What a bitch of a day. I'm amazed I'm not sick. So during a meeting, that I had to leave a meeting to attend (I was running both), the VP calls to talk about an issue that was already decided three meetings ago, he's just so out of the loop playing with his web site that he has no idea what we're doing. I abandoned everything at 3:30pm, I had to go pick up a letter from the IRS. They have adjusted my 2000 tax returns, I owe another $250. Whew. An audit would have cost me 10x that just talking to my tax guy and a lawyer. I'll pay their piddly extortion.

Ah, but picking up the letter isn't so easy. It's raining and I have to take Krista's bike up to her (old) house. I don my riding gear over my polypropylene, then put my rain gear over that. Except the pants, they're baggy even over my BMW pants and I'm afraid they'll hit the engine or exhaust and melt. No problem, the BMW pants are water proof..... or not as I found out when my crotch got soaked about 5 minutes after I got on the freeway. 10 miles up the road the rain stopped and I sorta dried out. I had packed a full change of clothes in a trash bag inside the magnetic tank bag from my VFR (still had it around thank God) so I had something to change into for the ride back. As soon as we got to Krista's old place her Ex took off on the EX (how funny, get it, EX500... Ex-boyfriend... no?) which sorta freaked her out. Apparently he's trying to get her to come back to him. They're fighting about money too. Whatever. If he had a helmet he could have come and got the bike, but he didn't. He's running around with no gear at all, just shades. How squidly.

She took me to dinner for my troubles then gave me a ride home and picked up the rest of her stuff (helmet and whatnot). I stuck her with taking her old bike battery back too, I'm not doing her dirty work anymore. I feel good about that. :) We talked for 20 minutes then she left, never to return again. Chapter 10 is closed.

Now I have to work for a while, all hell broke loose after I left (who am I kidding, it was blowing apart at the seams way before then!) and there is a lot of damage control to do. I wish my link in to work was faster, running outlook via PC-anywhere at 2400 baud is hard to do.

I wore real clothes again and lucky thing too, it was picture day. The VP wants pictures of everyone to put on the web page. Here are two (you can see one of my spiffy shirts). One is me trying to look awake by the V880s, the other is Ed's team stuck in the racks. In the team photo across the back left to right it's Dennis, me, Ed, Bill, Tom, then in the middle it's Jimmy, Charles, Rob, Rod, Rice Boy (Steve) and in front is Micheal. The Canadian is not in the photo, he's back in Canada on vacation.

Here is the lovely email I typed up to finish the email chain that exploded today around 2pm. Aren't I smooth? (Some formatting lost of course). Notice that I used vertical AND horizontal scaling in the same email!

I understand that there is a whole lot of confusion as to the priority of testing, resources, timing, etc. Hopefully this will clear it all up.

Although no one person can get enough licenses/CPUs to test out this Hitachi solution by themselves, I think if we all work at the same time we can generate the load together.

How about this plan? This Sunday at 9am (when the Linux farm is historically unloaded) we all start simultaneous (hopefully automated) tests. Charles and Mark start as many runs as they can from the Linux side, Andrew starts timing runs from the Suns, Eddy starts runs a number of runs himself from the Linux side including fake load generating jobs on the 100 systems currently out of the queue for various reasons and Doug starts his massive layout jobs from the sunfire systems.

Charles, Mark and Eddy will simply check for huge gross errors, job deaths and really slow performance (if they can). Andrew and Doug know exactly how long their jobs took on the unloaded system and so will know how much slower they run now with it being fully loaded.

All these partitions will be on a single head unit. If/when that head starts to die, we'll transitions everything, on the fly, over to the second head unit which will be configured with 2x the number of CPUs and memory as the first. If it can't handle it, we'll balance the load across the two heads together, again, on the fly. If we still can't handle the load, we'll kill off the fake load generating jobs and re-evaluate.

These tests will show:

1. maximum capacity of one 4 CPU head

2. vertical scalability of a head (by jumping to the 2x configured head)

3. horizontal scalability over multiple heads

With Doug's and Andrews' timing tests vs. the last timing tests and Charles', Mark's and Eddy's pass/fail/gross slowdown results all together we should be able to make a decision as to the success or failure of the project.

After all the testing is complete and we have our results, Joe will take everyone out to lunch.

Comments?

I got my 21.3" viewable area LCD panel in today... man is it huge. It's got more area than a 21" monitor (they're only like 19.5" or so I think). I have to run it in 1600x1200 (vs my normal 1152x870) or it looks really funky. It basically only works at that rez. Fortunately I've upgraded to a GeForce2 card in my PC so I can run the 1600 mode.

First day wearing the new clothes and everyone has noticed. Even the guys in the office have noticed, although mostly they're just making fun of me. Gayla and Dawn approve, and Suzi (the other purchasing chick I never deal with because she doesn't cover any of my cost centers) even said something as she walked by. Wow, I didn't think it made that much of a difference. Jimmy says I look 5 years older now. That's not a good thing I don't think.

