I'm back from Florida and sitting in my desk again at work. It's freaky that it gets dark so soon, it's only 5:38 and it's already pitch black out. Sucks. Stupid daylight savings. Now it's dark when I get up and dark when I get home. That's not a bonus.

Ever wonder what they mean on the plane when the pilot says something about "disarm and cross check" and the flight attendants say "cross check complete"? Apparently they have to disarm the rear door slides so they don't deploy when the caterers open the doors. Each attendant does one door and then checks the other person's work (that's the cross check). I finally asked today, I was curious.

I have pictures from Epcot and all that I'll download when I get home. Going to the gym tonight after work, I gotta get at least some sort of workout in. I feel like a dehydrated slug.

Paige just stopped by and borrowed a can opener. Hers is still packed away in the camping gear with is at Rick's house. Oh. Visitors are odd.

The photos of Epcot are up. Included in them are a few pictures of a Mitsubishi dealership. That's Fountain Mitsubishi in Orlando, where the Montero is from. Yea, a little strange but it was right there so I had to take a picture or two.

Damn missed some updates. OK, quick, before I forget. The other night when Jo and her friend came to collect me for the show, the friend chick apparently had a positive reaction to me for the 2 seconds she saw me. She told Jo that I was cute and had "eyes that sparkled like jewels". Theater people are sure flowery. Nice complement though, too bad she's an overweight black girl.

The Battlestar DVDs are very good quality. Much better than they ever looked on broadcast TV from what I recall. The sound is still iffy but the video is clear. Watching without commercials is nice too. What was really strange was that the first episode of the gun two-parter aired on October 22, 1978. I watched it on October 22, 2003... exactly 25 years to the day of it's first air play. Is that freaky or what? I brought the DVDs back though. Leianne already tried to borrow them from me. They're too valuable to just leave lying around on the table like that. :)

I dunno if Dennis ever did anything about his problem employee... but I'm firing mine. Next Friday is his last day, he'll be walked out after HR and I have a nice little chat with him. I went through my sent items folder and found all the prodding email I had sent him over the last 14 days trying to get work out of him. I came up with 8. Some where bitches about missing meetings, others were complaints about not responding to pages while he was on-call. I didn't realize it was so many. My VP is totally in agreement with me on this, he really pushed HR to make it happen fast. I feel bad, but I think I've done enough.

Phil (the security guy) let a little hint drop yesterday. Turns out I'm on the 'watch list' the lawyers came up with. They're monitoring my email now and even archiving some of it for later discovery. Why? Because I send and receive email from Microsoft and Intel. Scary shit man. I hate to think how much sexual innuendo email they've got stored up!

I took a personality quiz/assessment thing on match.com and it says that my attitudes and ideals are not shared by 78% of my age group, and only 3% of the women out there are strongly attracted to my personality type. Wow. I knew I was weird, but not that far out there.

Last night I went to this swank Eli Thomas clothing store grand opening thing with Leianne and her sister. She worked there for 10 years at the old store and this is the new one in Santana Row. Lots of rich people there and some very nice trophy wives. I looked way out of place in my camping pants and t-shirt. I got to drive Kristine home though after she got too drunk. I was hoping she would slip and put the moves on me but no such luck. Damn.

Vareck's journal is looking pretty spiffy these days, lots of fancy color and boxes and whatnot. Makes my vi generated one look sorta old school. I am school though so it's probably OK. I mean come on, I still use ispell. Dennis' journal says that he's taking his car in for the first service after 1 year. New car tech is getting impressive. Still, I would have wanted to swap out the original oil before now, all those little bits of metal floating around can't be good. Although maybe it's got one hell of an oil filter?

Yesterday Steve bought the Battlestar Galactica DVD set. All 24 episodes plus the pilot and some misc crapola. He's going to bring it back in today (or his woman will when she picks him up) so I can watch it tonight. Gun on Ice Planet Zero baby! Woohoo! (I'm so easy to entertain).

