My definition of a pain in the neck.

When I can't turn my head and the shoulder and upper back muscles are in spasm.

I'm not in San Diego. I woke up Tuesday morning and not only was my back still hurting, but my neck was out as well. What a lousy way to loose 2 days. I can think of a much better way to loose 2 days. One day I'll convince her.

I'm better, but I'm not leaving town. I'll take a trip to Capitola tomorrow.

I've been watching a bunch of movies. I finally saw the Big Lebowski. The Dude approves. Definitely worth watching once or twice a year. John Goodman was was let off his leash and it was great. Although sometimes you want to find the duct tape to shut him up.

That is it for now. Ain't life grand.

Sunday night, June 25, 2006. Great weekend.

Went to visit Andrew and Paige as the start of my week off before atarting the new job. Landed Friday at 8PM and crossed the sound on the ferry. It was wonderful to be cold. San Jose was hot. Too damn hot. The Seattle area is nice. One of the nicer spots on the earth. Green, hills and mountains all in one view.

Got back to Andrews house at almost 10PM Friday. Had a snack, jumped in the hot tub and went to bed.

102F, a perfect temurature for a hot tub. Hot enough, but not so hot as to only last 10 minutes. It's amazing how much hotter 105F feels. 98F-102F perfect. Ended each evening with a soak in the hot tub. I'm not sure life gets much better.

Saturday was really nice. Low 80s. Walked the beach. It is called Agate beach. A 5 minute walk from their house. It has that name because people find Agates on this beach. It was fun. I took a bunch of pictures.

This is Me.

This is Paige.

This is Andrew.

Facing towards Aggate pass bridge.

Along the beach

Out towards the sound.

There is something strangely sad but photographic about a sail boat on the beach.




Then we came back to the house, relaxed and then went out for lunch. Bella Luna in Kingston. Pretty good pizza. Then we went shopping for dinner before going back to the house to relax for a while.

Dinner was amazing. I made risotto. I used fresh large crimini and morrels in it. Andrew made this great shrimp dish. Large shrimp cooked fast in a large hot wok. Tossed with a ginger lemon sauce with hot peppers. Yumm. Paige made a salad with various veggies including fresh snow peas from their garden. Topped it with a really nice dill dressing. We had port and chocolate for dessert. Life is tough sometimes.

I watched The Joss Whedon Series "Fire Fly" for the first time. Interesting. May have to buy the DVD of the one and only season. Old west meets Space Cowboy and motley crew. OK with Geena Tores and Morena Baccarin, hot motley crew. OK, Fire Fly fans, don't attack.

Then the night ended with a dip in the Hot tub.

Sunday was a lazy day. Had Breakfast. Andrew took some spicey sausage and tossed it into some of the left over rissotto. Very good. We went shopping for dinner, came back and watched 2 more Fire Fly episodes. Andrew fooled around on his guitars and then company came.


Paige's friend Brook and her not boyfriend from England Gary. Had a good time. Again we made an excellent dinner.

Andrew grilled salmon on the BBQ. I prepped some corn on the cob and cooked it on the bbq as well. Paige made a salad. Same dill dressing. Excellent stuff. By prep, I shucked the corn, put butter, salt and fresh black pepper on the corn. I then wrapped the corn back in the husk and aluminum foil. Then cooked the corn on the BBQ for 30 minutes.

The wine was excellent. Bonney Doone "Big House Red" and V.Sattui Prestion Vinyard 2002 Cab.

Again we suffered though chocolate and port for dinner. Sharfenburger has a hazelnut dark chocolate. Go buy some now! The port is a 1978 Krohn Colheita.

It is time for bed. Yep, ended the day with a hot tub.

OK, it is now offically Monday. I am on a flight back at 5:45PM. I'll get home, repack, get a nights sleep in my own bed and make my noon flight to San Diego. I might play the letch and post a photo or two of the locals. At 45, noticing twenty somethings makes me a letch. Now don't waste you time asking me if I care. I figure if the drool isn't running down my face, I'm not a complete perve. I'll start worrying if I don't care to look anymore.

