D E M E N T E D P E N G U I N . N E T

I don’t know what sparked it – whether it is due to his new school, or if it’s just something inside of him that caused it – but it seems our son has a bit of an entrepreneur in him. He came home from school yesterday and asked me to help him with his “book sale”. Okay, sure. I thought it was something for his school. Nope. His plan was to sort through his books, collect all of the ones that he no longer wants/needs and sell them out on the sidewalk. Essentially our seven year old started his first business. He didn’t sit in front of our house though, he went across the street where he felt he had a better chance of selling them. He’s already got rule #1 down – location. He did sell something too, a book to a friend of his that he was playing with at the time. It was sooo cute, as you can see for yourself:

Hayden's book sale

To help our new commitment to getting into shape, we’ve decided to expand our regimine to do a few things outside the home to make things more interesting. We have been trying to decide between several options and finally landed on two – break dancing and a personal trainer. Hayden has even decided to join us for the break dancing class, and is really showing some talent. Nickey has compiled a couple of videos of both:

New dance class:
http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/1i2UehK8fKhxccCPZIxJ

Personal Trainer:
http://sendables.jibjab.com/view/JyS0pRXbnmsdqysu

Thanks to my friend Jarret, whom kicked me in the butt today to motivate me to finally update my blog, I’m making the time to at least update a little bit of the last 2 months of adventure in my life. I suspect it will need to be a two-parter since there’s so much to update on, and I’m just trying to fill in some time while I wait for my ride home to be ready. It may be a little rushed, but let’s see how far I can get….

The ride home from Seattle was fairly uneventful. We stopped in Albany, Oregon to see a former high school classmate of Nickey’s. We spent the night in Roseburg – Hayden had his own room . The next day we drove down to San Francisco to have dinner and spend the night at my Mom’s place. Instead of driving the U-Haul into SF and trying to find parking for it, we decided to leave it in a mall parking log in Emeryville across the Bay Bridge. We got up the next morning and went out to breakfast, then left to go pick up the truck. Of course nothing goes perfectly smooth when moving, and our big hiccup was finding that the truck wasn’t where we left it. I walked all around the parking lot looking for “no overnight parking” signs but didn’t find any. I finally found a sign at the entrance to the parking lot that said there was only 2 hour parking allowed. I called the number on the sign, which was for the local police department, who said they hadn’t received a call about towing away the truck. The call went from “where did our truck get towed to” to “we need to file a stolen vehicle report”. Yay. We needed to call U-Haul to get the license plate number and while Nickey was on the phone with them, fortunately, we got a call back from the police department that they had just received the information on our truck and that it had been towed. Whew. $325 and a half hour later we had our truck back. We found out during the process that it had been picked up less than an hour before we got to the parking lot – so if we hadn’t gone to breakfast we would have beaten the tow truck there! Oh well, at least we finally made it home at about 3:30 that afternoon to start getting our lives back on track once again.

Things have been really great since we’ve all been back together. Even though it sucked that we had to go through all of that we both feel that it has actually helped us in many ways and I think we are more conscious of our actions and how they affect each other. Hayden has adjusted fairly well, which is good because it can take anywhere from a week to a couple of months for him to adjust sometimes. He started out back at his old school, but our goal was to get him out of there as soon as possible. Nickey started looking for work so we could afford to put him in a private school, but fortunately we lucked out and he was picked in a lottery for a Charter school. The school is an entrepreneurial school, which is pretty cool. They teach things from the business perspective – i.e. math is counting money in the second grade. He loves money, so it should be a good fit for him

Christmas was pretty good. Hayden got lots of cool stuff. I only had to work one day between Christmas and New Years, so we all got to spend a lot of much needed time together. We were really looking forward to the new year since 2009 sucked so bad on so many levels. So far 2010 has been much better.

