My new addiction is going through the Sunday CompUSA and Best Buy inserts in the Sunday newspaper and find the almost-free computer gear deals after rebates.

Today is was a Netgear print server which I have actually wanted for quite a while. (Well not the Netgear brand in particular, just a print server.) It is normally $65, but after a $55 rebate will only be $10.



We had our printer hooked up to the back of the computer I use most often. All of the other computers in the house have to direct their print jobs through that computer to get to the printer. That means that computer has to be on for any other computer to print to it.

A print server lets you plug the printer into it, and then you plug the print server into your router. When a computer sends a print job it goes from the computer to the router, and then from the router directs it to the printer server.

I was having problems getting it setup this afternoon when I brought it home. After a while I gave up and we went downstairs for some dinner and TV.

I gave it another shot when we came back upstairs and was successful. I did some Google searches and found someone that said when you are using the Add Printer Wizard to select "Add Local Printer" rather than "Add Network Printer" which seems totally counterintuitive, but it worked perfectly the first time.

I have been pretty happy at work. My first week was horrible because I was sick the whole week (Recall I had a 102 degree fever and was throwing up the night before my first day.) and I didn't get my computer until halfway through the week.

I didn't realize how much working in a beautiful environment could affect my mood. Almost every time I walk around the building I get a little lift from just appreciating the artistry of the architecture. Architecture has never effected me that way before, or at least not that I was consciously aware. All of the natural light in the building has also been good for me. The previous two years I worked in a basement with no natural lights. There were days when I would not go upstairs, so I would come to work in the dark, work in fluorescent light all day, and leave after the sun set. Blech!

Another thing I just realized yesterday was that I like working around a lot of people. The previous two years I worked in a small environment. If I stayed in the general vicinity of my desk I might only come into contact with a half dozen people or so in a day. Now I come into contact with that many people before I even reach my desk in the morning.

Yesterday, Friday, was probably the best day I have had there so far. I had one big exciting achievement that not only did I get a hearty heartfelt "attaboy", but I was really excited about what I accomplished. My boss's exact words were "I'm glad you're here." How can that not make your week? If I described the accomplishment you would probably be more than under whelmed. Using industry jargon terms I figured out how to set up an unmanaged raster catalog and then use it to create wireframe outlines of all of the aerial images in several directories. I won't go into the benefits of how this will be useful until we get all of our aerial images into our SDE database and how it will be helpful in organizing the images so we can get them into our SDE database. Just know that my boss and I were excited about it.

I also had a little win yesterday when I imported a CAD file into my GIS software. I have done it before at my previous job but it is the first time anyone has done that where I work now. I will have a little bit more to say about that on my e-mail list. Maybe later today but no promises.

Next Friday I am flying to Springfield, IL in a small private turboprop plane.





It will take about 55 minutes of flight time to get from the DuPage Airport to Springfield and it will be me and four big-wigs from one of the engineering firms we have under contract.

I am still at a temporary desk with a temporary phone extension and no voicemail. I can't order business cards yet because I don't know my phone number.

They are exceeding strict on their Internet usage and e-mail policy. NO personal use. I have already had my hands slapped twice by the Internet usage monitoring people. As such I cannot make posts from work which explains why I have not been posting a lot lately. A lot of times I have things I want to write about when I get home, but by the time I get chores and errands done it is time for bed and I am too tired to put much energy towards writing.

I am starting to know more people and am able to nod, smile, and say hello as I walk the halls. I make an effort to try and call people by there name because people like to hear their own name. I think it makes a difference to people if you say "Hi Brian." rather than just "Hi.". The first week or so can be a little depressing because you feel like such an outsider.

When we worked in the city a lot of the people we worked with lived in the city. There were people that we would have liked to do things with outside of work, but because they lived 30+ miles away it made it difficult to do anything spontaneous. Now that I live only 15 minutes from work I am hoping we might be able to meet some people we can do things with.

We have a time and attendance system that everyone must use whether they are hourly or salaried. When you are issued your badge you are also electronically fingerprinted. When you swipe your badge when you arrive at work or leave you also have to touch an electronic fingerprint pad. That prevents you giving your badge to someone else and swiping you in for the day. You have to enter two different fingers into the system and the terminal will randomly prompt you for one or the other. I don't know why they need to do that. I guess if someone really wanted to get in the building with my badge they would have to cut off two of my fingers instead of one?