June 23rd 2006. My last day as an employee at Yahoo! Now that I don't work for the company any more, at least at 1:30PM today when I have my exit interview. I can wear yahoo gear.

I am ready to start new adventures. Starting with visiting a friend in Seattle this weekend and then exploring San Diego for 6 days. Will be fun.

I was not able to get everything done I wanted to get done before I left. But I got a lot of work done.

.........................

Yikes. I have to take a shower and get into work. But there is a maintenance guy replacing the wax ring on my toilet. It has been a problem since I moved in. the monthly wax ring replacement. But he just said he saw the issue. The freaking pipe is rusted and partially broken so the wax ring nevers sets correctly. A 1/4 inch sliver of metal is rusted away after 30+ years.

Wall mounted toilets are held by this heavy iron bracket that is mounted into the studs. Yes, a residential location with a wall mounted toilet. This plate needs to be replaced. Anyone taking bets that they don't corectly fix the drywall when they do this?

He's done. Time to get clean and see of the door hits me i the ass on the way out!

Jazz night at the Aquarium was great! Great tradition.

The weather Saturday was great. Here is a picture of the coast.



Started with dinner at the Crazy Horse. It has a really good salad bar. Had a full 4 course meal, salad, pasta, meat and dessert, or put another way: fiber, carb, protein and sugar. $10 bucks, what a deal. Alway enjoy eating here. This isn't fresh choice or sweet tomatos, but good. The service is also very good. Water glass is always filled, which is one of my biggest rating factors of a resturant. The plates are removed, the waitresses are friendly and the place is clean.


Jazz night has two great things going for it. One is that there are no lines or crowds. You don't feel presure to look and move on because of the other 30 people around you. And of course the other is the music. Always great music. Nothing like listening to jazz and seeing a 6 foot shark in the background.



Everyone was out for the party.



The bat rays where in a friendly mood. Did not have to stand around for 20 minutes waiting for one to want to be petted. One of the few things that feel better than having your hand on the naked butt of your girlfriend.

The aquarium has a "petting"area. A place where they have live statfish and mullusks, sea cucumbers and you can touch them. This is the first time they have had this area staffed for jazz night. It was really cool. Got to touch a sea cucumber.

There is another exhibit that must be experienced. There is a tide pool that is fed by running water over a glass roof. You stand there and this rush of who know how much water running over your head. I it a rush. If they put a comfortable chair there I'd just take a nap with the sound of these big rushes of water happening ever minute.

Lavey Smith sounded great and looked great. The Skillet Lickers have an amazing set up musicians. I was hoping she would have had a new album for sale. Her last album was 10 years ago.

The other groups were also good. It was scary, a man with two accordions. Do accordions get tuned to different keys? "Play an acordion, go to jail" as a friend of mine says. don't know if he made it up or it is someone elses line. Two accordions mean the firing sqad?

The group with the accordion had a guy playing an 8 string guitar like instrument. It sounded really cool.

There is this one group of women that get stuck by the penguin exhibit every year. Peguins smell really really bad. They have an Andrew Sisters thing going. They sing like the Andrew sisters, but play their own instruments.

I was disapointed. I always look forward to seeing the big outer bay tank. There is usually a Sun Fish and a sea turtle. The Sun fish gets too big and they have to release it and wait for another one to be found. I don't know why the sea tutrle was not there. This is the same tank where the white sharks was kept for the six months.

That was pretty wild when they had it. I'll never forget looking for it and having it just appear. It was only about 5 foot at the time, but it was still scary to see the snaggly toothed mouth approach you. Even if protected by 6 inched of glass.

The traditional venders were there. Odwalla has free samples and on the way out, See's Candies has freebees. This year it was their lolly pops. I had a butterscotch. Can't beat butterscotch.

I bought a new digital camera. It has ISO800 sensitivity builtin. I thinks I got a few good shots. Unfortunately i forgot my USB cable. So it will have to wait until tonight. I update this post with some photos.

It's Saturday, June 17th. I'm in Monterey at my friends house. He is working out and I am blogging. Guess who's the inshape one :D

Tonight is Jazz Night at the Aquarium. Or as others know it, "The Maritime Cetacean Institute of Sausalito". Sorry, just watched the movie last week.

