Leanne moved in yesterday and it's weird. I got back from my class today (first of my management classes) and found that the house had changed state. There was new stuff in the living room, junk in her room and someone cleaned the kitchen.

The bike turned over 1001 miles on the ride home today. That's a lot in a month I think. And on an unrelated topic I got the new tags for the Montero today. I scraped off the old tags and found that they went back to 95, and back then it just said 95, not until 99 did they start using 4-digit years.

Don and Kelly5 are showing up tonight and we're all going to see The Fast and the Furious or at least that's the plan. Kelly5 really, really doesn't want to see it but she's going to just to keep me happy.

I rode in from HMB today, the long way not taking any freeways. It took 1 hour and 20 minutes but was fairly enjoyable. Don't think I would want to do it every day however as the ride back in the dark is really scary.

Maybe I'm not management material. Jim asked me "what do I tell this guy? He got all upset and then realized that it was his fault that it didn't work." I suggested "bite me, dickhead". That's not very PC. :)

I just got back from the range a few minutes ago. I made it there, hit 60 balls and made it back in about an hour. With less traffic at lunchtime that will be completely doable during the week. I'm going to leave the clubs here as I'll ride in tomorrow (rain or no rain, what's up with two days of rain now?).

Apparently Vareck mocks me for my perceived yuppiness. I didn't actually know I was doing that. I'm taking my first management class this Saturday, my journey toward the dark side begins. Next, I'll get a Lexus...

I've been running setiathome on my linux box for a few days now and it's interesting to check out the display every so often. Since I'm mostly using my box as a fancy X-terminal having a job running on the 2nd CPU isn't noticeable. What I did notice is that I have PIII/700s in a pile and my desktop is a 450. I need to get those in use (and one sent up to Dennis some how).

Back at work, trying to finish up this perforce server solution. I have to beat a yes/no answer out of everyone, no one wants to commit, they're all just happy whining and not actually doing anything. Grrr.... at least it's a real problem I can work on.

I've got my rain gear here now so I can ride the bike home. I'm leaving the Montero here (with my golf clubs) so tomorrow when Christina drops me off I just hop in and go to class. Then after work I can go to the driving range instead of sitting in traffic. Too cool.

I've made it home, thanks to a ride from Raj (one of the web developer guys who lives in Fremont) but I obviously can't make it back for class. Traffic absolutely sucks right now with the rain since no one knows how to drive in it. I'm wondering how bad it will be tomorrow? Christina is going to give me a ride to work and I'll bring my rain gear so I can ride home even if it's raining. I hope I can get to class in time... man, this isn't working out like I had hoped it would. Bike commuting is just costing me lots of aggravation.

Crap, it's starting to rain! Rain! Argh! I don't have my rain gear with me! They said it was going to be sunny and 70 just like yesterday. Damn, wrong day to ride.

I got some email from Camille, she's back from Amsterdam. Apparently she's doing well for herself as a model. If she ever gets famous, that will be cool since I can say that I've slept with her. :) (I know, I'm bad).

I never realized how bad restaurant food is. I went to Macaroni Grill with my dad for lunch today. The bread had oil all over it, the chicken was coated in oil, the pasta was coated in oil, etc. I still can't get the oil residue off my hands. The food is just crap, there must be 1000 calories in fat in that one dish. Ick.

Pictures from Friday. Hardly exciting as I mentioned, but somewhat interesting if you like grass and trees.

You would think debugging a dead light in the bathroom would be pretty simple. First, check the bulb. That's not it. Second, check for any blown breakers, nope (and the fan on the same circuit still works so I didn't think that was it). Next, get out your VOM and test for current to the socket... oops, no VOM. It's not in the tool box, so it must be... oh no, with the rest of the stuff up at the cabin. Damn. Looks like the light will be out for another 3 weeks until I can get it. I did check the switch for any obvious signs of weirdness. Nothing unusual, just the typical shitty house wiring. I'm amazed that more houses don't just burn down due to wiring sparking/melting/bursting into flames.