I am excited about the couch we ordered this week. For the first five years in our current house when we watched TV in the family room we were separated by a long coffee table. Sheri started to not like watching movies down there because she felt like she was alone. A few months ago we moved the coffee table out of the way and dragged her recliner next to the couch were I usually am. This is nice but not aesthetically pleasing. The couch we ordered is a sectional. We have always disliked sectionals for some reason, but this would be the perfect solution for us. We can both lay down to watch a movie and lay head-to-head. They said it will take six to eight weeks to deliver, but I have a feeling it will be here sooner. I think they say a lot longer than it will really take just to prevent angry phone calls if they are running behind my a week. Like it normally takes about three weeks, but it is possible it might take four, and in certain instances maybe five weeks. So if they said it will be there in three or four weeks, they would get phone calls from a lot of people after three weeks if they have not heard from them yet.

I have been thinking about getting a dog again. I am far from certain about it though. I remember all of the great things about having a dog, but time has diminished from my memory the unpleasant parts of dog ownership. The need to pick up turds when it is 90 degrees and humid before cutting the grass. Stepping in a turd while cutting the grass that I missed. Not being able to sleep in past 6:30 am on the weekend because someone is whining to go outside. Not being able go out someplace directly after work for the evening. The hassle of what to do with a dog during vacations. Muddy paws when it is raining outside.

Do those negatives outweigh all of the enjoyment a dog provides? I don't know. That is the calculus I am doing in my head now.

Lately I have been bringing up fond memories of the quirky things Goliath used to do.

Last week I had a meeting with the vendor that does some of our aerial photography. Someone from our side asked about their involvement with the Department of Homeland Security. They said they do provide them with services. That piqued the interest of the questioner on my side and he pressed further. He asked if they are regulated or monitored in some way by the Feds. He was a little evasive but ended up answering yes. He pressed a little further into how they monitor them or how often. He again was evasive, but ended up answering that when the plane lands on a DHS flight that there are people waiting for them on the tarmac and they remove all of the computers and hard drives that were used during the flight. Cool!

They also said that the huge high resolution produce so much data so fast that the planes are outfitted with RAID arrays! Not so much for the data capacity, but for the ability to write the data to disk very fast.

RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. A bunch of hard drives are strung together so that to the computer they look like one big hard drive. The reason it makes it faster is because data is written across all of the disks at the same time rather than to just one disk at a time.

Normally the computer will send a file to the hard drive and the drive controller will say "OK, send this little pack of data to this area on the disk." Then it has to wait while the drive head moves to that area, and then wait until the spinning disk moves into the correct position, and then actually write the data to the disk, and then it does it again. Nothing gets written to the disk while the head is moving to the correct position.

With a RAID array there is a RAID controller. It sends a little packet of data to the first drive and then immediately moves onto the next drive and sends it a little packet of data to write, and so on. It doesn’t have wait until that data is written to disk before it can dump the next bit of data out of the controller's buffer. By the time it has sent a little bit of data to every drive and makes its way back to the first drive, the first drive should have been able to write its piece of data to the disk and is waiting for the next bit of data.

So with a RAID array on the plane where they might be snapping almost 1 gigabyte images every few seconds you cannot afford to wait for the data to get dumped from the camera's buffers.

He made a comment during the meeting along the lines of "Well what do you expect from a $3 million camera?" I don't know if he was referring to the whole specially equipped plane, to just the camera and associated electronics, or to just the camera, but in any case it is pretty impressive.

The camera has to be mounted to the plane in a hole cut through the bottom of the plane. There are several gyroscopes that record the exact pitch and yaw of the plane for every shot, and of course there is a survey-quality GPS receiver interfaced with the camera and the exact position is recorded along with every image. The camera itself is also gimbled so that can remain as close to horizontal as possible.

Before each flight they get the best results if they can place targets on the ground over precisely surveyed geodetic monuments. These targets are basically big white canvas X's that can be seen from the air. When the photogrammetrists are orthographically correcting each image they use these known positions as reference points.

We decided to take a break from Burger King and go to Panera for our weekend breakfast routine this morning. I think their brewed coffee is bad, but the do a pretty good job on their espresso.

I ordered my usual exactly like this: a small decaf triple Americano. She didn't flinch and punched some buttons on the cash register. She got our food and Sheri took it to find a table while she finished my coffee. She came up to me after a minute and asked "What exactly is in an Americano." "Three shots of espresso and hot water in a small cup." "Oh."

That got me to wondering if she charged me correctly. I looked at my receipt and she rung me up for a latte for $2.89. That is almost a dollar more than I pay at Starbucks for the same thing.

When she gave me my drink I said I think she overcharged me. The menu says a shot of espresso is $1.29 and each additional shot is $0.39, so it should have been about $2.00. "Do you want me to have the manager ring up a refund." "Sure, but take your time. I am going to go sit down."

