I'm so tired. Work has been going like 1000 miles per hour with stuff happening all over the place, people being moved into my group, plans being made for the new data center, etc, etc. I can't believe it's only Wednesday, I feel like I've been running hard for a whole week now. Whew.

Tonight I've got to finish up my homework for tomorrow. Not looking forward to class I can tell you that much. It's so harsh! Ugh.

Dennis should be at the track today with the BMW group if I read his journal right. That's pretty cool, he'll be actually using his yuppie mobile to it's fullest extent. We'll see if he wants to change tires when he returns from the track. :)

I took the Montero over to the shop again so they can finish up the hitch thingy. It's been totally redesigned to my specifications and looks sweet. They even like it better than their design. It's made of lighter tubing and doesn't have the large "deck" on it and weighs about 100 lbs less. I'll take some pics tomorrow when I pick it up. I also convinced dad to let me take his old fart car instead of the truck so he's driving a company car for the next day and I've got the Mercedes. It fits in the parking garage at work and will fit in my garage at home. Much nicer than the truck.

I blew through the rest of my homework. It was some translation stuff which I normally hate but since I did a bunch of it in Germany it was easy. I can actually say "I would like some fruit" and crap like that without looking it up. Much. I still can't spell in any language so I have to look up the nouns a lot. Still, it seemed way easy.

Now I'm thinking of going for a walk and then to bed early (like 10pm) so I can get up and go to the gym in the morning. Thursday isn't normally a gym day but we're taking Friday afternoon off and we'll probably go to the driving range (did I mention that Netapp signed us up for some golf lessons?). NVDA is having a stupid 'beach party' in the parking lot. Bring the kids and let them run around and scream, etc, so I told Ed that those of us without kids shouldn't be penalized and should just get to leave. He didn't care. Turns out he took the whole day off. Gotta like that.

Busy day today. There were three vendors in today (Cyclades, Perforce and Netapp) and at 4:30 I had to go over to Netapp to give a talk on future requirements (sorta like the EMC thing). There were a couple of Netapp's high level engineers and they really seemed to get it when I told them what we wanted. They want to now meet with the whole team to get more input. Very cool, my guys can drive them in the right direction.

I've been teasing Valerie heavily via email and she seems to be taking it well. The innuendo is running fast and furious as well. She still can't find a dress for the wedding and I suggested she get something like this, although I thought it might be cold. She agreed. I said that although it wouldn't work then for the wedding I could think of a couple of other uses for it. All fun innocent non-detail filled chat. She then said "I imagine you see me wearing that while we're getting ready for bed". Whoa. That's cool. Sure, I was thinking it but didn't expect her to say it. That seems just too obvious. :) This can't last, I gotta enjoy it while I can.

In case anyone was wondering, it takes 1.5 hours to do a reasonable detail job on the RT. Wash, dry, wax, plastic cleaner, etc.

Yesterday was busy after the last update. Joe's BBQ was actually fun (pictures of his house are uploading now, see the main page). I went swimming (the only person over 10 years old to touch the pool, fortunately I was out before the kids showed up), had some egg rolls and orange soda and was generally social. No one else from my group showed up which was not a surprise. At 4:15pm I left headed for Discovery Bay. Yahoo! maps shows it at 1 hour 43 min for the route. I did it in 1 hour 17 minutes. There is a desolate wasteland outside Livermore you have to go through. To generate revenue they've lowered the speed limit to 50 and made the whole thing a double-fine and mostly a no-passing zone. I made 23 very illegal double-yellow passes and was running at 2x the posted limit on a couple occasions. No cops anywhere obviously or I would have found them. The average soccer mom was doing 75-80 as it was so I didn't stand out that much. The party itself wasn't that bad. It was all boat people but the ones at our table weren't bad. One couple owned tanning salons (big business out there which I don't get since most people just lounge around outside as a hobby anyway) and just moved to a 'not too big' house on the water (5000 sq. ft.). The other couple owned those Mailboxes Etc type stores (but not that brand, it was like "the UPS Store" or something). They all worked at various stores, etc, and were in their early 40s. They'll all be retired by 50 easy at this rate. I had a few adult beverages and danced a little and then crashed hard. Lots of activity in the heat really took it out of me.

