I’m working on my new web site on my new machine. You can take a preview look. I am still tweaking the layout and such, but most of the content is there except for the resume/personal information and links page. Probably be another week or so til I bring it up. Comments welcome.

the weekend trip to vegas was pretty good. made money at the tables(mostly $8/16 hold’em), ate at a couple different buffets. Bellagio has the nicest buffet i’ve been to, and the Excalibur’s is huge, seats hundreds easily and it’s not a bad value at $10 for lunch.

Went to Mon Ami Gabi in Paris for dinner which was nice, Tracy had a really good filet mignon there. Also we hit Raffles in Mandalay Bay and I had a huge prime rib which was really good.

There’s nothing like eating a gross amount of food to get you motivated to workout for the week.

Ugh. This morning’s swim showed just how terrible a swimmer I am. Especially in the non-freestyle strokes. My breastroke is not good, my fly and back are really terrible. Oh well, at least those aren’t that important in triathlons.

Kojo has put out 2-1 odds that he will beat me and Dave Orr has placed $20 on me. I’m not sure if that wise or foolish for Dave, based on how little he knows about how i perform compared to Kojo.

Also Lesbian Linux rules.

Ok so the wedding itself wasn’t quite so nice, but it was still good. Nothing too unusual about the wedding. Being one of the groomsmen, I got to hang out with the the wedding party and I talked to a bunch of Lydia’s friends. They had a great DJ. A guy named Jeff Fernandez from Show on the Road Productions. I highly recommend them if you ever need a DJ in the Chicago area.

Kojo got us on this training schedule that is pretty damn hard. I’m only on the first of 26 weeks and I’m hurting already. He got it from this book The Multisport Training Bible. He’s also got the Training for Multisport Athletes.

We’re going to be doing 2 workouts/day for months. This could suck. I have my doubts that Kojo can make it, hell I have doubts that I can make it, and I don’t have a baby due in 3 months.

I already blew away my XP box and I have a full redhat 8 install running. I’ll need to migrate the services off of the old chen.net box and everything. I expect it’ll take a couple weeks.

Wow was the rehearsal dinner we went to tonight expensive. Musta been 80+ people there at $100/plate at The Peninsula Hotel. They had at least 5 kinds of salad, 4 entrees, 5-7 desserts, and 4-5 asian dishes. And tomorrows dinner is probably going to be even more expensive because it’s at The Drake Hotel and everyone at the wedding will be there.

Well here’s the rundown of how that reunion thing went last night. I heard that an alumnus of CWA owns Fog City Diner, which explains why we had it there. Not sure which one though. I talked quite a bit with Carl Spence from my brother Tim’s class of 1988. He is a curator/organizer for the San Francisco Film festival, which sounds like a cool job. He gets to go to Sundance and Cannes and watch all the upcoming films, which sounds pretty interesting. My brother’s class actually had the best turnout with 3 people. Carl, Wan Suwandi, and Erika Krieger all showed up. I suspect that they even all hang out together, but I don’t know. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Erika or Wan, but I could get an update on them from Gretchen I suppose.

From the class of ’89 I talked with my wrestling teammate Paul Twardowski and I saw, but didn’t get a chance to talk to Bo Brustkern. Paul does real estate development and he lives in the North Bay and married to a nice girl named Michelle, who if I recall correctly is applying for a psychology doctorate somewhere in the Bay Area.

The only person from my class that showed up besides me was Amy Wilkinson. She just finished her MBA from Stanford and will be starting to work for McKinsey in January. She said that her brother is happy and married working in Portland(?) as a neurologist and his wife is a doctor I think.

John Long my 8th grade english teacher told me about what his son Jesse(’89) was up to and it’s pretty much what is described on the CWA alumni page.

I also talked to someone new that I’d never talked to before. Bruce McKendry from the oldest class of 1964 also a lifelong friend of John Long’s was telling me about his invention of a breast pump that doesn’t hurt at all. Apparently one company has an %85 market share for a breast pump that is pretty painful to use, and his new product is supposedly great. I am sure that when I get pregnant, I’ll have to give this a try. I’ll dig up the URL and post it here when I remember to.

