Great class today. It was a long drive from Alameda down to 237 then back up 101 (avoiding the clogged bridges) but it was nice to spend the extra night with the woman last night vs. staying at home like I usually do on the night before class. The class was good because we (the instructor and I, not Kristen) had an entire real dialog. It doesn't sound like much, but in English it would have been:

Me: morning
Her: good morning Kelly. You rode your motorcycle today.
Me: yes. It's very warm today and good for riding.
Her: did you come from Milpitas?
Me: no, this morning I came from Alameda.
Her: really? How long did it take?
Me: I don't know. What time is it?
Her: 7:45am
Me: well then, it took one and a half hours.
Her: that's a long trip. Did you do your homework?
Me: yes, I have it.

I know it looks lame and simple, but it wasn't scripted and I didn't have to think it in English and then translate, it just sorta came out. It's a big step forward.

The other oddity is that I've seen 2 accidents in the last 2 days. Not just the aftermath (I did see a 5 car pile-up on 880 south but it had happened long before I drove by going north) but the actual crash complete with sickening crunch. In Chinatown in Oakland right before the turn into the tube (tunnel) going to Alameda I was waiting at a light and watched some bozo just randomly stop about 50' in front of the tunnel, like he suddenly didn't want to go in. The guy behind him smacked into him and the 3rd guy piled into the 2nd. My light turned green and I just drove around them and into the tube. There wasn't anything in front of the first guy. Maybe he's afraid of tunnels. The next wreck was on 880 south today. Traffic in the fast lane stopped and a guy in a blue pickup locked up his breaks and slammed into the featureless sedan in front of him (I didn't get a chance to look). I zipped through the nasty cloud of tire smoke back into the car pool lane (I was going around a poky guy in the carpool lane which was why I was in the fast lane to begin with) and avoided the whole thing. A little bit of excitement to start the day and make sure I was awake.

The bad news is that Kristen has some 'women problems' and has to go to the doc again and get some nasty procedure done. It sounds like they heat up a wire and scrape some cells off the inside of her plumbing. It's nasty, but it's necessary to prevent some sort of cancer(!). I guess that's why girlies have to go to the crotch doc every year to catch these sorts of things.

Just to prove my Fanta theory that US based Fanta is a totally different color and flavor, I submit the following. US on the left, German on the right:

I got up today thinking I would ride to work. While suiting up in the garage, I realized that it's just to damn hot to ride so I drove. It's not so bad if you don't have to have real clothes on under your riding gear, even my summer suit isn't so bad when you just have shorts and a t-shirt on underneath, but it sucks when you have to not be stinky and whatnot when you reach your destination.

We fired Terry officially yesterday. He didn't take it well, he's told off the Taos people and called me a dozen times as well as other people on the team (even though he's been instructed not to). Not sure if he'll try to go postal or not. I don't think so but you never know. I've got my fighting stick right here next to me in my cube in case he shows up. Of course if he's blazing away with a 12 gauge the stick won't work but maybe he'll show up unprepared and we'll get lucky.

My 1-on-1 with Ed went just fine. It was 2.5 hours long and I really had to pee by the end of it but otherwise there weren't any real surprises.

The big news of the day though is that I finally, finally, finally did something with my 401(k). Two years ago, or maybe 3, we changed providers and unless you told them what to do they put all your contributions in a money market account. I sent a copy of the fund info up to the Bernstein people and they looked them over and suggested what mix I should do. I logged into the site and rebalanced it away. Now watch the market crash. :)

OK, I lied. I did go for a ride on Saturday. I still went by the dealership and picked up chrome stuff ($21 for two tubes, one to remove the blue haze and dingy stuff and one to actually polish/protect the pipe) but only after making a trip up Hwy 9. It was a great day out and all the cops (3 cruisers and 2 bikes) were on Hwy 35 so I didn't see anyone. I ran into Milan, our old HP sales rep. He's a total knee-dragger squid type, but is in his 50s. Guess age doesn't slow some guys down.

Saturday night we went to the city and had dinner with some of Kristen's friends who were pretty damn cool people. She seems to have a lot of cool friends. I need some local friends and I'm not sure how to go about it. A lot of hers are old college buddies and since she went to college here it's easy. Plus she gets out of work at 4pm and has more time for socializing. Damn, who gets out of work at 4pm?

Sunday was mostly just laying around reading (finished the Da Vinci Code) while the woman watched her race. We did walk to breakfast (some popular waffle house) but that didn't turn out so well as she got violently ill as soon as we got back to the house and puked up those popular waffles. Oops. I felt sorta crappy and ended up taking a 2 hour nap but kept my food down.