Dad is coming over, we're going to go for a little ride and then I'll go to the parents house for ribs tonight. Bills will have to wait until tonight.

The ride was short, only 45 or so miles. It was really hot and out there was a lot of traffic. We rode out 237 up into the hills which was nice, but it was still hot so we came home. The ribs were good and I got out of there at a reasonable time so I could come pay bills. However, I spent about 1.5 hours on the phone with Valerie chatting away so it's now 9:30pm and I have a pile of bills to pay that are due tomorrow. That sucks. Good thing I got enough sleep last night. She did say tonight that she thought I was cute. Gotta like that.

I went to the BMW dealer today and picked up my free t-shirt (using the coupon they gave us at the BMW trailer at the AMA race) and then went to the consignment lot and lowered the price of the truck and changed it over to dad's number. He can talk to morons on the phone for a while now.

I've got just over an hour before I need to head down to Joe (our VPs) BBQ and then at 4pm I'm headed back up to Leianne's place for the BBQ at the harbor there. She had a date to this thing and the tickets were $130 and he bailed on her at the last minute. His reason? Oh, he got pulled into a last minute softball game. How lame is that? So I'm going to go up there and be a nice guy and go with. Plus it's at the harbor so there is a good chance there will be some bikini clad hotties for me to check out. :)

I'm listening to Paul Oakenfold right now (lots of trance music). It's pretty cool to work to, keeps you moving but doesn't clutter your mind with words so you can think of other things.

I think I found the resort that we're staying at in Norway. It is 'rustic' just as Audi said it would be. Anyway, check it out at http://www.aurlandsdalen.com/.

I put my anti-hacker stuff back in place but instead of a 1-minute update cycle it's running on a 10 minute cycle. There have been 2600+ IPs that have attacked pong in the last few months. Don't the script kiddies have anything better to do?

Can't believe it's Friday already. This week has flown by as I've been so busy at work. Not the can't get anything done mired down in crap busy but the getting stuff done kicking ass and taking names sort of busy. Work was actually fun this week.

So Jill, the game over girl as mentioned before, and I went out last night. The kids thing hasn't been resolved obviously so why is she still interested? Maybe I'm just a summer fling? That works for me. Anyway, we saw Bad Boys II because Tomb Raider wasn't out yet. It was a really violent movie which was expected but the level of graphic detail was way too high. People's heads blowing up, charred torsos getting ripped apart by mines, etc, etc. I'm actually getting tired of these sorts of movies. Yea, some of it was cool but most of it was just lame and they shoot way too much. How many times can you see a random building blow up? Anyway, the evening wasn't about the movie. After the movie we sat in the car for a few hours chatting and around 2:30am we went our separate ways after a few kisses and making plans for next Friday.

Today (this morning) she hit me with an IM thingy and we chatted for a bit. I suggested she come down for lunch (she had the day off, her parents are coming into town for the weekend) and she did. That was cool and she told me where I could find a picture of her on-line. She hates it, but it mostly looks like her. We kissed a couple of times and I went back to work. Later, around 5:30pm, she called on her way back from her parent's hotel to change for dinner, just to say she was thinking of me. Sounds strange. It's like she's falling for me, but she knows I'm not into kids. What's up?

Horrible dreams. Not really nightmares just tons of disjointed images thrown into a pile. War protests, castles, vampires, running away from some unknown (but visible) bad-guy troops, learning where the captives are kept, breaking through protest lines (I was supposed to be really good at it due to a lack of compassion) and in the end the reoccurring dream about my teeth coming loose. I think that one is because I grind my teeth sometimes and it translates into the dream. The lack of compassion is easy to explain, the accounting girls told me that today because I don't like dogs (they tried to get me to admit that some picture of a fat puppy was cute). There is way more to the dreams but they're fading fast and that's good, I'm not sure I want to remember this set. Time to go to the gym.