About five minutes later she came out and said her manager said it would only be cents difference. That when he rang it up it came out to something like $2.70. "Really? I though the menu said it was $1.29 for the initial shot and each additional shot was $0.39." She said something like "Really?" and that she would go ask her manager again.

At this point I didn't really care anymore. It wasn't worth the $0.80 and just expected her to come back and say something like a double shot is $2.50 and you only get one additional shot for $0.39 or something like that.

She came back with my full $2.89 and an apology and said I was right, but that they didn't have the buttons setup on the cash register to ring it up like that. Cool!

Last night after dinner we went to Meijer to pick up a few things. This Meijer has a Starbucks up front so I ordered my usual. I took my first sip and it obviously only had two shots. She misheard my order and rung me up for only two shots, so she remade my drink the correct way. I've scored four free shots of espresso in the last 12 hours!

Last week at J.C. Penny I bought a hood that was on sale. It is designed to either be worn like a scarf to just keep the drafts off your neck, or as a full fledged hood. I bought it with snow blowing in mind. When I use the snow blower it launches snow up in the air where it is caught by the wind. A good portion of it seems to swirl back around and find its way down my neck. I got to put it to use this morning because we had a snow storm last night, and it was heavy snow because at the beginning of the storm it was wet and rainy along with the snow. It worked great and I would recommend it. It rolls up pretty tight and it makes a nice seal around your neck to keep the wind out. I thought it might make a good emergency item to keep in the car too.







Backyard tree taken from a second floor window.

I am tempted to order this book just so I can have the title in my bookcase. You have to follow the link in the previous sentence to read the whole title. Best. Title. Evar.

I observed something a little unusual today. I received a dataset with over 2 million records and was asked to do some compute-intensive operations on them. I didn't want to process all of the records at once because it might have crashed my computer, or at least tied it up for the whole day. I also wanted to take a small random sample of the records ahead of time and test out what I was going to do in order to make sure it worked.

I noticed that one of the fields contained the date and time that each record was created. My idea was to parse out the records using the minute each record was created, thus dividing up the 2 million records into roughly 60 equal groups. If a record was created at 11:27 then that record was in group 27.

This would let me experiment on 1/60th of the data before I started processing, and also let me control how many of the records I processed at once when I actually got down to business. When it came time to actually process the records I could do 1/10th of them at a time by specifying in the query string to only do records with creation minute 1 through 6. When that group finished processing I would then run another batch with creation minute 7 through 12, and so on.

The weird thing I observed is that I expected to have sixty groups of records with roughly 36,000 records each. I expected to see variations between the groups, maybe give or take 1 or 2 thousand, but overall pretty close to each other. What I got was a huge range. The lowest group had 31,400 records, and the largest had almost 88,000 records!

When I get back to work tomorrow I am going to plot out the groups and see if the distribution is normal and what the standard deviation looks like.

After we got home from our errands yesterday I looked on the web to see if I could find any information about the airport we were watching planes take off and land from. It turns out they have a restaurant there that serves breakfast all day. Back in Columbus there was a restaurant called the Barnstormer at the OSU airport that we used to go to on the weekends. We thought we would check out this restaurant for breakfast this morning.

First of all the actual building itself is great. The west side of the building is directly on the tarmac, and large windows span the entire side of the building for an unobstructed view. It was actually pretty busy for a Sunday morning. Planes would land and then taxi right up to the side of the building and come in for breakfast.

The food was good but the prices were slightly higher than what you would pay for a comparable meal someplace else, but we thought it was OK because the location and view made up for it.

However, the service we had was bad enough to spoil the whole experience for me this morning. I think it was just our waitress though. The kitchen and the other waitress seemed competent enough from what we could see.

She came over to drop off the menus and ask what we wanted to drink. Sheri asked for coffee and I asked for decaf and a glass of water. She came back over after about five minutes and couldn't remember if we ordered coffee. She came back with coffee and no water.

When she brought our plates out she asked if we needed anything else. I replied just silverware. She came back a few minutes later with the order of pancakes we were splitting and asked if we needed anything else. Silverware. My food was considerably colder by the time she brought the silverware out.

I normally expect at lease one stop-by during a meal to see if we need anything. About halfway through still no stop-by, and my coffee had been empty for several minutes. She was just chatting with the other workers behind the counter. Not busting her butt on anything. I took my cup to the counter to get a refill.

We finished breakfast and started reading the paper. No visit for coffee refills. Sheri got up to use the restroom. On the way back she walked behind the counter to grab the pot of decaf for me.

