Woke up very late today since I didn't get home until way late (3am or so). I went to Gary's birthday party/festival (with Betsy) and we stayed until midnight. On the way home she fell asleep as did I, and woke up right before I smashed into the white mustang in the right lane. Oops, that would have been a bad thing for sure. I pulled over (after missing the turnoff toward concord by miles) and walked around to wake up. Betsy had to guide me to concord, I had zero idea of where things were. We both made it home OK, but I feel pretty bad about endangering our lives, missing the turnoff, and having her have to put up with the 'festivities' all night. If I'm lucky, she'll talk to me again.

I forced dad to help wash/wax the truck. After two passes with the orbital it looks awesome! We used a cleaner/wax for the first pass, and a really hard polish for the second coat. It looks much better, even Ed noticed it looked better when we left the house this morning (carpool). I should do that to the red rat. We took pictures, mostly for vareck's benefit.

Work sucked more than usual today for some reason. I actually was walking around looking for tums or something to keep my stomach down. Lunch was pork something with peas and carrots. Made some progress on the 'midday' project, hopefully it's a done deal. Spent about $45k on hardware, pissed off a guy from netapp, and played with our German buddies software. I also shot a jawa and got yelled at by the software manager. Stupid jawa. (trivia: did you ever actually see a jawa get shot in any of the Star Wars movies?)

I did manage to salvage one bit of positive stuff out. One of the engineers asked if I was the guy who should be working on the compiler warnings on the NV-large-number-not-announced they were seeing. Technically I think the answer is no, but I said that and that I would be happy to learn and take that on. Heh heh, my big move into engineering? I'll just let myself get sucked into the sim build code base and poof, they won't be able to live without me. First my 'Project Eclipse' changed the way they do sims company wide, now this.

My 'random crap' portfolio is done I think (not to be confused with the professionally selected crap that amex does for me). I've put $3000 of play money into the following CSCO GE BUD PIXR FCX F HD and let it ride. Ameritrade probably hates me, I'm making them credit me for the first few trades since they were supposed to be free but they actually charged me. I tried to get them to extend my free period as well, but no luck there. Bummer. (but let me refer you to sign up so I get more free trades and can annoy them further). I'll probably pick up some more FCX with the scraps I have left in cash... actually maybe not. I'll have to pay to sell these securities so I should leave some cash in there so I can place the sell orders. I hate to have CSCO in there (just because it's in all my 'real' portfolios), but it was a killer buy... and it's carrying me right now since it's up 19% and all my other stuff is up/down 1-2%. And yes, I'm aware what BUD is and yes, I still don't drink. Go figure. The guys in the office think it's funny and keep drawing beer cans on my white board.

First, let me say that I'm a total weenie when it comes to dating. I admit it, I know nothing. Gayla says I just need to relax and enjoy the game. local(Kelly) says I'm clueless (but not helpless). I guess that's something. Someone take a note, I need to give up on dating here real soon before it drives me crazy. I'm just not adequately socially proficient.

For someone who doesn't like taking medicine, I'm sure living on it now. My shoulder hurts so bad I'm using advil just so I can keep using my arm, and using tums to keep my stomach in line during the day at work. I've never had this much undirected stress before. Back at supra I knew exactly which idiot was pissing me off. Here it's just an overall feeling of unhappiness.

Today was the official 3rd day of the new workout style. I've admitted that I'm not going to get any bigger, nor stronger then I was before the accident. My shoulder won't heal and that's all there is too it. This new routine has me spending less time in the gym, but making way better use of the time I am in there. It's more of a station-keeping workout (and endurance) rather than a building workout.

Um, what else. I feel like shit. No, that would be Dennis' line. Whoa, my connections to nVidia just went down, but I can still get to pong (must be coming at it from the front side of the firewall). I can't ping www.nVidia.com, this is looking bad for the T3.

I'll loose the frames soon enough since I've had two whopping complaints about it already. I'll figure something out.

Oh, and just to finish up on a good note, I professed my desire to get out of MIS to Doug today and told him to put a bug in the Eng VPs ear. The shortened workouts at the gym will free up some time to do extra work stuff at night to make myself invaluable to the Eng team as 'the build monkey'. It's not glamorous or anything, but once my paycheck comes from department 510 instead of 410, I think it will be worth it.