Talked to Valerie last night. She's bought her tickets to Norway, she's officially coming along for the ride. That's pretty cool. She's pretty sure that she is crazy for doing this and I agree but really what's the worst that can happen? We don't get along? I doubt it, I can mostly get along with anyone for a few days especially if there is the distraction of a lot of activity going on (like the wedding). And just for Vareck, I had her send me a photo. It's not the best (being from the Halloween party last year) but it's something. Here ya go, she's the one on the left in the leotard thingy. Is she a cat? Who knows.

I also spent a bunch of time talking to Jill, the chicky from the T46 event the other night. We were getting along really well, maybe too well, and then the issue of kids came up. Game over man, game over. I went over my objection list to kids and she wasn't sympathetic at all. She agrees that she doesn't know what the value of kids is either but she wants to have them. That's a big official whatever. Now the whole going to the movies thing on Thursday seems a little moot. I've already failed the first round interview, why bother coming back to pick up the free t-shirt? Well, maybe she has friends. It's all about networking at this point.

Damn, the desert was hot. It was 102 at one point, probably worse than that downtown Reno stuck in traffic. Saturday morning we rode out Hwy 108 and around then up 395 and eventually got to Reno. There was some bowling thing going on so all the large hotels were full. I got us a room at the crap motel across the street which was fortunate so we could leave the bikes parked in the nice parking garage at the Silver Legacy. We had dinner at the the buffet at Haharah's (lots of crab and fruit) and then dad and Rod gambled. Rod lost $60 playing roulette, dad won $1.50 playing video poker and I found $1 lying on the ground. So, I came out in 2nd place without actually gambling. Nifty. Dad went to bed and Rod and I wandered around and eventually ended up at some lounge in the casino. There was live music and somehow we got drug into a conga line with a bachlorette party. It was odd. Then somehow we ended up over the change booth and I had to figure out how to talk to the cute girl that worked there. She was in the back doing employee change so I couldn't just wander over and talk. I came up with a plan. I talked to a young female security guard on the floor and told her I wanted to talk to the change booth girl (she knew her, her name was Marta, she's from Poland). She went over on my behalf and told her and got her to come to the edge of the booth where I could talk to her. She was flattered that I went through all the trouble but she has a boyfriend, blah, blah. That was fine, I just wanted to talk. I tried to get a picture but the booth guard had a fit yelling "NO PICTURES!". Damn. Rod can vouch for my story though and confirm that she was cute. Sure, anyone can hit on a chick, I have to hit on the hardened targets.

Friday night I went to the scene with Jo and Sue and friends. It was pretty good (the theater part) and dinner on the roof terrace of the theater building was excellent. I'll definitely go to the next one.

Hmm... my writing isn't flowing right now. Probably because it's 83 degrees in the house. I might have to turn on the AC.

I think the AC in the house is out, or the heat pump or whatever. I've not used it since... like last year or something? I honestly don't remember. Anyway, it didn't seem to be getting very cold. I don't even know if the pump was running. I'll debug later, for now I'll just open the windows and sweat.

I forgot to mention earlier that George Carlin was playing at the hotel we were parked at. The show was sold out though. Bummer.

Here is the GS picture I took last September and the RT picture I took today. I remembered the sign but not exactly how the bike was sitting. Close though.

I got my hair cut at the local Supercuts. It's probably as good as I could have expected, she didn't really speak English and I don't speak any Korean so not a whole lot of directions were going back and forth. She was fast though, took like 10 minutes to buzz it down to nothing. I noticed that she made it symmetric. I've had my hair parted to (my) right forever and now it doesn't part at all (there is insufficient hair to part). New look.