The waitress finally stopped by our table at least a half hour after we were done eating and asked if we wanted more coffee. Yes please. She came back with just the regular pot and said she was out of decaf. Did I just want a little of the regular? "No thanks, I will wait for the fresh decaf." Twenty minutes later still no coffee. Sheri went up and got me another cup.

I could have gone for one more cup while we were hanging out, but by this time I was just getting annoyed with the everything and so I didn't bother.

We didn't get a check so we thought they just keep them at the register and you tell the cashier what table you were at. No. The cashier asked for our ticket. She couldn't even be bothered to bring us the fricken check.

It was about a $20 check. I would normally leave a $4 tip, and $5 or maybe even $6 if the service was fabulous and the personality was pleasant and sincere. Sheri said she would take care of the tip and I should go pay the bill. I thought a $2 tip was adequate for the almost none existent service we received, and told Sheri to leave that amount. She is normally the one that gives wait staff the benefit of the doubt in situations like this, but she was so annoyed she said she was only leaving a dollar!

I definitely want to go back, just not to her section.

Her is a high-def aerial of the airport with a push pin of where our table was in the restaurant.

When I was looking around the airport's website I saw something about learning to fly. I have thought about learning to fly gliders before, but I never followed up. I did a little more follow-up this time, and I think I might seriously go for my glider pilot license at some point.

There is a glider club nearby and the instructors teach members for free. They said it depends on the student, but the average cost to get your FAA glider license is about $1,600. That includes about 20 hours of ground training and 40 to 50 flights. At that point you have to fly solo for the FAA and I think take a test.

That doesn't sound bad at all, and the 40 to 50 flights wouldn't even be like a chore. That would just be part of the fun.

The club sounds pretty cool too. The monthly fees are $25, and the gliders cost $20 per hour to rent. It costs $14 to have the tow plane tow your glider to 1,000 feet. There is also a one time $500 initiation fee. And like I said, they have volunteer FAA certified instructors.

I am not going to take any action right now, but it is going to be in the back of my head. Maybe we will start by going out and pay for a half hour ride some day.

We both slept hard and late today, but we made it to Burger King in time for breakfast. We lingered there for a bit reading the paper, and that is where I typed and e-mailed my long private post about work. I might have another one of those in my yet tonight.

Then we went furniture shopping. We are looking for a sectional for the family room. It is the first time we went looking at them armed with measurements of the area where it will go. Up until today we didn't know if one would even work there. It will.

We were next to a Performance Bike shop and I wanted to stop in for a couple minutes and look around. I walked out with a $45 or $50 tire pump for only $30.

Then we went to Kohl's to get some new clothes for me. I got a pair of blue slacks, three shirts, and a three-pack of actual Jockey shorts. I have never actually owned Jockey brand shorts. You always use the term "Jockey shorts" in the generic way you say Kleenex or Xerox.

We stopped for a little snack at Krispy Kreme, and then parked at the end of a runway at a small municipal airport for a few minutes and watched small private planes takeoff and land.

Then we went to Meijer for a few necessities and to get something for dinner. We are going to make Ruebens this evening and eat them while watching our movie. I also wanted to try the new Campbell's Select Gold Label soups. We picked out the Blended Red Pepper Black Bean Soup and will open that up if we still want something after our sandwiches.

We received the copy of our marriage certificate in the mail today so I can take it to my benefits department tomorrow and get Sheri on my insurance.

The bad news is that I didn't remember until this afternoon that I owe the IRS by Monday three months of estimated taxes for the fourth quarter of 2005.

The good news is that I am signed up with their EFTPS system (Electronic Federal Tax Payment System), so I was able to get on-line when I got home and schedule the funds to be transferred tomorrow.

I felt better today. I still didn't have much of an appetite. I had a South Beach Diet protein bar before I left for work. Around 11:30 AM I had a Clif bar, and mid afternoon I snacked on probably about 1/3 cup of Krema peanuts. (Thanks Greta!) When I got home I still wasn't too hungry and just had a few crackers with some brie cheese. Sheri had to work late and didn't get home until after 8 PM, and she brought be a double cheeseburger from McDonalds. That's it.

I was running a fever again last night, but it was less than Sunday night. Last night it was only 100.9º. I went to bed really early and slept mostly through the night, so I felt fairly well rested today.

I still don't have a PC at work, so I sat at my boss's desk for a couple hours first thing in the morning and tried to do a few things. An outside programmer that has written a couple web apps for us was scheduled to come in around 11 AM and do some things, so when I got there I had to turn the PC over to him and I pretty much just watched over his shoulder the rest of the day and asked questions. I learned a few things.

Recall that Sheri picked up that $39 after rebates hard drive on Sunday when I wasn't feeling well. Because Sheri had to work late I figured this would be the perfect time to cause a mess in our office and install it, or at least crack the case and make sure I had an open bay, open power connectors, etc. to install it some other night.

The first challenge was opening the case. It turned out to be hinged on one side and it doesn't actually come apart. It is like a clam shell. I saw the little release tab on top, and pressing it kind of made it come apart a little bit, but it took some fiddling to find out there was another release tab on the bottom. Once I found that it just sprung right open.

I spent some time reading the instructions and getting familiar with the layout of the inside of the PC. One thing that impressed me with Dell is that even though it only came with one hard drive, they included additional rails that are needed to install additional hard drives down the road. There were several of them clipped to one side of the case. I just snapped them off, screwed them into the side of the new hard drive, and slid the drive into an open bay.

The ribbon cable that came with the Dell originally had the two connectors too close to each other at the end that it made it impossible to plug in the new drive. Lucky for me the new drive came with a longer cable and that had the two plugs at the end spaced further apart.

I buttoned it all back up, plugged everything back in, and turned it on. I got an error message that said I did not plug in the power cable to the video card. The video card would not even let the system boot up. It just stopped everything and displayed that warning in big red letters.

Crap. OK. I probably just jiggled one of the power cables loose. I will open it back up, make sure all of the connections are secure, and then try it again.

Nope. Same message. I feel my forehead getting a little dampened, but no full fledged panic yet. I opened the case, rechecked cables a few times, but got the same error each time.

I figured I must have damaged a solder connection somewhere by accident. I thought the worst case scenario is I will have to go out and buy a new video card. Couple hundred bucks. Not what I wanted to do, but certainly not a catastrophe.

I opened it one more time and just kept following the power cable to see if I could spot any signs of damage. I don't know how I missed it, but the cable that came from the video card, snaked its way around a couple places, was not plugged into anything. I could immediately feel a big sense of relief. OK, not to figure out where it was supposed to plug into. I assumed it went right into the power supply, but it didn't. The dangling plug was just sort of hidden behind the power supply. The plug was supposed to plug into another plug coming from another set of power cables.

I did not unplug it, so the only thing I can figure is when my PC was built two years ago the person that assembled it did not push hard enough to snap the connectors together, and when I opened it up tonight there was just enough force to cause the two to come apart without me noticing. Whew!

After I plugged that back in the PC booted like a charm. I loaded the configuration software and it mapped it to a new drive letter, portioned it, and I am ready to go.

If it wasn't for the video card power cable problem it would have been a piece of cake installation. I have never done one before, but I would have no qualms about doing one again in the future.

In the new world of digital photography you can never have too much hard drive space. If/when I ever get my Canon EOS 20D camera with its 8 mega pixel sensor I will really be eating up disk space.

I went to bed last night with a 102° fever and I threw up once. I didn’t sleep well because I would wake up hot and sweaty, roll over, and then wake up an hour later almost shivering. Lather rinse repeat.

I was exhausted this morning and my stomach still hurt.

I didn't do much today because my new PC had not arrived, or at least IT had not configured it yet.

Here a few pictures of the office, and then I am going to bed.

Do I look like I am ready to pass out? Well I was.


Looking north from one of the conference rooms. They call them fishbowls.


Looking south from the same conference room.






After spending eight hours a day for two years in a basement with no natural light, the sunroof and all of the natural light it affords is nice luxury to me.

We went to McDonald's for breakfast and to relax with the Sunday paper for a bit, and then I was going to drop Sheri off for some clothes shopping while I went around the corner to CompUSA and the bookstore waiting for her call to pick her up.

We were about getting ready to wrap it up and go on our way when I noticed a little knot in my stomach. After a few more minutes my skin started to feel extra sensitive all over my body and I felt a little achy.

So Sheri dropped me off at home and she went out by herself. (She ended up a getting a nice cotton cable knit sweater.)

I couldn't get warm at home. The bases of my finger nails were a little blue, but I never reached shivering stage. I moved it from the couch downstairs up to bed. I slept a little bit, but more just like drifting in and out of consciousness.

One of the things I wanted to do after reading the Sunday ads was go to Best Buy and get a 160 gigabyte Western Digital internal hard drive that they had advertised for $39 after rebates. It is normally $130. Anyway, I totally forgot about it because I was feeling like crap. Sheri took it upon herself to go pick one up for me because I made a comment while we were in the restaurant that at that price they would probably sell out today. I have never installed a hard drive, but from what I hear it is not too difficult. Thanks Sheri!

