

First day wearing my new fancy socks. It's amazing what a difference nice socks/underwear/undershirts make. I hope I don't start getting to expect nice stuff like this.

Some pictures from the woman of her ferry ride to SF today. She's been going to the Ferry Building for 15 years now, but I think this is the first time she's gotten on a boat. (the ferry building is full of fancy food shops, stores and restaurants ya see).

Classy.

Busy weekend. Saturday was packing, sorting and organising as well as running around picking up random crap for next weekend (safe moving tools). Saturday night we went to Station 1 with Loki and Anna for a goodbye dinner. Very disappointing really. The food was fine, and we brought our own wine so we came out way ahead on that, but they moved away from a tasting menu only to pure À la carte. Lame-o. Half the fun of that place was sorta the take-what-you-get ordering and all the amuse bouches and little random things they brought out. Just order and serve is fine, but not what we were expecting for the evening. I didn't even take pictures of the menu or dishes. Perhaps my heart just wasn't in it (although the chilled corn and goat cheese soup was pretty awesome).

Today we went back to the surplus store to pickup a duffel bag I saw yesterday that will come in handy for moving rifles, and to Macy's to try to find me a belt, and to the North Face store so the woman could exchange the rain jacket my parents got her for her birthday. I couldn't find a belt I liked in the size I needed, but she found the right size jacket. 30 minutes on Amazon and I turned up a belt I liked so I guess that worked out OK.

The last of the ammo (I think) loaded up into the cans I bought and painted yesterday. I also found 1000 rounds of 9mm in that little skinny can, had it tucked back behind some other crap in the safe. It says $89 on the top of it. Damn, when was 9mm $89 per thousand???

The woman's new cell phone... yea, she upgraded to an iPhone! I suspect they'll come out with a 5S or something in the next week. :) They were able to give her a 919 number so now she's got her NC business number and can get cards and letter head and stuff printed up as she's already got the office leased.

Two new strange things in the house to pack up. First, a tiny urn of Heather's ashes that Paul wants spread in the pasture at the new place. Second, dad had a larger version of our "brand" made to hang on the new barn. I'm sensing some sort of redneck theme in the making.

Scary...

I know lots of people who have done presentations, but this will be my first in front of a large crowd. Based on the sign-ups in the next few weeks I'll know if I'm in a room of 25 or 250.

The woman opened her present last night and was very happy: