I am so out of here now. I've got about 10 minutes left at the office and them home to finish packing and wait for the ride to the airport. When I get back, I'll have 64mb + 32mb + 8mb of pictures, I hope to fill every CF card I've got. Let's hope I have enough batteries!!!

Looks like the market is still going down. I feel good about my decision to stop playing the game. At least more brick and mortar companies are still using computers. Maybe I can get a job with the IT group at BUD after the semiconductor sector dies?

If the batteries in the GE5099 die, the you still have a standard retical to back it up. Oh, OK. So I just ordered one from SWFA, should be here before I get back. Now I just need to find the rings. (I couldn't justify $1200 for a scope just because the retical looked cool, sorry, I tried).

Class today was hard since I'm so fuzzy headed. I did get some good rest last night and will tonight again if all goes well. I really need to pack tonight, or at least get 75% packed so I can worry less. This trip is going to be pretty scary.

Useless idea of the day, I scanned in all my tickets from the various trips. Yes, I have too much free time during the day.

I also took some pictures of the machine room using low-light mode, 'sharp' focus, no flash (mostly) and told the camera the lighting was florissant. They look really whacked. No, I will never learn.

Now I know the universe is messing with me. After Kelly and I got all 'screwed up' because of my insecurities yesterday I thought things were done for sure but nope, I managed to pull it back out. That was good. Then on the way home, the truck blows the upper radiator hose and I have to limp it into the parking lot and trade it out for the Montero which was back from the shop today. I have dinner with the parents, then go to the book store to find all of the Lord of the Rings books for the trip. The first store has books #0, #1 and #3, but no #2. The second store had #2 but none of the others. Good thing I picked up what I could where I could; I now have them all. I also got a book on traditional and modern jo (the short staff, not the chick who sold me the car) which is pretty cool. I like the staff a lot better than the sword. Sure, the sword is more flashy and all, but the staff is way more fun and versatile.

Worked out today at the Y (rode in with Kelly because I had to pick the Montero up). Horrible workout. I had to drop the weigh by 50% and I was still moving slowly. I think I'm getting sick again. I've managed to quickly recover the last few times by taking a day or two off; I'd better do that this time as well. Don't want to get sick before vacation.

And speaking of the Montero, they wanted $700 to fix it (new cat converter). Yea, I don't think so. Dad's mechanic said $170, and that's $110 for the cat and an hour of shop time. The hour of shop time is a rip off, but the cat is priced right. It will probably need an O2 sensor as well, but that should help out with the gas mileage.

I think I'm going to re-think the scope now. I'm still unsure of that whole illuminated retical thing and it's battery requirement. Plus, it just doesn't look cool. :) Check out these three reticals. The first is the one on the GE5099, the second is the one on the .223 specific Springfield and the third is on the Night force brand scopes. It's pretty cool looking.

Dennis brought his S4 in today and I took some pictures. Again, I tried some different camera settings. Most these shots look really bad, I have no idea why I keep trying to out-guess the camera. It should know best.

Kelly seemed happy with the bracelet I got her while at the jeweler picking up her ring. We talked about it last month and I've been searching for a nice one on and off since then. She liked this one the best of what we saw. Most jewelers carry the same stuff it seems, there are probably only like 10-15 choices in this style.

It seems like the longer you have a shredder, the more things you find that need to be shredded. I empty the shredder 2-3 times as often as the regular paper basket in the office now.

I got one of the rear speakers hooked up (don't have enough cable for both, I'll have to find more) and when you put the DSP into 'church' mode it really sounds cool even with only 1/2 of the rear working.

Also finally made it to the driving range today. Should have skipped it, I did horrible for some reason.

I selected a scope to go with my upper. The Springfield GE5099 6-20x56 Mil Dot Government Model. Way overkill for what I need, but this way if/when I get a 'real' rifle I can just move the scope over. Obviously this photo is not to scale with the photo of the upper. Oh, and Kelly's take on this is really interesting. She's anti-gun anyway, but she said that it's stupid to pay $1400 for 'stuff' that I'm not going to use but once a year or less (I've only fired the AR once in the two years I've had it). She said that in the future (like when we're married or what have you) that if I want stuff like this I have to use it at least 6 times a year. What sort of strange restriction is that?