I went to bed last night at 8:30pm trying to sleep off this cold. Seems to have had no effect at all, other than I feel sorta sluggish this morning (got up at 7am). Dad will be here at 10am to give me a ride to Mountain View to pick up the Montero.

I've noticed that most radio stations have given up streaming their stuff over the net due to some legal crap. That's too bad, I liked listening to music from all over. At least WFMT out of Chicago is still doing it. That's my favorite classical station that I listen to on Sunday mornings (like I am now).

I skipped the movie. I actually went to the theater, saw the huge crowd of people milling around and didn't bother stopping. I'm sure I could have gotten in to see it, but I just wasn't that motivated. I rode for another hour or so, not really going anywhere. I found a huge dirt lot behind a industrial plaza and rode around on that for a while getting the feel for the bike in the dirt. I also rode around the 'auto mall' and rode through some of the dirt lots there (home of future car dealerships). No one chased me out of anything, that was nice. The bike just runs so well now I hate to get off the thing. I was hungry though so I had to stop.

Dinner was two, yes count them two, bags of ramen. Ramen is bad, it's all carbs and fat and has like zero nutritional value, but it's cheap and since I can't taste anything anyway taste is not an issue. I want some sort of desert but again, since I can't taste anything, walking to the store to get a peppermint patty just doesn't seem all that good of an idea.

I'm not sure how to deal with my vehicle situation. The Montero is at the BMW dealer where I picked up the bike, the bike is here and the GTI is in HMB. I would have dad drive me to the dealership where I could get the Montero and swap it out with the GTI, but he's not around right now. They went somewhere with my grandmother, or something, I really don't remember.

Tonight I'll probably just do bills, drink lots of fluids and read. I thought about going to the coffee shop, but since I can't taste, hot coco does me no good. Kelly5 is going out to dinner with Ken, one of her ex-boyfriends. She couldn't understand why I didn't want to be at her place when he came to pick her up. She said I was invited, but somehow I don't get the feeling I would really be good company. She said she wouldn't be out late. I told he she could call if she was back before 2am. We'll see.

Golf yesterday was awesome, much better than I actually thought it would be. There were only 3 of us in our group and we had one guy who could play so our scramble score was 1 under par. That rocks. I did pretty well I thought, much better than I ever have before. When you play with good people, you get better. It's true of every sport. They gave us shirts and balls and stuff as well. I snagged two extra three packs of balls (they were $11.95 each if you had to buy them). That's some expensive ass golf balls. I've got pictures I'll get out of the camera soon (probably Monday, the camera is with my clubs in HMB). They're not very cool, it's just a golf course.

We saw Almost Famous last night. I liked it, Kelly5 said it was not was she was expecting at all. Today I'm going to go see The Fast and the Furious, the ultimate rice-boy movie. I rode through the parking lot on my way back and saw a ton of civics with coffee can mufflers parked in the lot. Must have reached it's target audience.

Speaking of riding, I picked up the bike today from it's 600 mile service. They did the injector swap and reprogrammed the injection computer and it's way better now. It really take work to find any faults in the system now. I hope I still get close to the 69 mpg I've been getting. Next month I might get the hard side bags, I need to be able to carry more crap.

My cold is still going. My sore throat is gone, but I'm congested and can't taste/smell anything. Hopefully the Magic Nose Spray (tm) is doing it's thing and will save me from infection hell.

It's official, I have Ed's cold. I went to the store this morning (after squash, I can't believe I could play at all) and got some drugs to try to ease the throat pain. So far it's not working very well.

Oh, and I survived first contact last night. A guy in an Excursion wasn't too happy about me lane splitting past his sorry ass so he got on the horn and swerved into me. He didn't move very fast and I got out of there with nothing more than my mirror getting knocked off (it folded in nicely and I was able to put it back in place). Whew, gotta watch those psycho drivers.