I almost sent email to Krista. I'm really starting to miss her now. Not the ultra-painful missing like last week (which is easy to suppress by just working more) but more of the type where you notice something is wrong, have to think about it for a bit and then remember she's gone. I left a pile of clothes on the bed last night on her side and this AM when I woke up the weight of them on the blanket made me think someone (her) was there. When I fully came awake and figured it out I was of course really disappointed. Not knife to the heart, just "damn, what a sad thing that she's gone". I told Leianne that I wish Krista would feel some discomfort too, or at least have a few weeks (or hell, even days) of trouble securing a new person but I know that's not going to happen. Stupid bitch.

I did send email to Krista and told her how upset I was, etc, etc. I feel better for some reason. I realize it's sorta wimpy because I 'contacted' her, but I needed to do something to help ease my mind.

Good news, I talked to Krista and we hashed out the details on why the relationship failed. Bad news, I made a bunch of mistakes (like not doing enough stuff for her, I wasn't really engaged in the relationship fully). Here is the major deal though. She wasn't ready, she was still to 'undefined' from her previous relationship to try to be in another. Honestly, I was (and am) to undefined myself. I'm not happy enough with who I am and what I'm doing to actually try to include another person in my life. There isn't anything fundamentally broken with me, I'm just not ready. Interesting way to look at things. That's why I'm so needy really, I'm looking for an external person to make me feel justified. If I was more comfortable with who I was, I wouldn't seek their validation so much. I can't change to fit anyone else's version of me either. K5 wanted to warp me into exactly what she wanted and I tried to do that but in the end it was too much so I ran away. I'm pretty confident now in what I need to do. If I could just keep this mindset! I could rule the world! OK, maybe not that, but at least have a more happy life.

I read Dennis' journal about Dungeon Siege. He's right, if I still played games I would play that. I'm not exactly sure when I stopped playing games, probably after Diablo II got boring. I would have to go invest in some serious hardware if I wanted to get back into games. I could keep my 21" monitor but the rest of the stuff would have to go. What exactly is a DirectX8 compliant sound card? My ISA SB32 probably isn't one. My SB can't even play sound continuously when windows open/close. I had to set the 'acceleration' settings to minimum for it to work at all.

Last night was a real trip to SFO all right. We had dinner at this tiny hole-in-a-wall sushi place (which was only OK but freaky expensive), rode in one of those electric buses, hung out in a dive of a bar while the band played and then took a cab home (it was pretty cold, didn't want to wait for the bus and walk). I made it home around midnight and fell asleep instantly. I've been doing that a lot lately. I damn near fell asleep on the stairs. I can't be that tired, wonder what's up?

Paul will be unemployed as of the 30th and he's doing OK with it. I thought he had more money than he really does.... other than the $1.2M house in SFO. He's only got 1 month of living money set aside, after that he has to live off plastic and then after that, he's got to start selling his instruments (he collects really expensive mandolins and banjos and whatnot). After that he says he will get desperate and start cashing out 401(k) money. He says that most people have at most 3 months saved up and 6 months is more than 99% of the world has. Interesting.

Shopping trip #1 complete. While out, I drove by Irvingon High School where I went for one year while we lived in Fremont. So I stopped and took pictures. All of the interior shots were taken through the bullet resistant doors so they're a little distorted. Not bad though. That roundish building in photo 1410 is the library where we had one, yes 1, Apple IIe computer.

On this trip I picked up the last two missing D&D novels. Here is the complete collection of Greyhawk novels. Using the sharpen filter really put a lot of artifacts in the image. The old Sharks ticket book mark shows where I am in my reading. Did I mention that I'm finding faults in the editing of the books? There are a couple of narration slips in there that were noticeable even though I wasn't looking for any mistakes. What was the editor doing? (other than laughing all the way to the bank :)

Shopping trip #2 complete.... and with really interesting results. I collected Leianne and we went clothes shopping. I spent enough to get some good stuff, but didn't go all crazy with super-trendy designer labels and whatnot. We'll see how the crowd reacts tomorrow. I'll wear something in and see if Gayla thinks it's good or not.

I also picked up these:

It's probably better that you don't ask. :) I just wanted to get out somewhere and this was the first thing I could think of (a concert) after all the music stuff Paul was going on about last night. I went down my MP3 list and found this concert next weekend. Cool. It's good Alanis had something or I would be at Britney Spears show on 6/2/02 (the next artist on my MP3 list). The B52s are playing at Wente toward the end of summer... hmm....

We also saw The Scorpion King after hitting the mall. It wasn't as bad as Dennis hinted at. That or I just have really poor taste in movies anymore (which is quite possible).

Dennis and Kenny called last night to harass me and verify that I made it to a strip club. I hadn't. I wimped. I went to the driving range instead and hit a bucket of balls to get ready for today.