Today I've got to run laundry, pay bills and get some packing done for the trip. I have a credit at REI so I'll head there to get some shorts and what have you. I'm only taking one backpack (the black one that I took to Mexico) for the whole 11 days. Kelly is taking one small carry on rolling-bag thingy as well and that's it. She lived for 5 weeks in Italy out of that one bag. Guess you do laundry on the trip?

Update at 4:30pm. I got a 64mb CF card at Fry's and some more NIMH batteries. They almost had me with the Duracell Lithium batteries with the 10 year shelf life, but $8 for 4 one-use batteries? Great for backups, but I forked out the $12 for the good Panasonic (1600mAh) rechargables. The Duracell NIMH rechargables were $14 and only 1200mAh so I went with the Panasonic even though they don't have as good of a brand name. The cheese-ball NIMH that came with the camera were 1200mAh so I'm expecting good things from the new ones (the cheesy ones work quite well, actually, I shouldn't call them names).

Dad gave me his old sub-woofer, four surround speakers and some massive looking cables (the size of an old thin-net cable) but he traded in his center channel so I don't get one of those. I have no idea why I need any of this stuff but it's free. The sub is a Yamaha and the little speakers are B&W LT1 for what it's worth.

Oh, and did I mention the Montero failed smog? It's still at the mechanic's until Monday as they try to figure out which 11 year old thingy failed. I deposited this check however so the minor part about the Montero not being right just doesn't seem to matter all that much at the moment.

Update at 6:45pm. I had to abort my workout tonight... I was just too damn tired to move the weight. I was getting all down on myself when I realized my total food input was from breakfast this morning (two eggs, two pancakes, hash browns and toast... can you tell we went to Denny's?). Sure, that's probably 1200 calories but I usually eat 2700+ a day so no wonder I was out of power. A slice of leftover pizza and a power bar will have to do, I need to get my butt to Half Moon Bay like 15 minutes ago.

So I did drive the S4! Dennis, Doug and I headed out and they were giving me a lot of crap about driving too slow. I then started scaring the crap out of them by doing some four wheel drifts, a dukes of hazard style tail sliding turn (it was marked 15, we were doing about 45), getting the tires squealing at every turn, getting the passengers squealing pretty much continuously, etc. Doug was happy that I approved of the car. Dennis ordered a yellow S4 sedan and it actually showed up today (he left around 2pm to go to Sacramento to get it. Yes, he bought it in Sacramento and it was shipped from a dealer in LA... no one in the valley was willing to sell him one for less than MSRP+$5k. Stupid dealers.) I should get a commission from Audi I tell you. (I also did a double yellow line pass on the outside of a blind corner around this dumb ass SUV driver, then cut him off big time as I came back into the lane and rocketed onto central expressway, but we'll leave that part out. :)

I finally ordered my upper for my project AR-15 sniper rifle. I got the Bushmaster 24" V-Match flat top with the full floated, fluted barrel with the Harris bi-pod. It should rock. Next I'll need to pick a scope.

Doug picked up his Audi S4 Avant (wagon) last week and I finally got to see it (and take pictures, which are sorta washed out because it's overcast and I tried to compensate with the "HIGH" ISO mode... didn't work very well). Twin turbo all-wheel drive station wagon. It rocks. I couldn't get any distance shots because it was parked and he thought I was nuts anyway and wouldn't move it to let me take pictures. I'll drive it later and see if it's really fast or not. The 6-speed feels really good, very unlike my GTI shifter.

Fought with Kelly5 last night, but I think things are OK today. We finished the 'discussion' up this morning so I missed my workout. Tonight I have my makeup private lesson at 7pm then I'm going to the gym.

Finished class today at Sun, I know a few tricks now that will be helpful, and pretty cool to try the next time we have a system crash.

So what makes one unhappy with their job? Pay? Hours? Unpleasant work? Unpleasant coworkers? Bad boss? No respect? No challenge? No advancement? I've got to figure it out, it's driving me crazy... very slowly. It comes out more when I question my own intelligence like I'm doing in this Sun class. I can't figure out how this class will fit into my 'real job' and I'm realizing that 1. it might not and 2. if it does, no one will care. Maybe I'm just seeking outside validation again?

Had to leave HMB at 5am to get to the gym by 6am and to Sun (in Milpitas) by 9am for class. I'm getting slammed in this 'crash dump analysis' course. I could be in over my head... I've never been in over my head in a Sun class before, they're usually pretty slow.