Dad called to remind me to pay my quarterly taxes. They're due next week, i better sell some crack or something quick to raise money. Also, I asked him about that coin he has around his neck. Apparently it's from some old Spanish gallion. Back in olden times they used to take solid blocks of silver along to trade. When they got to port, they would shave off pieces and cut them to weight, then stamp them with the official seal and poof, instant cash. Apparently it's authentic. I think I'm going to do a similar thing, but I want a titanium chain and probably a Roman coin. At the party Saturday, apparently I was supposed to meet the friend that was with Anita (the hair chick)... can't recall her name. The grapevine says she wants Anita to give her the appointment right after mine so she can 'bump' into me again next month. intriguing.

There is a spider with a leg-span of 2" crawling along the wall toward the router. It's body is tiny, but it's legs are huge. Whoa, he just fell off the wall and hit the floor about 4' down. I've never seen a spider fall.

I heard on the radio Mission Impossible 2 is a john woo film. Now I must see it. Curse Dennis for making me know who john woo is.

I think I'm going to try contacts again. I have to drive in tomorrow since ed has some fancy dinner thing after work. I've got to take the old Honda tires over to dad's work in the AM; someone wants to buy them. Maybe I can sneak off to the mall or something at lunch or after work and hit one of the one-hour places. Experience says they stock my prescription of contacts, but they key is getting them in my eye. If I do it, I'll hit the sunglasses place and drop some money on some cool shades. :)

We took our official office photos today, the ones they're using on the intranet site. I put chimpy the monkey on my shoulder for the shot and pretty much look like an idiot. Maybe that way no one will want to ask me for help.

The miata club is doing a Mt. Hamilton run Saturday, I should go. I need to get an oil change tho at some point, it's 400 miles overdue. I could drop the truck off after taking the tires over and try to get it done after work, but I really don't want to go to skippy lube. Sunday I'll break out the jack stands after the race.

Oh, and I think I'm starting to agree with Vareck now, CSCO is over valued. They came in and did this song & dance routine for us and it's true, they're loosing market niches to various little companies (extreme and what have you). if the keep that up, it's going to be bad for the stock price. Then again, they're like a $500 billion dollar company so maybe they can get all bloated and slow and still turn profits? I dunno.

I keep cutting people off in the truck, I just forget it's so long and I zip in too soon. Haven't taken the nose off a civic yet, but it's coming I can feel it. I don't like driving it, it's too big and too high off the ground. I can't see why people think the 'command driving position' of SUVs is so great. Ah, but wait, people are stupid, I forget. The truck wasn't a total loss tho, i did take those tires over to the shop and that guy did buy them.

Traffic was bad (and I had to drive myself today), really bad, like 237 was backed up completely to Lawrence and beyond. Rather than sit in traffic for 2+ hours, I stopped at the theater and saw mission improbable 2. Very John Woo. It was an OK film. I liked the dove flying through the fire with the white nimbus around it. Nice good vs. evil touch. There was a preview for "shaft". Looks really bad, with cheesy 70s music. I'll have to see it. :) And drawing on my vast useless knowledge, the guns were the Beretta 92 Centurion (not the F), H&K USP, EAA Witness and a few misc guns I didn't see long enough to ID. MP5s were the mainstay of the bad guy carbines. Not a single damn revolver... my 686+ could kick all their butts. The M209 they fired from the helo I didn't think was actually a M209, it looked to complicated. The bikes were a Triumph Speed Triple and I think a Katana. Didn't ID any cars other than the TT roadster and the porsche.

I called Anne today, we're going to go hike on Saturday. That should be cool, I need to get out of civilization after today's adventures in nVidia land. She wasn't up for the miata run. She liked the 'spirited driving', but it makes her queasy after a while.

Something is hosed with DNS into my VPN connection, I can't get in unless I use the IP. Does winders have a host table I can populate for just such an emergency? Oh well, checking up on work isn't that important, I have a new game demo to play.

Update. yep, I got the call to fix DNS... although people thought it was an issue with the dialup server and/or the radius server. Good thing I know the different between a "password incorrect" error and a "can't find address for hostname blah" error. Lisa said it best "I'm so bloody clever". (that's a line from 'weird science' for you kids out there). Oh, and the demo crashes my machine.