What else. Still working on figuring out how to either get more work out of my problem guy or replace him. Man that sucks. Just work, dammit, don't be a slacker. Are people so stupid to the economy out there? He is Indian, I guess he can just go home and work if he gets fired here.

What, am I some sort of sysadmin? I missed going to the theater with Jo tonight to stay at work and help Rod out with the failed HDS array and while that was going on one of the sunfires crashed and I'm now doing firmware upgrades on that (we're moving everything to 5.14.5 as they crash since we can't get downtime to do it before they crash). It's like I'm actually working again. Kinda fun.

I also was playing around with the Opteron boxes again and Winders AS2003. They've come a long way, but you still have to reboot when you make some network changes. Lame.

Those tricky bastards. Replacing the batteries in the watch won't make it come back on. There is an "AC" circuit (all clear maybe?) that has to be activated as well. It's a little spot on the board of the watch that you've got to touch to the + of one of the batteries (using a pair of tweezers) to get the watch to turn back on. The guy at the watch place showed me the trick. Ha! Now I gotta go to Fry's and pick up some more of those 10 cent batteries and stick 'em in the freezer. Can't pass up 10 cent batteries that work now, can I?

Saw Kill Bill last night. I liked it. Yea, there was all that blood and whatnot but it was pretty comical, not too freaky at all.

Worked on the Montero with Troy today. It's neither the output shaft seal nor the main case seal, it's the damn shifter seal (where the shift lever goes into the case) that's leaking. It's serviceable from the top, or so it looks. I'll go order the seals and then figure out if/when I can tackle the repair job.

After vacuuming downstairs, washing down the banisters (they're metal, they seem to collect crud) and some other misc tasks I went for a drive. I stopped at the German deli and found that they have every version of the Ritter Sport bars, all 15+ varieties. Yum! I got one of those as well as some of that strange sausage that I like so much. A single package of sausage turned out to be $16... it's about 3 lbs and was on sale. Oh. The stuff is really, really bad for you as it turns out from the nutrition info (which I never saw in Germany) but you can't eat much of it anyway as it's so rich. Some of this with some sharp cheddar will rock. I stopped by my parents and tried a couple of cheeses there as they always have 5-6 different cheese types available. Dad has gone with all soft cheeses this week so I didn't score there. They did have fresh raspberries so I snagged a couple of those. Also yum.

I'm currently sitting on the front patio reading and watching the sun go down. I stopped at the bookstore and picked up the 4 book set of the Legacy of the Drow one of the older series of D&D based books by R.A. Salvatore. It's trash reading but I really enjoy it so I'll indulge myself a little. At least they're not fattening. :)

I changed my editor for my journal to be "vi +1" which will make sure I start out on the first line of my journal when I invoke it. The memory feature that puts you on the last line you edit is handy, but not what I want for the journal since I add at the time all the time.

My neighbor just came out onto her porch and is smoking. She's got a ton of plants on her porch, you can barely see her there but you can see the flame from the lighter.

I kinda want to go to the store....hold on, wireless link is freaking on me. Why is that? Pong is pretty damn local now, shouldn't have service outages.

Interesting, very interesting... I've always wondered how many people read personals ads (aside from myself). So I put one up on craigslist and put a link to a picture of myself in the public area on pong. The ad has been up for all of 10 minutes and I've already got 20 hits on the pic on the web site. At least I know people are looking at it and if I don't get responses it's not because no one saw it, it's because they didn't like what they saw. Puts a spin on things anyway.

Oh, and this free MP3 player (128mb) I got at the user conference last week actually works pretty well. Nice interface on the unit, usable controls, plugs right into the laptop with USB. Kinda big physically but otherwise it's excellent for free. :) Sure beats my old Rio that finally died beyond repair. :( Poor Rio. Gave a few years of service, even after the crack pipe soldering job to repair the battery holder.

