It's the woman's 42nd birthday today. She's old! All of her facetube friends are reminding her of that too.

I can't believe I've filled up the 250gb SSD on my macbook. I realise I'm using it as a "server" now hosing my VMs and all that but I think it's all the bulk storage I've moved there that's killing it. Yep, a quick du shows that the crap I copied off the main server before shutting it down to pack is where it's all gone. Larger SSDs are spendy but a 500gb USB disk is like $50 on amazon and a 1TB is only $75 so I probably should just get one of those and toss it on there externally. The bulk stuff doesn't need speed anyway and when I get my main server back up I can just reuse this drive as a backup disk at work. Right now I have 2x 250gb disks under my desk and it's a mess of cables. They're old 3.5" drives so they need power bricks too.

Yesterday at work there was a "Fiat Drive Event" where they had some of the 500e electric cars in the lot and if you test drove one they gave you a free box lunch (from our cafeteria). I've wanted to check out a Fiat anyway, especially since mom declared that she wants one for some reason, so it was fortuitous they had them there. Plus, free lunch.

The line wasn't that long because I was early and a quick trip around the block showed the car to be much more fun that the Leaf I drove before. In all a good use of my time as far as entertainment goes and that free sandwich! :)

Looks like we're switching insurance companies too. I just got quotes for State Farm since I've had them since I was 16 and the woman got quotes from Nationwide because her dad used to work there and they're a NASCAR sponsor. Oy. After much going around in circles it turns out Nationwide is actually cheaper and gives us slightly more coverage for the money. I figured that "loyalty" would get me a better price but as it turns out that's not the case. They've covering my bike well also and it's cheaper that Geico which is surprising. I went away from SF because their bike coverage sucks, but it looks like back in NC all insurance companies like bikes. Maybe because it's not a year-round riding season so they know you're paying for the bike to sit a majority of the time?

Last night I blasted through a few of the last episodes of Dollhouse that were stuck on the DVR from the weekend. Those last few episodes? Whoa. I forgot how off-the-rails that show went at the end. Joss knew it was cancelled and wanted it to end well, but holy crap did it take a left turn. We didn't see the finale but the second-to-last was enough to be a major WTF. Not sure how I forgot that.

Sorting through the safe it dawned on me how to move all my antennas. Rifle cases. They're long and skinny and have some structure to them so the antennas can't be bent into strange shapes. I just need to make sure they're labeled so they don't think their guns and try to steal them.

The safe clean-out was interesting in that all of those 1999 30-round mags that are irreplaceable artefacts in CA are just low-quality mags in NC that I wouldn't ever want to use. I'll be replacing them with modern p-mags as soon as I arrive; so fast from treasure to trash.

At this point the garage is 95% packed, everything dad is going to take is boxed up and everything I'm keeping is boxed up with the exception of my tools which I may need to take some furniture apart and the painting supplies. There are several boxes which need to go with me to the RV (go-bag for the car, golf clubs, etc) which I have to ensure don't get mixed in with the stuff the movers take. I should be able to put that stuff in the RV before they get here though.

I updated my resume on Sunday night and got it to two people in RTP that wanted to give it to their respective bosses. One is in sales for an SE role, the other is in the "customer proof of concept" labs which would be a hands-on building demos sort of job. Could be very interesting and I would learn all sorts of crapola I have no ideas about now (SAP, exchange, VDI). It would be cool to know more about technology in dept as part of my actual job.

The woman is in a training class all day so today I've manged to hit the driving range, file my expense report, do about 3 hours of stupid on-line training (I've already done the live demos and all the 'hard' parts of the certification but hadn't sat through the 3 hours of marketing crapola you're supposed to do first before you go after the technology) and watch several episodes of Dollhouse which is playing on the "Joss Weekend" on the science channel. Amazing how you can do training and watch TV at the exact same time! As long as you get the questions right at the end of the sections they don't seem to know if you were watching the big screen or the little screen. :)

Coming into the office today made me realise how detached I am from the bike. In the old days if I had an errand to do like run to the office I would just hop on the bike and go. Today I was half way here when it dawned on me there was zero reason to take the 4runner like I did. Oops.

Done at the office now, headed home to pack up some garage stuff.

So the demo went well, they seemed to like it although it took 1.5 hours instead of the 0.5 it takes if I just go through it. Obviously there were a ton of interruptions and questions and a lot of discussion but that's' way better than them just sitting there bored and letting me go through the motions.

