Humidity report, day 1. At 8:55am local time I went for a run. 81F and 84% humidity. Yea, it's nasty. Sorta like the cook islands only without the salty spray as well so I think I can grow to live with it.

For the run I had to break in some new shoes as well. I forgot to bring mine (which were long overdue for replacement anyway) so we stopped by DSW last night and I picked up a new pair. Possibly the last pair of running shoes that aren't neon coloured in the whole world. 80s fashion is coming back, I've seen more 20-somethings in neon than ever before. If we get off the shoulder tunics and tights on chicks again (and mini skirts) though I could live with that, minus the big hair.

The house we're staying in is nice enough (probably go for $700k at home) but it's got way too god damn much furniture in it. You can't turn around without banging your shins on some little nick knack stand or whatever. In the bathroom if you want to put a bath mat down you have to move a little table out of the way (covered in shells and unusable soaps) and then the mat touches the table, wall, tub and toilet at the same time. It's small too. The woman points out it's free so I should shut up, and she's right. :) Still, it's amazing how spoiled we are at having a clutter free and modern house (and by modern I mean no tacky 1700s style southern clutter).

Made it to NC, it's 84F and 84% humidity and that's, uh, OK I guess.

The house sale, which seemed so certain just a few days ago, continues to circle the drain. The offers were mostly scams and we're scrambling to get even 1 solid real offer. Hopefully we'll know more tomorrow but today's open house was lame and didn't turn up anything.

On a positive note, the outdoor pet babies are growing up and the woman is happy about that.

Trying to take arty shots of the bridge as we drove back from Santa Rosa. Eh.

We got 5 offers on the townhouse, 3 are good and 2 are weak (FHA with tons of contingencies) but they're all over asking price. We're countering with terms and rent-back, not asking for more money. The flexibility will be more important than trying to screw them out of a few more thousand (I think). We should know by Saturday who's taking the counters.

Saw this in the parking lot at work today and it made me laugh. Had to actually pause the call I was on to take a picture:

Open house is still going on today, 10am-1pm and we've had more people in the garage today than all of yesterday. The realtor said that two groups came through twice yesterday so that's a good sign in my mind. If you weren't thinking about it, why come back? Just to verify it wasn't good? Seems unlikely, but in this market where there are exactly 4 townhouses to choose from in Milpitas in the price range you could take your time and see every one of them several times before choosing.

Sunday was the graduation party up in Alameda and instead of the usual BBQ they brought in a dude to make mexican food out of a van. Everything was awesome, although I couldn't enjoy the 3 types of salsa they had, nor the funky bean dip. Stupid doctor and her diet. More amazing than the food though I thought were the kids. Yea, they dress funny and talk funny and all that but in general they seemed like they weren't stupid and were motivated to do something with their lives. Of course these are all middle class kids from Alameda so not exactly gang bangers from Oaktown, but still, for some reason I keep hearing the next generation is so lazy. Maybe, but at least they talk of having a future for themselves beyond being rock stars or baby mommas.

Skittles have no real fruit in them, right? I should be OK with the "no citrus" portion of the diet with these.

Camera caught a few people in the garage yesterday, most just looked around or looked at the washer/dryer area. The only one who seemed to notice the camera was wearing a google t-shirt. Ironic.

The first day of the open house is today, I'm pretty nervous about all these 3rd worlders and their spawn coming into our home screwing things up. Kristen said it was pretty much a daycare center in the other open house with kids running around playing in closets and stuff. Hopefully our realtor keeps things in check better since we've explicitly told her we do not want that happening.

I moved the hammiecam into the garage and set it up to capture images with the motion detection setup again (storing them to the pi of course that I setup with ftp and smb this morning). I want to see who's going in the garage as it's the most vulnerable part of the house now.

At the driving range you sometimes find real golf balls mixed in with the range balls. If they're crummy I just hit them back out, if they're interesting I sometimes keep them. Today I found this one, which if it was a #1 or #7 would be even more interesting, but I've never even seen the brand in real life so it was good enough to swipe. (It's the ball Goldfinger played, for those of you who don't remember old movies).

We now know the max speed of the macbook air fans, 6500 rpm. I know this because it was running loud enough for me to check the fan speed. Guess running 4 VMs and trying to update them is taxing it's little brain.

Went to the gut doctor today, she wants me to eat a really restricted diet for the next 4 weeks to see what impact it has on how my gut works. That was the trade off for her not sticking a chunk of sharpened pipe up my butt and looking around. I'm OK with that trade-off, let's just hope it has some positive impact otherwise it's the pipe for me. :(

Two of the houses we liked in RTP just sold, and nothing new has come up in the last 8 days. Getting a little worried that we missed the spring rush and now only have the dregs to pick from. Even the 4.5 acres with the garage/apartment combo that looked like a promising site to build a house on is gone.

The windows VM running on the old MBP is actually much faster than it was running on the dell server. The dell had SSDs and more RAM and all but it was running an older base OS and ancient hypervisor (vmserver 2.0 on top of centos5.5) which is my guess as to why it wasn't as snappy. Still surprised I can tell an operational difference considering the whole session is remote over my cable modem. I shutter to think how horrible my home net connection will be in RTP. Most houses we saw had DSL. Get ready for 9600 baud.

The primary server is shut down. Windows VM migrated to the macbook, web sites and DNS migrated to the pi board, no-ip services running on the router.... ah crap, I forgot my NFS share for doc backups. Guess I don't need that because the time machine is backing everything up.