I got to Pruneridge at 9:06am and they put me with a father & son twosome with a tee time of 9:07am. So much for any warm up, I barely got my cell phone and crap off my belt before I had to go. It was a good game even though it started raining on the 7th hole. On the 2nd hole I think I made my best shot. Off the tee using my 5 iron (my best club) I managed 186 yards. The whole hole was 286 and I was just even with the 100 yard marker right in the middle of the fairway. Made my whole game. I tried to use my 3 iron with poor results and didn't hit the driver at all until I made it back to the driving range afterward. I won't be using the driver anymore... it broke. The little synthetic insert in the head came out. I thought it was sorta loose, maybe that's why I'm so random with it? Anyway, I'm sure it's fixable but for the moment I'll stick with the 3 and 5.

I walked to the 7-11 and got some sixlets, ick. Now that I'm sick I'll sit here at the computer and punch in quicken data and balance my checkbook before I change and head up to SFO for dinner.

Eric provided me with all the frequencies for SJC but with dad's scanner last night I couldn't pick up anything on any of the channels. The scanner works, or at least can pick up weather info and the police but nothing from the airport. I would have though you could hear it 20 miles away but maybe not? No idea how good his scanner is. It's some fancy one that you can program via serial connection. When he goes to each race there is a guy there that plugs the scanner in and puts the car data in it for the current race. He joined some club that lets him do that at every race for free. Apparently they change frequencies every time at every race so it's worth it. I think the race this weekend is in LAX.

Well, I managed to squander away the whole day pretty much. I went to check out golf clubs and found that I can't hit a 1 or 2 iron any better than I can a driver. The guy at the store said to just skip getting a new driver or a 1 or 2 iron and stick with my 3 iron and current driver until I get a little better. How odd, a sales guy that talks you out of a sale. I did get a cheapie sand wedge because I don't have one and had it re-gripped right then to match my other clubs.

After the golf store I got a jamba juice and a one of their protein pizza bread things for brunch and checked out mountain bikes at the bike shop in Fremont. Not a big selection and nothing I liked. There were a lot of road bikes. Next I got my backpack and book and headed up to skyline to go for a hike. When I got up on the mountain though it was raining pretty hard and it was cold. I sat in the car and read for about an hour hoping it would stop but no luck. I drove back down to Saratoga and got out and walked around a little checking out the funny restaurants and all the old white women moving from store to store. I did smile at a 20-something woman who was talking to some guy... she actually did a double take back at me and returned the smile. Hehehe, the guy looked sorta irked but I was dressed to hike, not take his yuppie chick from him so he got un-irked once he saw me.

I drove back home and stopped at another bike shop. They at least had the bike I looked at last year (the "Mt. Tam" model). Again, not much in the way of selection of mountain bikes but a huge selection of road bikes. Maybe road bikes are getting popular again? I remember a while back Don saying you couldn't find road bikes in stores usually, or maybe that was just road bikes in his size?

The weekend is shaping up like this: Saturday morning golf (by myself, not sure who they'll stick me with at the course, it will be nerve wracking), Saturday evening dinner with Paul in SFO and a trip to his club to listen to a blue grass band (he plays in a band there himself on the 3rd Wednesday of every month... if the music is good I'll have to return to listen to him). Sunday Leianne is going to take me clothes shopping. It's time to get some halfway decent looking shirts. I can't keep running these 16+ people meetings looking like I'm going for a hike. Time to grow up, just a little.

And speaking of growing up, I'm trying to find out more about strip clubs. Jimmy says I should go to forget about my troubles. He only goes when in Vegas so he's not too useful as a guide here (although he invited me to go to Vegas with them next time the group goes... I should, just to belong :). I'm currently picking Kenny's brain to try to learn as much as I can before adventuring off.

I just called for a tee time, they won't give them out for just one person. I have to show up and just hang out until they can put me into a group. That sucks, but I suppose it's fair.

I couldn't take the pressure of holding the Ducati stock so I sold it this morning and took my 15% gain. 15% in a few weeks is pretty good so I won't complain or anything. I did get my invite to the shareholder's meeting already, unfortunately I'm a little far away (it's in Italy and all).

Speaking of percentages, I got my body fat down 1% this week. Doesn't sound like much but I need to start somewhere. I'm feeling a little fat and I want to trim up a touch before things get out of hand. I think I said it before, I need to exercise more as the 3 days a week at the gym won't sustain me where I want to be.

I talked to Krista today (via email). She's got tomorrow off after all and is going hiking. I wasn't invited along or anything. I told her not to contact me again until she's ready to come get her bike. I've had enough now.

So I still don't have a plan for tomorrow. I am taking it off, but what to do? Krista will be hiking with someone on Mt. Tam so I don't want to go there and risk running into her. I tried to get a hold of Don but he never reads email it seems. Maybe I'll ride down to Carmel and have a beverage at the Hog's Breath or something. Hwy 1 should make for an interesting ride (better than just blasting down the freeway).

Got into a down drag out fight with Ed this morning at the staff meeting this morning. I was pretty tired and cranky from the past few days, plus we had a big sun box go down this morning around 3am which didn't help my mood any (or the mood of the troops that were called in to work on it).