There is a rule in the universe: Kelly can not have a normal life. Period. EOF. No, I have to have one of these 'volatile' lives. Check this out. Today I get home and leave for the gym. The miata is dead. Damn, I take the truck. I do great on my cardio (new music in the Rio), but boom, my shoulder goes out completely. Again. I'm toast, i can't workout for a week at least. I'm gaining weight, and loosing strength. You do the math. I might as well start eating like shit too, I'm going to get weak and fat anyway. There is just no winning.

But keeping with the theme, good stuff did happen as well. I'm 25% engineer now, just like that. The right people talked to the right people and poof, I'm a grunt working for one of the good engineers. It's my big chance, don't blow it. And for some reason I'm taking it personally when people decline my meeting requests. What's even more weird? I'm starting to like _making_ the meeting requests.

Good news, the hike is still on. Bad news, it's pushed back to 3pm. That's good news, means I can do the Mt. Hamilton run with the miata club. Bad news, the miata is dead.

Convinced Ed he should have a BBQ at his place for us employee types. That could be interesting, Ed with an apron trying to BBQ.

Enough whining for one day. I'm going to ice my shoulder and read. Actually, I'm going to ice my shoulder, then go to the coffee shop and read. I could use a drink.

I got my barbarian up to level 8 on diablo II. :) In fact, I think I might have to play some more this afternoon.

Yesterday I did the laundry/house cleaning crap in the AM and generally puttered around. Didn't get a battery for the Mazda. I've got the old one on the charger now and when it's done I'll take it down to the auto parts place and have them test it out. Hopefully I just left the door slightly open and the dome lights drained it. I don't want to put a new battery in.

Also went hiking with Anne yesterday, couple miles along skyline trail. There were 30+ cars at the trail head, we saw 3 people total on the trails. Everyone else must have taken the more 'popular' routes (less elevation changes). We got back just at dark, went and cleaned up and with to Madori for sushi. Someone brought up dancing and we ended up dancing around in the front room to some classic 70s disco (hey, it's fun, bite me) scaring the crap out of her roommate, and her roommates cats. I still dance like a white boy, which is fine I guess since I am a white boy. I mentioned that her skin was really soft, she said she's like that all over. :)
Update

Spent some time this AM booking tickets for my mom and grandma to go to Iowa. I have no idea _why_ they want to go there, but I yahoo!'ed them some tickets.

The farmers market it going on in Fremont right now, I'm half tempted to go. Not sure what I would get. Actually, I should go to pier 1 or it's local analog and get some more 'decorating crap'. I saw mom got this cool looking wine pot up in Napa a few weeks back and I think something similar would look good sitting on the kitchen counter.

The miata is happy again. I recharged the battery and it's holding a charge. The records show that battery is 7 months old, hardly due for replacement. It's been been holding a charge all day. I wimped out and went to skippy lube and got the oil changed. I had them do the tranny with redline synthetic like the miata crowd told me to. They screwed up and didn't charge me for the oil. Oops. It makes a huge difference over the 7 month old standard oil that was in there but the syncro for 2nd is still weak, can't cure that with magic oil. I forgot how much fun it is to drive that thing! After slugging around for days in the truck (and mom's 5-series when dad wanted to borrow the truck yesterday) it's good to be in a light car again. I'll never be able to drive a normal sized car again.

I did make it to the coffee shop for about two hours (unlike yesterday where I flaked out even after putting it in the log). Almost done with my book. There was a couple on a motorcycle, both wearing pretty beat up leathers. She was quasi-cute with a really spiff ear piercing. I couldn't ID the bike, it looked like a Honda frame sorta, but it had been down on both sides and there wasn't enough plastic intact to make a positive ID. Dash didn't look factory, and the light(s) in front had been replaced with this rice-boy style projectors. I didn't want to get to close, it looked ready to explode at any second.

Oh, and there were two open houses today in the complex. I went and checked them out. A 3 bedroom, 2 bath upstairs unit about 50' from me is $279k. A one bedroom ground floor unit is $195k. The realtor says I'm sitting at $225k w/o upgrades. Excellent.

I just had the checker at the store ask me how long I had been a vegetarian. I didn't know I was. I was buying cereal, milk, vegetarian corn dogs, vegetarian chicken nuggets, apples, snow peas and this organic portabella mushroom & cheese pizza. OK, I'll give her the comment.