Yesterday I did a brave (yet ultimately lame) thing. The Kelly services chick that does all the temps for nVidia is pretty cute so I had my agents check her out and see if she was single. She is. Interesting. I've talked to her a few times about non-work stuff while we were working and she seemed cool. I had Gayla (who sits near her) watch and email me when she was alone and then I came over and asked her out. Now she said no, because she won't date co-workers. My agents had reported that to me already so I knew I was going into a loosing situation but I had to try it anyway. Each failure makes you stronger. So it wasn't so bad, she thanked me for the offer and explained her policies and whatnot and we left it at that. Fairly painless.

Right now I'm just wasting time until dad gets here. We're meeting at my place at 7:30am and will be in the Saratoga 76 station to meet the other 3 riders by 8am. We'll be at Alice's for breakfast before 9, eat and then head down 84 to La Honda and the coast, down Hwy 1 to Santa Cruz and then back over the hill on Hwy 9 (unless we're running out of time in which case we'll just hit Hwy 17 which is the main freeway back over the hill). Should be fun. Three of the people.... actually 4 of the people have never done the loop before (dad, Colin, Jason and Dan). Colin is out visiting from New Jersey and is riding a rented 1150GS from SJC BMW.

They need two lines at the breakfast counter at work in the morning. One for people that just want food, juice, milk, donuts, etc and one for the people who want the stupid fluffy coffee drinks. It's not Starbucks people, the double non-fat soy tai tea mocha latte iced espresso frappichino with whip isn't the same and it takes the Mexican dude behind the counter 30 minutes to figure the thing out.

Valerie sent me some pictures of the storm damage that hurricane did to the east coast a few weeks ago. The house with the tree in it is their (her parent's) neighbor.

So I've finally done it, or finally setup myself up to do it anyway. I have a T46 dinner tonight and I rode the bike in to work. I think I'm going to ride to the dinner. Don't have much choice, I've got a vendor in from out of town at 4pm to talk about power in the new data center and that won't get done with early enough for me to get home and to get back. Plus we have a work luncheon thing so I can't sneak home at lunch. I'm trapped! I realize it doesn't seem like a big deal but it is. When I go to these dinners normally I look just like all the other geeks. Tonight though I'll look way different than the other geeks because I'll be in my biker attire. It's either going to set me apart or alienate me. Time will tell.

At the coffee shop tonight I saw the best ass I've seen in a long, long time. This skinny blonde chick walks in (with a cop, they seemed to be together) and proceeds to saunter around in line, at the window, etc showing off her most amazing butt. Incredible. I realize that it doesn't mean much to most you guys but for those of us that don't get to live in Seattle or Portland it's a rare treat to see such a fine woman.

For reasons that are not entirely clear to me, Jo is going to loose her job at the theater tomorrow.... before she could quit. At one point I offered her the spare room to use if she needed it. Looks like she's going to be taking me up on the offer. She's got no job (again) so rent will be even harder to make so now she'll hang here until she gets something else. She's willing to work anywhere, Starbucks, Home Depot, whatever. Just not in IT. Sigh.

I got my hair chopped again tonight. This is phase 2, even shorter than last time. The girlies don't like it but I do. Sometimes though you've got to do what's right for you, even if others don't like it.

Oh, and my 10 cent batteries? Quite dead. That or my watch is broken. Damn. I knew it was too easy.

I has some strange dreams last night. Mostly involving some sort of time travel. I never got to travel in time, but I was running around exploring and figuring out what an alternate me had been doing to screw with the time line in supposedly good ways. One thing that stands out was that there was a library and workshop underground... a train station had been built over them. It was odd because I had seen the same workshop and library in several other dreams over the last year. At one point I knew I had to be on a certain train because something was going to happen on it (what that was I never found out). I told the ticket guy I needed the cheapest ticket on whatever that train was, destination didn't matter. He said I could go to Portland for $19. That seemed cheap but then I remembered that I was in the past and that $19 was probably a lot back then. I couldn't pin down the exact date, but it had a 1800s feel to it.