"Lavey Smith and the Red Hot Skillet Lickers" are the headliners. So between that, and the aquarium not being crowded, I'll get to wonder around without being crowded and listen to great music. I am a happy camper. I go every year. It is a great event. I'll be interested to see what they are not doing this year. They lowered the price of the tickets by $25. It has been $75 for a few years. This year it is $50.

As usual me and John stopped Papa Chanos in Sand City. Great burrito place. Although I was a bit grossed out today. I like at the authentic places they have the pickled veggies. Who ever preped the radished did not wash them. Nothing like going to bite into something and find it is muddy. Ok half a worm is worse, but this is right up there.

Also driving up they were picking Strawberries. Stopped at a farm stand and picked up half a flat of fresh strawberries just picked in the last day.

Wait, holdon, I'll go have a couple and let you know.....

Man they suck :D :D :D :D

Perfect. Perfectly red, sweet with just a minor tartness, no mushy spots, no mold. Too good to be wasted in a shake.

After this week, tonight is well deserved, even if I do say so myself.

This last week at yahoo was hell. My boss is out until July 7. My last day is June 23. That's 2 weeks with no coverage. Even if he was in, he has to come up to speed with everything I've done in the last 15 months.

I had to talk to too many people within IT to get 2 servers up on the network. I promised to try to get these new servers for my app up and running before I leave. I had to play the "It's my last week" card more then should have been neccessary.

Plus we had an electrician that labeled a circuit on my rack in the electrical room as being a lighting circuit. They shutdown 8 of my systems twice before I was able to get them to figure out what was going on.

Then my co-worker has had sporatic problems with her system since day one. This last one was abviously, at least to those who should be admins, that the automount master table was wrong. It is a good thing this admin replace the drive and did not wipe the drive. He claimed he had never seen the error before. I talked to his boss, who also did not have a clue. But to be fair, he is not a BSD admin. Plus the yo-yo closed the ticket without addressing the problem.

So I fixed the problem, reopened the help ticket, entered some "comments" and showed my co-worker what to do if they screw up up again.

This on top of making sure everything is bulletproof. This was an extremely stressful week.

So next week will be my last a Yahoo. It's Saturday afternoon, 6/17/06, and I am looking forward to going to Jazz night at the Moneterey Aquarium tonight. So I am going to relax today. Hmmm, is writting a blog where I bitch about things relaxing? Well venting makes be feel better. not relaxing, but it feel good.

So for my last week, I have to get these 2 new servers up and ready. I got one up last night. I had to. I made a horrible mistake. I had not been noticing the growth of one of my DB tables. MySQL MyISAM files only allows tables to be 4GB in size by default. The table was within a week of being full and stopping everything. Well I found out the hardway that It can takes days for a DB on a single drive to rewrite a 4GB tabkle with 62M records.
After 4 days I was only done with 43M of 62M records. The new servers finished the task in 1 day. Going from a single 7200rpm sata drive to a battery and memory backed raid controller with 6 x 146GB, scsi320, 15kRPM drives in a raid1+0 config make all the difference in the world.

I'll get the table replaced Sunday night when I get back home. Once this is done, the system can probably run for a month without intervention. So next week will be: get the servers done, write docs and fix a few bugs. Much less stressful.

Oh yea, the other traditional last week activity, going to lunch with different people.

I can't wait to get on a plane next Friday.

Why can't we have ubiquitous WiFi?

The telcos all have wifi plans. But that is where roaming does not work. So to have access to wifi, your choices are all expensive.

• Only go places with free wifi.
  
• Pay t_mobile so you have borders, Starbucks and airports.
  
• Pay other providers.
  
• Work for a comapany the pays for iPass.
  

So it ends up you either can't find a seat or your provider is not the hotspot of choice. And do you really want to pay multiple providers? If you live somewhere you are in range of a wifi provider then cool. It's an option. But if you like me and pay comcast $45/month. Paying 1-2 other providers makes the cost of internet access too high when you never know if it is available when you want it.