Sheri came home and brought me some cold soda and got into bed to warm me up. I think my warmth is back to normal. (If anything I might feel a little warm now under the covers.) My stomach still feels like it has a knot in it, but strangely enough I feel a little hungry. I think I will mix up some soy protein to drink.

Sheri stopped at Blockbuster and picked up Wedding Crashers. We are going to watch that in a few minutes so we will be free to watch Desperate Housewives tonight.

I still have to pack my first-day-of-work crash kit and pick out what I am going to wear.

Sheri's nausea seemed to pass overnight, so hopefully by tomorrow morning I will be back to normal as well.

After work tomorrow I am going to stop for a haircut, go home for a shower, and if we are both feeling up to it go out for a dual-celebration dinner at Sullivan's Steak House. We never really did that for Sheri's new job a few weeks ago. Now we will have two reasons to go out.

In yesterday's mail (Friday) we received our biannual (I think that means every two years. If not, that's what I mean.) notification that one of our cars is due to have its emissions tested.

In the past the notice always sits around for several weeks while we put off doing it, and it is always in the back of my mind eating away at me until we get it done. This time I wanted to get it done right away.

The closest testing station to us opens at 8 AM on Saturday, and you need to have had your car running for at least 15 minutes prior to the test. So my plan was to get up at 7:45 AM so we could get 15 minutes of driving in and be there right when it opens at 8 AM and get the testing taken care of. I wanted to get there early so we didn't have to wait in line for 45 minutes.

We didn't quite leave at 7:45 AM. It was more like 8:20 AM and we got there about 8:45 AM. They have an electronic sign out front that tells you how long the wait is. When we pulled in it was only 3 minutes! And actually the wait was zero, and we were in and out in about three minutes.

They have four or five lanes you can choose from. There was one lane with no cars waiting or in the test stations so I picked that one. The waved me in to the first station and told me to kill the engine. They took off our gas cap and screwed a cap on that had a hose attached to it. I think this is to make sure there are no leaks in your gas tank. I think they pressurize it and then monitor the pressure for a couple minutes.

We passed that and then they waived us on to the second station inside the building. For this one I had kill the engine and the get out of the car. The guy got in and plugged into the car's computer interface under the steering wheel. Their computer downloads any fault codes and operating data and looks for anything that would indicate poor performance. Bad oxygen sensors. Cylinders not firing. Stuff like that. It took just a minute or so. He got out of the car and printed out our certificate and we were on our way.

After that we went to Einstein Brothers bagels for breakfast. I had a spinach and bacon breakfast panini and Sheri had a blueberry bagel with a schmear, and a coffee.

After we went through the paper and did the crossword we talked about what to do next. Sheri didn't sleep well the night before and probably tossed and turned for at least three hours. Therefore she was starting to drag and didn't feel up to much. I didn't have much more energy.

We decided to make a few stops and then go home for a nap. We went to a local grocery store that carries HoKa turkeys I wrote about last weekend. We just wanted to see how much they were, what sizes they had, stuff like that. We think we are going to buy one to eat over next week's three day weekend.

We went next door to Trader Joe's to get some food for the afternoon and evening. I was still full from breakfast and Sheri was not feeling too well, so shopping for food just didn't work.

We left there with nothing and were going to go home. I remembered I wanted to try the different flavors of water I wrote about a few days ago so we stopped at that grocery store and I think we bought almost ten different flavors, and they still probably had about ten flavors we didn't try. We tasted the wild cherry which we liked, and we tasted the tropical which we didn't like. It was supposed to taste like a mixture of mango, papaya, passion fruit and banana, but I didn't taste any of that.

We went next door to a hardware store to see if they carry the Venta humidifier we have been thinking about. They did but we didn't buy it. At $430 it is going to take some more thinking.

We went home and Sheri took a nap. I turned out to be restless so I made a batch of Chex mix, but it wasn't really a mix because I just used whole wheat Chex. No nuts or pretzels or stuff.

switching to Reader's Digest mode

Sheri got up. We watched a movie early. Didn't really eat dinner. I'm starting to feel a little gurgly. Sheri threw up, but nothing came up. She got hot and dizzy. Laid on the bathroom floor. I brought her a fan and a cold wash cloth. Felt better. Read for a few minutes. Turned out the lights and went to sleep by 9 PM.

I am going to finish up this post. Look up a few things on the web, and then try to finish one of the books I got for Christmas; In God We Trust: All Others Pay Cash.

Tomorrow we don't have too much planned. I need a haircut. Sheri wants to go shoping for some clothes. I will probably go to CompUSA and the bookstore while she does that for an hour or so. And that's about it so far.