I've got one of these FlexScan L685 flat panels as a loaner until my 21" panel arrives (Friday I hope) and it's really hard to work on. At 1280x1024 the fonts are hard to read whereas on the 21" Mitsubishi cheapie monitor they were just fine. Panels still rock though, my cube seems huge now that I don't have that 4' deep corner piece just to hold the huge glass monitor. Plus this is probably better for my eyes or something (no radiation blasting me in the face).

The big news is that pong has shown up on the radar inside work now. They've scanned the net because we have to do an IP renumber (or ISP is dying so we're gong to do some weird masking stuff) and the guy in charge was unsure who exactly owns pong. I had to fess up. Let's hope they let me keep it, else it's got to go home and get served off of the cable line and DHCP. Bogus. I suppose as long as I keep it on the IP won't flop around on me? Backups will suck though, I best start doing incrementals instead of just fulls all the time. 1.4G over 128k would take a while.

The other big news is that my management options are now all underwater. Probably a good thing that I sold them all at $59, eh? For once I did the right thing!!!! Woohoo. Well, only slightly woohoo because the next block I vest next month will be worthless. I'm not being negative, I just hope that the stock ride isn't over. I wanted to use some stock money over the summer to maybe go on a vacation or something.

Almost 7pm and I'm still here. Looks like I'll be eating dinner at work again. Not having class in the evening has taken a lot of stress off me, but also not given me any reason to go home (other than south park tonight). I'm going to get fat if I don't do something other than the gym 3 days a week. Run at lunch time? My shins won't take it. Maybe I could bring a bike in to work and ride around. Of course, I would have to go buy a bike since I don't have one anymore but I'm sure I could find a reasonable road bike cheap.

Another long day, like 15 hours or so. Dennis may be able to get away with that stuff but I sure can't. I'm getting too old for this shit. :)

Strange day. Not bad strange, just strange.

Loc had a laptop apparently, although how he got it I don't know. Supposedly you're supposed to have your managers approval to get one. I don't recall giving it, especially not for a really nice Toshiba. Anyway, he brought it back and now I have it. The desktop guys reloaded it with win2k and handed it back to me. I would use it (I got a wireless card from Dennis) but I don't know any of the passwords they stuck on it. I don't like win2k already; give me back win9x. Do home users really put up with this 'security' stuff?

I talked to Christina today and she said that I'm a nice guy, deep down inside. I didn't understand that comment so she explained. Basically I'm a nice guy with people I choose to be nice to, but to everyone else I'm cold, unapproachable and generally mean. That's not good. I questioned coworkers and they said the same thing, I'm not friendly and approachable unless I really know someone. Interesting. I asked Gayla and Dawn, they think I am a nice guy all the time, but that figures because I'm always nice to them (they're purchasing, they get us toys).

So continuing on the self-exploration, we talked about friends. Basically I have none (local) and haven't made any in the last three years... other than girlfriends and they've all gone south on me. That's bad. I think that this should be my priority. Forget finding a girlfriend, I need to find just regular friends first. OK, so how? Coworkers? That's all I've really got. I can't start hanging around people who think I'm unfriendly so I hit up my supporters (Gayla and Dawn). They're both semi-social and agreed that they will invite me along on their next outings. I just missed three birthday parties for some of Gayla's friends, but there should be more social stuff to come. Dawn is a hiker and she and her husband invite people along all the time, apparently they're a "the more the merrier" sort of hiking crowd (up to a point, whew!). Next hike they'll drag me along. I can be the 3rd wheel for a while, it will get me started meeting people and trying to be friendly.

There you have it. Not such a bad day, just one filled with exploration and opening myself up to possibilities. Tomorrow is a whole new day, who knows what I can learn? I'll ride my bike in, that always puts me in a good mood. I've got 9am, 10am, 2pm, 4pm meetings tomorrow though, that will probably get to me after a while.

A picture from Sunday; our bikes at a rest break while riding up toward big basin (didn't go into the park, just rode up then turned around and rode back).

I think I forgot to mention that I got a couch on Saturday as well. It's one of mom's old ones she didn't want because it doesn't fit the decor anymore. It's some fancy-ass linen thing which means that it's expensive and hard to clean (and it's white-ish color). Not bad for free though. I'll have to take a picture at some point once I get the living room cleaned up (it looks like a paper factory exploded in there).

Went for a ride up Hwy 9 today with dad. He did OK running his KTM up there. It's no sport bike, but that's OK, I didn't feel like riding fast today anyway.

Work is getting to me again; email has been flying all day. Everyone is blaming me for everything, and not being able to keep up, etc, etc. Either they'll fire me or move me back down to 'individual contributer' mode. I could deal with the demotion, I don't really want to get fired though. I just bought the house and all and I don't see a future for myself if I loose this job. Why I feel that way I can't say. It just seems that once I loose this one I won't have the energy to pursue another. I can hardly stay awake as it is now, I can't imagine trying to job hunt like this. I slept a lot last night and want to take a nap now and it's not even 3pm yet. Something is really whacked right now and I can't figure it out.

