well, today I was reminded of the US-First (usfirst.org) competition I was a member of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_Power

Week has still been a bit tough, but next week will be the real trial. I have been focusing on work, so that has helped.

Last week and this week I have been in Foster City CA helping again with out Digital division. This week I am making more progress on backups. I still need to get NDMP sold, but will tackle that one next week. The last trouble spot is the netapp backups. I have been integrating a DL4200 VTL in to their environment, and it has been interesting.

Yesterday my friend Lisa sent me a text to checkup on me. That made me quite happy that they are still thinking of me. It sucks that I have not been able to see them.

Ok, that is enough random thoughts for one day.

Well, my week long vacation is coming to an end soon. In four short days, I am flying back out to California for 2 weeks. I am looking forward to the work, but I am going to miss home. I am flying my cousin out over the weekend, and I am glad she decided to come out, it will be a blast playing tourist for 2 days.

Yesterday was a nice day. I got my backyard leaves taken care of, but I hope that I get another run at it before it snows. I still need to do a final mowing of the back yard. Yesterday evening my father came over to avoid all of the Halloween kids. It was nice having him over, we ended up watching a crappy remake of the shining.

Today I did the annual car detailing taken care of, and that was my main off-work accomplishment. This afternoon I went to meet up with what I think is a new friend I first met on Saturday. Me and her seem to have quite a bit in common, so I am looking forward to getting to know her better. It was amazing how much in common we have, everything from geek things, to movies and tv shows, to life experiences (or in some cases lack of experiences) to god knows what. What a day.

Well, 2 days in to my vacation and I am enjoying it.  I read an e-mail from my boss, and it looks like I will not have a crapload of PDO to worry about loosing this year, which is nice. Yesterday and today I did yard work, which has been nice because the weather has been in the 60’s.  I will need to continue tomorrow, at which time it will be cooler but that will be ok.

About a month ago I signed up for the pre-screened flyclear airport “express lane” and for the last 2 times I have gone to SFO, I had forgotten to bring my passport. Dug it out today, and with luck I will not forget it.

Not much else going on today, just trying to find a good horror movie to watch.

36 hours and counting - no calls, pages or e-mails from work. I think I am on a streak here.

Man, it is hard for me to think that October has some and gone so fast.  The fall leaves are falling (and in my back yard, the warm late summer has gone to somewhat chilly early fall, and in days Halloween will have come and gone.

I am still spending much of my time in California, and the  time I have been in Minnesota I have tried to keep the house keeped up, relaxing and spending time with my Cosin, which has been very enjoyable.

So far in the past month or two we have gone up north to hang up with one of my cousins close friends, and have gone to a fun pre-Halloween party. It is great being like, social and stuff!

At work I have still been dedicated to my project in San Mateo, CA and have been traveling quite often to CA. I am enjoying the work quite a bit because its a change of pace for me, but the travel also gets tiring real fast.

As I mentioned, yesterday I went to a bar party with my cousin  and one of her friends. I am not normally a bar person, but I do need to admit it was fun. I attempted to dance, which was very embarrassing and my cousins friend was a very nice person, and I enjoyed hangin out with her.

This week I am taking off of work to get the house in order for winter, and take care of some things that have just gone to the way-side.  I am looking forward to taking it easy for a week, and then its back out to CA next week.

I spent last week at home, and it is amazing how busy the week gets when I spend half my time away from home.  All of the little things like mowing the lawn just build up. Kirsten stayed over these last two weekends again, and I am finding my time with her very, very special.  She is such a nice person and we just “click”. It is like the relative I have not had. I miss her when I am out of town, not something I am use to.  It is nice to have such special relatives, who cares for me, and I care for her.

The previous weekend we had gone on a shopping trip to Ikea to get a bed frame, and then off to Sams Club to get a mattress, so I now have a real guest bed. I had gone to her church, and hung out with her after church normal thing, which was a bit of a change for me.

Last week at work was also busy with just playing catchup.  I had done some miscellaneous work on my CA project, but nothing substantial. A good chunk of work as also  just getting back in the loop on some of the normal Minnesota work I had done.

Last weekend we had gone shopping at the MOA for a bit, and for some reason I can not remember what else we did. Silly me. All I remember is going to target, but I am sure after some time my memory will come back :-)

This week I am back in CA, and already looking forward to doing home. the folks out here moved to some new office space, and it is quite nice.  I do have some decent projects coming up over the next day or two, which will show some progress at work for this week.

Ok, lets fire this blog up again. I am going to shoot for weekly posts, but we will see how that goes.
Well, first off, I have enjoyed my summer a bit too much, and fallen off the wagon with my weight lost :-(

about 1/3 of my hard work is now gone. My hope is with the correct help and motivation over the winter, I can fix that.