I'm getting Ed's cold, I woke up this morning with a sore throat. Damn. I started taking the Magic Nose Spray (tm) again right away. This should prevent it from turning into a sinus problem (I hope). I just want to make it through Friday so I can play golf, I don't care so much if I'm sick all weekend (gives me an excuse to just sleep).

I installed real player 8, man what a pain. There are a dozen screens of crap and if you just click through them you'll be put on every mailing list on the planet and have all sorts of shit added to your desktop, menus, browsers, etc. Eventually it's going to be impossible to install and app without getting screwed in some way. I hate marketing.

Here are some useless pictures. The generator was dead and the repair guy left the doors open while he was working so I just had to take a few shots.

What a happy day. There was a 2 car fatal traffic accident on 680 this AM that blocked 2 lanes and the CHP kept them closed until after 9:30am so traffic was toast on 680 and 880. I went and got the bike and rode to work today. Happy day. Then at lunch I told Kelly5 that I might be willing to move out to HMB with her if she supported my idea to ride to work every day. Talk about a struggle for her. She'll think about it. Friday I'm going to play golf at the Presidio which is supposed to be a really expensive, really exclusive place. It's free through one of our vendors having a tournament. I managed to swing a second invite so Kelly could go (she is technically part of IT so the sales guy was OK with it). She's very happy about that.

Some nice guy on the F650 message board pirated his $125 BMW F650 service manual CD and put it up on an FTP site. It's only a 25mb PDF doc and they charge $125 for it? No wonder people pirate it.

Dennis is down here now so we got together on Saturday (after the birthday party at which I won a DVD of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) and saw Tomb Raider. I thought it was a fun movie but he didn't like it. Bah, like he knows movies.

Saturday night Kelly5 and I went up to Pioneer so we could golf with dad on Sunday for father's day. It was a pretty good time and no one got too badly sun burned (I missed a few spots on my leg so I'm a little crisp). Dennis says I'm too yuppie now with the facial hair, dressing all fancy (I was still dressed 'business casual' from the party earlier that day) and playing golf. Do I look too yuppie here? I'm not dressed funny.

OK, maybe a little. Those carts sure are fun to drive around in though. My parents had been up there for the week and they left around 3pm Sunday, we left around 7:30pm. I took a nap in the afternoon so we didn't exactly get moving as planned. Sure was nice up there.

The sun roof crapped out on the GTI on Sunday too, but at least it was stuck closed instead of open. I should take it in but I hate to think how long it will take to get an appointment. I did get a nifty catalog of VW stuff in the mail up in Pioneer (where the car is actually registered) and it had a GTI t-shirt in it. I've never seen a GTI t-shirt before, they always just have that stupid new beetle stuff. I'm thinking of ordering one. I also got the license plate for the bike.

I was just looking at Vareck's pictures of his weekend mountain climbing (in the snow). Notice, no snow where I'm at. (Although his pictures are very impressive). It does make me feel a little 'soft' though, I doubt I could make that climb.

Our friends at the IRS sent me a nice letter saying that back in 1999 I did a 401k roll over they didn't like and now they want $3600 in back taxes unless I can prove otherwise. Isn't guilty until proven innocent sorta backwards? Ah well, it's the IRS, they're above the law. Fortunately I think I've got the documents to prove they're wrong and I did do it properly. I'm sure this is just one of the many run ins I'll have with these bastards. They're always after more and more.

I got my bike tonight and rode home so I can ride to work tomorrow. I was going to stop by the coffee shop and read (had my book with me) but I couldn't get myself to stop riding once I started. That and the shop was chock full of high-school skippies. School is out for the summer so they can loiter and vandalize stuff all the time now.

Here is the ultimate in exciting photography... pictures of my condo parking lot with no cars in it (they still haven't opened it up to let us drive on it yet). Please try to contain your excitement and not make these your desktop background image.