Krista is all moved into her new pad. Pictures were taken of course. (the first one is a leftover from the funeral trip, it shows my mom being weird with that stupid frog). You enter her place through the back of the garage, it's a converted wine cellar apparently. As you can see, it's very tiny but very nice. $1250 a month gets you 500 sq ft. or so. The 'bed' is that loft looking thing to the left of the door and there is a ladder attached so you can get up to it. A queen bed won't fit, she's got to get a double. We had to take all the doors off to get stuff into the main room which was a pain, but it's done now. Whew. Check out that garden out back, pretty nice, as well as that view looking down her street. There are 5-6 little restaurants about a block away as well as a small coffee shop. The neighbors are having a party tonight and she's invited. There are two guys living upstairs, don't know who else is in the building.

I thought I lost those moving pictures, my PC died during the upload from the flash card so I had to reboot. After that, no pictures showed up on the card and when I put it in the camera, it showed "incompatible card". Crap! So I rebooted the PC, unplugged and replugged in the USB CF reader and tried again. Suddenly the card was OK again, I could read the photos off and it worked in the camera again. Some strange solar flare must have taken out the PC, reader, card and camera simultaneously?

I'm going to go wash the bike and get all the bugs off from last weekend, it's pretty crusty.

Couple more pictures to post here. One is the remnants of the old alarm that was still in the Montero. I had to track down all those nasty wires and un-route them from the various locations they were run to. Someone cut out most the sensors and whatnot, but left the wire. The other is a closeup of the 3rd party EFI controller that's making the BMW run correctly. I was tweaking with it just a bit today to see how it effects the bike. You can really screw stuff up if you try.

Krista called a while back and let me know that she got a mattress delivered and the place is taking shape. She didn't want to talk long when I returned her call, seemed like someone was there with her. Sigh.

I also made it to the driving range and hit a few balls. My back is really starting to protest, I better take it easy for a while.

So much has happened... let me make a list of what to write about or I'll forget:

1. Fired Loc
2. Krista called off the relationship
3. Engine restorer snake oil actually works
4. Played golf at Wente today

OK, now that I've got my list I can start expanding. The stupid Netgear wireless router keeps locking up on me so I have to type in little bursts. I know it's not the cable modem because I can't even keep a ping going to my end of the router from the PC. I guess it could be the USB adapter too, but power cycling the router brings it back. Signal strength is good, so I know that's not it. Why am I always debugging something or another?

1. I finally pulled the trigger on getting Loc out of here. He's been slacking for a while now and with the help of HR I did all the right things to try to get him to perform. We (managers) were given the instructions to either bring '4's up to '3's (meaning on a 1-4 performance scale get the low end people at least up a notch) or to 'manage them out' (PC way of saying fire them). Loc had been given bad reviews twice before so I wrote up a corrective action plan (CAP) to try to get him up to speed. He was given the choice of taking the CAP and if he failed to perform in 30 days, he was out or take HR's buy-out package which lets him get to his next stock vest date, and then he is out. Because he's over 40, the law says we have to give him 21 days to decide. It took him about 21ns to decide, he was ready to leave anyway. He finished with HR, cleaned out his desk, sent out a bunch of email then left. Ed (my boss) was happy and Joe (our VP) was happy with the results. Some of the engineers are not happy apparently because of whatever email Loc sent them (which I've not seen yet). It probably says something nasty about me because they came looking for me today. Fortunately, I wasn't there, see #4. I did call Kenny afterwords to try to talk me down and make me feel a little better and whatnot since he's had to do similar stuff before. It's all a part of being a manager apparently. (obvious I know).

2. Last night Krista and I were talking about her upcoming move to SFO and she said that she didn't want to be tied down or under any obligations to anyone. She didn't want me as her boyfriend anymore because it would keep her tied to me. Now we're free to date other people, or whatever. Kenny had warned me against creating a self fulfilling prophecy. Too late. Now she's going to be living in the city and free to date. Yep, that doesn't sound too good for me. At least she was honest about it, right? I thought I had a month or two before she bailed; turns out I have a day or two.

My ping packet loss to any nvidia.com host is about 25% now. However, my yahoo! broadcast radio is still playing fine. Oops, now my connection just dropped (but obviously I got in again or I couldn't type this).

3. My friend Troy said that "engine restorer" actually works. Troy has been racing and blowing up engines for longer than I've been alive so I usually take his word on car related stuff. He says that it works as advertised, but that you have to add it frequently because it wears off the cylinder walls about as easily as it goes on there. He had over 300k miles on his old van using the stuff and now puts it in everything with over 100k miles. I put a can in the Montero and it's been in there about 1000 miles.... wow what a difference. At 4k RPM the engine is smooth, really smooth. Before it sounded like it was going to rattle apart but now it's just happily chugging along. At lower RPMs I can lug it down in 3rd with less chatter and stronger pull. It's not an instant "wow, more power" sorta thing, it builds over time. I wish I had run a compression test before and after, I know it's improved. Sounds bogus I know and I wouldn't have believed it if I didn't see and feel it for myself. If the truck wasn't such a pain to work on (and have so many cylinders) I would test it before I put a can in.