Class yesterday was so bad that I nearly wept. I can't keep up with these guys. They seem to know everything already and it's like I'm a zillion years behind. I hate being the dumb guy in the class! Argh!

I'm also having some trouble driving the Battlestar around. I've got to use dad's truck as the Montero is at the welding shop getting the A-Team treatment done to it. They're fab-ing up a custom assembly that will allow me to carry the Suzuki on the back of the Montero. It's this 3-hitch setup off the main frame (the montero is body-on-frame like any real SUV should be) and it's going to be cool when it's done.

Rod is freaking out about the ride this weekend. The weather forecast for Reno shows temps in the high 90s (!) and thunderstorms. It will be just like Colorado I'm guessing, it rains for like 3 minutes and then dries out again with lots of noise and lighting in the middle. His bike has never seen rain and he doesn't want to get it wet. Like me he doesn't wash the R1 but instead uses the Honda spray cleaner/polish on it. The BMW I use soap and water on and then wax... it's not as flashy as the R1 and gets too many bugs on it not to give it a real cleaning once and again.

Lots of dreams this morning and I had wish I had written them down. Here is what I was able to commit to short term memory. Dream #1 was that I was at home in Medford (although the house was slightly altered) and there were some people around that I didn't know. I was taking pictures of things around the house. Dad suddenly noticed that the stereo was gone and when we looked around there were lots of other things missing. I looked at the front door (which wasn't the correct door for the house) and found that someone had cut holes in the frame of the door (and some in the glass) and must have used a hanger or some such to reach in and flip open the deadbolt. I wanted to take pictures but every time I ran into the back room I came back with the wrong camera, none of them were mine. After the 3-4 time I got my camera and took a picture but it came out blurry, as did all the other ones I took of the holes in the door. Dream #2 was that I was riding with Rob and Jeff (from BSDi) up a twisty mountain road in the rain. We stopped at a house where there were two women and a small kid. The kid had a mini sport bike (like those 50cc things they had at the track) that was in pieces and I (or I think I) was supposed to fix it. It got very cold in the room we were standing in and then I woke up.

Vareck was going on about how cool Kenny's life was (and it does seem that he's got things together although I believe there is some work strife) and it got me to thinking what was wrong with my life. Then at the gym today I was thinking of who I would like to swap places with and the answer was always no one. Sure, it would be fun to have the money some other people have, but as for the rest of their life I don't think I would want it. Or I would try to change their life back into mine and it just wouldn't work right. I'm pretty happy with myself and where I'm at and don't see what I could change right now other than the obvious stuff that I'm too lazy to do anything about (like my hair loss).

I dropped the Montero off this morning at 9am at at 1:30pm they called and said it was done. $201.46 later I have new rear inner axle seals and no more leak. Cool. Now I just need to get the transfer case leak fixed and I'm set. That one I'll try to find myself and see if I can hack/patch it from the outside without dropping the case. That's a lot of work and I'm just not up for it now. I want to finish paying off the Germany trip before I spend and more bucks on fixing up the Montero.

And I still haven't got a haircut yet and I'm going to a T46 dinner tonight so I won't get to either. Tomorrow is class, Friday is the theater, the ride is Saturday/Sunday.... looks like Sunday afternoon at the mall once I return will be the ticket.

Dinner tonight was awesome! If it was a weekend I'm sure we would all be out doing something right now but it's Wednesday and everyone had to be to work tomorrow. Good food, fun conversation, cute women, what more could you want?

Today we visited one of the smaller Microsoft data centers. It was quite a nice setup using APC cabinets.... much nicer than the Cisco data center of last week and the Sun data center of this afternoon. Sun's data center looked like our old Monroe street stuff and they had just moved in. Old style, very crappy looking. They also had a lot of 1997 equipment in there (old filers with 4gb disks, Sun 690MPs, etc).