I went to Fry's in Sunnyvale and found my batteries. They were marked down to 10 cents each. Yea, 10 cents. I should have got a bunch of them but who knows what the shelf life is and if they would be useful the next time I need them. Probably will pick some more up next time I'm there if these turn out to work. I mean, even if they're weak when I need them next they're something.

Busy weekend. Saturday morning I rode out to El Granada to visit with K5. It's a 45 mile trip door to door and I did it in 44 minutes. Yes, I was hauling ass the whole way. ~80 mph on Hwy 101, at least 45 mph on Hwy 92. I passed (illegally) 34 cars on 92 and was sailing along until I hit the Half Moon Bay minivan festival. Every barf box on the coast was out clogging the roads. I still made good time. Anyway, she's doing well. Doesn't even look pregnant from the back, her arms, legs, butt, etc haven't really changed, she just has this huge old gut where the kid is. So far she's not a fan of being pregnant, she just wants the kid. She's not working and is going to school full time to learn about interior design. It's a 4 year program, sounds pretty involved. Jeff (Mr Boy Toy) was in Vegas for a guys weekend so she was alone at home doing gardening and whatnot. The back yard looks really good and the house is well decorated. She won't let Jeff put any of his stuff anywhere but the back room for the most part so it's hard to tell that he lives there. She always was sorta like that. :) We had breakfast at the cafe which was tasty as always.

Saturday afternoon I went on a date with Sue. Not the neighbor Sue but the sister of our Netapp sales rep. She's interesting enough. We had sushi and then went to Starbucks and sat for a bit. I was home by 8pm or a little after and read and crashed on the sofa only to wake up around 12:30am and go to bed. Today I met up with her again and we did a hike over at Rancho San Antonio. We did the big 'power pole' hike which was 10 or so miles, lots of elevation changes as you follow these power poles over the through the hills. I took a few pictures that I'm sure I'll download next time there is something interesting to download. After we went for a jamba juice and Cupertino was having an Oktoberfest thing in the park so we walked around that. Yea, it didn't exactly feel like Germany. The food booths were serving Chinese chicken salad, tandoori chicken, etc. No bratwurst, no sausages, only one pretzel booth, etc. No real beer either, just Becks. We sat on the lawn in the shade for an hour or so and then went our separate ways. We each had stuff to do.

I cleaned out my camel back reservoir using the brushes and cleaning tablets I got at REI. It cost just as much as buying a new reservoir but I've got 10 uses of the treatment stuff. It worked pretty well, I'm happy with the outcome. I also took apart my hiking watch as it needs new batteries (takes 2 as it turns out). I couldn't find them at Fry's nor at the two drug stores I went to. I'll hit a watch shop tomorrow and if that doesn't work hopefully there is a source on-line. (just checked, found the SR927W in the first two places I looked, $1.50 each. good to know).

Tonight I went to my parents and had dinner. They were at Whole Foods today so dinner was organic rice and asparagus, fresh tuna steaks and scallops wrapped in bacon. The fish and scallops were BBQ-ed by dad and pretty tasty.

Possibly the most exciting event of the weekend was on Friday though. Have you ever wanted to un-do one of your worst mistakes? Well I got to do just that. The guy that I sold my mini-14 didn't want it anymore and offered to sell it back to me for what I sold it at. I got back my mini-14, with the scope, 1- 10 rnd mag, 3- 30 rnd mags and 3- 40 rnd mags (just as I sold them to him, still in the original packaging). It's so cool. He used it for jackrabbit hunting but only with the 10 round mag, he never bothered with the others. It's used, but not abused and looks good. I love it! Woohoo, my mini is back! And I still have the original paperwork showing I bought it in COS in '97 so it's totally legal (mostly).