Went to a new sushi place with our new account and the guy ordered his favourite "flaming dragon roll". Hard to take a picture of it but basically they have some sort of salmon roll in foil and pop it into this burning tray of something. Hard to take a picture of but you get the idea. Wasn't too bad, but I prefer my sushi cold.

Moving the VM from VMware server 2.0 on the linux host to the mac got me a few improvements according to the windows experience. Obviously the graphics would improve running on the mac vs. the java console on the web login on the server, but I wasn't expecting the CPUs or disks to be faster. We'll see how well it works remote from the office on Monday.

Getting more real by the moment. This appeared yesterday, and sometime between the time I got home and the woman got home a "COMING SOON" sign showed up as well. Realty gnomes running around the complex.

It's been so crazy around the house cleaning, boxing, and generally getting things ready that I've not had time to do much updating. We are ensuring that we stay social, but all at home time is devoted to house work. 90% of what we own outside of the big furniture is now packed and in the garage. The inspections and photos are on Wednesday and the open house is the weekend following that. All goes well the house will be pending by the end of the month.

Sunday I played golf (work thing) and although I generally did poorly, I did manage to get a par on a 500 yard par 5. Never done that before, usually my pars are all on par 3s, nothing where I need to be long off the tee. Everything just clicked though, I had an awesome drive, a follow up 3-iron shot and then a 7-iron hop right onto the green. 2 puts and I was done.

Saturday we went to dinner with Scott and Lina to the Los Altos Grill. Totally overpriced and horrible service (just like yelp said), but they didn't have a corkage fee. I brought the last bottle of the '07 Fogarty pinot I was saving, and it was just as good as we remember. After we went to their house and sat on the hill and watched the sunset. I was cold and they have a stash of blankets and hats so I took advantage of that, but apparently I don't know how to wear Russian hats.

It's strange being homeless and just moving from starbucks to starbucks in search of a table/wifi/power spot. Found a nice one in a small starbucks in a Safeway so I'll be here for a bit waiting for my next appointment and working on building a 64bit version of a utility I need. The last build was in 2010, but I think we were all 64bit back then so what's up with using the old build systems? Oddly they're still around so the auto-build kicks off to them and gives me a fresh copy of the old version. Also, I think the guy that wrote it is gone, can't find him in the directory to ask questions.

Currently homeless sitting in another Starbucks waiting for 2pm to roll around. I'm only 10 minutes from the data center so I've got plenty of time to get there.

Stopped by the LDC here and said hello to the old Austin crew. Everyone was happy to see me, some new managers stopped by to meet me saying they had heard good things and were wondering if I was coming back, etc. Love fest for sure. I had a brief closed door meeting with the Sr director about some ideas he had; he wanted to bounce them off me for verification. Crazy, but it shows they value my opinion and even trust me to keep my mouth shut about potentially new things going on. Sigh, why couldn't I have worked for people like that instead of the douche bag?

Why does Aspell on the pi not know the word "center"? It doesn't understand it as an HTML tag or a normal word. Oddly it wasn't in my custom dict that I moved over as it's just a normal English word. Or so I thought.

First.... RUDY'S!!! Woo!

I'm in Austin today to go to a deployment at a colo tomorrow at 2pm. It was cheaper to fly in today because we got the tickets last minute, but I don't mind giving up part of my Sunday because I can go see friends here. Well, in theory. Seth is out of town and Brian isn't back until tonight. Hopefully Brian shows up, but I guess at least I got some Rudy's. I'm easy to please I guess.

I've spent the afternoon in the hotel room working on configuring the web server on the pi board. My and the woman's web sites now run 100% on the pi board. It seems fast enough so far, but the image processing (creating thumbnails and whatnot) is crazy slow. It takes 15-20 seconds or more to generate a thumbnail out of a standard iphone photo. Guess I don't have to watch it run anymore when I'm making new pages. Otherwise it was pretty easy to get it moved, just had to learn how to install all the mods on Debian instead of RHEL and hack the configs of the web sites a little to conform to the new apache version on here. Next up I need to get the pi backing up to the main server since we've gone from RAID1 protection down to however reliable an SD card is.

Last week got pretty busy, I never even got back to finishing the entry about the long weekend or a decision to move to NC. I honestly can't remember all of what happened, the move has been such a major decision that everything else has sorta fallen by the wayside. Hopefully whoever reads this in the future can piece together what's happening by the entries surrounding this decision.

We've got about half the house packed to far, all the pictures are down and I'm patching holes and painting. The worst thing to pack of course is the ammo. So far I've got this pile going. It and 3 boxes of powder and primers along with the weapons themselves and potentially my bike will go with me on the trip east in the 4runner. I'm looking at small enclosed trailers now so there will be room to carry everything. I do need to replace the rear springs too, just having a few hundred pounds of Netapp gear in the back makes it turn into a low rider, so having a lot of weight on the hitch isn't going to work either in it's present form.

Last night we went up to SF to go to one of those professional networking thingies the woman goes to every quarter or so. The venue for this one was a lot better, and it had an open bar instead of a coupon for 1 small beverage. The ride up got me thinking though, could this be my last BART ride and last time in SF?

Now testing port forwarding via the pi board (seems OK, hotel wireless is pretty poky so I can't tell if it or the pi is the reason for the RDP slowdown but I suspect it's the wireless) and next will setup a squid proxy because at some point I'm going to shut down the vm server to pack it and will need a way to browse content at work without the censors blocking it.

Squid running. I wouldn't think 512mb of RAM would run all this without swapping a little but I guess we used to have 16mb or 32mb and were perfectly happy. Probably some unneeded services I can shut down to save memory too.