Yet another freaky thing happened. When I got back from class tonight I logged in to check email (to see if Troy was up for squash tomorrow, he is and we've got a 6:30am court time) and there is email that was sent out to all of engineering saying that one of our netapp filers is going down for maintenance tomorrow at 8pm. Big deal you say? Well the guy that sent it is named "Tom Schmidt" and his title is "Senior Systems Administrator". Like, who is this guy? I've never heard of him and when did we hire another 'senior' sysadmin? I think I would have had a chance to interview him..... unless it's my replacement they just brought in? Whoa, I should never take days off. :)

Oh, and speaking of Troy, I finally found out which company he ended up going to. Globespan bought Microsemi for $40m... I wonder how much of that was stock? Check out this scary cart of Globespan and be thankful for the shape your own stock is in.

Tax guy is pretty cool and he's going to coordinate with an investment guy for me (3 actually) then get back to me with the various profiles of the investors so I can pick the style and level of involvement I want. Sweet, a professional that actually delivers something for the outrageous fees they charge.

I made it to the gym with no problems this morning and I also went to my parents to water mom's plants since they're up at the cabin this week (I was supposed to do it yesterday, oops). They're repaving the streets here at my condo and at my parents! What are the odds? So I can't park at my house for a day and I can't get the bike out of my parents garage until tomorrow. I was going to ride today but obviously I'm not. Instead I'm doing laundry. I should get that gift soon before traffic gets too bad, and I'll probably go to the driving range and hit some balls before I go to class. I could do with a few more days of this relaxing stuff.

Whoa, and how freaky. Apparently my parents called this AM (I just checked the phone) so I returned the call (they put a phone in up at the cabin). They must have found the old answering machine in a box up there because my voice comes on saying to leave a message. I wonder if there are any 2.5 year old messages on that thing (last powered up in CO)?

I can't believe it's so late, I got home around 7, what the hell have I been doing? Oh yea, paying bills and trying to find food. I'm uploading the photos from the weekend. I have the Big Basin (road) up now and the pictures of dad's car are uploading now (making it really hard to type since they limit upload speed to 128k). I've made up the ad and posted it, but it's not very good. It's just hard to get excited about it, it's pretty much stock other than the wheels. What could I say about it? Just the usual maintenance stuff and whatnot.

Tomorrow morning I'm going to go see the new tax/investment guy and see what he has to offer. I'm also going down to The Gun Exchange in San Jose. Don and I went to the gun show on Sunday and I really got all psyched to get a Springfield M6 survival rifle. MSRP is $185 so it won't brake me (I hope!). None of the dealers we went to had them (and the guy that had one at the show was from South SF and he had .22hornet/.410 and I want .22LR/.410) but oddly enough our Netapp service rep stopped by today on his way back from the exchange and said he saw that they had them. How weird. It will give me something to do, even if I don't get one (probably won't, like I need another gun). I've got tomorrow off, BTW, which is why I'm finding things to do.

I would like to go ride of course, but the bike is due for service. I might take a short ride anyway. I do have to go to Toys R Us or equivalent and get a present for Christina's kid for Saturday. How did I get roped into this again???

Lunch was some sort of bogus pork curry. Nasty green shit is what it looked like to me. I had a salad (with mushrooms and carrots), brown rice, steamed broccoli, a bowl of misc. melon slices, and two cookies.... gotta have some cookies.

I have all sorts of pictures to upload, from my bike trip last weekend and of dad's car (which I have to put ads up on yahoo! to sell) but I've not been home yet. Kelly and I went to Pete's Marina to look at sailboats. She's big into sailboats so we went to look at a Lancer 43'. I didn't know what I was looking at personally, it looks like a boat. It seemed nicer in the picture, and for $88,000 I was expecting something really cool. The rigging is top of the line gear (according to her). All I know is that unlike the boat next to it, this one didn't have radar. You've got to have radar man, why else have a boat if not for the cool electronics? No solar panels either, gotta have solar panels.

I'm glad it's getting close to lunchtime, I'm getting hungry.

Pong is back on-line now at the new building. External DNS has been updated but internal is still wrong. I'll have to fix that next.

