Let's see those little trick-or-treat bastards try to get in now. I tie-wrapped the gate locked just to be an ass. Normally the lights out and the lack of decorations would be enough, but in fact this year there are some decorations. Well, sorta. I took the woman to a pumpkin patch and got 3 small pumpkins. She sure seemed to like it. I was expecting more from the "patch" when in fact it was just a tent with a bunch of left-over pumpkins in it. Whatever, made her happy and that's what I was after. Went for sushi at Midori when were were done. Tasty!

Saturday we went up to her apartment and organized some crap and she cleaned the bathroom. I fell asleep on the floor around 4pm; she put my head on a roll of paper towels and covered me with my jacket so I wouldn't get cold. After the nap I vacuumed the place while she finished up the scrubbing. We went to to Speisencommer (sp?) the German place. The special was wild boar which was quite tasty. The company though, man I could do without. It was Jenny and Tom, her (now old) downstairs neighbors. Jenny is fine, Tom is a moron. He kept bringing everything back to politics, yet he's really stupid about it. I understand that he's a flaming candy-ass give everything away ('cause he's poor) liberal. What I hate is how he doesn't think anything through. He was saying that the governments job was to redistribute wealth, yet then complains that all these deadbeats filing for bankruptcy was making credit card interest rates higher. Hmm... someone else's bad decisions effecting his money? How is that different than just taking his money and giving it to the people who make poor choices and end up going bankrupt? Dumbass. The other fun one was his gun control idea. He suggested just suspending the 2nd and 5th (?) amendment and going door to door seizing guns because they're bad and no one should have them. As a reporter, you would think he would be against just 'suspending' the constitution and getting rid of popular opinions. I didn't bother asking how he would feel if they just suspended some amendments and took over his paper because someone though what he said was "bad". Again, dumbass. At least think your stuff through and come up with better arguments and ideas. Discussion is good, beating your chest and throwing feces at things you don't like and don't understand is just annoying. The best part of the evening was that we walked to the restaurant.

Today we went to Starbucks for a beverage, snack and to read the paper (which was all political crap, even the travel section was bad). After we walked home we started organizing, tossing duplicates, etc. The kitchen is done, the master bedroom and bath are done and the den is close. Dad came by with all my reloading stuff from the cabin so I can figure out what to keep and what to toss. In theory, Don has a .50cal reloading setup and I'll probably start making some bullets in the coming weeks.

Finished round 2 of the in-person Google interviews. Man, those boys know what the hell they're doing!

Horrible dreams last night about robots/cyborgs taking over and killing everyone. Lots of scenes in the dream, various "resistance" type activities that ultimately end in disaster for the humans. The final dream was where we find out about how the cyborg dudes started, some kid wrote a video game. It was very old, the box said "now uses 20Kb of RAM!" so who knows what my brain was up to. I'm sure if I could write it down it would make a bad SF movie on USA, but alas it's fading fast. It was also very stormy last night which woke me up a few times. Looks like no motorcycle today, it's still windy and raining outside. It's also freakin' dark still, even at 7am.

I changed the DHCP range on the router to start at .10 and made the laptop static at .3 now. That way the woman's computer won't keep taking over my IP when the laptop is in suspend mode. Pong only talks to MAC/IP combos it knows about so when she steals my IP I have to VPN into work and come back through the router so I can see pong (as it always knows about .1). Lame to have to go through 20+ network hops to reach a box that's 20' away.

I forgot the most important thing from yesterday... I got a haircut. Yes, but not just any haircut.... we did it at home. Using the $17 trimmer the woman got we buzzed my hair back down to 3mm (what the #1 guard gives you). It looks like my normal $25 but at a big savings. Now that we own the trimmer, I'll get a haircut every two weeks for free. How cool is that? Short hair rocks! I can't wait to go bald, that will be even better.

