It's official, Jo isn't moving to Australia. I wonder if she'll want her furniture back? She's homeless now anyway, had to give up her rent controlled SF apartment (with a garage). It was $905/month, now it's $1900/month and it was taken by someone else. Oops. Obviously I'm not getting the Montero now which is a bummer. I was looking forward to going on some back roads this weekend.
I totally walked into a meeting today. I was just going into the lobby to snag a candy (they have good mints at the front desk) and boom, I walk into some droids from one of our resellers and start shaking hands and whatnot. Turns out Ed had a meeting with them just then and I got pulled in. After an hour, I had had been talked into doing some crap I didn't want to do, and have another meeting setup for tomorrow at 11:45. My 10am didn't make it today, so that's been moved to tomorrow at 11am. 45 minutes to do a full LSF config? Eeesh, that's tight, especially if anyone is late. The LSF guys are never late tho. I am a meeting calling God now. Outlook and the Palm V are your friend, really.
Had lunch with Anne, she is still sick and I'm pretty sure she just gave it to me as my eyes are burning and my throat hurts. I was reading Cosmo just a few minutes ago, maybe that's the cause? :) Actually, Cosmo has a salary survey in it. A 'profiler' for the FBI makes $90k, a executive chef in NY makes $70k, bimbo actresses/super models make $2-5 million. Worst job, pay wise, is a DJ in NY (who is 27) that makes $10k. How can you live in NY for $10k? Must sell crack on the side. The personal assistant to Katie Couric (who the hell is that?) makes $40-60k. Hmm... which side of the range is she on? There is only one assistant to Couric (one Courtney Allsbrook, 25, who is really really cute in the photo), how can there be a salary range?
It's almost 10pm, I had better get to bed soon. I've got to get up at 6:30am and go to the gym. Then at 7pm is one of my makeup one-on-one classes with my Kenpo prof (he's been out) then the rest of the normal class from 8-9pm. Thursday is another session.
There is another Kelly in the MIS department now, one of the 15 (!) SAP people we have hanging around now. We just spent another $100k on dell hardware for them as well. I really don't like those people. Now they're trading email on the MIS mailing list about who's dressing up as what tomorrow and who's dressing their kids up as what, yada yada. Man this department is staring to suck.
Let's see, what interesting stuff happened this weekend. I finally put the aluminum trim rings on the dash vents in the car. Not sure how much I like/dislike it, but they're on there with some nasty epoxy and I doubt they'll come off without a fight. Makes the car look more Audi-like, a good thing.
Saturday we went to some bar with Anne's friends. They're decent people, a little wacky, but nice. Interesting to see how real 28 year olds live; very very different from any of myself or my friends. Not sure which group of people have it better, they seem pretty damn happy. Then we went to this exotic/erotic party/art show in Willow Glen (rich area of San Jose). The art sucked, big time. Yea, it had naked people in it, but since I've already seen naked people before and am not 12, it didn't do anything for me. The top less chicks in body paint were somewhat amusing, but again, I've seen naked chicks before so that was only so-so. Around 10pm Anne and I split away (after watching her friends hit on and get shot down by a number of random chicks) and shot some pool. I had no idea I was so bad anymore. Apparently my skills learned in CO did not stick with me.
Today we went up to Ikea this sorta wacky euro home store. I found some chairs I really really really liked, and a kitchen table and chairs, and a large rug. I didn't buy anything (no room to haul it in the miata) so in two weeks we'll go back and I'll load up some goodies. The kitchen table, chairs, rug, two living room chairs, sofa, tables, lamps and folding screen (gotta have a screen) will all run under the $2500 budget including tithe to the government. The store itself sucks, it's very badly arranged and too hard to move from department to department. That and every idiot on the planet goes there and brings their 9 kids, 6 brothers, grandma and the dog so there is this huge useless surplus of people that just don't need to be there. We did see the kid dungeon which was funny. You dump the kids off and they tag them with a blue shirt with a big number on it and you get a claim check for your kid. I thought it was hilarious.
I was bad, I brought my Diablo II play disk to work and played some while I was eating dinner. I got my guy to level 19 and found a better 'military pick' to whack guys with. The game is starting to drag tho, I'm stuck at a 'wall'. The bad guys going forward are too tough, the others are too easy. I hate having to just run around whacking stuff to get experience to go up a level so I can take on the next big bad guy (and I've not even done half the quests of act 2 yet).