More importantly we got to go to Phantom Canyon! I remember saying I would never be back, but 14 years later, I'm back. I didn't recognise anything downtown COS, or anything in COS at all really. It's very built up and looks a lot like California in many ways. Doesn't even feel like I'm travelling from a roadway/traffic perspective.

Some shots from 1998 and today. Back then Eric has some shot-shit camera that did 1024x768 and cost real money. Now we have 3264x2448 on our phones, which also weren't all that in '98.

Yea, 5:22am and I'm at SJC. Trying to minimise travel time so Kathleen isn't away from her family an extra day is starting to suck. I like it when I fly by myself so I don't have to worry about taking my time and not being up at all hours all the time. Her husband is off for the summer, why can't he deal with the kids more? Anyway, at least I still have my platinum status for a while longer and got a free bump to 1st class today. Normally I don't care as much but today the security line was hellish, so being able to just walk around it and go into the rich people line that had all of 3 people in it was nice.

We got a ton of paperwork back on the new house (well report, pond report, insurance quotes, updated closing date doc) but not the one we really want, namely the one where the sellers agree to fix the stuff found wrong in the primary inspection. They've had the report and counter for 5 days now, their realtor says they're getting quotes on things which makes sense, but it's still annoying I had to actually call to get that info. I guess they think going silent for a week in the middle of a deal is OK? Things are slower back there.

Better stop goofing off and start working on resetting my simulators for the demo in a few hours.

Moving the site today, it's all synced over and tested and now I'm just waiting for the DNS to propagate. Now that I'm using a domain I own rather than the DDNS name as the address I shouldn't have to change it in the future as I move things around.

As a strange backup procedure I'm actually still editing all the data on my own pi board which gets backed up regularly and then after each edit I run a quick rsync to move any changed content to the remote site (ie Kenny's house). This way I can run my backups local as well as do low-latency uploads and editing while I'm sitting here and then the sync can take time while I'm not paying attention. Doesn't sound like it would be necessary in this day and age, but what about when I'm at the trailer park or wherever and don't have fast access? Perhaps unnecessary but it's only taken me 5 minutes to setup and test so it's worth it.

Web site should be moving soon. Kenny setup his unused pi board with a drive and tossed it in a box and assigned a static IP so I'm in the process of copying all 22gb of crap over to it. His connection is way faster than mine so I imagine people who read this will actually enjoy faster image downloads.

Packing junk in the garage and going through old books and stuff I found an Nvidia expense report, complete with receipts. It was from one of the Bangalore and Taiwan combo trips and it does show that I was in Bangkok, for 3 hours anyway. I knew I was in a few extra countries, this trip didn't have the layover in Japan on the way home, but now I can officially I've been to Thailand. Sorta like I've been in Amsterdam, for 2 hours.

More moving progress, we picked up a bunch of speciality boxes (picture packers, wardrobe boxes, long boxes for my golf bag, etc) and I spent a good number of hours knocking out more packing. It's amazing how much crap we have. I'm also amazed how much brass I have. Bags of brass from Corvallis even. Guess it doesn't go bad, just not sure how some of it is going to clean up.

Our realtor here was freaking out texting me about a noisy fan in the bathroom. It didn't make any strange noises during the inspection but it squeaked during the appraisal so she was super worried. WTF, it's a bathroom fan, what's the big deal if it's noisy 5% of the time? She wanted us to have it replaced which is funking nuts. I'm not taking time off so her dude could come swap it out during the week, so I got up there and cleaned it out and used some of the teflon lube on the bushings and it's fine now. Crisis averted. I'm going to be pissed if somehow the buyers are trying to back out or something and looking for excuses.

Last night we went up to San Mateo to visit with Rick and Felice and see their new kid. Rick is a crazy wine guy and has a 5000 bottle cellar (full!) built in his garage. It's like a little temperature controlled wood panelled room inside the garage, and it's really cool. He opened up a few bottles so I could taste them and we actually did the tasting inside the cellar (it's pretty big) then went back into the house. Sometimes rich people can have cool things.

What was even more amazing were their kids, or at least the older one as the younger one is like 2 months old and didn't do anything. The older one is 3.5 years old and can walk around and play basketball and talk some and watch videos and entertain himself for hours on end. We were there for 4-5 hours and and he basically did his own thing most the time and only interrupted when it was time for his dinner. The nephews really are stupid, they can't do anything for more than 5 seconds without hitting each other, throwing stuff or breaking things. I guess when your dad works at Genentech and your mom is a shrink you're bound to not be stupid and be raised right.