My company took everyone, including significant others, to Vegas for two days at the end of January. They put us up at THE Hotel at Mandalay Bay in suites, they were awesome rooms. Nickey and I have been to Vegas almost every year since we’ve been together so it’s starting to get a little old, but we were looking forward to having some time to hang together. We walked the strip a little and I gambled a little. One of the nights we went to a place called Hofbrauhaus which is a “German and Bavarian restaurant and beer hall”. I hadn’t ever heard of it before, but it was awesome. I’d recommend going, although it’s not cheap – $16 for a beer very large beer. An unexpected bonus to the trip was right before we went to the restaurant. I was playing a penny slot, trying to win the Harley that was the top prize, when I hit the next to the top prize – $1585.00! I didn’t even think it was possible to win almost $1600 on a penny slot. I was one square away from winning the bike. I got eight squares to win the second place prize, but needed nine to win the bike. So close!  Here are a couple of pictures (which I found out later I wasn’t supposed to take – oops!):

That's the bike I was trying to win in the background

Yay! I won!

Nickey got a job a little over a week ago. It was in sales at a medical company. She knew right away she wasn’t going to like the company. She compared it to the movie Boiler Room. Two days later she left. To her credit she hit the job boards again and got another job right away. She is pretty tenacious. Her new job is working for a guy who’s 78 years old, has a hard time focusing because of some war injury, and needs help organizing things for his projects. Sounds like a perfect fit for Nickey. It’s flexible hours, pays well enough, she loves to organize things, and it will give her good practice for when I get that old. I have no doubt she will excel at this job. I keep telling her she needs to find a project management job, and this is pretty close from what it sounds like.

Other than that, the most notable things are – I got staph infection again…from a bandaid, it’s been raining a lot here lately, and work has been taking up a little more of my time than I would prefer. On the work note, I got a side contract job too working for a company called Home Exchange. They were featured in the movie The Holiday. It’s not very many hours and it’s a little extra income so that helps. I’m hoping to be able to work with them for a long time to come.

One last thing before I actually try to get some work done. Here is a picture of a side project I was working on yesterday at work. This is sitting on my desk. I thought it was pretty funny:

Need a shiv, take a shiv. Have a shiv, give a shiv

Wow, this is cool. I’m on a Virgin America flight headed for San Francisco and I’m updating my blog using my cellphone going though the in-flight wifi. Sweet! Fortunately the wifi is free otherwise I’m too cheap to pay for this They also have games in the headrests, which actually includes Doom! Unbelievable.

So I’m ultimately heading for Seattle, San Francisco is just a layover. I’m heading to Seattle to bring the wife and kid back home finally. It’s been five months since they left, so this is a much overdue homecoming. We’re driving a U-Haul and her car down to LA over the weekend. We’re going to spend the night in Roseburg OR tonight (the kid has his OWN ROOM!!), then stay at my moms place in San Francisco on Saturday night, then it’s just a 5-6 hour drive home from there on Sunday.

Hope the dogs will be okay. I’ve got a friend taking care of them while I’m gone but didn’t really have much of a chance to introduce them. All he really has to do is say the word “food” and I’m sure they will let him in.

Looks like we’re starting head in for the landing now, I’d better wrap this up.

UPDATE: I’m on the second leg of my journey to Seattle. I thought I’d test out the wifi a little more and decided to access my server over ssh, which worked. Awesome. Then I ordered a few movies from Frys, which worked. Double Awesome. The only thing I can’t seem to do at the moment is connect to the vpn at my work, but that’s not really important I guess. It would be nice if I could do that though.

I did a speed test using http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/ and the results were 361kb download and 307kb upload. Not too bad but I wish the little “kb” was a big “KB” instead…. I copied a 12M file from my server (using scp) which took a minute 50 seconds to transfer and the average transfer rate was about 106KB.

Ok, enough techie stuff for now. I’m just trying to see what this wifi is capable of and if it is something I could ultimately use. I’d give it 3.8 out of 4 stars. The only thing really lacking is vpn access, but that might be something on my side (although I doubt it since it works over normal wifi). I can get around vpn access if I just use ssh so it’s only a minor hindrance. Still not sure if I’d pay for it but then again I’m not really sure how much it costs either. If it’s only a coupla bucks then I’d most likely pay, especially on longer flights.