There, now I'm running the 2.4.5 kernel. I'm hoping for faster SCSI drivers. It's already way faster at mounting file systems (but since I rarely reboot that's not too exciting).

Something is seriously wrong with either our net connection or the connection to wherever the name server is located. SSH logins and FTP connections hang for a long time. It's DNS for sure. Either way I'll need to take pong down today to move it from the old campus to the new one. I've got a home all setup for it, tucked into the rack of systems that control the linux farm. No one will question it there.

Last night was pretty good, Kelly and I went up to the city to visit her friends Karen and Matt. Matt was out working (he works at yahoo! and has made it through all the rounds of layoffs by working his ass off) so Karen took us to this trendy little restaurant that was, get this, cheap even. I had grilled sea bass (that was excellent) with potatoes, peas, beets and bread for only $12. Amazing, you can't get food that good anywhere for $12 much less in SFO. We didn't stay to late since we were both pretty tired from all the running around.

My monitor is freaking out, the image keeps moving side to side by one pixel every few seconds. You can't really tell unless you look at it just right. I hope it's not dying on me, this Mitsubishi Diamondtron monitor is the best I've seen yet, much better than even the Sony Trinitron Sun monitors.

I've been thinking about the camera again and want to do an experiment. I want to see which looks better, taking a 'fine' level photo in 800x600 or doing a 'standard' level in 1792x1200 and then scaling it down. I'll use 33% more memory doing the larger pictures but it might give me more options as I can print them easier? I'll do some tests and try to figure it out.

Good day at work.... I wasn't there! Ha! I left around 10:30am and took the day off to go ride. I went up Mt. Hamilton and checked out the Lick Observatory. (Photos here). I left the camera in 'standard' mode to see what it looked like. Some jpeg loss but the images are 1/3 the size of the 'fine' mode ones. About 300k instead of 850k on average. I think I'll just use the memory and stick to 'fine' mode for most stuff. My batteries died during the tour of the observatory so only a few shots from inside (I didn't have a chance to run back out to the bike to get my spare set). That dark picture of the flowers is Mr. Lick's grave. Spooky, it's under the movable floor at the base of the telescope which moves up and down to allow you to always be at the usable ends height. They said normally it's in the 'down' position so you don't get to see the grave but they're working on it today so it's up most of the way. Cool for us.

The road itself was pretty stressful. Lots of gravel and really really windy. Not the good kind of windy either, it was too tight to ride smoothly even on my trail bike. There was another bike at the top, a Buell S2 Thunderbolt and that guy said that it just takes some getting used to but he can manage even on a big boat like the S2.

I tried to take some pictures of the valley on the way up, those first few shorts are looking back toward the Santa Cruz mountains that define the west edge of the valley. The bay is on the right. And it's not just a cheesy camera that makes them blurry like that, that haze is real. Smog is more of a problem than most people know.

And those pictures around the 'road closed' area are interesting. Half the road washed out at some time apparently so they closed this section of road (the detour isn't too far around). I of course had to see exactly why it was closed and rode past the signs and once I saw there was still enough road to get by on, I just used my SUV bike to blast over it. Cool, I feel justified now. :) Try that on a CBR929RR.

At the store I made another interesting discovery. Kellogg (and some small-time companies) have these super soy-protein cereals. 10g of protein per bowl and they actually taste pretty good too. I'm switching to them instead of my mini wheats.

Went to the driving range with dad tonight and did OK. Not as well as I think I did last time I actually played, but I didn't suck so bad either. Maybe I'll try to go again this week. I want to take a day off here since they still owe me one from 3 weekends ago. I was going to do Friday but there is a cool meeting on Friday I want to go to. Tomorrow is the interesting 401(k) meeting, don't want to miss that so maybe Thursday? Sorta a weird day, I should make some sort of appointment or something if I'm going to take off a middle of the week day.