4. Since I've got all the pressures of management, I might as well take the perks too. I went and played golf in a tournament at Wente with IAS, one of our integrators. I'm not Tiger or anything, but I did do very well, didn't get pissed off or frustrated, and made some really solid shots. It was a scramble format so our team shot a 2 over par. The ringer team shot a 8 under. Oh. They had a 'leftover' $50 gift certificate that I got at the end of the day once most of the people left. I stayed after the awards and snacky-dinner thing chatting and being social which is probably why they gave it to me. I learned that they also have a lot of concerts out there at the golf course... the B-52s are playing later in the summer as well as Jewel. I should go try to catch a show; they're medium venue, somewhere around 2000 people. I could probably survive that. How violent could a Jewel concert be? :)

I'm listening to a radio station out of Seattle. Lots going on up there that Kenny and Dennis could be doing! And just for the record, it's spelled White Plume Mountain and it's by Paul Kidd.

It's still cold here, I'm not sure what's up with that? It was summer here a few days ago but now we're moving back into winter. Rain looked likely this morning but now it's just butt ass cold and windy.

Netapp invited us to a premier of Spider Man on May 3rd. I don't think I'll go, I'm not all psyched to see it like I was LOTR. I don't want to miss a gym trip for that movie. If someone sees it and says it's good I may see it independently.

I'm reading White Plumb Mountain (better check that spelling) and it's not as good as the other AD&D books. It's buy a different author and his writing style is too casual/flippant for the genre. It does have more magic in it thought and they're using the actual spell names instead of hiding them.

Golf lesson today, we worked on pitching, putting and bunkers (sand traps). I like pitching and putting and hate sand. Sand is bad. No sand. We play on Friday, I'll basically take the whole day off I think... although they're trying to drag me into a meeting on Friday at 9am. I don't think I want to go but I'm sure I should. I could ride in to work... no, that's no good I need to go to the gym. Although I shouldn't go to the gym because I don't want to be tired for golf. Interesting dilemma. I didn't go to the gym this AM either because I was going to go tonight. Then HDS invited me to the sharks game (they have a luxury suite) tonight but then I can't go to that because Krista is all freaked out and I should be there to talk to her when she gets to my place (I'm doing dinner). Whatever. At least south park is on tonight, it might not suck.

I got to hire my first person today. It wasn't that 'formal' but I did shake his hand afterwords and do the 'welcome aboard, now get to work' thing. I also worked with HR getting the paperwork ready to fire Loc in the next 30 days. I'm doing the full management gambit here.

Kenny is at that windows conference this week. I would like to go to one of those and see him speak and smack down the little skippies trying to act all cool and know it all. It would be interesting to know the speaker (other than Kolstad and the Usenix/Lisa stuff).

Crap, I tried to leave 30 minutes ago but I'm stuck in the middle of two things now. They're not even management things, they're technical things. It's almost like I'm doing sysadmin work again! Probably because everyone (except the guy I'm going to fire) has gone home for the day.

It's sorta raining here and they've issued snow warnings for the Sierras, it's actually snowing up at the cabin. Just Sunday my parents were up there clearing pine needles off the roof and working on the property in 70 degree weather.

Golf lesson today, we worked on pitching, putting and bunkers (sand traps). I like pitching and putting and hate sand. Sand is bad. No sand. We play on Friday, I'll basically take the whole day off I think... although they're trying to drag me into a meeting on Friday at 9am. I don't think I want to go but I'm sure I should. I could ride in to work... no, that's no good I need to go to the gym. Although I shouldn't go to the gym because I don't want to be tired for golf. Interesting dilemma. I didn't go to the gym this AM either because I was going to go tonight. Then HDS invited me to the sharks game (they have a luxury suite) tonight but then I can't go to that because Krista is all freaked out and I should be there to talk to her when she gets to my place (I'm doing dinner). Whatever. At least south park is on tonight, it might not suck.

I got to hire my first person today. It wasn't that 'formal' but I did shake his hand afterwords and do the 'welcome aboard, now get to work' thing. I also worked with HR getting the paperwork ready to fire Loc in the next 30 days. I'm doing the full management gambit here.

Kenny is at that windows conference this week. I would like to go to one of those and see him speak and smack down the little skippies trying to act all cool and know it all. It would be interesting to know the speaker (other than Kolstad and the Usenix/Lisa stuff).

Crap, I tried to leave 30 minutes ago but I'm stuck in the middle of two things now. They're not even management things, they're technical things. It's almost like I'm doing sysadmin work again! Probably because everyone (except the guy I'm going to fire) has gone home for the day.