Tonight after work I rode down to SJC and had dinner with Jo (crappy little Japanese place which I rather liked the simplicity of) and then did my part for the arts in getting her new web server box to talk on the net. I think it's official, I don't know how to use the route command on Linux. Every time I try I end up using some bastard child mix of BSDi and Solaris syntax. Wrong every time. Fortunately the CLI 'setup' util helped me out or I would have had to actually read the man page. Scary.

I updated the oil info for the Montero. It's still using 1 quart per 1000 miles. I guess that's OK, that's what the BMW uses too!

Nothing from Val today. Hmm...

I talked to Val for over an hour tonight and she asked for my flight info. She's going to check on flights tomorrow and maybe, just maybe buy tickets. It will be pretty cool if she goes, there will be someone else around to help me navigate.

Just got back from the AMA Superbike thingy at Laguna Seca. I'm still not a race fan but we got good parking in one of the paved bike lots and we had pit passes so we could wander around. Good work bonding thing. I didn't get many race photos, but I did get to enjoy some shade (too bad my eyes are closed):

Riding home was a lot of work. We had to lane split for 15 or so miles to get out of Salinas (a good place to get out of) which was interesting as there were hundreds of bikes doing it at the same time (we left early to avoid the bulk of the crowd). Once we hit the open road we were doing 90-100mph all the way to San Jose. There was a guy on a 1200LT (big ass BMW) that obviously wasn't coming from the races as he had a rifle slung over his back. It might have been an old Enfield but it was hard to check it out at the speeds were were riding, plus it was really windy so it you had to concentrate 100% on riding.

I swear that couch has some sort of sleeping toxin on it. Every time I try to lie down and read on that damn thing I fall asleep. If it's 10am, 3pm, 7pm, doesn't matter, I end up taking a nap. They're never very restful either.

I must get a haircut this week, it's starting to drive me nuts. Anita is out sick for two months so I have to find someone new to do my hair. I may have to risk super cuts or some crap this week...

Last night I took Sue to see Pirates of the Caribbean which was entertaining. There were a ton of white chicks around in the theater. Maybe the slightly effeminate pirate guy really did something for them? I dunno, but whatever it is I hope it was a trend. The funniest part of the whole evening was when we went to get sushi. I had dressed up on Friday as we were going to Cisco to check out their data center (to get ideas for our new one) and since I didn't have much time after work to change Sue suggested that she get dressed up too rather than have me change. Whatever. So she was wearing a black skirt and nylons and this strange black top (I never noticed before how big her boobs are, I really should scope my fiends more :) and it was rather nice looking. While walking past the Starbucks there at the theater these two 20-something bimbos were totally checking Sue out and making disapproving faces. I don't think they appreciated her look. OK, so maybe it doesn't sound that funny now but for some reason it really struck me last night. Shallow bims, what can you do?

Today I busted ass and spent 4 hours getting the red truck washed, waxed (3 times to get it unoxidized!) and generally ready to sell. I couldn't fit it in the garage very well so I called Rod and had him pick me up from the consignment car lot. It's stupidly expensive to have a vehicle sold there but whatever, it's done. Now I just have to hope it sells in 30 days so I don't have to pay again. Dad supposedly may have had some guy that wanted it but he's always saying that and never produces a buyer. I'm tired of waiting and really tired of having to clean the truck up only to have it sit and get all crusty again.

And not that anyone cares at all, but here are the before and after pictures of my kitchen faucet project. The old was was getting crusty, it was hard to get it to turn on and off. You can go so crazy with that stuff, a faucet can be $500+ and the ones I liked for the bathroom were $850 EACH! Crazy shit man.

I've uploaded the misc crap that's been building up in the camera the last few weeks. Some Suzuki adventures and pictures of dad's new RT. Also, notice all the crapola behind the bikes in this picture vs. the clean garage in this one. Nice eh? Some of that crap went to the dumpster, some went into those cabinets I've had installed for months and sitting empty.