I’m bummed that I’m here in Chicago and my new computer is waiting for me at home at the post office. Oh well, I’ll have to wait until Monday to get it.

So I just got back from my high school reunion-like dinner. I call it that because it was for anyone in the bay area who graduated from my high school. So there were about 15-20 people there from all ages who graduated from Charles Wright. more later..

Yes yes, i know my web page layout kinda sucks, but it’s content that counts isn’t it?

So I’m thinking about buying a copy of Age of Mythology because I like RTS’es and I’m good at them. I also missed out on the whole Age of Empires and Age of Kings craze, so I thought I might give the 3rd edition a try.

Ben and Lydia are getting married this weekend, so we’ll be in Chicago for some fun and snow.

And amazingly enough the Giants have made it to the World Series. I’m actually not that big a Giants fan mostly because Barry Bonds is an asshole, despite his amazing hitting skills. But I try not to take it out on the whole team for his attitude.

So this is bizarre… IBM is releasing a new PowerPC for the Mac among other uses with 42 bit addressing. I’m looking forward to reading some articles on why they chose that seemingly odd number. I’d understand 32, 64, even 48 bit sort of, but 42?

Everyday I use Mozilla I get more fond of it. I’ve been using Mozilla gestures from the Optimoz package, and I really like them. Unfortunately like everything non-Microsoft, I hate getting too used to having the gestures available, because then I get sad when I don’t have them.

Oh yea, and there’s an Ex-Blue Martini employee website.

Someone said that Blue Martini will be focusing on consulting and service revenue now. Not sure if I agree with that strategy, but whatever..

So we had a contractor do some landscaping work to clear some bushes. It took Tracy a dozen calls to finally get it done. They started somewhat promptly, but then what they said would be a 2-3 day job, took about a week and a half, only because they didn’t show up for about 7 consecutive days. I think its pretty common practice for a contracting company to start a job and just not finish it until you pester them enough. Their main goal is to get your business first so you don’t go with another contractor. Then they just put off finishing the job until as long as they can. I can easily imagine them taking on way more jobs than they can handle and only finishing the jobs at their convenience or if they think I won’t pay or worse, if I might sue them.

So whenever you buy a new car, they send you about a billion surveys to complete, one about the first impressions, one about the dealer, one after you’ve had the car for a month or so. And they take forever to fill out. I understand they want their customer satisfaction results, but give me a break, let me complete it over the web or something at least.

Also it’s official, I’ve paid money to be in the California half-ironman. It’s kinda silly that they charge you $160 for it, but oh well.

So I’ve been running over the triathlon numbers and I think completing the half-ironman in 7 hours is pretty reasonable and I suspect I should be able to do it in 6 hours if I’m feeling good. I am shooting for splits of about 45 min swim, 3 hour bike, and 2:15 run. Which breaks down to an 2:15/100m in the swim, 18 2/3 mph on the bike, and 9:25 min/mile run. I think I can cut a little bit of time from the swim and the run even.

My former employer Blue Martini laid off another round of %30 from their work force. Ouch. A lot of old timers and skilled people are available now. If you are searching for a person there, or are looking for a job, email me, I might be able to hook you up.

I had another personal best run today. 6 miles at < 7:30 pace. I'm on a roll. This was after I had two solid 30+ mile rides this weekend. If I can keep this up I'll be golden.

Ben and Lydia are getting married this weekend. We’ll get to have a nice weekend in Chicago and hang out with Tracy’s sister.

I’m testing out installs for various linux distributions and I’m pretty impressed with the redhat installer. It can do a network install from a single floppy. Debian takes about 5-6 floppies and it doesn’t have the simplicity and beauty of the redhat one. I think that may seal the deal for me. Oh yea, and I hate figuring out how to partition disks, it’s a pain, and it doesn’t affect your system configuration enough(imho) to make it critical that installers should ask you how to do it. Just partition the damn disk for me please, and give an option for advanced users to do whatever they want. Flame me if you like, call me an inept hacker, but my first priority when doing a linux install is to have it simple and easy to understand. I can’t even begin to describe how little I care about cylinders and sectors and disk geometries. Ok that turned into a little more of a rant than I intended, but you get the point.