It's sorta raining here and they've issued snow warnings for the Sierras, it's actually snowing up at the cabin. Just Sunday my parents were up there clearing pine needles off the roof and working on the property in 70 degree weather.

I quit my Kenpo class today; I'm just not giving it the attention it deserves and it's really bumming me out having to go to my lesson week after week and not being able to do well for a lack of practice. My plan is to take it back up in a few months after I get a better handle on what I'm doing with myself in general.

Krista called about an hour ago, she's found an apartment in SFO and will be moving this weekend. She seemed pretty excited about it. I'll give her one thing, when she says she's going to do something, she does not mess around! I'll miss her, but hey, what can I do about it. The MTBF on my relationships must be around 3 months now. That's a good data point. Single again... at least it's summer time and I can, uh, well, do nothing as usual. Guess I'll get to try touring on the motorcycle some more.

I don't know about the rest of the world but it's really windy here, and in Nevada apparently. The truck driver called me this morning (the one carrying our HDS array) and said that the truck in front of him on the highway just blew over and blocked the road and now he was stuck. He won't be here until tomorrow. Scary stuff that wind.

I got to write some code and hack with hardware today, it was fun. This RaidZone 2TB storage system just runs Linux so I can pretty much do anything to it. It's got a little two line LCD display that they have some useless status info running to. I tossed their app and wrote my own that makes it look just like a netapp display with ops/second being graphed. It's pretty cool, even though I did waste a good amount of time on it. Managers get to have some fun.

Now I have to do the un-fun stuff like writing this CAP to get one of my guys fired.

Montero electrical maintenance day. I reprogrammed the keyless entry to not lock/unlock the doors when you turn the car on/off, I hate that. I also tracked down every 'extra' wire in the engine compartment and under the dash pulling out a huge wad of crap for the old alarm (and the old alarm brain box was still up under the dash). That's all gone as well as the bogus fog light wiring which was only half hooked up. I'll pick up some new lights today and I've got my parents picking up the box of auto electrical stuff from the cabin to bring back with them.

I even got motivated and cleaned my bathroom. Now I'm currently at work getting my golf clubs to go to the range (and typing this).

Krista called last night around 10pm. She was drunk and with friends somewhere north of SF. She didn't come back last night and I've not heard from her yet today as of this writing. Um, is it just me or is there a pattern here? Apparently not drinking is really screwing up my relationships; chicks can only wait a few months before they have to go out with 'friends' and not come home for days (see K5's adventures in Miami). Sigh. I'm pretty upset and not looking forward to if/when she ever returns. Best I can hope for is she brings her own truck to get her stuff and haul it away; I'm a little tired of playing mover. I know this is going to effect my golf game too and I don't need any other problems with my game right now. We've got a vendor tournament coming up next Friday and I really suck still. Taking the winter off was a bad idea. :)

Hey, and I just checked, Vareck is back (or more accurately his page is back). I'm sure he's got some stories and pictures to share.

I just got back from the funeral. I rode ~360 miles today, so 6+ hours in the seat. My ass is a little sore, but mostly it's my right wrist that's bugging me from holding the throttle open that long. I managed to go 75-80 a lot more than I thought I would. The little GS did well, even with all the luggage on there. I stopped for gas twice and I'm averaging 62mpg. That's not bad since I'm running at 80% of the bike's max speed a lot of the time (cruise speed and max with luggage is 80 mph, max speed period is reported at 105).

They had a real mass for the funeral (over an hour) and they did in fact cremate her. They had this really cool looking marble colored 'brick' that contained the ashes and after the mass (full communion and everything) we went to the cemetery behind the church and they stuck her in the ground. Pretty painful to watch all the upset family members.

Mom and I got into this theological debate afterward about how the church is all a scam designed to keep people in line and motivated to work even when they know they're just going to die at the end. She agrees that the church is corrupt and mostly wrong, but doesn't give up on the whole 'god' notion. It was probably the longest and most meaningful conversation we've had in years.

By far the coolest thing was checking on my Christmas trees. When I was small (like 5-8) I used to get one of those little living trees at Christmas (the kind they sell in the grocery store). Anyway, dad started planting those trees on my grandmother's property. Here, 25 or so years later you can see what's happened. They've gone from 1' high to what, 40'? It's hard to say but you can see the house that's been built under them for scale. Don't they just look like giant miniature Christmas trees?

We finished up around 11:30 last night and I just bailed out of here, didn't even finish my journal entry (I just went back and at least finished the sentence I was typing). Everyone was amazed when I showed up today at 9, they figured it would be out until later this morning. Krista had to leave at 7 so I was up at 6 as usual (after reading until 12:45am). I had breakfast, did laundry, hung a picture in the living room and watched a few minutes of TV (apparently people are killing each other in the middle east... this is news still?).

I wanted to mention the food in the new cafeteria. It's awesome. At the pasta bar they take your selection of mushrooms, peppers, shrimp, scallops, chicken, etc and cook it right in front of you in a pan with the sauce of your choice then put it over three types of pasta. A huge bowl of this with a cookie and bread/roll thingy and beverage was $1 (with the subsidy). Amazing!