I have so many documents to write at work, I really should get on it. I also want to update my resume, just to keep it current. I've got a last minute 1-on-1 with Ed tomorrow. He's leaving on vacation for a few days and wanted to meet before hand. Shouldn't be anything too traumatic.

Oh, and speaking of vacation, we picked Hawaii as the destination in June. Not the big island itself, but Kauai, or whatever the last one is. It's the most lush and least yuppie while still having food and water available. We've got quad-runner tours picked and those 'zip line' thing (where you go through the rain forest canopy sliding on a big ass wire). Should be fun. 6 days and only two of them with official activities. The rest of the time will be spent lying around and/or doing any impromptu stuff that catches our eye.

We're starting to get resumes for the IT positions in India. Man these people have weak, weak skills. They've all got MCSE and CCIE and all that crap but no one has touched any real hardware, written any real code, worked for any real companies. I guess they're just a pool of fresh college grads.

I'm watching some cheesy Dirty Harry movie on TNT and it's kinda cool to see SF in the 60s (I'm guessing it's the 60s)? He was getting chased by a motorcycle cop and I'm like come on, just run him over, he's on a bike! Eventually he does but it took him a while. They're all using revolvers and this one cop looks like Tackelberry. Whoa, they just showed a guy reloading his revolver. And man their flashlight technology sucked. I can't see anything in this movie.

I got off early yesterday since I was off-site at Taos (working on firing that contractor unfortunately) and I managed to get the Saab washed and the trim detailed before the woman showed up for dinner. This morning I was going to go for a ride (it's a wonderful day out) but instead I'm going to go get some polish to take the oxidation off the pipes on the BMW and take the shotgun over to the range to get it worked on.

Ed suggested I be the one that goes to Hawaii to do the data migration from the filer at iReady (the company we just bought, it's officially announced an yahoo! so I can say it now). While a free trip to Hawaii would be fun, I'm going to let Rod go in my place. He's the filer guy so the perk should be his. I could of course take it, I'm the boss, but what the hell, I'll go to Hawaii with the woman in a few months anyway so what's the worry. I don't feel like traveling by myself just now.

I realize I'm behind the times, but I just learned all the various ways you can tunnel crap around using ssh. I knew about the X-windows forwarding but I didn't know about the ability to forward any random port to any random other port on either end of the tunnel. Seriously bad ju-ju for the security guys since apparently a lot of engineers are doing this as they won't offer a non-windows only VPN solution. Can't watch was people do on their own. Unless you block/proxy every freaking port you can't really stop it either.

Yesterday was very, very bad here at work. Like me flipping off the handle and saying 'fuck you' a number of times and actually getting up and leaving when my boss said "if you don't like the way you're being treated why don't you just leave?". I've apologized to the innocents that got caught in the middle of the fray, but their very PC managers who are so easily upset and oh so ready to run to HR are causing me some trouble. My boss is avoiding me pretty well right now, not sure what to make of that other than it's nice to have a few moments to play with ssh. :)

I've not setup my linux box in my cube yet, it's just an extra noisy box. I'm using exceed and just pulling all my xterms and apps off one of the sunfires, they're not doing too much at the moment anyway. I did replace the power supply in my desktop to quiet it down (the old fan was going) and I found some memory lying around so I'm at 512mb now (up from 256) and I think that's helping a bit too. Some day I'll get a new PC and migrate off this ancient win98 box with the oh-so-loud IBM SCSI drive.

My new shoes were constantly squeaking. The comfy 3rd party inserts were causing a lot of noise so I used the same trick we used to use on rocking chairs at the furniture store. You use a bar of soap and rub it on the surfaces that are squeaking and poof, no more squeak. It worked well on the shoes too. I have no idea how long that will last.

My apathy is creeping into my staff meetings now, they know I don't really have it in me anymore. I've got to get more involved, but can't bring myself to do it just yet. :(

I just set my exceed to be full screen X and have to run tvtwm. My god, it's just like 1992 all over again. I still have my full set of OSU X config files in my home directory...

I made it home just in time. It rained lightly all the way down from Alameda but as soon as I got into the garage the sky opened up and it dumped like crazy. Whew.

Saturday was the psycho review class and I think it went pretty well. I seemed to remember how to shoot after a while and we got to do new stuff in the afternoon. Some move/shoot stuff, team tactics, etc. I got paired up with this 70 year old dude using a wheel gun, but he was pretty good so we did OK. The best part was that I may have made some friends. I traded numbers with Eric and his wife Erica, they're motorcycle people (done several Edelweiss tours) and obviously shooters. They also live in Alameda. Interesting.