The miata is happy again. The battery is holding a charge and that fancy oil is really noticeable when the tranny is cold. I can also down shift into 1st now while moving. Before it 1st was totally locked out while moving. This is a huge plus, especially for tight autocross courses.

Trainer guy (Pete) says that I didn't hurt my rotator cuff this time, it's my 'secondary pectoral' or something like that. He did this Spock death pinch on my shoulder and after the crying died down, it felt better and I could lift a little. They got in 10 new machines at the gym, most different that was already there. They shuffled everything around over the weekend to make room, so it took some getting used to the new positions of my favorites.

Went to two (2) meetings today, that sucked. I organized both of them. I talked to (the real) Dennis for about 47 seconds today to help me debug a remote access problem, although he probably didn't know that's what he was doing. I'm supposed to bring him a geforce2 card when I come up there. That's probably a good bribe to get him to take me to class if Kenny is busy. Ed gave me a palm Vx today. If it can sync my outlook calendar and contacts it will rock, else, it's useless as I'm not going to maintain separate databases. I'm pretty tool-loyal. Notice it took me 9+ years to get off mh and onto outlook. No going back now. (Actually, I went to outlook because Eric did, I figure he knows better than I was the best tool for the times is)

I just realized I'm going to SAN next week to play pool with Eric, er, go to USENIX. cool. almost like a vacation.

Time to go play some diablo, then install sshd for the German dudes to use at 2am PST or whatever time they get into the office over there. Andre sounded like he was dying on the conference call this morning, turns out they were playing badminton seconds before the call.

Awesome night! It's 84 degrees out tonight at 10pm. I got out of the gym at 9, went home and dumped my stuff, dropped the top and went for a moonlight cruise. Cruising down the highway, warm breeze going, no annoying sun in the eyes, it was great. Stopped by jamba juice and got a 'raspberry refresher' before heading home. There was another white guy at the juice place and oddly enough he was carrying a knife too. Looked like a 4" blade tho. He looked like a 'normal' kinda guy, there with his 7-ish year old son. I didn't know what the 'knife talk' protocol was, so I didn't ask him about the blade. Some people may get cranky about you asking I guess.

Two dumb thing happened today. One was there was a power outage all morning, so since the UPS I stole from Vareck has been dead for a year, my alarm clock didn't stay up and I over slept. Somehow only by 8 minutes. Second, I forgot my shirt and socks when I went to the gym. I paid the $24 idiot tax and got a new shirt and some spiffy running socks at the gym store. Funny, the last time I got a 'club sport' shirt was when I forgot mine. Maybe I need to leave extras in the car for just such emergencies.

Usual meetings and whatnot at work. I spent 75% of the day 'parameter tuning'. That's pretty much what I do, be they kernel, driver, NFS, what have you, if there is a parameter, I'll have to tune it at some point.

Called the real(Dennis) again today to bug him about his possible job offer at supra, er diamond, er S3. He's not taking it although it sounds like he wants to. Loyalty to the Borg is all that's keeping him back I think. I understand, it was hard for me to leave my former employers (looking back tho, glad I did!)

What else to say... not much really. It's quasi-late, I should answer the rest of my email that built up while I was at the gym and then read. I really really really like these new Hampton books. He's pretty close to kicking Niven off my top-author spot. He's doing an amazing job of characterization. There are 3-4 stories going on and he moves between them each chapter. When two of the story lines converged, I really could feel how out of place the characters from each story line were in the other environment. When I started to feel like I could feel the main character going nuts in the new setting, I knew the writing was good. That and I keep using phrases out of the book w/o really thinking. That makes for a good setting, when I feel like I'm part of it. Good thing he's cranked out a lot of books. To be fair, perhaps after I finish these I should re-read _ringworld_ just to give Niven a rebuttal. It has been 10 years since I last read his works.

Oh, and I almost forgot. NASCAR guy at work is going to bring in his ZX-7R tomorrow so I can ride. He says it's horrible for a fellow rider to be bike-less at the moment. I'm packing my leathers now.

So much for NASCAR guy (actual name is Kurt). The battery in the 7R was dead so it's sitting on the charger today, he says he'll ride in tomorrow. I have my leathers at work now. Tomorrow should be another scorcher of a day temp wise.

