Busy weekend. First off, we went up to the land to meet with a realtor to put it on the market, and second to camp. :) The realtor spent about 2 hours tromping around taking pictures and stuff and after I faxed him the well papers yesterday he's got it going into MLS this week. He said with the quality of the well and the creek near by, as well as the privacy it should appeal to dope growers, a large segment of the land buying population up there. Really? Whatever, just give me my money and then you can do whatever you want.

We didn't setup a tent though, we tested sleeping in the back of the truck. It worked about as well as I thought, and better than the woman thought. That said, I won't force her into camping again, she's done her part of the rest of time.

Found a bible while clearing out my book shelf. Interesting what you can find opening to a random page....

The more a company advertises, the larger margin business it must be. That's my theory anyway. All the radio ads in the morning are either for the two big mattress stores in the area, or AT&T wireless. I know mattresses are a huge margin business, and I can only assume that the government granted wireless monopolies are huge profit too, just like the monopoly cable business.

Yesterday was a strange ass day. We went go karting with one of our channel partners, about 30 of us in total were there. We ran a bunch of heat races to figure out the groups and my past racing experience must have helped because I ended up in the cool kids group by time, and in the final wheel-to-wheel race I came in 3rd. The 1st place guy takes his kids karting and the 2nd place guy is some motocross and road racing guy. I actually had the fastest lap time in the race but at one point I got shoved into a wall (hard, pretty bruised up today from it) and was in last and had to fight my way back up. Given more laps perhaps I could have caught them, but then again I could have been wrecked again and come in last.

In any case, it was not a "clean" race. I too crashed a couple of people, caused a few guys to spin out, pushed someone out of the way, etc, etc. Rubbin' is Racin' and all that.

After karting we went to one of the sales guy's houses for dinner. He had some dude come in a cook up street tacos (yum!) and had a huge selection of adult and non-adult beverages. He lives in Los Gatos and even though it's a smaller house, it's been completely remodeled with what looks like little expense spared.

Perhaps more important than the karting was the Ericsson demo on Wednesday. After all my worry it went of amazingly well. We got completely off-script and I had to improvise (and do some stuff I hadn't actually tested with the simulators) but in the end the head dude from Ericsson said "you've shown me something in 20 minutes that I've been trying to figure out for over 2 months". I'm going to call that a win.

Kathleen is always impressed by the Versace chairs and sofas in the Marvell lobby. The CEO's wife likes spending money. To me, they're just uncomfortable and ugly, but what do I know about elite furnishings?

This is more what we know about around our house... how to save money on rodents!

Dennis noted that he hurt his arm somehow and it's impacting his ability to do random stuff, like wiping his butt. I learned the same lesson when I screwed up my shoulder which is why I've been focusing on learning to do everything with my off hand. I may have gone too far though, now it feels really strange to brush my teeth with my right hand.

Today I've got to give a live demo to the Ericsson team from Sweden. It was totally screwed up yesterday when I did a trial run, my VMs were screwed... my linux VM was half ass configured to be a DNS server and my cmode nodes were trying to use my half configured AD server. I've got an hour before they get here so I'll double check my fixes and run though it one more time... as soon as the all-hands ends.

It's a nice day outside, why am I inside screwing around with my web server setup? Just feeling nerdy today I guess. Here is what's in the works, I'm trying to move the web server from the VM on my server to the pi board. I picked up a tiny 32gb USB stick cheap (it's only USB2.0) to hold the content. I have imagemagik installed for the thumbnail processing and the web editing software is just vi/ispell so that's all installed as well. Once the content is over I'll config and see if it's got the balls to serve files out. How can it not? Those Chiclets just kill me, wireless and storage in the size of cheap gum. Technology is amazing, or I'm getting old. Take your pick.

Ever notice how every Katey Perry song is pretty much identical? Maybe it's just me.

Wednesday at work they announced layoffs, looks to be about 10% of the company. We didn't know who was going, they just blocked all the conference rooms and closed the gym and started pulling people in and letting them go. It wasn't random or tenure based from what I can tell. The regional manager I kinda liked (as much as you can like a slimy high level sales guy) is gone, as well as the chick who ran the demo pool who was completely incompetent. I won't miss her, although who are we going to complain about now that the only incompetent person in the office is gone?

Oddly Wednesday was otherwise quiet and we had a golf game schedule for the afternoon so my boss, Kathleen and I played a quick 9. I can't say I did well in the grand scheme of things, but I tied Kathleen! Ha! She even claims to enjoy playing (which makes me think she should be good but apparently that's not the case). My short game needs serious work, I've not practised it at all and it shows. Avi kept screwing up shots and I told him he had "survivor's guilt".