Update on the 5ghz wireless. So far, haven't noticed anything on the mac airs or the phone, but the nexus 7 works 50% of the time from upstairs which beats the 25% or so at best that I was getting off the other wireless router.

Washed the truck today too, noticed another dent (bastards!) and a section where the clear coat is starting to peel. I guess 14 years of hard life is starting to show itself. Can't wait to get it into a garage every night!

Box of goodies showed up from amazon last night and I put the case on the current pi board, cloned the CF card so I could bring up the 2nd board, and swapped out the 1A power supply for a 4A supply with 4 outputs so I can run multiple boards from 1 supply. Woo. Toys.

We got the inspection reports on the Apex property yesterday and went through the 50 or so pages of them (lots of pictures in there). Overall the property is in pretty good shape other than the deck which we kinda knew about. We're signing the papers today which asks the sellers to fix all the things that need fixing and we'll see what they counter with. In CA the answer would be "go screw yourself" but in NC the realtor says that it's typical that the seller takes care of items known to have problems. Very different!

I ordered up some heat syncs to go on the new pi board so I could try overclocking the snot out of it but since I was already buying I got a second set to go on the main system as well. Why not let it run a little cooler too? I also ordered a case for it finally, having it sitting on a piece of cardboard seems just a little ghetto and if I end up putting this in the woman's office to use her office (fast) Internet I don't want it so vulnerable.

Saturday I picked up a u-haul trailer and loaded up the cabinets and other misc stuff and took it up to my parents. It doesn't look like it but there is over 1000 pounds of ammo snuck into those cabinets after they were down as well as under the row of flowers in the back. I ended up loading that stuff in the back as I was a little too weight-forward on the rest of the load and you want 60% of the weight over the front but I was clearly over that.

The trailer says it weighs 1750, so with the 1000 of ammo and the cabinets at 200 each plus the plants inside the front cabinets, the two little trees and their dirt, etc we're looking at 3000 pounds of crap being pulled by the 4runner. It's rated for 4000, but at some points I was going 25 mph so I'm not sure how you could pull even close to that rating. On the 10th of next month I'm going to have to move the safe with this thing, but fortunately the trailer with the ramp is much smaller so hopefully it won't be as heavy. Payload should be less too since it will just be the safe and the electric powered dolly I'm renting to move it around with.

I think this other 4runner is a 2000 which sits 1/2" lower from the factory than my '99 but still you can see there is a huge height difference between the bumpers of mine with the new springs and his with the originals (probably).

The moving estimator dude for Mayflower came by this morning and estimated we had 9-9500 pounds of crap that needed to be moved. Once we get his quote we can compare it to the one the woman got on Wednesday and then pick and book the move. Mayflower gives you an exact day for the move, not a 3 day window when they'll be there. I kinda like that better but not if it costs 50% more. She'll be done with work so it won't really have to be too precise as long as we're out of there by the 6th of September.

The good news of the morning is that my paper was accepted by the paper picking committee for Insight. Looks like I'll be presenting to 100s of people at the conference in October in Vegas. The best news? Presenters get rooms to themselves! No roommates!

Sitting in the room for the sales all-hands meeting, right across from all the new bigwigs. Guess I need to look like I'm alert and paying attention, hard this early in the morning after being on calls at 7am instead of being at the gym.

The new springs are installed in the 4runner and it does look to sit a little higher in the back. Probably should have measured it before/after but it doesn't really matter how high it is normally, it's how it does under loading. The real test will be Saturday.

Formerly hot chick who's now not hot is sitting next to me in the meeting now. Good thing I keep the font on the terminal windows too small to read. :)

Kenny's impulse purchase of an airport and running 5GHz got me to thinking. I have a 5GHz capable radio in the time capsule that's just turned off so why not try it and see if it makes any difference? So far, other than seeing that I'm on 5GHz (didn't know about the option-click on the wireless icon to see more info) there isn't any difference. maybe when everyone around here gets home and gets on 2.4GHz I'll see, well nothing I guess since I'm not on there. Meh, it was free. I will swap the nexus 7 over to the airport wireless even though it can't do 5, the placement of the radio may help with reception upstairs.

Yet another letdown today. The last super hot chick in the office (who's been out for a few weeks) has returned and is clearly knocked up. Sigh. Now there is nothing to look at.