Got in an actual shouting match with the VP today (of my department no less) on the cell phone. Ed said I did really well handling it. We'll see, I didn't feel like I did so well. I've not flipped out once since I've been at nVidia, and it's been 1.5 years already. Either I'm getting stable in my old age or this place just doesn't suck so bad. Probably a little of each (at least I hope there is some of me getting stable in there).

Went to the parents for dinner. Mom made this crab salad and got fat-free dressing for mine. It was pretty tasty, crab makes even fat-free thousand island taste OK. The purpose behind the visit was two fold. One was to have me checkup on the e-tickets for mom. The second was that dad wanted to 'set me up' with this woman in his office. Oh boy, here we go. Apparently she's 30, does a lot of the same things I do (and don't do so she's non-dancing and non-kid) and was previously going out with a 55 year old. Um, what? I'm sorry, when did the sugar daddy position open up? Apparently that's not the case, she just likes guys that are more intelligent. I guess you get intelligence with age? I sure would like to think I could be dating some 30 year old babe when I'm 55. I'm being a dare devil, I'm going to go for it.

People at work are now buying cars for their parents. Dad still says I owe him a 308 Ferrari. So, I'm making myself a deal. If the stock is still doing well next year, I'll buy dad a Ferrari for his birthday. A good example of one is only $30k. Someone next door bought a mondal (the 4-seater version of the 308). Man, does it look primitive, it screams 80s inside. Still looks cool and sounds cool. I just did a web search trying to find a good photo, but nothing came up. You already know what it looks like, it's the Magnum PI car.

I think I'll go walk over to the bank, then the store and get a snack. It's still in the 80s at least, freaky hot for 11pm.

Lots of stuff to report today. First, I'm up to 159 lbs. When I wasn't working out and still eating ice cream for dinner, I weighted 154 but was pretty 'chubby'. I must be under 9% body fat easily because when I was at 9.5% I still had some noticeable fat on my legs. Now there is zero that I can find anywhere. It's probably good enough, I'm going to ease up on the low-fat restrictions just a touch (once I get back from the trip tho since I probably won't be exercising properly) and see if I can maintain this fitness level. I don't want to get too skinny.

Kurt brought in the bike and I rode today. What a blast! OK yea it's a '91 and it looks like a big version of my EX but it's still a bike. I took a quick lap around the parking lot, went out through some back street and then hit Lawrence. Within 3 minutes of starting it up I was lane splitting and racing corvette away from lights just like old times. Compared to how I remember the VFR, the throttle response sucked (VFR was EFI, this was 4 carbs of course), the steering was heavy and vague and the suspension was pretty choppy. There was a noticeable break over when cornering, but that's because the (skinny) tires have massive flat spots on them from lots of easy riding. Still, it's a bike and it's more fun than any car. One of the engineers was randomly wandering the hallways looking for something to take a picture of with his 3.2mpixel camera so I had him take some shots of the bike which I'll put somewhere. I'm not in any of them tho.

During a discussion with the VP, he said that I'm overloaded and they need another person like me to make these projects go faster. That's cool that I'm becoming important and doing good stuff, bad that now there will be someone else fighting for the jobs I want. We'll see how that goes; I'm not afraid yet.

Checked out vareck's web page today. Looking pretty good. I find it interesting that the two people here who have actually been paid to do HTML coding have the crappiest (mine) and simplest (Dennis) web pages. I guess once you do it pro, you don't want to do it in your spare time.

Big update on the main page with the truck pictures.

Seems I've lost a few days in the journal here, just too busy to type. I'll just summarize as best I can. Friday I rode again, for about 2 hours I want to say (no clock). I rode over to dad's office so I could see Leanne, the woman he wanted me to meet, and to show him I was riding again. No idea why I would want to upset him, but I wanted to show off some...? Anyway, he didn't like it so I didn't tell him I'm thinking of getting another bike. It was amazing how easy it was to just get back on and ride. Within a few minutes I was lane splitting everything, just like the olden days. Temps were lower so it wasn't so miserable when sitting at lights. I won't get another new bike, unless I first get a place with a garage, but that's been said enough already.

Friday there was a screwup with one of the systems I was building, turns out the D1000s are differential SCSI and I only had a ultra-wide controller. The sales guy actually drove over at 5:30pm to bring me the right controller. I then spent hours fighting with veritas, the worst piece of shit I've ever had to work with, to do the RAID5 setup. Trust me, it's bad. Loc loves it, but he says it has a lot of problems that you have to be aware of or it will cause major data loss. I have no desire to debug sun's code on a production box.