My fingers are so sore I can hardly type. OK, all of me is sore. Let's recap quickly. Friday night late, after I spent time with dad looking at cars for mom, I drove up to Kristen's. Saturday she packed stuff while I lounged and then that night while she went to a party for a friend of hers, I went to a psycho class. Walt (the instructor) said I should show up for a few hours on Saturday just to get some night practice in. It was at the range in Richmond which is pretty freakin' scary (it's a bad town) but the shoot was good. Afterwords I went to dinner with Eric and Elana... yep, I have some friends starting up down here. They've got a nice house in Alameda and we have lots in common (guns, motorcycles, etc).

Today, dad brought the truck up and we loaded up 99% of the woman's crap and brought it down to my place. It's official, she's moved in. Pretty scary stuff. Not as scary as Richmond, but still scary. Of course I've had a lot of chickies living with me over the years I should be used to it but this one seems a lot more long-term-ish. We shall see. She has a lot of crap, but not as much as she could have. There is minimal junk down in the garage; most of it is stuff that I've got to put in the storage unit (the fake Christmas tree, the big fan, etc). I'll organize the storage better and should have no problems. Most of what's in there is the large gun cases and a few boxes for things. I'm also going to throw out the old pink carpet and tile that's down there and replace it with the new roll of extra carpet and left over tile in case it's needed for a repair.

After going up and down those stairs at her place about a billion times, I think I'm going to call it a workout and might skip the gym tomorrow. We'll see how I feel in the morning.

I talked to Google more tonight and they still want me to come back in for a 2nd round. Here we go again.

Pong is acting really funny again, the arp data is all wigged out. Man, this wireless bridge is starting to suck again, especially with all the devices on the wire and the number of IP addresses being shuffled between the replay and all the machines. The replay seems to give it's up though, I don't see it holding onto an address when I login to the router.

I drove in today because a guy bought the El Camino and dad had to drive it Sunnyvale to meet the guy... except of course he flaked. Well, he sorta flaked. He said he couldn't come up with the last $250. Lame attempt at last minute bartering and it didn't work. So I'm stuck in the car and with an hour or more commute home in traffic. That sucks. I made the most of it by going to the BMW dealer to get some oil for the bike and just puttering around not going to work. It's nice to get out of the office on occasion.

The modem is still working, but it's 65 and sunny outside. So much for testing my theory. We'll just chalk it up to rain and move on.

So far, so good. The cable modem is still up and operational. I sure hope it's not really that it's overheating.

Damn, it's still working. And fast too. Grrr... overheating.... grrr....

Google sent email, they want to do yet another round of interviews. Crazy. How many will I go through before I just admit I don't want it? Oh wait, I already did admit that I didn't want it. Hmmm... gotta ponder this one.

Chatter on the BMW group says that this is crappy scan is a picture of the new '05 1200RT (the bike I have the deposit on). Let's hope it's just a fake spy shot, I think it's kinda ugly.

It's raining pretty seriously right now. Not an Oregon/Washington sort of serious but not bad for the bay area. Enough anyway for the media to tout it up like the world is on fire. Guess it makes for an easy news day chasing SUVs in ditches and trees that fall over.

The cable modem continues to act strange; needed a few reboots last night to keep the service going. It seems like when the neighborhood connection goes up/down the modems can't reconnect and they have to be power-cycled. Not sure why that is. What I did find out was that packet loss to/from pong and the router was 50%+. Someone (dad?) moved the antenna from next to pong (where it might have blocked the ladder in the garage) to on top of the power supply. I'm surprised the signal made it the 10' through the floor to the router sitting on top of that cheap obviously unshielded power supply. I'm also thinking I'm going to move my PC from the cheap l-sim 4u box that it's in now to that ultra-small dell I brought home to replace pong. I setup the woman's machine and it's so quiet, guess modern stuff is like that. The dell is a p4 something or another which is faster than the p3/450 I'm using now. I'll have to move my video card over though, I doubt the on-board video has the balls to drive the 21" flat panel at 1600x1280.

This is bad, all the net connections at work are locking up, I can't get to my local machine but I can get to pong. Oh the irony.