Dad came by last night and swapped vehicles so he can take my 4runner to the shop today to get the rear springs replaced. Once that is done I'll be able to tow a trailer without the butt sagging to the ground. I've got a trailer reserved for Saturday and we'll be hauling the garage cabinets and work bench up to the parents house. Mom is looking forward to all the extra storage for her gourds and craft items and dad is looking forward to not having piles of junk in the garage without a place to put it.

I've found a 16gb nexus 4 for $300 on CL, new in box somehow. Oy! I gotta find a hobby other than looking at crap on CL.

Getting even more serious!

The buyers of our place came by on Sunday evening to check a few things out. The guy is FOB from India and doesn't understand things like fire places, furnace filers, air conditioning, alarms, garage door openers, water heaters, painting, BBQs, etc. Basically this guy was like "my dad does all that back in India". Guess what? You're not in India dude, better man up and learn some actual life skills or get some of daddy's money to hire a handyman. His wife seemed brighter, and it turns out she works in engineering at Netapp. She was a few years off the boat and could understand how the thermostat worked.

Just caught the appraiser measuring the garage at home. Hopefully this is the last guy that needs to come through our home and we can go back to using the alarm and not being so staged all the time.

The dude looks like he's being attacked by a giant cat5 cable! Look out! (guess I should go move that out of the way).

I keep finding myself looking at more electronic junk I don't really have a use for, but find interesting. For example, I still keep circling back to the Nexus 4, although I would be afraid to swap out my iphone even for a little due to the funky mail apps on the nexus. So what would I use it for, a tiny reader tablet? I don't play many games so it's not useful for that, and it's too small to replace the 7 as my bedside web browser/reader... so what would I use it for? Camera? Google maps works very well on the iphone so... yea. Basically I can't figure out why I would want one, I just do. Lame.

The other thing I keep circling back to would be a mac mini (there are a few on CL) to use as my VM server. Why exactly I can't figure out. Why get a mac and then run windows on it in a VM? That's what I'm doing now with the old MBP and it works just fine, so why change it?

The only idea I have that makes any sense at all is to get another couple of pi boards to setup a little cluster. I could run grid engine on them, overclock the compute nodes and use them to generate thumbnails faster. Fun, but why? I think it's just the interesting factor more than anything, and another pi board and a power supply wouldn't break my guilt-of-spending threshold I don't think.

I thought I was getting first class being in seat 1A, but it turns out that's just the bulkhead in a really tiny plane. I was by myself next to the galley so I had no overhead space, no under seat space and had to stare at the wall the whole flight. Oh well, I got off first! Woo. You know you're close when this is the view from your seat:

Had another key made for the house since my parents had mine. With me in control of the "key in a minute" machine I paid the extra $1 to get a fun key:

Panoramic shot of the chapel at Duke this morning. Went for a walk in the campus gardens. Duke has some crazy ass money, makes the CA schools look like crap.

On the 4th we went to Tony's farm, worked in the garden, mowed about 10 acres of lawn and.... uh oh, they just called our names at the gate. Wonder what's up?

One of the woman's favourite houses (who refused to let us see it because they just accepted a contract) came back on the market today. Ah, karma. 30 minutes of their time to let us walk around might have got them a backup offer, but now they're back on the open market. We let people tour our place after we were in contract, backups on these things are good. Guess they know that now.

Went for a run today, lasted 30 minutes of jogging/walking before the humidity took me down. That's not too bad considering I probably can't do that for more than 30 minutes at home anyway at this point since I've stopped my daily runs.

Fixed my thumbnail generator, the option to force thumbnail rebuilds didn't actually work. I guess I've never used that, I typically just blow away all the thumbnails and rebuild but now that the pi board has to do all the work and it's slow I'm less inclined to just blow things away and rebuild them. Not a big deal when it takes 10 seconds, major deal when it takes 10 minutes (or more!).

The email notice for the image capture is working great still, I got alerts when dad came by to take the trash out and our neighbour came by to bring it back in.

The woman found this on Facebook, I think it needs no explanation.

The woman and her aunt and friend are gone for a while to go look at some horse farm or something. Nice to have the place to myself even if it is just to get some work done.

I'm having trouble getting used to a smaller scale. Looking at hunt clubs there are some in NC but then I see stuff in Virginia and say "that's too far away" but when you actually map it it's only 2 hours away. CA is a big state and leaving takes serious work. Here you have to sorta know what's where before you judge.

Al Bundy!!! Oh, wait no, it's another sitcom. Cute chick, but otherwise the show is dumb. Looks really strange in HD too, not used to actually seeing anything in HD.