Kitkowskiland!

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

So today is the second day of my three day weekend. I’m digging the three days, but I’ve realized that if I don’t put plans into motion as soon as I hit day one, I’ll spend the day in my pajamas playing videogames and doing yoga. Not that this is a bad thing, it’s very relaxing. Still, I have things to achieve.

One of those things was picking up the bike from the bike store in Cary (I was having some break pads replaced). I needed some exercise today, so instead of waiting for Orie to get back with the car, put on some shorts, a hat, lots of sunscreen, my chain belt and yelllow pack, and walked to the bike store. I should have brought some water- almost two hours in the North Carolina sun is enough to bake one’s brains. The hat helped, though. it was one of those floppy fisherman-style hat dealios. I picked up the bike, bought some “biker socks”, and cruised back, making the return trip in about 25 minutes.

On the way I stopped at the Hallmark store to pick up an “I love you” card for Orie, cause it’s been awhile since I’ve done anything like that. It took me about 5 minutes to find such a card that didn’t have anything to do with birthdays or anniversaries. I still just wanted it to write my own words, but still.

Took a twenty minute cold shower, and now I’m beat.

Orie just got back from her dental checkup: So, the 1 crown filling for about $1K that we expected to pay turned out to be two crowns at $3,000. This is coming at a time when:
1) I am just about to go to the gaming convention.
2) We are planning our trip to Japan in October.
3) We were stacking up to buy a new chair, dining table, and save to put an addition on the house.
4) We have to pay $2,000 for the yearly life insurance bill.
5) The property tax bill just came.
6) We’re having every conceivable problem getting MetLife to pay for anything.

So, we’re looking to do one of two things:
1) Get a credit card offering 0% Interest for 6 months. Stack it. Start paying it off at $300/mo intervals. Cancel the card once it’s paid off.
2) Take out a loan with the bank using the car as collateral. Pay it off within one year.
3) We could pay it off with cash, but the problem is that will kill a huge chunk out of our savings put aside for additions to the house next year.

Ahhh, decisions, decisions. Debt.

Work is good (though I stayed about a grand total of about 6 hours late this last week catching up with stuff), life is good. Kinda swamped with personal projects, but otherwise things are cool.

Yoga, biking (a little), trying to get back into shape. We’ll see how that goes. My goal is to lose 6 pounds before I fly back to Japan. At two months away, that’s about a pound every two weeks. Aiming for 10 by the end of the year. Nice, slow steps.

So, it turns out that my house is a lot cooler than I thought it was! Our previous owner, was big into lawn care- and I mean BIG. The way that the house is facing, and the fact that there�s no shade on the lawn from the sun, means that during the summertime a lot of the grass just dries up and dies. He ended up tearing out a lot of the grass and putting in a natural area of trees and bushes and things, but he never stopped trying to make the grass is green as possible. When we moved in, he left us fertilizer, seed, and instructions for the sprinkler system. Funny thing is, I visited the house twice, and only the night before did I even realize that the house was equipped with a sprinkler system.

I just talked up the sprinklers to something I could use to sell the house for more when we end up moving. From years of mowing a steep New Jersey lawn with an electric mower I�ve developed an attitude that is pretty much �anti-weed�. I hate grass. I was thinking of tearing it all out and making the whole front yard a giant natural area just the thought of maintaining and watering and cutting and putting work into a weed just didn�t sit right with me.

However, the front was getting pretty dry and Orie and I came to the conclusion that if it only takes a few minutes to water the lawn we�ll do it that way. One thing led to another, and we realized we should just go ahead and give the sprinkler system a shot. My dad came over and we installed the backflow preventer that they require here in Cary. We hunted all over the house for the water flow control valve. My dad ended up crawling all around underneath the house to try to find out where the water valve was. It turned out, it was right next to the backflow preventer. Anyway, after a trip to Ace Hardware to get some �valve opening supplies�, we got everything installed and flipped the water switch.