I already have my desk fan packed in my computer bag for my first day at work on Monday. I will also load it up with some other office essentials:

Chapstick
Gum
Favorite mechanical pencil
Pad of paper
Desk calendar book
Box of tissues
A few protein bars

That's all I came up with so far.

My last day at work was pretty nice. People stopped by my desk throughout the day to say goodbye and wish me well. I also got lots of e-mails from people letting me know how much they enjoyed working with me and that they would miss me. That really meant a lot.

About 20 people pitched in a bought a bunch of pizzas and cans of soda, and we all ate in one of the conference rooms. After that something really cool happened that I cannot write about here but will send out all of the details on e-mail list.

I actually was pretty busy today. Not actually doing work, but doing as much of a brain-dump to my two coworkers as I could.

I was fine the whole day except for maybe the last 45 minutes. Even though I am really excited about what lies ahead, I started to feel bad about leaving a place where I really enjoyed the work and the people. I have been there two years, but it doesn't seem that long.

I didn't get teary eyed or choked up. I just started to feel weird knowing that I would not be back there on Monday. Also my desk without all of my personal effects and clutter looked and felt very strange.

And even though it was a drag driving the 60 mile round trip drive every day, I felt a little loss as I drove that route home for the last time.

Extremely important Microsoft Windows update. It only takes a minute or two, so do it now.

It is so important that Microsoft didn't even want to wait until their normal second Tuesday of the month to when they normally distribute patches.

If you have your computer set to automatically install critical updates it is possible you will click on the above link and it will say there are no updates to install. This is good. But still click the link just to make sure you have it installed.

I am not used to eating lunch. I normally just work through lunch and eat nuts at my desk. The last few days I have been going out to lunch with people every day and my body is not used to the extra calories. I feel a little bloated and I have not been hungry for dinner in the evenings, and the scale is showing a couple extra pounds. I should dust off the stationary bike tonight and work some of it off.

I have been getting very nice e-mails from people wishing me well and people stopping by my desk to say they will miss me. That always feels good.

I have been cleaning off my desk and thinning out my paper files. I have been lugging a plastic grocery bag of personal items home the last few days. I have not really been working on anything. If something comes in I redirect it to the people who will be doing my work and then guiding them through it. It is better if they hit all the walls they can now while I am still here rather than when I am gone.

Sheri went to the doctor today because she has been sick for almost a month, and getting sicker. One of her symptoms was her ears felt clogged and has trouble hearing, especially out of her right ear.

A few weeks ago my right ear felt clogged and had difficulty hearing out of it. I bought some ear wax cleaner and a bulb water irrigator thinking that would help. I did it twice a day for three days and it didn't help, and it still feels the same, maybe worse.

When Sheri went to the doctor today I asked her to ask the doctor if he either a) had any suggestions for me, b) should I make an appointment to come in and see him, or c) should I make an appointment with my ear nose throat doctor.

He said that both Sheri and I should use Afrin twice a day for three days for our clogged ears.

Finally, here is the reason for this post: Sheri went to the store and picked up a bottle of Afrin for each of us, and she picked out this new "flavor" of Afrin that has camphor, eucalyptol, and menthol, and I love it. It really gives your nose a nice fresh and cool feeling. It is almost like aromatherapy. If you have need for a decongestant nose spray give it a try.

The last time we were in Dominick's I picked up a bottle of sugar free sparkling water that was apple cider flavored. It is the Safeway brand which is the store brand there, and I think Safeway products are carried in a number of different grocery stores.

Anyway, it is amazing! It doesn't just have a hint of apple flavor. It tastes like I am really drinking apple cider with a little fizz.

It is in a crystal-clear quart sized bottle and the beverage itself is absolutely clear. They had some other flavors, and I am going to have to try those now, but I forget what they were.

In the Sunday paper CompUSA advertised a USB WiFi adapter for only $3 after rebates! It is normally $40.

I don't need it for anything right now, but I thought it would be a good tool to keep in my laptop bag. If I ever needed to network a desktop computer in a crunch that was too far away from a LAN connection I could just plug the adapter in the USB port and be all set.

Also if Mom and Dad's neighbor's ever set up an unsecured WiFi router I could pop this into their computer and do any updates for them in a few minutes rather than a few hours over dial-up.

This makes me want to kiss Dave.

I meant to post this last week on the private mailing list because my new job was still unofficial, but now that everyone at my current job knows I can go ahead and post it here.

It has been a few years since my last pre-employment drug screening and I don't remember the protocol being as involved.

I was walked back to the lab by the technician and told to wash my hands in the sink, but not to use soap, and then dry my hands completely with a paper towel.

I was then led to the other side of the lab and the technician opened up a cupboard on the wall that must have had 100 sealed specimen containers. She told me to pick one.