As long as we're on the subject of security, I would like to personally shoot the idiot that does Linux password auth code. Twice, in the back of the head. With a 12 gauge. Stupid 12 year old.

I burned most of Saturday working at Troy's on the new NT server buildup. Nothing to horrid there. I'm starting to like NT better than Linux, at least you know what it can and can't do.

Enough ranting, on to happy stuff. Anne emailed Friday to cancel our get together, she was working late on a project and didn't think she would have time. As it turns out, she worked until 7am, went home, went to sleep and then got up at 4pm so we could go up to Davis for the music gathering thingy her friends (more like associates) were putting on. Somehow we ended up getting up to Davis really late, like 8:50. The shindig ended at 9pm so we heard about 4 minutes of music by the time we got in place. oops. After that brief interlude she chatted with the band people and I got to play rodie. They had me carrying speakers and amps around and what have you. It was fun for some reason, everyone was really friendly toward an obvious outsider. I was the only guy wearing a industry (CSCO) t-shirt, the rest looked pretty hippish (it was Davis after all). The night was young (10pm) when we left so we hit a few of the bars around looking for a pool table. Davis is like Seattle apparently, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting at least 2 really cute women. That college thing, I should go back there. Anyway, we played some pool (I did horrid) and danced and acted like stupid college kids making out in the train station across from the main drag. The rest of the get together is classified.

Since today is father's day I went over to the parents place and had dinner and watched TORA! TORA! TORA! (dad loves that movie). It really was entertaining and make people in the US look like fat bloated slobs... which isn't far from the truth in my book. What I don't understand is that if it's based on true events, why was the military so dumb about radar? OK, sure it was a new invention then, but wouldn't the ability to see thing advancing from any direction hundreds of miles away be pretty obvious? Especially since the alternative it to have your own planes up flying in circles?

The India server build is almost done, I should get to leave work about 11pm tonight. I'll change my voice mail greeting for the trip in the morning. I also want to try to zip over to Frey racing and get scheduled to put the cage in the miata. Thunderhill is only four weeks out.

Also, called insights and got ammo taken care of for the class. $229/case (ouch!) but what can you do, it's not like I can carry that much on the plane. Final note, I tried the 'meat ball and cheese' lean pockets (only 7g fat, 300 cal each, 2s a big meal) and they're way way better than the pizza lean pockets. Looks like a change will do me good. :)

Long gap in the log there, but I've been out of town at USENIX in San Diego. The conference ran all week, one day of tutorials for me, the rest was papers and invited speakers. I must say that it defiantly was not as good as I had hoped it would be. Actually, the Linux kernel class sucked. (Don't tell my employer or they'll never send me to another conference again). There was a tiny amount of useful information in there, but mostly noise. Eric says that happens, eventually the tutorials hold no value. This was a topic tho I really am not up to speed on. Perhaps I was hoping for too much.

San Diego is nice, if a bit humid. My hotel room overlooked the harbor and spool and had a little balcony and everything. Imagine every b-reel shot of San Diego and you get the image I had out the window. I spent a lot of free time sitting out there reading. I got somewhat sunburnt the first day sitting by the pool reading the conference notes. The visualization of the net talk was very interesting.

The only bad thing that happened was that I damn near had to knife someone on the pier. I was walking around relaxing enjoying the sights and this bum (bum ett?) woman started trying to hassle me. I just kept walking and she started following me getting very verbally abusive. She followed me for 100' or more, but never got more than 5' from my back (I was watching her shadow and comparing it to mine to get the distance). If she had moved closer I was going to have to turn around and start trying the verbal challenge thing (Phil demonstrated this to the others as I told the story so they would know how it's supposed to work). I'm not very good at that, I probably just would have screamed and leapt at her trying for a crippling strike right away. bad bad bad. I was very very angry that she would intrude on my personal space, mad enough that running didn't occur to me, but killing her did.

Had a rockin' rental car, a hyndai sonata. Fake wood trim and all, but it did have a sun roof and a reasonably peppy V6. I checked the manual and there was a 2.2L 4-cyl available; I always thought the rental people got the cheapest thing out there. Handling was crap tho, and the automatic was slow to shift, but aren't they all?