Jo took me to lunch at the yuppie Mexican place. Next Friday is her last day, then she is off to Australia (and I get my car :).
Bah, it took me over 1.25 hours to get home tonight because it rained. I got home at 9:15pm. Spud people suck.
Kenny emailed down (PGP encrypted no less) the pictures from the psycho class. Here are some I didn't have before:
Went to the doc today, spent four hours there. They poked, they x-rayed my head, and in the end, they said I had a sinus infection. Woo hoo. So I got 3 different drugs to try out.
I went to Kenpo tonight anyway and toughed through it. I did OK, I just had to breath through my mouth a lot. Felt good to be active again (since I skipped the gym again this AM since I was so dizzy and tired).
Got my blade tech holsters today for the Walther and the Kahr. Both are excellent, just like the Glock holster is. The Walther pretty much isn't there once you've got it strapped on it's so small and light. The Kahr isn't too bad either. Any will work just fine. I'll stick with my plan and carry the Kahr most the time. Yea, it's not as cool as the walther, but it holds the same number of rounds (6+1) but is 9mm which is better than .380 any day. Also, it's easier to index on the draw and is less prone to 'bite' me since it's slide is higher up from the grip.
I am sick, again. Too much exercise and stress, not enough sleep and poof, my body crashes. I've been sleeping for 3 days now trying to make it go away faster than usual. Seems to be helping. I went up to Pioneer Saturday and slept up there, sorta. Anne made me get out of the house and go to this historic Indian park which although it was interesting, wasn't helping me recover. Monday I drug myself into the sheriff's office to turn in my CCW application (and probably infect them with my horrid disease). The old cranky guy at the desk witnessed me signing it then looked it over and told me they would send me a letter in 7-10 days telling me 'the next step'. I asked cranky guy what that was and he said 'wait until you get the letter'. Oh. Then he said that it would say something to the effect that I should bring myself, $93, photo ID and all the guns I want on the permit down to the office to get fingerprinted and serial #'s recorded. Yes, they really want me to bring a bucket full of guns into the sheriffs office. They're used to it he said.
Monday I make it home in time to go to work, but called Ed and said I was staying home. Today he said he thought I was faking it. Why would I fake being sick? If I wanted time off, I would just say I was taking some time off. Faking sick is the easy way out. He then ran away from me when I started coughing. I said I'm not going to our IT department dinner tonight and Joe (the VP) said I had a bad attitude this morning (he was eavesdropping). Even if I wasn't sick, I wouldn't go to the dinner. Having a fun night out with our group is one thing, but all those SAP/business development people are going too and they're are 15+ of them. That's why we don't get to go to Malibu or something else fun, it's too expensive now that our group is 2x the size. I still say the business app people should be part of accounting, not IS. None of them are technical people, they just make power point slides and have meetings.
And the bright part of the day? Kicking some diablo II butt. I was going to stop playing (it eats up a lot of time) but tonight I was having fun wailing on people, er, maggots in the 'maggot lair'. My shield didn't seem to be stopping the poison attack from the big bug guy, so I took it off and went in with two axes swinging. I just leapt into the middle and whack whack whack. One of the axes gave me mana back so I could keep going and going. He didn't last long, and I only used about 4-5 healing potions just standing in the middle of the room swinging stuff. The only downside is that now I'm constantly seeing that 'ghost' image of the map overlay, even when I'm not playing the game.
I ordered the .22 conversion kit for the Glock 23 finally. It's $200, which is the cost of a case of ammo. Being able to shoot .22 with the nasty glock trigger and frame size will be well worth the cost.
How did I ever come to live in such a shit hole of a state? Once I am vested I am out of here, someone make a note of that.
We had a really weird server crash today. Loc has one A5200 drive array hooked to two different E4000s so when it freaked out (like it did today) we loose two systems instead of one. I'm still not sure about the logic of that. Anyway, I did a full diagnostic and couldn't figure it out (swapped out _everything_ that could be removed with a screwdriver) and called sun finally. They had me repeat everything of course, and finally agreed it was busted and called for a rep. I figured it out and whacked the hardware enough to make it run, only 30 minutes before the local SE called and asked if I really wanted someone out today since it was so close to 5pm or if it could wait until Monday. Duh. I'm glad we don't have to rely on them for anything but parts.