I had no idea what to expect. I certainly didn�t expect to see, over the next minute or two, a symphony of about 20 hidden sprinklers on at least five different zones spring up all over the place. They appeared out of NOWHERE. I literally did not see a single one of these sprinklers in my yard in the six months since we owned the house, until we hit the switch and they popped out in a pattern, like automatic Alien-destroying turrets. It was like watching Starcraft on my lawn.

It kinda sucks, because after seeing that there�s no way I could blow off using the sprinklers. It was one of the coolest things I�ve seen in my home. It was like opening the basement to see that it came with its own Ninja clan. I cannot escape my sprinkler destiny.

Man, I love how Roadrunner is fast and cheap.
I hate the fact that their DNS servers are always failing (all 4 area servers), how the cached IP addys keep slipping, and how their staff entirely consists of total retards.

I called in today because I sent an email through a “service webpage” whcih guaraneed it would reply with a fix for my problem within 4 days. The reply I got within 2 days was “Call the service number. Kthxbye.”

So I called the service number. I got to Help Desk One, which are local guys. This is where I used to work some four years ago. They troubleshoot cable modem and hardware problems. Barely.

ME: “I’m having a problem with the Raleigh DNS servers.”
LEVEL 1: “Let me check your cable modem hardware.”
ME: “My cable modem is fine. Solid as a rock. My problem with the servers is [LONG LENGTHY TECHNOBABBLE EXPLANATION].”
LEVEL 1: “Hmmm, your cable modem looks fine from our side.”
ME: “That’s exactly what I just said. [REPEAT EXPLANATION].”
LEVEL 1: “Let me transfer you to Level 2″
ME: “…ok”

LEVEL 2:”Are you using a router?”
ME: “Yeah, right now in fact, but this problem happens both when I am connected through the router and when I’m connected straight to the cable modem.”
LEVEL 2: “OK, I see. The first thing I want you to do is connect the PC directly to the cable modem.”
ME: “Let’s try this again. [I explain my situation in detail. I have him ping my website, I have him try through other DNS servers. He sees that the DNS servers are bad].”
LEVEL 2: “Let me transfer you to Level 3″
ME: “…ok”.

Now, I remember the Level 3 guys back when I worked at TWC on the frontline. I worked at a job that basically paid, oh, about $28-32K depending on how many holidays you worked. If you stayed there long enough, and showed Real Promise, you may one day be promoted to Level 3, where you get 35K a year. You wear a red club shirt with the little RR logo and carry a laptop case with you, and look important. What I REALLY remembered well about these guys is that they would wait for 2 weeks to look into a client’s case, and then close it because “Oh, this was probably related to that storm we had two weeks back. Probably.” Of course, it isn’t. And of course, they don’t call the client. Rather, the client calls in a MONTH later to find that their case was closed TWO WEEKS AGO, and that the case CANNOT be reopened, and that they have to open a NEW CASE, wait TWO MORE WEEKS, and pray to f***ing God that they didn’t just close the case again on a whim.

So I was a little hesitant. But hey, these guys control the servers, right? They’re Level 3.

When the Level 3 guy got on the phone, I explained everything to him, had him do the nslookups and everything. I proved to him the problem. He marked it down in my account and promised to contact someone in charge of those DNS servers and open a case.

ME: “Oh, so we can’t open a case now?”
Level 3: “Well, I’m going to just take notes here, and I’ll contact the server team to open a case.”
ME: “So, we have no case number right now? No way to track this issue?”
Level 3: “Uh… sorry, no.”

On one hand, he was very nice and very helpful. On the other hand, I’m not holding my breath. I get a better connection to my root domain www.z-builder.com when I tap into my neighbor’s wireless DSL conenction than when I use my own.

Here’s the real weird thing: So all my browsers can’t negotiate (by hostname) to www.z-builder.com when the DNS servers fail… and yet my Outlook email picks up email from the server like there was no problem! I checked the settings three times, and sure enough Outlook is connecting by Hostname, and not IP Address. I’ll give $10 to the person who can explain to me how Outlook can connect by hostname to my email server when DNS (and thus all my web browsers) isn’t finding it.