Today Kristen and I lounged around and eventually made it to see Kill Bill, Vol 2 in Oakland. The seats were crappy and it killed my back but otherwise it wasn't too bad.

Not into typing just now so I'll put up a few images, those that survived the camera. Sigh. (As an aside, the camera seems to work with the other brand of memory now). A picture of Seattle BMW (the sign anyway), Kristen and I in Seattle, the RT odometer at 9999 miles, and a strange electronic widget that was by the hose outlet (guessing it came from the cable box?).

My instructor brought me 2 bottles of Fanta! Unfortunately one of her kids drank one of them before she could bring them to me. Bummer. So much for drinking one and saving one. I can tell it's different than the US stuff, it looks so sickly pale orange vs. the bright neon orange of the US version. I'll have to save it for a special occasion.

Yesterday was an all day "leadership and team building" seminar. Ed, myself, Dennis and Tom went. It wasn't the worst seminar I had been too, and at least the tables weren't like the typical convention setups where you can't pull the chair in and you always bash your knees on some sort of cross brace. We got done at 4pm and I was home by 5pm and headed up to Alameda.

I got to meet Divina (sp?) who is another of Kristen's friends. She seems to have an endless supply of them. I apparently passed the test, the grilling was pretty minor.

This morning I was about an hour late to work. We lounged in bed a lot and we fooled around for a few hours and then I had a nice leisurely ride south. I blew off the India project meeting, I just didn't care to sit through another one. Ed filled me in, we weren't needed at all. They mostly talked about the buildings they had picked (which for some reason cost more per sq. ft. than out newest building here) and then spent time on export controls. Glad I didn't leave early for that.

I must say that I'm really starting to take a liking to this girl. Missing work to hang out? Crazy.

I must break the TV circle of Evil. I turn it on just to watch "during dinner" and end up sitting there until after 8pm watching crap. I didn't do that tonight and I ate (salisbury steak budget gourmet, yum!) and read some German and then started on my bills and filing and have things paid and am half done with the Visa stuff input into Quicken. I'll get more done if I just leave the TV off, amazing. Why did it take so long to figure that out?

I'm always bitching I don't study any German, mostly because I don't. So, I'm going to start small. Each day I'll learn 1 word. Yes, just 1. Seems lame but in a year I'll know 365 words and in two years I'll know 730. That's a lot compared to just bitching about it and doing nothing. Tonight I'm actually working on 6, I want to know the dative-only verbs. Let's see if I can do it from memory: helfen, gehören, gefallen, antworten, glauben... crap. I'll cheat and look it up, the last is the easiest: danken. Ha, I even spelled them right!

I put another 128mb of RAM into the laptop and it's given it new life. It's easily twice as fast as it was before (with only 128mb) and it's not bashing on the disk continuously. I can play movie clips without it freaking out if I try to resize during the operation and coming in/out of suspend seems faster too. Overall it's worth the $15 or whatever work had to pay for this memory stick. Cheap bastards wouldn't get me the $50 512mb stick but whatever, I'll take this and be happy.

My back is doing much better, it's just sore now instead of in pain. I think it's just my muscles getting retrained on how to sit and stand. I feel like I'll be ready to go to the gym again starting on Wednesday. I would go Monday perhaps but I've got that leadership/management class all day so I won't get to go to the gym per my normal schedule. The extra rest is good though, mom wanted me to wait a few days before starting a light routine again. She's going to give me some exercises tonight to help strengthen my "core" so this won't happen again. Good. It's handy having a PT in the family.

Today we went for a ride, the Mt. Hamilton to Mines road route up to Livermore. Some of the guys from work went... man are they slow. Plus the stupid Ducati overheated on the ride up the mountain and it took us about 45 minutes to get it cooled down, opened up, the radiator refilled and the coolant cleaned off the tires and fairing and whatnot. They were riding very slowly as well so dad and I ended up sitting around waiting for them a few times. The whole ride was only 130 miles but too 4.5 hours.... way too long! Dad's bike turned over 5000 miles and mine turned over 10000 today. When I got into the garage on Friday my bike was at 9999; I took a picture. We'll have to see if the picture is still there, the new camera still isn't working. Not sure what I can do about that since it's already been sent in for service once. (I know the answer is to send it in again).

Last night Rod, Jonathan, Leianne, Kristen and myself went out. Leianne joined us later after dinner. We went to Nola's and I got the skirt steak which was awesome. Sometimes it's worth going out.

Speaking of going out, we're doing it again tonight. Kristen invited my parents up to go to dinner at some German restaurant. I'll be leaving here in a little bit, she wants me there at her place before my parents show up. She's really freaking out and I'm not sure why. I know they're "MY PARENTS" but she's met them before and it's not really a big deal. Who knows, maybe it's more scary for girls.