It's late, why am I still at work? Well, Netapp was in today at 11am doing some stroking exercise where they had the 'top filer team' from yahoo! in to meet us and say that they'll be working for yahoo! and now us too. As the meeting wrapped up, netapp4 blew chunks. Not in a nice way either, it took several disks with it. After 5+ hours of debug, they figured out what happened and started rebuilding. We have one volume left that just finished it's rebuild and now has to be WAFL_check'ed (fancy fsck) which will take about two hours (it's a 1TB volume). So 12+ hours of downtime on the day they show up to tell us how wonderful things will be going forward. The irony is just funny. Hey, at least I have something for my status report on Friday.

Also today I went over to Hitachi to check on the physical size of the 9960 and to see if the doors will open when up against our little raised partition we use to keep people from stepping on wires. It won't, the doors are too low and we can't run without the doors like we do on the E6800 class stuff. Oops. Fortunately we can sorta lift the doors off the hinges after you open them about 2". Since the Hitachi guys will have to open the doors and not us (we're not allowed to swap the drives in these units) it doesn't bother me too much.

My great-aunt died yesterday and dad wants me to go to the funeral which is scheduled for some time this week. When I die I want them to cremate me so they can hold the funeral later, if at all. Priority should go to the living as once you're dead, you're dead. It's not like you care if it takes a few extra days to bury you. On a positive note, I think I'll ride to Mariposa

Crap, I just realized I forgot my kenpo bag AND I'm getting my haircut on Wednesday so I won't be going to that class either. Double crap. I didn't want to miss class today. Stupid, stupid, stupid. I even washed everything last night and had it packed and ready to go.

The networking guys all have $3300 21" flat panel displays now. Why exactly do they get all the cool stuff? I could use a nifty display. Jimmy the network Skippy just bought a 2002 M3 too (picked it up yesterday). And people say I bought too many cars.

Working late from home. Now I see why the storage situation sucks, I'm trying to copy files for people and my transfer rate goes from 2mb/sec to .3mb/sec when someone else tries to hit the filer too. These Netapp boxes really are getting overloaded.

I've uploaded one of the only photos I took in Hollister. This is where we parked; pretty exciting eh? I know, I'm stretching for images as of late. I've just not been around interesting stuff to take pictures of.

So while waiting on files, I ran around and took some pictures. Here is a picture of Krista reading/sleeping (notice the book is pretty much sitting on her face at this point), the black sofa (taken in really low light) and the new tires on the Suzuki.

Daylight savings time is just stupid. I'm sure if every computer around wasn't already programmed to adjust for it we would just give up on this outdated notion of messing with the clocks. I don't think anyone knows why we do it anymore.

Yesterday dad and I went dirt bike riding in Hollister. It was a lot more fun than the desert trip, you don't have to give 100% of your attention just to keeping from crashing. You can actually enjoy some of the ride some times. I rode the Suzuki with the bald tires since I didn't get the new ones mounted up in time. After we got back we took the bike to the dealer and got the tires mounted up (and they even washed the bike which was a cool bonus, it had a bunch of mud on it from the ride).

The other big news from yesterday is that we went and got Krista's couch.

It's official, I'm 30. I don't feel any different, I've been feeling tired and old for weeks now so the actual day doesn't really do anything for me.

This has been the worst week I can remember in a long ass time. Everything seems to be falling apart at the same time. At the executive off-site drunken fest-o-fun they said that IT's main focus right now should be the back-end storage problem that is causing our tape-out schedule to be all screwed up. That's my project. Our VP knew nothing about it as he's totally focused (as always) on SAP and the web weenies. The web guys have like 20 people now and are hiring more. SAP is up to 8 and hiring more (plus 10 or so contractors at $300/hr). At the all hands meeting I talked for 4 minutes, the web guys for about an hour and they had a demo of the new internal web stuff; now with nifty fonts and colors that you can customize yourself! wow! meanwhile back in trying to make chips land I've got one good employee, one I am in the process of firing and one overworked contractor. Hmm... something is really wrong here but I can't figure out what. #1 department focus, 3 people. #2 focus, 38 people.

I really should have been journaling more this week as so many things have been going on but I've been swamped. Every minute of every day is filled with problems, meetings, meetings about meetings, etc. Netapp once again has gone over my head (and my boss) and started telling the VP stories. He's clueless as to what's going on so he just believes whatever they say even though engineering and my team are telling him differently. Good thing he doesn't actually make any decisions for us! :)

My 30th birthday is this Friday and I don't have any plans so far... well, no scratch that I do have plans. Dinner with my parents on Friday and the shooting event on Saturday. Dad wants to go riding on Sunday. So much for a relaxing weekend. Truth be told I don't actually want to go to the shooting event. I'm sorta shot out right now.

My request to take June off was denied. I'm going to make them start buying my PTO back if they're not going to let me take it.