Forgot to mention that Ed and I went to San Jose State yesterday to hang up more flyers looking for a college punk to come change tapes and whatnot. Sweet deal for a student to make $20/hr doing CS grunt work. Probably can't get a student for $20/hr these days but we'll see. I felt pretty old walking around campus, fortunately (or unfortunately, however you look at it) there were no cute chicks to be found. Lots of ugly fat ones tho. According to Ed's brother, SJSC is 40% Vietnamese, 30% Chinese and 30% 'other'. You would think that with the high Asian population there would be some really cute women running around, but it didn't appear so.
Had lunch with dad today, not really sure why. I had to drive over there as well which really sucks in lunchtime traffic. At least he paid. When I got back extreme next door had blocked off half the parking lot and was putting up tents for tomorrow. I thought the product brief would be inside; maybe this is just the launch party? If it's just a beer bash I'm not going, I don't really have a desire to socialize with the people from work.
We had lunch with the used Sun equipment vendor, can't recall their name right off. I suggested Madori. Yep, sushi from cacheflow Monday, sushi from these guys today. Two free lunches in one week, and we've got something going on Fridays as well. More sushi? We'll have to see.
Class was good tonight, I talked for about 45 minutes after class with David, a pretty cool guy who is a mechanic in real life.
Oh, was I bad. Today was a pretty busy day at work, and Jo said that I owed her lunch. I don't know why, I think she just always says that. Anyway, it was a great day out, 65, sunny, light traffic, etc. Since she's a herbivore, and I was in a festive mood, I took her up to Boulder Creek to that pub. Yep, middle of the day on Tuesday and I'm driving hwy 9 in the miata with the top down taking corners like a mad man because there are zero cars on the road. The sky really got blue up on top of the mountain once the smog and ick was left behind in the valley and everything smelled of trees with a light chaser of wood smoke. Lunch was really good, then another spirited drive back to the valley. I got to work, sat down at my desk and Ed shows up about 30 seconds later saying "meeting! meeting! everyone up!" so off we went to meet with sun and waste the rest of the day. No one even noticed I was gone for 2.5 hours.
Class was good tonight, very small with only 5 people, but still good. Lots of 1-on-1 attention. My instructor is out of the country at the moment so I'm just doing the group class on Mondays for a while now (and Wednesdays) and they want me to come spar on Thursday. Oh.
Here is an interesting tidbit, I didn't get tunnel vision in a panic situation. Almost got crushed between a Camery and a taxi at the 880/237 exchange tonight about 10pm. The cab 'merged' into me at 65, the Camery was blocking my escape to the left. I couldn't power out of it, so I got on the brakes, hard. I locked them a few times, trying to modulate good threshold breaking and as they closed in, I kept my eyes on the gap between them making sure I could fit, but I was aware completely of the red car and the yellow car on either side. Pretty cool I didn't panic. Afterwards there wasn't even the usual 'I almost died' adrenaline rush. I must be tired. :)
Back from Seattle and psycho camp. Let it be known that Kenny is a better psycho then me; he can draw and fire faster, and his split times are better. Now I don't know if it's the fancy holster worn on his hip (vs my standard leather worn in a concealment position) or the lighter gun and recoil (vs my huge iron .45) or just skill/practice, but he was faster. I can still out drive him. :) This class wasn't as good as the last one, or the first one. It was fine tuning skills, but some of them I didn't have to begin with so the fine tuning wasn't so useful. I wish I had a politically incorrect range I could try this stuff at. The worst part of the weekend was me finding out that I'm tone deaf. The frequency range the little electronic timer buzzer is I can't hear over 1' away with the headset on. Really freaky and frustrating. I got around it tho by borrowing one of those electronic booster headsets and wearing it backwards with the pickups pointed right at the timer they would hold right up to my head. It worked pretty well. Here is one of the only pictures we took. Not very exciting, but when the exciting stuff was going on, we were both busy. The shirt is one of the Insights Training shirts, complete with one of many psycho sayings on the back. Kenny has the "if you die, we split your gear" one. Also, those pants make my butt look big... The crappy brown belt I'm wearing just about broke, so I tossed it and spent $96 on a good one, as well as $50 on a top quality dual mag pouch. I now have a Galco belt, holster and mag carrier, all in matching black.
We also met Kenny's woman Britta. She's was cuter in real life than in pictures (which I suspected). She's also about 3" taller than Kenny (she was wearing high heeled boots).