On and off I've examined the whole cell phone modem thing. 10 uears ago I concocted a serial cable that had my palmIII dialing an ISP through my StarTac.

With bluetooth this isn't supposed to be so bad. It isn't if you own a Win PC. Work if you want to do this via a Mac.

I found the instruction and not can use the edge modem function of my cell phone to get approx ISDN speeds.

This does not work so well. The best I got was 28kpbs. Not good enough these days.

I am leaving Yahoo. My last day is June 23rd. I've done some good work. I $%$#'ed things up and cleaned of a minor mess or two. It's been interesting. It's tough working for a guy that is more hard headed than me. But I have to say Steve is a very good engineer.

I am looking forward to the new challenge of my next job. It is a steath startup. Can't talk about it. I think the NDA has a clause about making people disappear if I tell them about the company.

But I am back to being a build & release person again. There are things I never got the chance to implement at Zone Labs I can put in place here.

I get to work home 3 days a week. That will be good. I have always had the disipline to not screw around and get my work done. I have always enjoyed working from home. The biggest challenge to working from home is socializing. I do go to the office 2 days a week, so that will help. I need to make sure I meet with friends on the weekend. There is the potential of being a hermit from Thursday evening until Tuesday. Not a good thing.


I cant wait for next Friday, 6/23. I leave Yahoo and head straigth to the airport and fly to seattle to see my buddy Andrew. I'll have a bottle of really good port. This can be dangerous. I fly back Monday. I then fly to San Diego Tuesday and I don't fly back until Monday July 3rd.

I've only been to San Diego once before. I did not do anything fun that time. It was for a usenix conference. This time I am staying on the border of Pacific Beach and Mission Bay. I'll post pictures when I get back.

My main goal is to bike around the 27 miles of trails in the area. Read a real book. By real book I mean something non-computer related. I still have the last 70 pages of Hunter S. Thompsons "Hells Angels" to read. I hope to get a little drunk. Just plain relax. Reset things.

Enjoy.
Later...

I was doing my semi-anual cleanup of my Yahoo bookmarks.

When ever this happens I eventually get hung up on this one web site. I born in Far Rockaway, Queens, NY. My parent grew up there as well. Most of the contributors to the site are at least 10 years older than me. I keep hoping for people writing and referencing PS215. It does not seem to happen.

I lived in NYC and spent my summers at the beach or the pool at my apartment. The beach was only about mile from my house. Far Rockaway is basically a sandbar between Queens and Brooklyn. In the 1930's there was a push to make Far Rockaway part of Brooklyn.

It was strange that I almost had a suburban up bringing in the city. I had a climbing tree. The apartment had a playground. It also had a long driveway where we could play baseball. And we played riders and runner on our bikes.

Riders and runners was tag with a bike. The riders tried to hit the runners. The runners tried to get the riders to crash. I guess this is not a game sthat would be encouraged these days.

I walked to school and there was the local candy shop where I'd sometimes spend my lunch money right on Beach 25th under the L.

In the winter, there was a storm drain that always backed up. So when it was cold enough us kids would always stop and shoe skate on this mini frozen lake.

Also in the winter after a snow storm, the front of the school was on a bit of a hill. Enough of one where we'd grab anything we could and use it as a sled. You had to have some control. Smashing into the wrought iron fence at the bottom was no fun.

Man I'm old enough to become nostalgic for my childhood.

This wasn't bad enough. I thought I had picture of me as a kid in Rockaway. So I pull out my photo's box to look for the pictures. Ends up I have a couple of pictures of me in my Cub Scout uniform somewhere downtown. But none of the store signs were in focus. I was a flag bearer in a parade that day. The other pictures were taken in the apartments play ground. So nothing to add to the pictures of the main streets of Rockaway.

I wound up spending over 2 hours looking though my photos and old birthday and holiday cards I collected.

Saw pictures of people I had not thought about in 20 years. Saw pictures of women I dated or had crushes on.

Looking back, I'd have to say I had pretty good taste in women. Hell I still think I do.

Enough of this. Yikes.