I just noticed that our newest team member, Philip Ong, has the long of "pong". That's funny.

It suddenly just got quiet. I think the AC just shut down. Gotta go check... Yep, there are two skippies outside working on the unit. They really should warn us when they're going to drop the AC, that's kinda important to know so we don't panic.

My back was totally screwed up yesterday. I couldn't workout very well. I could do bench (bumped my rep weight up another 5 lbs, happy about that) but I couldn't sit up after doing bench. It was quite embarrassing. I had to lie down to put my socks on, had trouble getting up from the toilet, etc. I'm going over to my parents tonight to have mom do her therapy thing on it and see if I just pulled a muscle or if I'm throwing a disk or whatever. I'm getting old and it sucks. What's kinda funny is that I was unable to really sit in the car, it was too strange to bend/twist to get in so I ended up riding the bike. I can bend side to side, but not front to back. Very odd. It's better today but I still need to rest and heal. Weak human body!

Yesterday on my ride up to Alameda, I got the crap scared out of me when a CHP dude (on an RT-P) pulled up next to me and yelled "SLOW DOWN!" looking very angry all the while. I nodded and did so and he just rode off, didn't pull me over or ticket me or anything. Guess it was my lucky day. I know I've been pushing it a bit on the rides up there (saving some serious time at 90mph) but it's only a matter of time. I'll slow it up for a bit. What I really need is 11-99 license plate frames for the bike. I don't think they make 'em though or dad would have scored some by now.

BTW, Microsoft Map Point kicks serious ass. I was playing with it while Don was here making some maps out to Arizona (thinking of riding instead of flying when I go back with Kristen in May). You can pick the "fun" roads and skip the interstates and everything. I'll have to plan some rides this summer. I won't go to AZ on the bike this time though, the passes are still closed mid-May. I wanted to ride out through Yosemite but it's pass is closed until June 1 usually (sometimes until July!). Having the opening dates for the last 20 years on-line is pretty cool.

Our VP just went and put a deposit down on one of the new 6-series BMW convertibles. Hideous?

My linux box didn't auto-update for daylight savings time. I'm not sure why they would have other than NTP should have set them.... might help if I had NTP running too I suppose... Doh.

There, a few minutes of config work and now it's up and running. We'll see if it works as it should.... 5 minutes later and the clock is going nuts. Hopefully it will stabilize.

Survived the Seattle trip as well as the birthday dinner with everyone at Chevy's. Sue ended up bringing one of her guys with which was good, I wanted to meet at least one of them to test the quality of who she is dating. I'm impressed, the guy did really well being at a dinner where he didn't know anyone. We finished dinner around 8:30 and then disbanded. I was asleep by 9:30, Kristen took off shortly after we got back to my place. The plane was late getting us there so we didn't get to go home first to pick up her car, nor freshen up or anything so I'm sure that like me she wanted to get home fast and get unpacked and settled.

I ordered the tickets for the George Carlin show on Sept 23rd. They were almost sold out and only went on sale yesterday. That's nuts, they must not release all the seats at once or maybe Ticket-asster is holding some back. I let Steve rant and rave over the $30 worth of extra fees that ticket-asster adds on there so I won't go over it again. Still though, someone needs to find a way to boycott or otherwise knock this monopoly off the top of the hill. We think MSFT is bad? Ha, at least you have a choice in OS. There is no choice if you want to get tickets for stuff... is there? Not that I've found so far.

Tonight the woman is coming down to my place instead of me going up to here place (we usually spend Monday and Wednesday nights together since I can ride down to work in the AM and not have to go to the gym). She's going to see if it's even possible to go north on 880 in the morning. I'm going to guess the answer is NO but she wants to try it and says that since it's my birthday she 'owes' it to me. Humph, sounds like a lame excuse but I would like to know if it's possible. Who knows, maybe she can come down here every so often.

Dad picked up my camera from the repair shop (were they ever going to call me) and I've got it back. So far taking random shots around the office it's not corrupted anything. That's something. I'll take it to Seattle over the weekend and give it a real workout. Glad to have it back, it's so cool compared to my old crusty (but reliable!) Nikon.

Also on the upgrade path today I upgraded my blackberry. I no longer have the little AA battery powered one but now have the big ass one with the built in battery. It charges off of USB and they gave me a home charger as well so I won't get caught without power very often. It's 2x the size of my old one though and according to the desktop guy that installed it people want them bigger. WTF, it's a PDA not a damn laptop. Is all of the USA obsessed with "bigger is better"still? Dumb asses.