Got pissed off at the market, again, so I sold off most my stocks. I kept home depot and CSCO, even though they're both losers at the moment because they'll come back, then I'll dump them. I'm not playing the market game anymore.
I now know how Dennis must feel every day, that horrible dread of going into the office. I've got so much crap on my plate right now and it seems like an endless array of people around me that will steal the glory if I look away for even a moment. Feeling pretty fucking unappreciated here Al.
My crack-pipe soldering job on the Rio died finally, and I fixed it correctly this time. Tinned the iron even. Eric would be proud. Tonight I also cleaned the Kimber for this weekend, put a new edge on my blade and oiled the hinge even. I'm feeling the need for some simple repetitive action here to release stress.
Voice mail system was down in the AM, so I probably lost the message from my instructor canceling the lesson for tonight. I went, he wasn't there, so I spent 30 minutes practicing my myself. At least I didn't have to charge myself.
The Thermal exhaust rocks! At idle it's quieter than stock, but a lot more deep sounding, not tinny at all. Around 2000 RPMs it could almost, almost be a touch ricey, but then at 2500 is looses that little rasp and goes back to awesome. At 6500 RPM it's music. It makes you want to run it up and then down shift early for corners just to hear that vrrrrrrrrrooooooommmmmmmmmmmmm as it engines brakes down. Not a Porsche or anything, but it still sounds great. And, the annoying rattle is gone. When they pulled the old cat off and shook it there was the sound of rocks in a tin can. Yep, that was the rattle.
Mine isn't all scratched like the one in this picture, nor did my catalytic converter come with the cat. (Anne was bummed, she wanted the cat)
Weekend from hell, and I got it all done and no one got hurt.
Saturday:
1. Got the new Thermal exhaust and cat installed on the car (had Midas do it, I was in no shape to get under the car)
2. Oil change to winter oil 10W30 fully synthetic Castrol (they had no Mobil 1)
3. Shopped (and with dad's help) haggled successfully for a washer, dryer, fridge and bed for the cabin. We got another 25% off on the bed, 15% off the appliances and paid no sales tax. He's scary good at that haggling stuff.
4. Ran around with the 3 ton Mitsubishi flatbed turbo diesel and loaded the appliances, my bed, the parents new bed, the stuff from Jo and the boxes of crap mom got (bathroom stuff, towels, kitchen stuff, etc) and took it up to pioneer.
5. Unloaded all the above mentioned stuff, setup both beds, then slept.
Sunday:
1. Unloaded (dad and I, no hand truck) the appliances and carried them in the house and got them wired/plumbed.
2. Nailed down all the loose trim on the decks, stairs and repaired the trim on the chimney (on a 20' ladder, it was a lot scarier than it sounds due to how badly the ladder was placed, and now we know why they didn't fix it before) and painted the trim, steps and new wood on the deck.
3. Painted the new wood on the back of the house, door trim and front eave of the roof. The paint matches done by home depot don't match for crap, BTW.
4. Weather stripped the doors, winterized the exposed pipes, etc
5. Cleaned (and scrubbed!) the propane tank. I have no idea why.
6. Drove back to Fremont, did laundry, cleaned misc crap, and entertained Anne.
Anne wants to know when the cabin starts to be fun and stops being work. I think that time is close at hand. It supports life now with the full range of appliances, furniture and bathroom/kitchen niceties, and being fully 100% cleaned by mom. She even made dad get on the ladder and scrape the paint over spray off the windows on the outside and then clean them with this nasty cleaner. Place has probably never been so clean.
The parts arrived to work on the miata which is about the only good thing that's happened today that I can recall. Work was just very very busy, lots of people running around causing trouble and asking for things.
I was going to buy diablo II tonight and play on-line with Nick, but it's now 9:30pm and Fry's closed a long time ago and I'm still at work. Second 12 hour day I've done this week, I'm not used to this crap. Double sigh. Well even if they were open, I wouldn't be able to play as I've got to go home and get to sleep before 10pm so I can get up at 6:30am, get to the gym and get to work by 10 for the stupid ass LSF meeting. What a total fuster cluck that will be, they only gave us two days to test and no one has started yet.
Speaking of meetings tho, I held a 2 hour meeting with Sun today, they wanted my input into their new compute farm they're designing. I stood the whole time. I was poised at the white board with a marker but never got to draw anything as they were asking questions the whole time and I mostly just waved my arms in the air a lot and that seemed to work. There were all native English speakers so we could move the conversation along at a good pace and got a lot done.