Quite a bit of my summer has been just thinking of the past, and work. I had a very large project at work which was on my mind for most of the spring/summer, which was the design, costing, buildout and now support of an e-commerce environment utilizing solars 10, and solars zones. This has help save our costumer at work some money, as well as hopefully long term, save some manhours on our side.

Right as that project was coming to an end, I started being involved in another project that will go well in to the winter. A business unit in our company has been struggling quite a bit for man power as well as experience, and I was volunteered to help them out. For me this is both good and bad, I am going to California every other week, but it is allowing me to become involved with more of our company. I am learning quite a bit, and I am feeling very useful which is very, very nice. The travel is a bit much, as I am going out to California every other week, but I hope I am providing the help the folks in CA need.

Now on to the outside-work stuff. This summer In spent many weekends in my house, going to <a href=http://www.al-anon-alateen-msp.org/>meetings</a>, doing house work, or relaxing. I have finished 2.5 major projects this summer. The first was to fix my livingroom. I had a mirror wall, which was so seventies. I got rid of the evil wall, and painted the sucker, so it looks a bit better.
The second project was my stupid plumbing, which was a bit more than I was expecting, I had galvanized steel pipes throughout my house which started to rust from the inside out. Some started to drip, and most had started to close up, affecting water pressure. This spring I replaced most of the steel pipes with copper pipes. I am quite proud of myself that I managed to replace most of the plumbing without burning the house down, and I now have water pressure in the bathroom again.
Third is my patio. The patio in my back yard. The patio was built over a tree stump that had been rotting away for a good 20 years, and this cause the sucker to start to sink. This spring I pulled up the patio, this summer I had gotten rid of the stump, and with luck, this fall I will get the patio back down again. We will see if that happens :-)

This summer I continue to struggle with friendships, but on the positive side, I have re-discovered family. It was very, very hard on my loosing my sister to an internship in IL 3 years ago. The only person I had felt real close too had left, and I was all alone in this world, it seemed. This was very hard on me, and I still somewhat can not figure out to do with my sis gone. This summer I started hanging out with one of my cousins a bit more, and have truly enjoyed (and continue to enjoy) her company. She can not replace my sister, but right now it seems like someone I can trust more than some of my previous “friends”

Well, that about sums up my summer in a nutshell, with luck I will update this more than once every 3 months, if for no one else, for myself to reflect someday.

Well, I ran across a new one. This is one of the more intresting http error pages I have seen.

IMDb: Kaboom!

Something went wrong.

Oh dear. Something broke. On the bright side it might just be temporary, but on the other hand it could be a bug.

Please try again…

But if the problem persists, please report it to server-errors@imdb.com.

Below are some data that may be of use to us to debug this problem. Please copy and send this, explaining which page you were at and where you clicked:

Date: Tue Jan 30 17:40:06 2007
Host: www.imdb.com
Server: imdb-online-6008.iad6.amazon.com
Status: 500
Client: 216.250.183.161
Cookie: uu=vZVDEahpCUBLEPkIUjLAIgaZWjlwaWxPIzp4OXN4eIrjOfpKEorJKkDri\
        apD4nlp0yoY8gYf8pkAPjy/5p51SdafnOuQzwyP1EwPCdBNjtnUrc1J9D9PP\
        YS1zt8TCkqZw+po8mM4WNpjejjaU8n4ylN4OSpjeikaYMn4mmBJWjlwT1x5N\
        klaOXP4bF1mKklKAzrZavZaGW1XP8xfRon2XiAubG1oKVo5e2PCOfgxuq0gW\
        c5iIElaOXBpWgkwORoJc=
Browser: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.9) Gecko/20061206 Firefox/1.5.0.9
Request: GET /title/tt0084503/ HTTP/1.1
Instance: 2007-01-30
Referrer: http://www.google.com/search?q=the+wall&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official

Thank you!

Yesterday afternoon I went to a holiday outing with work, at a bowling alley, and it was fun. I did not get much bowling done, but I did hang out for a bit, and watched others bowl.

Yesterday evening was kind of laid back, I got some xmas shopping done, and got some things wrapped before heading off to bed.
Today I went back to work, after having my surgery, and it was a bit different without my friend being there any longer, just was not the same. I spent the day working on a upgrade proposal, and trying to figure out how to do some SAN stuff. Overall not very exciting.

This evening I went to a going away party for someone I worked with at a prevous job. It was fun seeing people I had not seen in years it seems. Half of the people did not even recoginze me.

Well I am on day 3 of recovering, and it is going very good. Saturday sucked, Sunday evening I was able to move around a bit, and today I was able to get out of the house a bit.

Sunday I watched some movies (LOTR two towers) and the vikings game, and today I got a bit of shopping done, got my car cleaned, and watched the 3rd LOTR movie.

Tomorrow I better get out of the house, or else I am going to go insane!