Dad got a guy with a stump grinder in to kill off the stumps left from tree removal they did by the pump house years ago. A bit sluggish on the follow though I guess.

Meanwhile here in the east, things are still really damn cold in the mornings:

Mom in the lead in some slot tournament, but what's even more impressive is that dad managed to take pics with his phone and email them all on his own.

Bad news, my credit card number was stolen (again). Good news, I got my license plates today. I filled out all the forms ahead of time and printed them to save time. Took me 12 minutes at the DMV to get the plates and pay. If I had shown up just a few minutes after it would have taken forever as a bunch of people came in right after me. When I arrived 4 of 4 counters were busy but no one was in line.

I had this crazy dream last night where I was in Europe and renting a bike and went into a shop to buy a helmet. Inside I realise that the guy helping me had sold me my original helmet back when I first started riding... in Europe. So that made no sense but seemed really profound so I wanted to make sure I remembered it and typed notes into my phone about the dream. When I then woke up I realise that I was just dreaming about taking notes on the dream. Then I sent myself email to work to remind me to type this up when I could. So, hopefully I'm not dreaming now. Or something.

We were in home depot looking for crap and I wanted to get some tarps to close off the garage until the garage doors get here. For some reason the cheapest 5mil tarps were these camo ones. Leftover Halloween stuff?

One of the home depot scores (or maybe this was from Lowes, they're just across from each other) was a light for over the table that the woman actually liked. The 5k color bulbs are too bright and too sterile for a dining area so I've ordered up some 3k LEDs that are 40w equivalents. If that's still too bright I'll just put the dimmer back on the circuit.

Our first bottle of NC wine. It was a little too light for just casual drinking but it went surprisingly well with the steak and whatnot the woman whipped up for dinner.

The woman sent me this picture from this morning, apparently I missed out on the fact that the pond was starting to freeze over last night. Down to 21F or something stupid. The weather here is a bit crazy, it's 70F one day, then freezing two days later, then bouncing back up into the 50s/60s mid week. Damn Canadian air.

I've selected the first antenna I want to put up in the yard and ordered it up. Went around and around on vertical on a concrete pad vs. dipole in the trees and finally came up with something. It's the Buckmaster OCF covering 10m-80m. I've got a tree guy scheduled to come out and give me a quote on trimming some branches and hanging a pulley assembly in the trees so I can hoist this thing into the air. The slingshot or arrow method might work, but I want to make this a more permanent install.

The pond dude delivered the woman's "grass carp" yesterday. Now we have 3 larger fish in there that are going to eat the algae and grass. That's a good thing, as long as the huge hereon that's been feeding on the fish in the pond doesn't snap these guys up.

We drove out to Greensboro to visit with Volvo (one of my new accounts) and used 540 to get out of town. Not exactly a lot of traffic on 540 at 10am:

I've setup my keyboard and stuff at my desk but don't have my monitors yet so I'm sitting way, way far away from the laptop display. Good thing I can still see.

The woman and I got our health screenings today, and they said I have 29.1% body fat and am obese. I'm not sure how that's possible, but if it's true then we know why everyone in America is fat because I think I take pretty good care of myself and workout and don't over-eat and yet I'm still a fattie on paper. Also, it's hard to type with a band-aid on your finger. Also, also, I almost passed out _after_ they finished the blood work. I hate that, I do OK during the event and then when it's all over I freak out. Stupid.

The parents got the RV back home OK... mostly. Dad managed to lock the steering on the Jeep after he hooked it up to tow home and it ruined the tires scrubbing them as it tried to go right all the time. He said he could feel it trying to pull, that should have been a clue!

The woman posting pictures of the fox in the front yard prompted everyone to send her links to "the fox" music video or whatever it is. All the people with kids already knew about that annoying song but us child-free types were spared infection for a while.

Cheesy, but it was included so I figured I should use it. Somehow the safe is already getting full, I think it's because I had to take stuff out of "dad's" safe and bring it along. I also need to figure out how to use the height of the safe to my advantage.

Last night we went to the ghetto Chinese place down in Funky Vagina. The tea in styrofoam cups and plastic utensils were all present, but holy crap was the food good. You could plate that up anywhere in SF and charge $25/plate for it. Our dinner was $18 total and we've got leftovers for tonight. Deal.

At my new desk in RTP. First day of school, feels really strange.

What was amazing was that I went to the DMV today, and it took me 16 minutes to get in, do the paperwork, take 2 tests (regular and motorcycle), get my picture taken and get back out. Try that anywhere in CA.

The connection to my home server isn't as bad now, latency is much lower. Bandwidth is still crapola though. For the VM I moved to New York the latency is now ~20ms instead of ~60ms so that should help.

Concrete work is underway at the house.

Got some time to kill on my first day since no one is here so I've updated my photo download script. To cut down on the amount of copying to/from the home connection I now do the jhead auto-rotate and stripping on the mac then download the image to both the VM and the server at home. Then the home server needs only run the remote thumbnail script and verify permissions and it's done. No heavy lifting. I also wrote the downloader in bash, just because. Can't always rely on having perl around for doing even simple stuff like arg parsing.

I made my first meme. This is for the Quarterly Business Review Kathleen has to do tomorrow with her new SE. She made fun of me in the last review, so I thought I would return the favour with a comment on her having so many SEs.

Being a "normal" person sucks nuts. It takes 1.5 hour to get home if I try to leave at 4pm, 5pm or 6pm and it takes 1.25 hours to get in to work if I leave at 6:50am. There are zillions of people sitting in traffic for 3+ hours a day, and that's just going to/from Morgan Hill (I at least get on 101 8 miles north of the traffic in actual Morgan Hill). Those driving in from the central valley must spend 5 hours or more sitting. Wow. Those people are dumb.