The specimen container was sealed with tin foil across the top kind of like how the orange juice containers are at McDonalds. She instructed me to remove the tin foil cover and throw the cover into the trash, and then to dump out the contents of the container onto the counter but not to touch them, and then place the container on the counter.

The container had a bag and another smaller plastic vial inside.

She drew a little mark on the side of the container and said I had to fill it at least to that mark (it was a urine test). The reason is that there was a little thermometer strip on the outside of the cup and the liquid had to at least cover that to get a temperature.

She walked me to a restroom that had the hot and cold water handles removed and yards and yards of tape were wrapped around the handle stubs as well as the faucet. She told me not to flush the toilet when I was done, and then to just walk back to the lab.

Once back at the lab she told me to set my specimen on the counter. She had me sign and date a sticker that had a number on it that matched a number printed at the top of the page with my name on it. She told me verify that the two numbers were the same.

She then picked up my sample and poured it into the smaller plastic vial that I had dumped out on the counter before.

As she was doing this she was narrating exactly what she was doing. "I am now putting a cap on this vial. Now I am placing the seal that you signed onto the vial as proof that this is your sample. Etc. etc."

She then had me watch as she placed the plastic vial into the bag that I also dumped out on the counter. She peeled off the wax paper strip that was covering the sticky strip and sealed the bag, and then placed another sticker on the outside of the bag from the same sheet that I signed that had the serial number printed on it. She talked me through that part too.

That was it. It just took me by surprise a little bit about all of the formality the process required.

This is a link to the video I shot on Monday of the Mendota Hills Wind Farm. There is no sound because for some reason the sound always gets stripped off the video when I transfer it from our camera to the PC.

It was raining pretty hard when we visited so we could not get out for better shots. Some of the video is a little shaky and jerky because I am trying to control the camera with one hand and work the zoom with my thumb while I am leaning across the front seat.

It is unedited which means it is just raw video. I didn't tighten it up or take out any of the redundant stuff.

All in all though I think it is pretty cool stuff.

Former Pittsburgh Steelers great Lynn Swann is seeking the Republican nomination for governor of Pennsylvania in 2006.

For months I have wanted to drive out to a wind farm that is about a 60 mile drive west from us. We had nothing else planned for today so we thought why not. We got up and left before 9 AM. We thought about stopping at McDonalds for an Egg McMuffin for breakfast, but then we thought it would be fun to find a greasy spoon along the way. About halfway there we saw a nice little place in Hinkley, IL. I had a Denver omelet and Sheri had coffee, two eggs and hash browns. It was a nice place. There was a woman sitting right in front of me that looked a little like Shania Twain.

The official name of the wind farm is Mendota Hills Wind Farm. It has 63 wind turbines and has a capacity of 50.4 megawatts, which is enough to power 15,000 homes per year. The wind farm is spread over the property of 39 farmers. They receive between $3,000 and $5,000 for each turbine on their property per year. The company that manufactured the turbines as well as owns this wind farm is a Spanish company called Gamesa. The turbine hub is 213 feet above the ground. The rotor has a 171' diameter.

This is a link to a map showing where we were.

I took about 10 minutes of video and have already uploaded it to Google Video, but I can not link to it until after it has been verified by someone that it is not obscene. That might take a day or two. I will post the link as soon as I hear that it has been approved. Until then here are a few of the pictures we took.









On the way home we saw a sign for a turkey farm that said they sold things retail. It was only about a mile off our route so we thought we would check it out. They were closed today, but I think I want to go back and get a fresh turkey. The place is called HoKa Turkey Farms.

We also at the Chicago Premium Outlet store just for something to do. We had only been there on the opening weekend a year or two ago.

We were not in the mood to buy anything. We just wanted to look around for some ideas. It has an open air setup so it is was too cold to spend too much time going from store to store. I didn't think most of the stores really had anything close to a bargain except for one. The Brooks Brothers store had really nice stuff and very competitive prices. Sheri liked the woman's selection too. I think I will wait and see how most people dress at my new job, and if a change in wardrobe is required go back to Brooks Brothers to stock up a bit.

Sheri had to come into work again today, and at first I was just going to stay at home. But then I figured I would be doing the exact same thing at home (surf the web, read the paper, drink coffee) as if I went to work with her, so I came along. Also, if I stayed at home I would probably have stayed in bed when she left, and then slept too long and felt like a big lump later in the afternoon. This way we are both on the same schedule. When she comes home and is ready for a nap I won't be waiting for her all restless and ready to go do something.

I took these action photos of Sheri hard at work yesterday.