It’s been a strange 48 hours. I found out Thursday night that Nickey has a boyfriend – yay, on Thanksgiving Day. Ok, that’s to be expected. After all it’s been since the end of June since she’s lived here. I talked to her on Friday and asked her about it and somehow the conversation turned into us trying to work things out, I’m honestly not sure who started the topic. So we talked for a while and decided to pick up the conversation again in the morning. It was a rough night for me. She called in the morning and said she had been thinking about things all night and that she remembered all of the “bad stuff”. Why is it she always thinks of all the good times we’ve had until I want to really work things out, then it’s all the bad stuff? To sum things up, it sounds like she’s not into working things out after all. What a pit I’m in – she was the one I waited for, the only one I’ve deemed worthy of marrying, the one I was fully expecting to spend the rest of my life with. Meh.

Alright, enough with the heavy stuff. Today was a decent day. I woke up at 10, played with the dogs, then went on the road trip I promised the dogs. First we stopped off at Barger Harley because I needed some new gloves. The one’s I’ve been using are perforated so the rides home after work have been pretty cold lately. After that we started out towards Ojai, the initial destination, but traffic was horrible. Instead we went down towards Malibu on Topanga Canyon and stopped off at a cool store called Hidden Treasures. I’ve mentioned it before in a couple of my posts – it’s kind of a hippy shop with used clothing, incense burning, some bizarre antiquities, and that’s also where I bought my acoustic guitar recently. I bought some incense and then continued on down to Malibu. We drove down toward Santa Monica, explored a few side streets I hadn’t been down before, then headed back home. We stopped off at McDonalds and I bought the pups a burger, which Zoe enjoyed and Loki swallowed whole. I ended up taking a 2 hour nap after that – I had just eaten and I put on golf, what can I say . When I woke up I decided to tackle one of the projects that had been on my list for a long time. I dumped out the planters in the backyard, refilled them with soil, then planted grass seeds, and covered them in clear plastic – sort of like a greenhouse. The hope is to grow grass in them for the dogs, they used to eat the plants in them anyway so grass would probably be better for them.

So to end off the night I’m watching School of Rock and practicing on the guitar. Now that work will hopefully be slowing down quite a bit I’m going to make it my mission to learn how to play the guitar better. I’ve got two of them, you’d think I’d know how to play something on them….

Unfortunately this is the quality of the post you get from me when I have a lot of free time. I do usually use my blogs as a method of ranting about useless crap, so I guess I’ll have to get back to that again. I’m missing a few important key ingredients though – I need to dine on microwave cheese sandwiches with ketchup, and drink Jack and Coke. That’s when my posts are the most insightful

This year has flown by. I guess when you are absorbed in your job for 70-90 hours a week that can happen…. Fortunately we finally deployed the final piece of the game last week so we will *hopefully* be slowing down to somewhat normal hours finally. If not then there may very well be a major uprising by several of the crew.

I think this is the first holiday we’ve had off in some time (although I think we did have labor day “off”). I have been slowly taking advantage of the time off and have been cleaning up the house room by room – something that has been direly needed for some time. I still have a long way to go but I should be able to get it done by the end of the weekend. I’ve been spending as much time with the dogs as I can too because I haven’t been around much to give them attention. I think we’re going to go for a ride tomorrow to some, as of yet unknown, location.

Today has been surprisingly pretty good. Although I haven’t feasted like the rest of the masses in this fine country, I have been enjoying the day quite a bit. I had to work until early this morning and didn’t wake up until about 1pm but, contrary to my normal M.O., I got started pretty much right away. I’ve been upgrading my computer all day (it is at least 3 revs. of Ubuntu behind!), cleaned the house, played with the dogs, blared my new Kid Rock cd, etc. I ran out of cigarettes early this afternoon so I got dressed and headed out to the local 7-11. I felt very biker-ish with the beard, longer hair, the chain wallet and my CBGB t-shirt. I rode the bike to the store and since it was about 75 decided it was nice enough to forgo the jacket. I got the smokes and then went for a ride. It was one of the nicest rides I’ve had so far on the new bike. Perfect temp, not much traffic, and made most of the lights. It was a short ride – only about 45 minutes – but it helped to recharge me a little. It makes a big difference riding without a jacket, much less restrictive and freeing. I love my bike.