Two more days!

At the Agilent office in COS there is one of the tech managers (Glenn) who when we met for the first time kept thinking we knew each other but we couldn't figure out from where. After much brain wracking and several months I finally figured it out, he was part of that gaming group I was in back in '98-99 in COS. Crazy! He was the dwarven fighter who drove the big pickup who helped me pull the cleric's Geo metro out of a snow bank after a particularly nasty storm out there. Huh.

The most common lie told on CL in the automotive section: "salvage title but nothing is wrong with it" or "salvage title but the accident wasn't that bad". Seriously people, "salvage" means just that, something is wrong with it. If it wasn't that bad or wasn't screwed up then the insurance company would not have written it off.

I shrank down my hosted VM image and am snapshotting it now. After that's done I'll ship the snapshot to the NYC data center and bring up my system over there. That way the latency to it won't be as significant when I'm on the east coast... next week!

Saturday on my way to my parents I stopped by Ellen's place for a late breakfast and to say goodbye, and to see her new place. I also wanted to meet her boyfriend and check the dude out but he was too busy watching sportsball to come over. Lame.

Her place has a really nice view:

I've moved my Digital Ocean VM from the SFO data center to the NYC to reduce the latency to/from it once I've moved to the other coast. You don't really move a VM though you take a snapshot then do a re-install with that snapshot so the networking gets updated but all of your data is intact. However, the host keys change, so my auto-login script at home is now stuck at a warning prompt around keys changing. I could fire up the old VM and pull the keys off but I've already taken it offline and all that... although it might be possible to rename it out of the way and fire it up without conflicting with it's cloned brother? The networking should be different and all that. Might try that after my next meeting.

Re-casting Dirk Benedict as Face after the pilot was a brilliant move. Just sayin'.

I did my cDOT live demo to the IT group today in the "Founders Theater". 50-ish in the audience and who knows how many on the WebEx and live streaming stuff. I'm trying to get the IT VP who attended to send a note to my current and new bosses letting them know I did well. Gotta get the list of crap for my review a bit longer since the sales numbers are going to be a bit wonky this year moving mid-cycle.

If the woman wants more outdoor pets they sell whole boxes of them a the sporting clays place. :)

Two day Denver/Ft. Collins/Colorado Springs whirlwind tour is done, last trip to see those guys. A little sad, but they gave me a glowing review so that's going right into my folder for my 2013 review. My new boss will have to see all of what I was up to before since it's unlikely I'll do anything too spectacular in my first months back in RTP.

To keep the snow at bay I picked a Nissan 4x4 pickup as the rental. Plenty of room for the 3 of us, but lousy gas mileage as you would expect:

Holy crap, my double tunnel thing works. I can hit my windows VM that's on the MBP on the wireless at the RV park from my desk. Woot! It's almost usably fast too. Almost.

Friday night I got off my butt and went to "opera night" at Cafe Frascati in San Jose. Amy the office chick (field admin) is a part time opera singer and she was inviting people from the office to go hear her sing so rather than spend another Friday alone at the RV I made the trip out to be social. I'm not an opera buff but it was a fun evening, sorta an open mic night for opera singers. In addition to Amy and some other low level singers there were some people "off the street" which turned out to be the singers from the SJ opera who were there being social that night. I'm amazed at how such a motley crew can sing so well. There was one chick, looked like a 40-something heroin addict that was rail thin that was their best singer. How does all that volume and clarity come out of such an emaciated body?

Saturday I went to the office and picked up my personal laptop and some other crapola that needs to get packed up. I'm still not happy with using Firefox under linux on the hosted VM so I setup a reverse tunnel that gets me from the VM to the laptop and then using the laptop's private VM net I can hit my windows VM via a backdoor RDP session. It works, but we'll have to see how fast it is from the office. It's OK here so I imagine during the day it will be fine. Had to setup a script to keep the connection open in case it drops, no biggie but I had not put a sleep in between retries so when the net went down my laptop got super hot as it spun in a really tight loop trying to reestablish the connection. This mid-2007 MBP is one of those with the GPU problem but after all these years it's still running, so maybe it will be OK.

Also on Saturday I ran errands, got groceries, etc. I went to a wells by work and realised that this is the office I setup my account at when I first got back to CA. I arrived in CA in 1999 with $20k in my pocket, and 14 years later I leave with a wife and way more cash. CA, and NVDA and APPL have been good to me.

Today I went to Coyote Clays to use up a gift card I had as well as a leftover skeet token. Of course with no gear I had to rent a shotgun, eyes and a ammo carrier and use their ammo but I still got to shoot 2 rounds of skeet and take 25 random shots on various clays ranges before it got too busy. It was some special members day so the place was packed by 10am. I was happy enough with my performance and I used up my gift card so it all worked out OK.

Also today (or maybe it was last night) I signed up for Netflix streaming. Watching TV on my tablet with captions while doing laundry was worth it.

15 days and counting.

I'm trying to move all my browser stuff off the windows VM and onto the hosted linux vm. Firefox (even the latest version) sucks on linux for some reason. It works the same, it just looks really "rough". I would have never suspected that I was a browser snob it it does just look really, really bad. I've tried to add the load monitors and network monitors and all the other windows junk I have onto the linux box and am making some progress. Trying to move in and make it mine. The biggest worry I have is my saved password cache stuff in Firefox sync. If it's loaded onto this VM it could be stolen. I think I need to wipe it out if for no reason other than that.