The best news of the day was that local(Dennis) got software VPN working for me so I don't have to use the ultra-slow Cisco box anymore. Normally loosing a cool bit of hardware would be a bummer, but I'm not running a subnet at home, nor anything but Win9x so it's not doing me any good really and just makes noise.

Went to dinner with Dad and talked about random stuff. I then was on a mission to clean the bathroom. I spent $37 on chemicals and paper products but it's ultra clean, including the hard water stains on the shower doors. I even got foo-foo stuff like lotion and tissues for the woman. Chicks dig that sort of thing almost as much as candles. And sometimes you run across a funny that reminds you that you live in the valley. The garbage bag in the bathroom? A Fry's bag.

Survived the weekend in Phoenix and for Vareck's enjoyment I took a lot of pictures. My fiddling with light levels seems to have made things worse, they all look sorta weird and soft-focused. I should just buy a damn coolpix 990 and be done with it but I'm determined to keep this camera and learn to live with the limitations. At least it's easy to carry. :) Denise and Paul were our hosts in their 4000+ sq. ft. home. A 2600 sq. ft. house with a 3 car garage is $169,000..... I brought home a real estate magazine. I wanted to puke when I read through it. At least I got Kelly5 convinced that money goes further outside of Hellifornia.

The flight home was uneventful and we stopped by San Carlos to pick up the Montero. Man, what a rolling box. She left a Madonna mini-disk in the player. Oops for her.

I didn't go crazy, I didn't go to Fry's and buy another set of batteries. I do have my current set all charged up and I'll steal some more fresh AAs from the cabinet so I've got backups for the trip. We're flying out to Phoenix tonight. Found out we're going to some sort of baseball thing; apparently spring training is going on and it's high sport to go watch these overpaid athletes practicing. Hopefully I can outlast Kelly in the sun, it's going to be miserable hot there. I did bring my goofy hat.

Got pretty beat up in class last night, I lost the use of my left arm for a bit after this guy practiced a nerve strike on me. Wasn't even hard, but I couldn't move my arm very well nor close my hand for about 10 minutes. No bruising this morning surprisingly. My right shin is pretty badly bruised however.

Troy didn't show up for squash at 6:30am. He must have forgot (or we got crossed up and he was there yesterday). I instead did some work on the heavy bag then went back home and crawled back into bed until Kelly booted my ass out to get ready for work.

Made the Canadian drive to lunch today (since I rode in with Kelly) and he made me go look at a car with him. A Ford Focus. Man, what a piece of crap. He thought so too. The camera seemed to be having trouble in the ultra bright sunlight, I wonder what I forgot to put back in the manual settings I was screwing with?

Everyone sing now Na Na Na Naaaa, Na Na Na Naaa, Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye! So, after yesterdays little sell fest, I decided you know, I shouldn't get so greedy and should make myself safe in the long term. I called Mr. Broker again and sold my NVDA shares. Poof, gone, I pulled the trigger on 90% of my shares. The government gets their half, I get mine and into CDs it goes hopefully until I'm retired. If I play it totally boring and safe with zero risk, I can retire at age 49. That assumes of course that I don't do anything else, no more 401(k), no more squat and I still retire in style (and of course not counting on social security I'll never see). Now that's security. Greenspan can kiss my ass, the NASDAQ no longer effects me, etc. Now of course, if the markets take off, NVDA goes crazy and splits 50 times or whatever, I still have the other 50% of my options that will vest over the next 2 years (assuming it's all good and I stay). I'm happy, very happy. I've not been this happy in years. I took Kelly out for sushi for lunch. I may skip class tonight, I just don't know. It's so liberating being free of the the market fuck fest! This is dangerous, I might go to Fry's and buy a second set of rechargeable batteries for the camera!

I brought two dumbbells and a total of 80lbs of weight into work so I can try to do some light workout stuff during the day. I'll sneak off for 10-15 minutes in the morning and afternoon and do some stuff. Better than going outside for a smoke like the Canadian has taken to doing. Nasty habit he has.

Big move today, I called my investment guy and told him to sell all my funds. Everything, I'm 100% out of the market except for my NVDA stuff (up to 56 today... oops) and that little Ameritrade stuff I have left. I'm tempted to dump the Ameritrade stuff too, it's no longer fun to play with the markets.

The universe must hate me. I finally put in a sell order at 50 and the damn stock went up to 54. Normally people don't complain about it going up, but I'm just that sort of negative guy I guess. That's bad.