Played pool with Eric at local place, and it was free because one of the vendors rented it out for their festive event. I think we both played really well considering we've not played (for real) in forever. Pretty much just like old times, except I wasn't all depressed and bitter.

So that brings me to why I'm not depressed and bitter. First off, my roll bar shipped, should be here soon. It's the basic 'hard dog' bar from team miata so it will work with my glass rear window (non OEM). Dad's friend is going to 'modify' it to give me some cross braces that work with the window in the way, and a crossbar to mount harnesses to. Should be cool.

OK, so that's not the real reason. The real reason is that Anne and I are getting along pretty well. She's said that she's not 'seeing anyone else' while she's seeing me. Somehow I think that means we're 'going steady' or whatever the modern equivalent is. It's much much too early to be 'boyfriend/girlfriend' but if she wants to be exclusive for a while that's cool with me. It's very comforting to be around her, I don't feel any pressure at all. I am spending more money than usual, but it's not bothering me for some reason. Probably some sort of warning sign. Didn't the evil one start out this way?

Today was also my first introduction to her friends. She's going camping with a girlfriend from Texas and before they left today we went to lunch. I think I did OK being the charming, witty not quite so normal nerd and held my end of the conversation up. Normally when I meet friends (OK, when I met the evil one, the young one and the crazy ones friends) I get all quiet and shy and go into turbo defensive mode. Today I was just 'yep, this is me' and didn't worry about it. It's too easy, something is wrong. Wait, didn't I say that already? Anne said she was worried about me one because I was going to run without a roll bar at Thunderhill (that's fixed but she doesn't know it yet) and two that since I'm young (and according to her I'm hansom and have an excellent body) that I might leave her for a younger woman. I told her it wouldn't matter if I was 55, I still could leave her for some 21 year old bimbo.

BTW, someone stop the madness, I just sent another $500 to ameritrade. Haven't I learned enough? I'm loosing money on my original $3000 already. Maybe this is like a gambling addiction? Deal here, if I end up loosing more than say 10%? no, 20% then I'm going to cash out, say I learned my lesson and go on with life richer for the experience, if not the hard currency.

The spell checker did not know the words 'turbo' nor 'bimbo' (but it did suggest Bilbo as a replacement for bimbo).

Also, I have the photos of the Ninja 750 I'm riding at work, I'll put them on the front page.

The gym tonight went really well. For being Mr. "I don't need to take drugs", I sure am taking a lot. Tonight I took my multi-vitamin, extra vitamin C, creatine, chromium percolanate and two advil. I had energy and my shoulder didn't hurt. Sometimes western technology works!

I just deleted my personal ads. Hmm.... well off to bed, I have to get up early tomorrow, we're going in early so we can leave early and I can make my 6pm haircut (the only time I could get).

Stock split, then tanked. doh! I finally figured out what's bugging me about work lately. Ed and I now get in at 8, leave at 6. Loc gets in at 10, leaves at 6:30. Dennis gets in at 11, leaves at 6:30. So 2-3 hours early equates to leaving 30 minutes early.

Finally stopped and took a second to realize how 'valley' I was living. On the way home to my tiny condo, in 5mph traffic, car-pooling, we were interviewing some guy in Canada on the speaker phone which is installed in a $3000 civic hatch back. Somehow it just felt weird.

But not as weird as when I got home after the gym and started working again. Kim, the old receptionist (the one with the rich daddy that bought her the porsche) called totally out of the blue just to say hi and get together for drinks. Um, what? There must be some disturbance in the force or something. When I'm struggling along without a date of any kind, nothing. When I think I'm close to being in some sort of happy relationship, every nut ex on the planet starts to ring me up.

I did send email to the guy with the 20 acres for sale on Mt. knight. I really think I should do it. Even figuring taxes into it, it's only going to take 20% (or 25% if the market keeps dropping) of my currently vested shares to buy it. That's not so bad I don't think. If it's still for sale I'm going to try to drive out there on the 3-4 when I get back. It's 2 hours to the town, and another 45 minutes along a dirt road up the side of the mountain. Now that I have the truck, it's time to get some dirt to drive on.