Jo just called and invited me to go move boxes. I declined. I'm not up for moving crapola right now, it's pretty warm out and the truck is effectively gone so I would have to help make a zillion trips in the Montero and her Subaru. Not my idea of fun. I'll stay here and pay bills and shuffle paper. Again, not fun but it needs to be done. I really should get on-line bill pay at some point, stamps are getting expensive as are all these checks (the physical paper).

This morning I had a really strange dream. Vareck and I were going to some sort of gun show and the entrance was right next to a VW performance store. There were signs and parts and stuff in the windows, it looked sorta like a place in Fremont. Inside we were going to buy tickets and I gave Vareck $5 I apparently owed him (and we all know it's a dream now, I wouldn't give him back the money in real life). He bought the tickets which looked like some sort of weird plastic key chain with a string on it. Our names were on them but both of us had some part of our names screwed up. A woman came up and took mine. She was sorta short, brown hair pulled back in a pony tail, white shirt, pink jacket, black pants. She carried it around for a while and I had to sorta chase her around to get it back. I caught her and she licked the ticket and I said something like "that's not very sanitary". She then kissed me and hung it around my neck by the string. I woke up at this point somewhat confused.

Yesterday I invited Valerie to go to Norway with me. She is one of Sue's friends that lives in Boston or some such mythical place back east. We've been trading email for a while and she said that she's thinking of going to Germany because I was just there and enjoyed it and that she has a friend living/working there. I suggested instead that she comes to Norway with me for Audi's wedding. She's thinking it over I guess. She talked to Sue to make sure I wasn't some sort of crazy person. How strange would it be to go to Norway with someone I've met once for about 2 hours? Now that's adventure. I think.

I've got class tonight, then have to go to dinner with our DataRAM vendor guy. He's only in town every so often and he wants to do a thank you sort of thing for our last order. He's a cool guy (and single and close to my age so we can talk about similar stuff) so I don't mind meeting later after my class. Hopefully he can find the restaurant.

Damn, class was hard! There are 4 students in the class and the instructor really makes 'em work.

Dinner with Colin was pretty good. The food only sucked a little and he didn't act too sales droid like.

I got a new cell phone from work today, I was the last guy that hadn't upgraded in the department. I checked voice mail and found that I had 17 messages.... my old phone said zero. Some were several weeks old. Hmm..

Anti-hacker stuff is tricky. With my way-too-aggressive blackhole script I was locking out most everyone from my picture web pages. They were all 'untrusted hosts' so if they didn't respond with a good login fast enough it figured it was a denial or other attack and just nuked 'em. Oops. I'll leave my defenses down for a bit while I let people check out the photos.

I finally figured out the stupid syntax for removing the black hole routes from Linux. It's not what's shown in the man page or the 'usage' output for route. What do you what though, it's free after all. I can now easily unblock people as needed. My dad, Mr. CAPS LOCK can't figure out why the images password I gave him won't work.

I read Dennis' journal (Kenny's seems to be dead) and he's right about Battlestar Galactica and the "what were they thinking?" part. Why did they change some of the key characters to be women? Didn't one of the pilots have a girl friend? Are they lesbians now? Hmm..... lesbians.... :)

Last night I got the notion that I should go see T3. T2 was on TV on Sunday and I watched some of it and that got me into the whole terminator movie. Dennis hasn't seen it yet but I'm curious to see what he thinks of it when he does. T2 might have just overpowered this second sequel. It had some amusing parts but it just seemed like it was trying too hard and not doing a very good job of it. Interesting ending.... I sorta guessed it about 5 minutes before they told us what was going on. Maybe I'm just slow.

Someone is beating the crap out of pong right now trying to hack it. Stupid asses. It's making it hard to type.

Woohoo, journaling once again. I've got a lot to put in here... maybe I'll remember some of it when I sit down tonight to write.