And not that anyone cares but on the lame ass show She Spies (which I caught while doing laundry) one of the bad guys was the "Joe" dude from Joe Millionaire. He's got such a promising future. :)

Today was different. I went to the 9am cross training meeting and sat around until 9:15 when two people finally showed up. Everyone else on the team was late or 'forgot' or whatever. I was pretty pissed and let them know it. People seem to be avoiding me today. I don't think they're used to me being angry at them. They see me cranky with other groups all the time but not usually with them. It's quite different. Now I know why bosses turn into assholes, they don't start that way or want to go that way but people letting them down time and time again tends to make a guy cranky. People don't respond to kindness and respect for very long... you seem to have to kick them every once in a while too. Very sad.

Jo is still talking about quitting. She says she can't pay the rent and that she can just live with friends if she quits (but can't do that when she's working to save some cash or pay down debt?) She's in that almost-zero tax bracket so on her income she's probably taking home $2000/month. Let's see, so she's rent of $600 which leaves $1400 for food and insurance and gas and whatever. She walks to work, so that's got to be minimal gas costs. Hmm... could it be the $50 or so a day she drops out drinking with her buddies every night? Well, that's only $600 more a month. So what am I missing? OK, I'll admit it's not a good life at all, but seriously, what does she want exactly? She took the easy way out and played too much and now has to start over. Some prior planning would have saved her some serious pain.

The temp worker that wasn't working out? Poof, he's gone. They just came and hauled him away. Kinda sad, but it had to be done. The new guy starts Monday. The new guy seems much better, he's a new college grad, totally psyched to be working here. That's what we want to see in our slaves.

I'm sure there's something I should be putting in here but I've forgotten it. Rats.

Class today was pretty good. We were in the middle of the lesson and my instructor's stomach started grumbling loudly. Without really thinking I said "Haben Sie hunger? Ich habe zwei bananen in meinem Auto".... which means "are you hungry? I have two bananas in my car." Yea, it doesn't sound like much but I didn't have to translate it in my head first, it just sorta came out.

Oh yea, now I remember. Jo is an idiot. Not the VP Joe, Jo the English chick. She left nVidia because it sucked but she just couldn't wait those last 2 months until her first year of stock vested (which meant throwing away $100k or so back then). Then she screwed around in Australia for 6-9 months blowing all her savings. She got some job, worked it for a while, then quit. She shacked up with some guy and wandered around before coming here, wandering around racking up debt and then finally getting a job. Now she finds that it sucks (because people in general suck) and she's going to quit. She has no savings and still hasn't cleared all the debt she's already built back up. Just how stupid is that? The job can't suck that much, she's just managing a freakin' ticket booth at the theater. It's not like there can be that much pressure to perform. What, she won't advance in her career? She'll get fired? She won't have sufficient skills to reenter the ticket booth marketplace? She's at rock bottom, no where to go but up. Keep the lame job while you look for another, don't chuck it and go on welfare or whatever.

Also, my problem employee got his 'raise' the other day. Very small. He wasn't happy. He now wants to work less at the office and more at home. Ha. And to top it off there was a page tonight, ns246 died. I ignored it for a few hours to see him pick it up but it didn't happen so I just did it myself (all remote).

I called and confirmed the booking of the Scotland tour. July of '04. That's a long way off... I've got time to read up on the country. The info is here if you're curious.

Watching the election is like watching parts of Robocop where they have the fake news stories. I just can't believe that the terminator is going to be the governor. It's kinda cool, kinda scary at the same time. But really, what can he do? Take bribes, screw up deals, misdirect funds to lame ass pet projects, steal from the tax payers? All politicians do that. I'm hoping that because he's new at the whole thing he won't be very good at it so he'll end up not doing much of anything. Doing nothing is the best that we can hope for. No wait, they've got to balance the budget. Then after that they can do nothing. Just stay the f*ck out of everyone's lives and pockets. You're not a democrat, don't go taking more of my money and trying to protect me from myself thank you very much.

I have such an amazing headache. Almost like those killer headaches that plagued me earlier (was that a year ago?). Work isn't that stressy today as Joe is gone off on some SAP boondoggle in Germany so there isn't anyone wandering around causing trouble.