The "winter" look

Today was my birthday, the big 4-0. How the hell did that happen?? Can’t say as I feel any different than I did 10 years ago but I suppose it’s all relative. Fortunately for me most people are surprised when they find out how old I am, but then again I’m still a child on the inside.

The day started out, well, I guess normal for how my life has been lately. I got up at noon (had been at work until past 2am the day before). I went to “breakfast” with my boss, which is a normal morning thing. We went to the same place we always go – it’s a place called Hearts. This morning was a bit different than normal in that there was a crew there filming for a Census commercial. I was *hoping* that they were filming My Name is Earl (Hearts has been in a few of the episodes) and that they had revived the series, but one of the crew members confirmed that it wasn’t. After that we left for work.

Today was pretty hectic at work because we are releasing the store part of our game (League of Legends) tonight. I’m not the one doing the deploy but I have to be there at 6am in the morning for the second coverage shift. It’s a pretty big deal because we were supposed to release the store three weeks ago but there were some pretty big issues with it so the developers had to bring it all in-house and has been working feverishly on it. We are all pretty excited about it going out and can’t wait to watch the daily numbers. I got home early tonight, midnight, and should really head off to bed. For anyone who knows me they know I am in no way a morning person, and I have to get up in 4.5 hours. Ugh.

The highlight of the day was Hayden called me and sang me Happy Birthday. I wish I had been able to record it! That is one awesome kid, I sure miss him.

So there you go – my 40th birthday recap.

It ’s amazing to me how fast this year has gone by, but then again I’ve been mired in work and other things so time is bound to go by quickly I guess. Already a week into November? Dang.

So far SoCal has been living up to my expectations. In the last month there has only been 2 days of rain, some of the nights have been really foggy on the city side but clear in the valley, and the daytime temps have been in the 70’s-80’s. That’s why I wanted to move here. Last weekend I went to Seattle and it rained every day there. I do not miss that at all. I would never be able to justify owning a motorcycle in Washington, I just wouldn’t get to ride it enough. Here I ride it every day except when it rains – which is about 2-3 weeks a year.

As I mentioned, I went to Seattle last weekend to see Hayden. We spent about 24 hours together and had some fun. We went trick-or-treating, went to lunch with my Mom and Bob, went to Chuck-E-Cheeses, and had a sleepover at my Dads place.  It was a bit weird seeing Nickey for the first time in three months but things went ok, although she seems to feel the need to tell me way to much about her personal life. We have been tentatively talking about Hayden coming down to stay with me for about a week after Christmas which would be really cool. Just a couple of “dudes” hanging out together.

Apparently my neighbors house was almost broken into 2 weeks ago. She got hit last year too, but this time someone saw them so they took off before they could take anything. She asked if I could put one of my dogs in her backyard during the day on the weekdays to try to discourage them from coming back again. Even though Loki is much more intimidating I think Zoe is a better fit for the job because she’s easier to manage. My neighbor just had back surgery a few months back and I’d be afraid Loki would hurt her. He’s such a brute sometimes. As it turns out my neighbor is actually afraid of Loki anyway, and Zoe is doing a good job so she was definitely the right choice for the job.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for me and my personal computers. About two weeks ago my personal laptop at work had the hard drive die on me, then today I had the hard drive in my home laptop go bad and the power supply in my desktop die. It’s a good thing I have the netbook work gave me otherwise I’d be computer free at the moment.  That can’t happen…..

As I’ve mentioned before, where I work is now in hyper crunch mode. We are going live on the 22nd of this month and things are no where near ready, at least as far as I can see. Today I had to leave the dogs alone for 16.5 hours because it was one hellatious day, I left at 10am in the morning and didn’t get home until 4:30am today. I spent 6 hours at the datacenter in the morning setting up systems, battled for 4 hours with a web server in the afternoon (which ended up winning unfortunately), then another 5 hours at the datacenter after that. No lunch, a couple of smoke breaks, and back and forth to the datacenter a few times. It’s a good thing I love what I do…. I really feel bad for the dogs tho, they didn’t get to eat dinner until almost 5am.