| 9:56pm: | *whine* |
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i want an over-expensive car for no REAL reason other than I WANT IT! :P honestly, i could probably still drive my current car for a few years to come. the idea of buying a new car has been rolling around in my head for the better part of a year now. so i'm not entirely sure. one part of me wants to be completely reckless and throw caution to the wind! i make good money and jenn is working now, so let's be young and go nuts! i mean, today when i started the C63 jenn actually JUMPED from the roar it made! UGH! SEX ON WHEELS! the other part of me knows that we'd be better off saving the money and being responsible adults. ... blaaaaah! ;) (i'm glad THESE are the hard decisions i'm faced with!) in other news, thanksgiving this year was different! i mean, i think you never notice it but you get used to certain food. even regional things. this year we went over to jenn's aunt for our first TEXAS thanksgiving! which included smoked turkey, jalapeno smoked turkey and smoked brisket! it was super noms, but still not what we're used to. on top of all that, we spent thanksgiving with family we had never spent a holiday with before as well. so it different. part of it made me sad knowing that we wouldn't be seeing our parents... and i know christmas will be even harder. so far the kindle has been paying for itself. it's been the best investment and makes reading on the train super easy to and from work. i honestly have no complaints! the battery life is amazing and it's easy to read. this weekend has been nice! jenn and i played some left 4 dead 2 and rock band tonight! she's actually not too bad at l4d! super proud of my zombie slayer. :D |
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| 10:40pm: | you know... |
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| for as many technical issues twitter and facebook have, livejournal has been pretty flawless. ;) | ||
| 9:42pm: | sixers |
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so for the last three weeks i've been working six days a week. we're currently in crunch time on a project and they're hoping that the extra time would catch us up. although i believe we made good progress, i personally don't believe we're where we need to be (or where they expected us to be). it's a short-ish week this coming week with thanksgiving (we're working friday as the market is open 1/2 day). i've been working lately on setting our a load test/staging environment which the project was missing. we have ten machines setup to run Visual Studio Test Edition which allows me to simulate up to 5,000+ concurrent users beating the shit out of the system. i looooooove performance tuning as it gets you deep into the meat and potatoes of a system! a point i've been driving home lately is more resiliency and visibility into our applications. once thing i've seen come out in the load testing is we're pretty much doing black box testing as we don't have any metrics or logging on what's happening internally within an application when we're testing it. i'm hoping some side projects i'm worked on this last week will help get us where we need to be. part of this project involved an outside firm coming in and "helping us" (for whatever reason, the CIO doesn't think we're capable?). i don't mind because i love learning form people who know more on a subject than me. the guys that have come in are really great guys and i've been picking their brains on different testing strategies and how to implement newer technology. part of this is taking me back to my e-Selex days because i'm dealing with infrastructure more now than just focusing solely on software. to this, i guess one of the guys was previously COO for "vegas.com" and he's one of those guys who knows everyone. like wolfgang puck. seriously! one of them took us to wolfgang puck's five-sixty here in dallas and it was sooo funny. we got there and all these people came over wanted to meet us and say hello! even the sushi chef! at one point were were sitting at the bar and the GM as well as the Assistant GM/Restaurant Manager kept coming over to chat it up and see how everything was. it was funny to be with someone who was so "plugged in" to a place. made me feel like someone! aside from the company, the restaurant itself was nice and the view was -AMAZING- ! holy crap! the inside of the restaurant rotates at a speed of one revolution per hour. you honestly don't notice, so no motion sickness. it was nice being out with jenn and a friend because it felt like things would eventually get back to "normal" as far as our social life goes. i mean, the time at home has helped us save money... but still. need SOME social interaction outside of work ;) the holidays will be different this year, that's for sure. we won't be back in san diego... so it's gonna be a dallas christmas! jenn will be back earlier in december for our friend julias's wedding, but that's only for the weekend. the big problem for travel now is that we don't have any family/friends out here who can watch the dogs. we paid ~$300 to board them when we were out in san diego for my birthday... so that's something we have to take into account with trying to come up with ACTUAL cost for a vacation. i think this is a good post for now. ;) oh, and 1 vs. 100 is back on xbox! this is fantastic! jenn and i loooooove trivia! :D |
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| 9:09pm: | life, the universe and everything |
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at work today while sitting at a free company provided lunch, my co-workers and i got into a discussion about religion. not as much a debate, but an open discussion about our respective beliefs. which is interesting because i've been reflecting upon my own beliefs while reading richard dawkin's book. they laughed that i was probably the typical godless california liberal and i had to agree ;) seriously though, on a sliding scale between theism and atheism, i'm between atheist and agnostic... mostly leaning towards atheist. don't get me wrong, i think everyone is entitled to their own beliefs, but personally i'm a "shit happens" kinda guy. the universes will be done! seriously though, i know that there's a lot in the universe i will never begin to understand and i don't know WHY it is the way it is. some people give me this look of complete disbelief that i could be void of any faith. but i think it's because nature and the universe makes too much sense to me! i mean, i'm 28 now... so who knows what i'll believe when i'm 38 :P besides, if sleeping in on sunday is wrong, i don't want to be right! |
