I was wrong, I have been laid off. Ah well, such is life. more later.

I have a new plan to beat kojo come race day. I will be slower at every segment, but I’m going to win in the transitions. If I can make up 3-4 minutes each transition, then I will be in good shape.

UM’s basketball team had a streak of 13 wins broken last night, losing to Illinois. This win streak was especially surprising considering that UM opened the season 0-6.

Oh and my company is getting bought as expected. Here is the press release announcing that Navisite purchases Avasta. We’ll see how it shakes out. I expect to have a job, but if there are layoffs in the Engineering department which includes 6 of us, I will be the first to go I assume because I’m the newest on the team. The deal isn’t finalized until probably tomorrow, but I expect it will be, they did issue a press release after all. You have to be impressed with the purchase price. At today’s $2/shr price for Navisite, they are issuing ~230k shares for a whopping total of ~$460,000. Although there are some incentives which could include up to another 1.0 million shares in 6 months if we meet them. I guess it’s better than nothing. This and they are putting in about $1.5 mil as a cash infusion to help us reach profitability. Not that anyone here is complaining. We’re all thrilled just to know that we can come to work on monday. There might be some layoffs, but i expect most divisions will be left intact.

I had another one of those weird dreams. I dreamed I was living in The Sopranos. I was a close friend of Carmella Soprano and Tony accused me of sleeping with her. Then I think he killed me, but I turned into a sort of a ghost that haunted him. Everyone could see me except him, and I spent my time being an annoyance and scaring him. I don’t know what all this means.

Star Wars Galaxies will open up their final beta in mid-Feb or early March, that’s a bit later than I was hoping and it only gives them about a month to test the whole thing if they want to make their April 15 ship date. But maybe it will turn out well.

Had a long ride 3 hour ride this weekend. It takes me 33 minutes to get up Old La Honda road, which isn’t bad, but I think I can do better. Also I think I killed my legs because I was stubborn and refused to use my smallest gear. This weekend was tough, but this week is even tougher. I’m totallly dreading it with a 2:45 brick(consecutive different types of workouts) on saturday and a 3.5 hr ride on sunday. I think one of the weekend workouts on the schedule is almost a olympic distance triathlon workout which would take 4 hrs to do, ick.

A lot of my gamer friends are excited that Masters of Orion 3 has gone gold. Having never played any of the earlier ones, I am not that hot to get it, but it is a highly respected series, so perhaps I’ll pick up a copy. More likely, I’ll wait and see what they say and if they rave, then maybe I’ll pick it up.

I’ve been considering playing a bit of Magic The Gathering again. It’s been a couple of years, but every now and then I get a temptation to play. I’ve been looking at some of the current sets, in case I wanted to play some Type 2 tournaments or something, but I doubt I will. I don’t really have the time anyways. The next 6 weeks are the toughest part of my training program and after that it gets much easier. There are a couple of weeks which have 14 hours of workouts, which is going to be grueling.

I did a bike time trial this weekend, and I averaged 19.4 mph. It was a 7.6 mile slightly rolling course and I completed it in 23:40. About 2 minutes more than Kojo, damn him.

Ah neat, saav’s blog pointed me to a site for describing neat gadgets of all kinds. Hail gizmodo.

Also Counter Strike 1.6 is out. There’s a new riot shield, which is supposed to be very cool.

I’m looking at some linux load balancing and high availability tools for work. I’m not sure which we’ll go with but there’s things like.

• Linux Virtual Server: does IP redirection and IP takeover for load balancing
  
• Wackamole which keeps a set of virtual IP addresses up and has a great name
  
• Linux High Availability: does IP heartbeats and takeover
  
• Jessica which inserts middleware underneath java to provide a single virtual machine interface to distributed threads and thread migration and other cool things
  

The question for the day is what race and profession should I pick for Star Wars Galaxies. I am leaning towards being a bothan or mon calamari and choosing combat medic or combat engineer as my profession. There are lots of choices though. Some are pretty cool. The Star Wars Galaxies Official Web Site has more info on the choices.

I’m kinda getting disillusioned with Yahoo!. I’ve had it as my home page for about 4 years and they haven’t really improved it. There are minor improvements, but i really want a better, more personalized news gathering service, more like news.google.com, but personalized for what i click through to. I know Y! has a hard time making money off of me, because I never click through ads or popups. But at least I did use their Bill Pay service, so they made some money off me at least. They had a great year financially last year, and I read the other day that their Personals service was one of their biggest money makers, which was somewhat of a surprise.

Ben and I got into a discussion about whether Apple’s strategy of developing their own browser was a good one. It’s still not clear, I think it’s good, Ben was kind of on the fence about it. It’s interesting to note that they built their browser on top of KDE’s KHTML rendering engine instead of Mozilla’s Gecko engine. Also it’s things like the Burton Apple Amp Jacket which is a snowboarding jacket specially designed to hold an iPod. This of course brings up the obvious question: wtf?

I downloaded a movie off of IRC the other day. I felt dirty once I’d done it. But at least it got me motivated to fix my current redhat install so that it can actually play sound. That was an experience. Compiling modules takes forever, but at least I know how to do it. I actually spent the most time figuring out how to do a correct mkinitrd to make an init ramdisk. It’s really not that difficult, and I’m surprised I’d never done it before. Just never had an occasion to I guess.