Suicide: Orie saw a Yahoo Japan news article. Suicide is up a lot these days. 30,000 a year. 10,000 a year die in car crashes. They’ve had a “War on Traffic Accidents” for a while now, to host campaigns to talk about and alleviate traffic disasters. And yet suicide is three times a bigger killer. It seems everyone’s afraid to talk about it.

It makes those RPG scenarios that take place in Japan, with everyone committing Seppuku, a little less unrealistic. Though the favored method in Japan is still hanging. Followed by “jumping in front of speeding train, and exploding all over the place”.

So, I was talking to my buddy Paul. I didn’t get the lowdown of this in my newhire orientation, but he did: Basically, whereas in most companies you can only expect more pay if you join management, here where I work the management and technical (escalation) pay scales are equal… In fact, the technical pay scale actually goes one step higher than managerial.

Commitment to excellence? Trying to keep solid technical people technical and leaving the management to managers? You better believe it.

Man, that really made me feel good to work here.

So, I’ve been working on exercising lately, because I gained about 30 pounds or so in the past 5 years, and I noticed that it’s harder to breathe when I sleep (I started to snore), etc. So my goal has been “lose 10 pounds by the end of 2005. Lose 20 more next year”. By 2007 I plan to be back down to 180 or so.

Anyway, to meet those goals I’ve been getting back into exercising: Walks a few times a week, riding my bike more, playign badminton, and tonight I joined Orie in doing Power Yoga (following along to a 3-DVD set). We try to go through the first DVD (we haven’t tried the other teo yet) about once every three days, and am planning to next go to once every other day, and finally once a day for maximum impact. All in all, it’s about 40 minutes long, and MAN. It is rough. By section two (of three) I’m sweating as if I had been doing Tae Kwan Do opening combos (front kick, side kick, roundhouse kick). Good stuff, and I feel refreshed. I just want to get used to it a little more so I can step it up.

Next week, I also plan on signing up at the local gym near work- it comes out to about 10 bucks a month, and they’re open until midnight most nights. I’m looking forward to doing some light, repetitive weight training to supplement the rest.

Finally, I’ve all but given up on doing it tomorrow (bad weather, and I won’t be getting a lot of sleep tonight), but this Saturday I’ll begin riding my bike to work. I’m probably only going to do it on Saturdays… but in August, my office building will move a little closer to my house, and on safer streets, and when that happens I plan on jumping in there 100%, every day if possible.

Anyway, here’s some pics that I’ve had on my camera for a bit but never posted online:

Orie bought a small pillow online, and this is the box it came in.

Subaru is “hiding” in the bubble-bag wrap the pillow came with.

and
Back when I worked at CISCO, Steve and I were called to bring our PCs and phones home, and connect into the network via VPN 3002 routers and continue working through a Hurricane. So instead of doing it seperately, we decided to do it together at my house, using his fatter Internet pipe with Roadrunner. So that was our mini call center.

Here’s a pic of when Drew rolled into town, about 2 weeks back.

All three of us, and Yuki.

I’ll be posting more pics later, probably the next update will be “all cats”.

Oddly cathartic, but the whole bathing suit thing kinda creeps me out:

http://www.ebaumsworld.com/flash/bubblegirl.html

Try: Grabbing the person, throwing them up, to the side, or down…

So, today is my Day of Weekend. It was supposed to be three days (Sun-Tue), but Sun was Yuki-Con, a gaming event that Ben and I set up at our house, yesterday I went to work on the 4th (I get double comp days for that… looks like my trip to Japan might be “free” soon :-) ), and today is my “day off”. Unfortunately, I’m still used to shooting awake at 6:00-8:00 or thereabouts. Today I got up at like 7:30 and didn’t go back to bed.

But it was great, I got so much stuff in, socializing, and it’s STILL only 12:40. On the other hand, though, it feels like 5:00 PM and I think I need a nap. *sigh*

A lot to get done today, so I’m going to get started. A lot of it is work I promised that has something or other to do with the internet, so it’s very ethereal and “seemingly unrealistic” work, but it’s work nonetheless and if I don’t get started I’ll be doomed.

That reminds me, this next weekend I’m finally putting up links on the left or right to other friend journals and links, so stick around!