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| 7:06pm: | home! |
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as weird as it seems, having one of our best friends come all the way out here to texas and stay with us sorta makes this house our home. if that makes any sense. i think playing host drove it home that this is our hizzy. i think it's settling in more and more that we're in TEXAS! on that note, MAGS came out to see us! it was nice to have he over and show her around our little corner of dallas :P i hope she had a good time and was just comfortable while she was out here, as she was the first person to try out the "guest room"(/office) i don't post much about work, BUT, this time i'll make an exception. basically there's your generic office drama and inter-department arguing. it drives me up the wall when people won't put their pride aside and work towards the greater good. i'm working to try and bring the departments together and a VP in my department recognizes this and is working with me to try and build an "all for one" attitude in the MIS department. so here's hoping. people seem too attached and possessive of their systems, so when i ask a question about configuration or performance it's treated as a personal slight. one of the DBA's even asked me why i was "attacking the database as the problem" when i was simply asking for the benchmarks. in the context of the project i'm working on (performance tuning and load testing). in non-work news, we've signed up for gamefly a couple weeks ago and so far it's been alright. the new releases (just as with netflix) as a bit harder to get and you have to be a bit patient. BUT, it's only $20/mo and that means for every ONE xbox game i would buy at retail, i can pay for 3-months of gamefly. so it works out financially. i've been reading richard dawkin's the greatest show on earth: the evidence for evolution and although it's initial attitude was a little confrontational, the information laid out in the book is very well structured and easy to read. i find the points and examples it brings up interesting because it makes creationists sound like absolute retards. he gave the example of a creationism can also be explained as: the world came into existence five minutes ago with everyone and everything coming into creation with memories of experiences and life to date. we came into being with holes in our clothes and everything as you see it. it's laughable. anywho! gonna watch some monday night football! :D |
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| 10:04am: | B-E-A-UTIFUL |
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jenn and i went for a drive yesterday. we headed east on the freeway to see what lay beyond! funny enough, i guess right at the city limit there are fireworks stores as well as liquor stores! muuuch closer than our previously discovered locations :) after driving east for a while we turned north and decided to take the 66 home (as we knew it runs through our town). the 66 at this point becomes a country road and it's a fun little drive. there are some really cute houses and towns along it. one of them reminds me of julian. i was talking with jenn and i think the idea of living in a small town appeals because it reminds me of ramona growing up. to me, THAT is home. it was laughable though, some of the home developments out there started in the "high 90s" for a 3br house. :P we'll see where life takes us out here. i don't see us living in a backed suburban landscape or in the city. it's just not us. not that i want to live in BFE, but i think a quiet small town appeals to me more. it was a nice drive :) |
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| 10:30pm: | SAN DIEGO.... WHICH I BELIEVE IS GERMAN FOR A WHALE'S VAGINA |
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we took last weekend and headed to san diego for my birthday! a big thing was to see our family and the friends we didn't have time to see before we left :D honestly, what's so great about "vacationing" to san diego now is that it's like going to hawaii with all of our family/friends there. we both miss SAN DIEGO, but i don't think we're super hot on the situation in california. we're back home now and the pugs missed us. we boarded them at their vet for the weekend and they seemed fine, so that's nice to know. franklin went NUTS when we finally arrived at home. he meowed and made out with our faces all night long! we missed our floof monster! work has been... weird lately. there's a little drama about the view of our department in the eyes of upper management. there's this idea that nobody in our group "has the skills" to take on the new work. i'm like, WTF DID YOU HIRE ME FOR?! ugh. so i vented to my manager today and he told me to wait until next week and hopefully things will turn around. i figure worse case, i'll just request a transfer to another department. but i wouldn't do that until after the beginning of the year. gonna give this situation an honest shot at resolving itself. i used the amazon gift card mags gave me for my birthday to buy a kindle! i decided i'd rather have a kindle NOW than wait for a nook or sony whatevers! i'm SUPAH happy with the kindle! i've started reading my star trek series again as well as downloading a couple book samples for my next selection. speaking of MAGS, totally excited for her to come visit us in our little corner of texas! the pugs are SUPER excited and woodrow is working out with jenn in the morning to so he'll look super cute and get extra snugs! ;) i find that although LJ is dead, i think the act of long form blogging is being destroyed and shit on by twitter and facebook. looking back over my LJ posts past, i'm happy that i've kept this for almost 10 years. ALMOST 10 YEARS! wtf old! ;) |
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| 11:31pm: | i liked this quote from my latest book: |
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| There are several salient characteristics defining a healthy state: a good legal code and the means to enforce it; the equality of all citizens before the law and the state; a sound financial basis allowing for the provision of such public goods as national defense, law enforcement, transportation, education, medical care, and pensions; an efficient and effective government apparatus. A healthy state is uncorrupted by wealthy individuals, power businessmen, or special-interest groups; it is an honest broker for all the conflicting interested of society. Finally, a healthy state protects the weak from the predation by the strong. | ||