Maybe the cable modem is overheating? It's in the same cabinet as before but now there is the replay and the VCR in there. The replay was in there before as well and the VCR can't be kicking off that much heat because it's off, but I did have to lower the shelf down another 1" or so to get it all in there, and the UPS is inside the cabinet now and the whole works is no longer in the middle of the room but rather back in the TV alcove. I've taken the modem out and it's sitting outside the cabinet. If it runs for a few days I'll put it back and if it crashes, we have our culprit. What I'll do about it I'm not sure at this point but I bet it involves a fan and/or cutting the back out of the cabinet for extra ventilation.

Packet loss over the cable modem at the moment is 25%+ and it's completely stopped working on a few occasions now. Every time it rains the cable goes out. Will someone tell those dumbasses to close the box on the router so it doesn't explode at the first sign of moisture???

I've got 5 systems running on my router now. The laptop, my desktop, the woman's desktop and pong are all wireless, the replay box is wired directly in. It's so high tech.

Tonight we moved stuff out of the back bedroom and the living room in preparation for the carpet on Saturday. The tile and pergo looks awesome as does the fireplace. The carpet is really going to pull it all together so instead of islands of nice stuff surrounded by crappy carpet you have nice stuff all the way.

I gotta quit goofing off tonight and pack for tomorrow, get my good clothes into the car (I'll stop at the gym to change so no one notices me wearing spiffy stuff at the office all of a sudden) and fill out the paperwork for the interview. It's a standard looking NDA and a two page application which is all data on my resume. Except for my GPA. I totally don't remember that, but I'm guessing it was at least a 3.3? Hopefully they won't check that.

Work isn't so bad, when you're only here every few days. :)

I talked to Google again and they want me to come in even though I said no thanks. They said that they don't usually "chase" candidates but apparently I had some profound impact on the first interviewer dude so they really want to talk. I said that as long as they know I'm not going to leave now I'm happy to talk. The guy (Ben I believe, I wrote his name down) said that when he interviewed he didn't want to leave his job either but google is so cool that he just had to. They also played on the fact that I'm not going to make any more stock money at NVDA, which oddly is true. Yea, ESPP is worth something to me but they probably have that too. I just don't know how google stock will do, it's all pumped up and based on nothing and that sort of crap can't fly these days, this isn't '99 anymore companies are expected to at least fake making a profit.

Tile work continues at the house, I'm excited to get there today and see what they've finished. The downstairs bathroom should be completed at least. I primed and painted all the quarter-round trim stuff so he can do the finish work. There could/maybe be enough to also put the rounds around the base in the closet where the cedar is. Dad and I were going to do that but got lazy and didn't want to go back to home depot to get it. If there is extra, it's easy to install, especially since I already did the grunt work of painting.

I spent a few minutes working on pong's ssh defender script. It now will watch for failed ssh attempts and after 3 tries it black holes the host. I might put this on the http thing too, it's spiffier than my old one. I also have an exception list so I don't accidentally blackhole NVDA's IP if I'm testing or screwing around.

Having days off rules! Even if I'm just here waiting for the contractors.

Thursday, dad and I put cedar flooring in all the upstairs closets. It looks pretty good and with the use of Troy's nail gun it went in fairly fast. We took a lot of time to ensure we didn't waste much of the material and from the 50 sq. ft. of cedar we bought, we had just over 1 sq. ft. of scrap. Now that's efficient. The tile guy will be here today to rip up the rest of the carpet and start the tile work. Or we hope anyway.

Friday we headed down to Morro Bay for the Edelweiss reunion tour. The full photos are here. It was a good couple of days of riding, and I think the pics explain most of it. That wrecked bike at the end of the photo set was one of the other guys from the bay area. I really liked his R1100 before I stuffed it into that ditch. It's amazing how little damage it actually did, just the headlight and the turn signal and the screen bracket. That's not bad for being upside down.

Sunday afternoon when I got home I had to go up to Kristen's to go to some psych "party". It was up in the Berkley hills at some high-end doctor's house and while the house was nice, the people were really strange. 20-30 shrinks walking around with their very strange husbands/wifes/partners.