Thursday and Friday I had a class at work on presentations put on by some outside company. It's probably the best work training I've ever had. It was tough and long and they used every minute of every day to beat info into us and make us practice. They filmed our presentations, did 1-on-1 coaching based on the tapes (or memory cards, whatever) and had us do them again and again to practice and improve. They taught us organisation, interruption handling, and how to format and give talks to c-level staff (very different from the normal presentations we're all used to). Now I can see why the DR project at Apple got killed 3 times, the presentations they were giving to the senior VP were totally wrong.

The headache I've had for the last 3 days is still around. Thought it was tapering off but now it's back. Too much caffeine? Not enough? Allergies? What does it want!?!?!

I finally got off my butt and paid all the bills that have been piling up. Other than my yearly insurance renewal for the bike there was nothing but a couple of magazine subscriptions. Not sure why I was putting if off so long other than the fact that there was so much paper around it was making me think things were worse than they really were.

We're working on a master password list, I gotta ask the foo guys about that as well.

Friday I went up to see mom again and damn did traffic still suck even leaving at 3:15pm instead of 4pm. I had to lane split from the on-ramp of 680 until after Sunol, and then again on 580 for 20 or so miles before it broke apart over the Altimont. Then it was just crazy with people trying to cut in and out to make up 1-2 car lengths at 65-80 mph. There was some excitement on the way home when a guy pulled out of dead stopped traffic unexpectedly trying to flip a u-turn in the middle of hwy 84. It was a serious ABS test, I was on the brakes so hard and fast I would have dumped it if not for the ABS and likely just crashed into the side of the truck. That would have sucked. Sometimes I miss the KLR a lot, but when something like that happens and I'm not riding crappy vintage 80s tech it reminds me of why I should love the vstrom more.

Saturday morning I went and played 9 holes of golf with dad just to get him out of the house a bit. At first him having a golf cart in the garage was sorta strange, but it is nice to just load and up drive to the course in your own cart and then drive back home again after.

Monday night we took some customers to the Giants game up in SF. Long, long ass ride to go up there because we couldn't use 101. Even the carpool lanes were totally screwed up so we had to go around to 280 and up that way. After almost 2 hours in the car we got up there and then were reminded just how freakin' boring baseball is. I don't get the appeal, it's just so sedentary. At least in football, basketball and hockey there is movement and action and stuff. Baseball is mostly just watching guys play catch until some dude gets lucky and whacks the ball out to some other guy who catches it.

In the suites they had TVs on to other games and people were yelling and cheering and generally carrying on about some basketball game and you could tell which suites were watching baseball live and which were paying attention to the TV. Those watching baseball were just bored looking and quiet, the basketball people were randomly cheering. Probably looked strange to those outside the suites wondering why all these people were cheering at what appeared to be nothing.

Trying to be artistic I took the same pic out the window when we got there and then again when we left. Almost got them lined up the same.

Our heroic rodent climbing the stairs. He's getting old and slow, but he still manages to make up all 18 steps 2-3 times per night while the woman has him out "playing".

An advantage to the woman working in SF is that impulse buys tend to be pretty good. She went to the local exotic tea shop to get some teas for the moms for mothers day and she found some of the awesome salt we used to have. We got some of this stuff at one of the foodie fairs and eventually used it up but now we know where to get it locally so it's likely we'll be keeping it in stock at the house. It's good enough to just eat by itself, but probably not all that good for you to be eating raw salt in mass quantities. The white pepper is a bit of a joke around the house. You're supposed to use it in white sauces, eggs, etc anywhere you don't want to see black pepper flakes in your food so of course I bring that up every time I cook eggs or the woman makes her white pasta sauces. Guess I'll have to come up with a new lame joke.

Organised my electronic parts; no longer do we just have a pile of random stuff in little boxes.

Also spent some time with the label printer software and made up some goofy labels for the latest batches of jerky. The chuckar jerky took a bunch of hours to prep, trying to get 1 pound of meat off those tiny birds is serious work. Again though, it's the best jerky I make.

Went in for a physical today, everyone has been bugging me about that since mom's whole cancer thing started. Doc didn't find anything strange, and I only slightly got woozy when it came time for the blood draw. I'm afraid the worst is yet to come though, I've got to schedule a follow-up with the butt doctor... time for a colonoscopy! Yea getting old! Oh, and my left eye is only 20/25, the right is 20/20. Guess it's good my dominant eye is still 20/20, but what happened to 20/15. Damn getting old, again!