For a welcome to the building gift they gave everyone an official nVidia sunshade for their cars (since there are no trees for shade). It's too small to actually fit the window, but it's still a nice gesture. I was going to go buy a shade but maybe I can make this one work. The walkway is coming along nicely, BTW. Here are dad's guys hard at work, um, welding stuff.

I talked to Ed briefly yesterday about my possible advancement and he's been talking to the other people behind my back trying to figure out if they're up for me to advance to being the manager of the Unix weenies. Ed wants me to take some management classes as well. Looks like I'm on my way over to the dark side, and a 15% raise! I might make more than Kenny does.

I'm totally freaked out here. Someone's car was stolen from the parking lot here yesterday. I did a quick walk around of my place and someone damaged my gate latch trying to force it open. Looks like the criminal element has found it's way into our little community. And I don't have the drapes up to close in the front room (took them down to paint). I wasn't planning on putting them back up but I need to do something so they can't see in.

Bummer, no t-shirts. You can enter the drawing to win one of the spiffy shirts marketing drones get, but nothing for the rank-and-file people. I guess those glory days are gone. On the plus side, it's a nice day out so I'll go for a walk and see if I can find anyplace interesting around here (last time I found this scary looking taco place just down the street).

It's sure quiet around here when everyone goes to lunch, and really gets noisy when they get back. Apparently yelling down the hall is the preferred way of communicating since the radios don't work anymore.

We have some sort of product launch thing going on today, people are lining up in the hallway for t-shirts and ice cream. Hopefully I can snag a new shirt.

Hey look at that, the move is over! Well, mostly over. There is a hidden "Phase 4" where we move the DS3 equipment, web servers, notes servers and pong but I'm not sure when that is. No one has said when the lines finally move.

So after work on Saturday I went and got my bike back and wow, what a difference. It's not perfect or anything but it's a lot better. They found that the air temperature sensor in the air box wasn't attached right so the bike had no idea what temp the outside air was so it defaulted to 75 degrees and therefore ran lean when it was cold (like when it's 49 degrees out at the coast). They also upgraded the firmware in the ECU. That bike has a lot of sensors and computer bits in it. I didn't get to ride it all that much, just back over to Fremont to put it away. I'll try to get a ride in someday if I can get a day off.

Sunday I had to repay the labor Kelly provided by helping her fix some trees that had blown over in the latest windstorm, put new latches on both gates, dig up a bunch of gopher mounds and put poison in them and then help paint her living room. So much for time off! I took some pictures of the trees, just in case anyone was interested in my handiwork. She had no tools, just a screwdriver and a small hammer so my idea of pounding the stakes in the ground 2' and tieing the trees to them was not possible. Putting them at an angle like that up against the fence works a lot better than you might think.

Last night around 10pm (I was home playing that "Quicken '97" game Kenny gave me) Kelly calls. She was on her way back from a family gathering at her grandfather's house and was going to stop by to stay with me but instead asked if I would mind driving to her place instead (so she could spend the whole weekend at home rather than driving back over the hill in the AM). Since I had to go to work today anyway I hopped on the bike and rode out.

On the way in today I finally stopped by the BMW dealer and said "Hey, fix the damn fuel injection!". They acknowledged there was a problem and would look into it but since I didn't have an appointment there were no guarantees that it would get the software upgrade done today. They did give me a nice loaner bike that looks exactly like mine, right down to the color. It's got really awesome Metzler tires on it though, a whole lot grippier and smoother than mine. I might have to get some when mine are shot.

It looks like I've been journaling for a year now, I actually had a june_2000.shtml file in the directory. I'm sorta afraid to go back and read those earlier ones and find out what I was doing back then..... well, OK, I cheated, I went and looked. I noticed that work sucked, I was dating Anne, I weighed 159 lbs, I was unhappy and I rode Kurt's bike. My life seems pretty set in stone, how scary.

I know it's not a picture I took, but check out this view from the back of a guy's F650 (older version of my bike) going down a 'road' in France. With views like this, I might just be convinced to go. If this image doesn't do it for you, check out this for the whole image collection. Really worth the time to browse.