Nothing special with my hair this time, just the usual short and trying to minimize the 'thinning' effect. I hate having 'thin' hair, I just want it to go away so I can shave down the sides and call it good.

Very busy day, but nothing news worthy that I can recall. I should think about cleaning my gear for the trip. Tomorrow is my off night, I'll do it then. Perhaps a range trip is in order before hand as well, just to make sure I still remember how everything works.

I have some serious serious heartburn. I made some frozen ravilloli for dinner and they're trying to get back at me by killing me. No gym tonight since I've gone the last 3 nights. My legs are killing me anyway.

Seems like a quiet day. I got in at 8, did some meaningful work and got things done. Put the new F760 together and had the hardest time coming up with a name. I wanted to use 'Buffy' to keep the software guys amused (since they're all Buffy fanatics) or 'Gabrielle' to go with the 'Xena' server, but HR nixed the idea of any systems named over women anymore. damn. Loc wanted an 'alien' theme so I came up with "Area51" for the one today and the one we get next week will be "Roswell". I thought it was amusing. Naming things is a lot harder than it seems. It's easy to come up with cool names, but it's hard to come up with cool names that the VP and other assorted weenies will live with. We've got two more E6500s coming in at the end of next month, they'll need names too.

They had another health fair at work today. It was outside and much bigger than last time. I'm thinking something was wrong with their body fat reading equipment. 6 months ago at the gym I was 9.6%. Today I read 33.5%, and somehow I don't seem to be able to find 24% more body fat anywhere. Other people were getting readings in the mid-high 30's. There is just no way that's right. I can pinch about 1/8" of skin on my legs and arms. Hardly seems like 33.5%.

Went to the range tonight (as planned apparently, I just read yesterday's entries), so I've definatly got to clean my toys before the trip. I still have it in me, mostly. There were a few malfunctions I could live without, wonder if it's just the breaking in period? Or because the thing is dirty? Hopefully everything will turn out.

Oh, and Mt. knight guy still has the dirt for sale. I'm thinking I should go see it on Monday...

Like, stop the madness please. More ameritrade action, picked up SOI and some more VC to do with the free stuff ford gave me for being a stockholder. I'm an addict, I just know it. I've only got the 'buy' part down, I can't bring myself to sell anything. Sell == bad. You don't actually loose money until you sell, right? :) I'll go update the list on the main page.

Last night I made dinner for Anne, tried to make BBQ chicken sandwiches. My timing is all wrong, the chicken was done, but the salad wasn't ready and things got cold before we ate. It's been a while since I've had to coordinate a meal, I'm out of practice. Mostly I just push one button on the microwave and food comes out. She claimed to like it anyway. I warned her tho, if she says she likes it, be prepared to eat it again sometime. She still maintained her 'i like it' position. Either way, I think we were both late from work today. She's not used to driving in 880 rush hour traffic headed south. Probably should have warned her about that. My bad.

We did a big question and answer period thing last night, she wanted to know all my bad qualities, what makes me angry, etc etc. I realized that most of what makes me cranky these days is work related, rarely do I get cranky anywhere else. Sometimes at the gym when idiots are sitting around being social and tying up machines it need, or kids running around making noise when I'm trying to relax in the hot tub, but mostly just work.

I've got to get out of here early today (probably bail right before the 3pm all-company meeting) and go home and pack. I did notice that they have a conference call available for the meeting, I think I should call in and listen along in the car. That would again prove my valley-Ness by listening to the company meeting via cell-phone speaker phone mode conference call while sitting in traffic on 237. Too bad I have the truck today, that just ruins the image (yes, the miata is still without a working battery).

Two interesting things happened on my walk. One, the guys next door at extreme are smoking stuff (with a mesquite smoking cooker thing) in the parking lot. Smells like salmon. Fresh smoked salmon at work? Interesting. Sure smells good. The other thing is that you can tell school is out. That neighborhood I walk through has taken a turn for the worst now that the maggots are out of their cells. Trash everywhere, fresh graffiti on the bridge, lots of noise and no less than four cars with broken windows and missing stereos. I fear for the future, there won't be enough cells nor welfare to take care of all these losers once they're out of school.

But, to end on a positive note, somehow GE turned around after 4pm (after hours??? quotes are supposed to be real time) and poof, I'm in the black again. Not by much, but some, enough to keep me happy over the weekend until I figure out what my next buy is...