Last night's class was a good one even if I wasn't quite ready for it (being very tired). I really pushed my workout in the morning and then we did an hour of punching and blocking drills before doing techniques (normally Mondays are tame). I worked with killer psycho guy (Brent) and he managed to punch me in the face a couple of times on accident. He forgets I'm a slow newbie sort of person. Then this morning my instructor was on my case the whole time, I felt so sloppy and uncoordinated. It was embarrassing. He said though that as I get better he picks on more things so it will never seem like I get it. Oh.

Um, what else. My VPN is dead, @home changed the subnet on me (they wanted to break everyone who had static IPs and make them use DHCP) so I called and bitched and they gave me a new static. It will probably take a few weeks before Dennis gets around to reprogramming my Cisco 2600 with the new IP. If I could do software VPN I would. Maybe with the subnet number change they've dropped the packet filters that keep the VPN stuff from working?

I dislike working on the back of the E6500s, they're really noisy in back. We had a system crash today after several months of running with a bad CPU and 6 bad SIMMs. They wouldn't let us take it down for maintenance so we just waited until it crashed then did the work. Unfortunately it's making me miss lunch while I'm watching it do hardware diagnostics (and typing this).

Saturday Kelly went to play golf and I went to the driving range to practice what I learned in golf lesson #1 on Friday. I did OK, very consistent which is what I want. I've got a nasty habit of opening the club face and launching balls about 30 degrees to the right of my intended shot, but that's adjustable (I hope). I also changed out the drive belt on Kelly's truck (cost me $21 and 38 minutes to do a $150 repair job the shop wanted to do) and got my car washed, waxed and vacuumed. I feel better about that. Then that night I went to Kelly's bothers' birthday party (Kevin turned 40, Kurt turned 35 and their birthdays are 3 days apart so they get one party). Fun, but exhausting. Sunday I went car shopping with the parents. Dad wants mom to have a new (big, huge, massive boat) car. They looked at the BMW 740iL, Mercedes E430, Volvo S80 T6, and the Lexus LS430 so far. Quite an exhaustive day driving cars, especially boring old fart cars. The navigation system on the Lexus really works well and the engine and transmission are ultra-smooth. Of all the stuff they drove, I would pick that one (even though it's a total old-fart mobile). I had the camera along and was 'documenting' so you can feel like you were there shopping. All photos are unedited and the last 5 were taken without a flash. The camera does pretty well (sometimes) in low light if you don't use the flash (which is mostly useless).

Thanks to Eric for the thumbnail creation info and some perl, I now can automatically generate pages with thumbnails and links to photos from the camera. Now when I take a camera full of useless images I'll just dump them in a directory and make a page. Never know when those photos will be interesting.

Double argh, I'm getting sick! I'm going down! Everyone in the group is sick and I'm the last hold out and they're amazed that I'm still hanging in there. I need to take it easy and get some sleep.

Argh, after playing squash this morning I'm having trouble moving around. No stretching before nor after is a bad idea.

So I got upset at Kelly5 yesterday, but she actually made amends and things are OK. I'm still over-reacting a lot it seems. Gotta work on that... good thing my shrink appointment is today while I have the event fresh in my mind. I made us dinner which was fun: tuna and crab salad (low fat Mayo) whole wheat pita sandwiches with spinach and tomatoes and cream of tomato soup (really just regular tomato soup with a little milk in it). I also had low fat wheat thins and low fat cheese as an appetizer. Kelly5 said she couldn't tell the cheese and crackers were low fat, nor the Mayo very much either. That's cool, I'm liking that she thinks she too fat now and is exercising regularly and eating right (or at least better). She wants to get in shape for the Caribbean which may or may not happen, but she's trying which is really cool. Every other woman I've gone out with has gotten fatter when they got comfortable, Kelly5 is actually getting thinner. What a concept.

Bah, dynamic DNS doesn't work the way I want it to and no one can tell me why. The book just says that mixing static and dynamic IPs in a single domain is bad and you should use subdomains. I don't want to use sub domains, dammit, just tell me why it's bad and I'll figure a way around it.

I think I upset Kelly5, yet again. This whole roller coaster relationship is really getting to be hard on me. It seems like I have to bend over backwards all the time and continually make changes to things to keep her happy. Seems like all women are like that, just very selfish and always in the take-take-take mode until the guy burns out and moves on. I hate being all bitter, it makes me tired. Then again, aren't I always like this after the first few months of a relationship?