I picked up my Fanta... those packaging guys are nuts. Every can was in it's own zip-lock bag that was taped shut, and every two cans were wrapped in bubble wrap together. The whole pile was then in a styrofoam cooler, which was in a cardboard box. They went all out.

The contractor dudes are working away, we've had our first screw up. They demolished too much around the fireplace and now have to use full tiles instead of the 1/2 tiles. Oddly, we have enough to do the whole thing without ordering any more.... hmm... sounds like a scam to me somehow. I'll double check with the woman that she's OK with the full tiles and then we're back on schedule. The other tile guy is putting down some funny flooring on top of the existing sub floor to lay the ceramic stuff on. He's moving way faster than dad and I did. The compressor is really loud so I'm going down into the garage to clean the bike up. It's got a lot of salt crap on it from the trip and sitting out by the ocean a few nights.

Took today off and worked on the closet floors with dad. It took us all day, but now all the bedroom closets are cedar lined (the floor anyway). It looks pretty damn slick and with Troy loaning us a compressor and nail gun and various implements of destruction it wasn't that tough to do. The materials were under $100 and we used 49 of the 50 sq. ft. we bought. That's pretty efficient use of material.

Google called me today and left a message; they still want to talk even thought I gave them the thanks but no thanks message. Wonder what's up?

I've got to pack now and get ready for the trip tomorrow. I'll take some pictures and put them up on Sunday or Monday.

Yesterday I did a phone thing with Netapp, they're going to put out another "success paper" and they wanted some details about what we've been up to lately. I tried to get them to include the word "hokey" in a quote; I doubt it's going to make it. They never have any fun.

I am so sore. Yesterday was the psycho class and it was over half movement and team tactics which means lots of squatting down, kneeling, walking back to back, etc, etc. Fun, interesting and challenging, but still a ton of work. My legs are sore from the thousands of times I had to go down to my knees. My partner (since I didn't bring one) was this 40-something year old Chinese lady with an addiction to Nicorette gum shooting a Glock 19. She was pretty fast and knew what the hell she was doing; she's been to 1-on-1 training with Walt and done the force on force stuff where they make you go into a shoot house with simunitions and fight real people. She didn't slow me down at all, and I don't think I slowed her down at all. Walt (the instructor) wants me to go up to Richmond on the 23rd or 24th for a night shoot so he can give me some quick instruction to get me up to speed for the next review course in December. The Kimber worked well all class, even using the lighter 200gr loads. Those light loads are probably why my hands still work at all today. I also brought in the shotgun so they could test it out and the results are favorable.

Today we made a list of all the stuff the painter has to finish up (it's 2 pages, is that worse than usual??) and then went up to SF so I could drop off the tank. (With the tank sold for $450 my total profit on the bike is an even $1000) Just to make the trip worth while, we also went to the Metreon for lunch and then went to some fancy furniture shops. I never understood why Kristen hated the furniture places in the south bay but after seeing the offerings in the city I understand. Every store has different stuff, you can find anything you can imagine. In the south bay, it's store after store of the same crap, just pick the ethnic group you want to sell it to you. After 6 stores I was done, but we had at least found some stuff I like. It will be a while before we get that far, but at least she's got ideas of what I like and what I can live with so when she's out and about she can focus her hunting. It's a good project.

At work, Ed (my boss) got promoted up to VP of half the IT group. The other group (the business guys) will be under someone else. Now I just have to cancel my Google interview. It's too risky to go to it and risk my NVDA job now. I talked to Ed, I should be able to move up to director in a year or so. That's worth going for.

The big news was on Friday, I found a place that you can order all sorts of food stuff from Germany, including FANTA! Happy happy joy joy, I'm going to get my Fanta.

The other news is the woman wants me to put in here that I felt her up in the bushes while we were on our walk this morning (we go over to Starbucks for coffee and scones and to read the Sunday propaganda sheet).