Troy wants to do dinner tonight so I'll head over. I should be doing homework but seeing how it is that he speaks German I can actually practice with a real live human instead of just doing book work. That's worth the time.

I called Lynn about the Scotland tour and they can only get 1 RT, the other choice will be an 1150R or an 1150R Rockster (fancy paint on an R) or a K1200GT. The GT is a big old monster, I'm not sure I could handle it. Dad couldn't ride it because he can't bend his knee enough (it's more of a sport oriented bike than the RT is).

Troy's big advice? Get an MBA, move up the chain until I'm hired to run a company myself, make a bunch of cash and leave. Humph. He was paid to give a talk on international business and explained how the markets work and how internationalization is going to make life very shitty for a bunch of people in the US but make it really nice for a whole different bunch of people elsewhere in the world. It made sense, even if it's bad for the US.

I think Dennis' journal entry means that he asked his woman to marry him, but it doesn't actually say that. If that's what he's hinting at I hope they do it sooner rather than later. These 1+ year engagements that are popular these days are lame. Just do it. And if it's that "we don't have the money right now" excuse all I can say is that you're getting married for all the wrong reasons then. :(

I'm back from the trip, pictures are up on the main page. What can I say other than there are some seriously big ass trees in that park. Check out that one image of dad standing on the top of that root ball of the tree that's fallen over. It's over 21' high. On the way home we skipped over I5 and went on route "J1" which is a county road that sorta cuts between I5 and 25 into the south of Hollister. There is a serious lack of anything on that road other than a little cafe/inn thing. We stopped to eat there because there were a couple of other RTs parked there so we figured it couldn't be all that bad. We've picked our tour and are going to do something different next year. Scotland. Yea, I don't know either but we get to see Loch Ness, that's got to be worth something. I've got to call on Monday, they only offer the tour twice a year and one is already full (some group took the whole thing). We'll be lucky if we get in, and even luckier if we get RTs. Otherwise I want to do the "best of Europe" tour or the new one-way tour Munich to some town in Norway. You get to take a boat trip too. Way cool. Check out www.edelweissbike.com if you're curious.

I've washed and waxed the Montero finally, it was seriously needing some attention. Hopefully this wax will last it through the winter. The paint is holding up well and the clear coat is mostly still there. It's got to last a while longer yet.

I talked to the R1 riding neighbor; he had just pulled in from the Superbike races down at Laguna. He's got a deposit down at two different places to get in line early for the new R1. 180 hp, you need that. Got bless the Japanese and the sport bike arms race! :)

Wow, another record shitty day at work. This is like what, 500000 in a row? Woohoo, must be some sort of record. I've pissed off like everyone I know, no one is my friend anymore (at work mind you), etc. On the plus side, I'm scp-ing my home directory and all my windows files to pong as I type. Nifty.

Hmm... what else, something good. Yea, what would that be? I'm heating up some chicken for dinner. That's good. I'm leaving for my trip tomorrow, that's good.

I just got off the phone with Sue Wellington, the daughter of our Netapp sales rep. He thinks we should go out. Get this, she's a nanny that doesn't want kids. Yea, weird. She likes kids, but doesn't want them all the time because they can be a pain and she likes being able to do stuff on the weekends and having her freedom. We talked for about 1.5 hours on the phone and I'm going to call her when I get home on Sunday. Cool.

Mom stopped by with three more plants. My house is sure looking green. I hope I can keep all this stuff alive. Sure looks good with them all fresh looking (vs. the very sickly looking two little plants I did have left over from gifts people gave me when I got my eyes lasered).

I'm supposed to have packed already and now be going to sleep so I can get up in the morning and go to the gym before the trip.... doesn't look like it's going to happen. I'm tired and want to read and haven't touched packing at all. I'll just do it in the morning I guess. I also have to empty the dishwasher and load the stuff from the sink in or it's going to be ugly when I return.

Data continues to flow into pong. The fan is running really hard right now as the drive and CPU are generating extra heat with the load (doing the decryption and whatnot).