Oh, and I've figured out the low-light settings on the camera a little. I tried to take a picture of the inside of the safe, which is pretty dark. It doesn't look too bad.

Wow, I must be smart or something. Look at the quote they made up for me in the latest press release from LSF:

Kelly Alexander, UNIX/NT Systems Administrator for NVIDIA confirms that LSF offers a number of benefits that will help the company manage its anticipated growth requirements. "NVIDIA has always prided itself on being the industry's market leader. We've gained that reputation in large part because we focus so much effort on the design and simulation stages of product development. As the size and complexity of NVIDIA's products increased, it was important to have a solution in place that would allow us to run the number of jobs we needed to run, as well as ensure that the right groups were allotted the right processing power and scheduling time. LSF allows us to manage our design resources more effectively by scheduling job runs on a 'fair share' basis. Additionally, running the same application to simultaneously manage our Solaris and Linux compute resources helps make everyone's life easier."

More pictures from the party weekend. The first one is us walking toward the Space Needle. The last two are from dinner, first Vareck taunts Kelly5 into doing shots, then she tries to take him in a fist fight. She's strange.

Tonight I went to pick up my prescription and three interesting things happened. First, the pharmacist chick was being all friendly asking me about how I liked the area and whatnot. She's trying to buy a condo right next to me (in the next complex, the ones with garages) and was really chatty about it. Her mom lives close and she works right there, etc etc. Then I found that they had a special on power bars for 99 cents so I bought them out of my favorite flavor (chocolate). I can't even mail order them for less than $1.08/each (tax). Then the checkout girl started asking me about the power bars, where I worked out, etc. Do I have some sort of "I have a girlfriend so I'm desirable" field up? I also bought 3 different protein bars (spendy) to see how they taste before I mail order a box of them. For $2.50-3.00 each they're meal replacements, but with 32-34g of protein each, they might be worth it.

The external DNS server keeps dying on me. At least I figured out how to get into it (via a series of ssh hops) so I could restart everything.

I actually went to Jiffy Lube to get the oil changed in the truck. I'm such a wimp anymore. If I had somewhere to take the oil I would do it myself. It cost me $40 to have them do everything, and I didn't even use good oil.

I keep waffling back and forth on the idea of getting a motorcycle again. I can't decide if I want to get one, and if I got one, new or used or street or dual-sport. A street bike would seriously rock, but where do I keep it? And if I'm only going to ride it every so often, how would I justify the cost and insurance? At least it's a good decision I have to try to make.

Air travel is scary. Heading to Seattle on Friday we were delayed leaving because SEA is all screwed up. Then half way up they say that we have to go into a holding pattern for an hour or so but we only have 40 minutes worth of gas so they put us down in Portland. We were supposed to get into SEA at 10:30pm, but it turned into 1:30am. Six hours to get there. On the way back, right at the start of takeoff one of the generators (or something in Engine #2) blows up and we abort takeoff and sit for two hours while they check things out and decide that we'll just carry on with the two generators we have left. Five hours to get back to SJC. These five plus hour "two hour" flights are killing me.

Since Vareck was actually at the dinner party, he can't be on my case to provide pictures. Besides, I completely forgot all the important stuff I was supposed to bring, like my camera, the processor for Dennis, etc. Everything went well I thought, if behind schedule (really bugged Kenny, he's such a manager). I'll steal pictures from other people and post them somewhere just so I have a record. Check out here what happens to Kelly when he tries to drink adult beverages. (I had 3 over the whole night):

It's official, I'm part of the problem now. I gave Jo a check for $2000 and got the title to the Montero. Still not sure if I want to keep it, or sell it. First I have to get it smogged and insured.

Last night I spared for the first time in a while. Now I remember why I don't do it, or should do more (as to get better). I got punched in the gut so hard it took the wind out of me and today I hurt from the impact point all the way to my spine. Ouch. Good thing he wasn't going at full power. It wasn't regular sparing, it was point sparing. You try to just make it look like you could have killed the guy, but not to actually do it. When you make a good shot, the judge calls it and awards points. Just like the old arcade game Karate Champ. The main difference? No 'punch the bull' round after my first two fights. :)

I actually had a script in production named 'foo'. It's used to build a specific type of diskless system image so I can replicate clients easily. There were several versions "make_client.pl.old" and "make_client.pl.stupid-method" and "foo". Guess I forgot to move my working copy back to a real name.