And reloading my page I noticed the target picture and what I wrote. It's not 'still' shooting right, it was shooting _left_ and we moved the sight. So the sledge hammer adjustment moved to too far. Ah ha! I'll have them hammer it back the other way when next I'm up there. I guess that would be next week.
I finally figured out why I'm always catching people on the offramp from 237 to Lawrence. On 237 we're doing 75-80 mph which I continue to do as a I take the offramp, which is posted 40 mph. Oh.
Kenpo class was good, I picked up more info and stuff to work on at home. I got to punch a girl tonight. :) (Of course, she punched back). We also did work with kicks against someone holding a pad, so I got to see what it's like to actually connect with a kick rather than just doing it in the air. I also see why a knife negates about 15 years of martial arts training (as they say). I suck at punches, kicks and chops but if I had a knife in my hand, I could do some serious serious damage. Good thing I carry one. A year of this and I might just give up on the whole gun thing.
Proof I'm living in the sticks:
I tried that wolf ammo (the stuff from Russia) tonight. It doesn't work very well in the Kimber, it tends to double feed a lot, like every magazine there for a while. The case lip is too thick and the walls of the case deform out too much so it sticks in the chamber and the extractor can't get a good hang on it. It's also pretty 'hot', like military loads tend to be. My hand was sorta bruised/red after only 100 rounds. I guess I won't order anymore for the class, I'll have to buy the spendy good stuff at the range. At least I tried. Here is my best target of the night. I'm still dropping one round in 10 for some weird reason. Usually #8 goes in the toilet. This is a sample 10 round group at 25'. Normally we shoot at 21' but the light on my lane was misaligned and pointed too far back so I just backed the target up an extra yard or so. I'm still shooting slightly right as well, but that's got to be operator error, we adjusted the sights, mostly.
Saw an interesting t-shirt at the gym today. This little tiny Indian woman had a shirt that said "Your God is not MY Problem". I thought it was funny.
Also on the weird front today was this dream I woke up from. I was in a meeting room somewhere with Kenny, some guy I didn't know and Bill Gates. Bill was just sorta sitting there watching the unknown guy describing some sort of interface to something and it was clear to me that I was supposed to write the back end to this application as I kept thinking of ways to implement what was being described. After a bit I said something like "can we come up with the data structures we'll pass before we go on?" at which point the unknown guy said that the GUI was important but the function wasn't so we would finish the GUI design first, then worry about making it work. I was suddenly very worried that the product would look good, but suck. Is this was MS designers face all the time? Some manager type not caring if it works but only that it looks good? It seems far too likely; I feel sorry for those who are forced to work like that.
I went with Jo for coffee (she said I owed her at least one latte for 'knocking her up' so early on Sunday to get the furniture. To the English it means nothing to do about being pregnant). Anyway, I got to drive her, um my, Montero for the first time. It's a tippy little beast, like the Jeep only much worse. I have no idea why we didn't flip doing 35 mph down Lawrence.
Damn, went to the store tonight and they don't carry my 95% fat free salami anymore. Damn, damn, damn! Now what am I supposed to have with my reduced fat cheese and reduced fat triscuts?
Mom called me today and said that dad was really upset because he couldn't get the money together to buy his tractor and that it would be really nice if I would give him the money to do it. I don't think mom has ever asked me for anything before so I said yes right away. Looks like I'm buying a tractor. $6500 for a D4 cat. I think it looks like this (but hopefully he picked one that doesn't have the rusted treads):
Speaking of way too big of stuff, my friend Troy bought a new truck and trailer to drag his cobra around in. Check this beast out:
After yesterday's little jaunt you would think I was done driving around, but nope, had to go up to SF to pick up the furniture I bought from Jo. Dad, Anne (who is sick and is going to give it to me) and I went up and managed to load everything without damage. I drove over a planter of sorts to get up onto the sidewalk so we could load stuff. Her apartment may have a great view of the city, but it's hell to try to get in/out of and there is no parking, per usual city streets. Driving around I hate SF because there is no where to park. Walking around I hate all the nut balls that are always pestering you. The only wining move is not to play. Fortunately the only person I know in SF now is Paul and he's never around anyway.
Had sushi for dinner tonight and actually got good service at the place that always has really bad service. I'm also starting to like green tea, but don't let that get out.