I suck at this.

Has it really been more than a year since a meaningful post was done? I should probably give up and just turn this into my political whining :/

So… rereading my own posts… you all know I was married… that’s good. So what has the last year brought? Sadly, I don’t think this needs to be a long post. That isn’t to say I’ve had a bad or boring year, it has actually been quite wonderful.

First of all… I finally bought a house!!! If you don’t remember my saga have a look over here for a laugh… or cry. With my move to Hatteras Networks, my buying power increased a bit and Theresa decided it was time to look again. I wasn’t really in the mood so I let her pilot the process for a bit. We found a couple of town homes that were the right price and features (both were foreclosures if I remember right) but we weren’t able to get either. I was actually surprised with the second because we offered what the bank was asking for the home and accepted the “as-is” status. After we lost the second house, I fell back into the don’t care attitude but had more or less settle on the idea that I no longer wanted a town home and I didn’t want to move far outside of the town we already lived in. With that in mind (and the prices I was agreeing to for the town homes) Theresa went to task (with purpose I might add) and found two potential homes in a community not more than 2 miles from the apartment. We immediately fell in love with the first. The home was 8 years old but was immaculately maintained. Everything seemed to be in good condition and while the price was a bit high it really seemed like a place we could call home. The second house, which was bigger than the first and a better price per sq.ft., was a shit hole. It was a rented house, and the current tenants couldn’t even be bothered to go outside on a beautiful spring day long enough for us to tour the house. The carpets and doors were in abysmal condition and I don’t think we could trust the tenants to be nice to the house when moving out (I got the impression the house was being sold “out from under” them). After looking at the second house, it actually only took us about 10 minutes to decide that we wanted to make an offer on the first. We didn’t tell the Realtor that, we wanted to make sure we thought about it a little bit, but we were actually pretty set on it right away.

Offering on and negotiating on the house was a bit of a pain. The house was initially priced well over market value and at first the seller didn’t seem to think that was a problem. Indeed, we were offering on the house in less than 30 days of being on the market so he may have thought there was really high demand (although, that probably had more to do with their realtor), but it was hard to get them to budge. The process was pretty involved, but the one thing that stands out is how truly horrible the seller’s realtor was. Seriously, she nearly torpedoed the deal all on her own.. twice. The first time was when we were doing the inspection. We scheduled the inspection with full permission of the seller and then the night before the inspection we were told it would have to be moved because of work in the kitchen. Then, during the inspection, we found water near the dishwasher after testing it. I can’t think of any reasonable person who wouldn’t want to know what work was done in the kitchen after finding water in the middle of it. The realtor actually told us it wasn’t any of our business and not to worry about it. O RLY? I did get a little too angry at that, but fortunately my realtor was able to keep things together. The second time, was because we asked for a sit down meeting with the actual seller. Because of various odd communications and difficulties in negotiations, Theresa and I thought it would be easier to work out a few last issues face to face than with two realtors as intermediaries. Their realtor told us a meeting was unnecessary and that we had no business talking directly with her clients… O RLY? It also turns out that their realtor never presented them our request to meet and even refused their request to meet us! Really… thinking back… its amazing how much my temper has calmed in the last 4 or 5 years because in college I would have gone absolutely nuts on this lady.

We didn’t actually move into the house for a month or so after closing. The house was actually bought at the end of April, but the seller wasn’t ready to move because of how fast I needed to close (I liked my mortgage broker, but the industry is kinda shitty). I was actually a landlord for 30 days! The sellers turned out to be great people and its a shame their realtor was such a piece of crap. Because of her, I got the impression that the seller was going to try to screw me out of anything that wasn’t in writing so I was pretty much the asshole buyer that put every last thing in writing and demanded the letter of every clause in the buyers and renters contracts be followed. Things could and should have gone much easier.

The other big change for me in the spring was Hatteras Networks merging with Overture Networks. There has been some interesting fallout as a result of this merger, but nothing I’d like to put on the open internet. Unfortunately, I don’t have as much confidence in Overture as I did in Hatteras, but we have a lot of headroom for things to change and I’m being as open minded as possible.

Much of the summer was based around me and Theresa trying to get the house situated (and furnished). Not many of you own homes yet, but you’ll find out one day just how annoying $200 is. I swear, every weekend I was spending $200 on something for the house. Lawn mower (by the way, if you own a house… you need one), area rug, curtains, garage door opener… the list is actually pretty long. We did have a couple of amazing respites last summer. First, we had family and friends (thanks for coming!) down for a 4th of July party and house warming. We have some fun stories out of that one. Second, we took a weekend vacation to New Orleans since Theresa had to fly down for an ALA conference (btw, I recommend New Orleans for only a short vacation… the novelty wears off pretty damn fast).

Yet again, we did go to QuakeCon and this one was one of the most fun we’ve had. I think that is largely due to the fact that we didn’t do setup or tear down and managed to spent a lot more time away from the actual convention (last years convention was far more corporate due to Bethesda’s acquisition of id and a lot more generic than former cons). After 2010’s debacle with file sharing, we had pretty low expectations, so last years ended up pretty damn good by comparison. Despite that, some of us are considering ending our QCon trips on that high note and instead putting our efforts into a more traditional vacation; perhaps renting a beach house for a week. Probably more on that in a post to come (if I ever get around to it… I have other draft posts that will probably never be published).

That brings us into the fall which was very slow and sad for Theresa and myself. I did have a bit of good news… I bought a new Xterra PRO-4X (I’ll try to link pictures later) and took it off-roading with Tim (not my best decision). Sadly my fun was marred by other events. Theresa’s mother, after 19 years of various battles with cancer and a final 3 year fight that no one could win, passed in early December. I’m happy she’s not in pain any more and so very thankful for the same, but am deeply saddened that the world has lost such a kind and generous woman and that I won’t get to know her as Theresa did. We will move on and I hope honor her life in a way fitting to the person she was, which can only be an improvement over the person I’ve been so far.

Wikipedia is ruining knowledge (kinda)

For those of you who don’t read xkcd, this is now in my top 5 favorites (I may have to post up the others sometime).

Looking for help

I have a friend who is on a very tight budget but his wife is having some serious eye problems. If anyone out there knows an ophthalmologist who they can ask for casual advice (or better an ophthalmologist who has a free clinic in the WI area) please share.

Symptoms: Blue sclera and Hazed vision both with varying degrees of severity.
Preexisting conditions: Type I Diabetes; legal/partial blindness in 1 eye; bipolar disease (the meds play with blood sugar).
Eliminated conditions (via ER, optometrist): brittle bone, Ehler’s Danlos syndrome, pseudoxanthoma elasticum, Marfan’s syndrome, excess silver (silver nitrate)

The prevailing theory seems to be diabetic retinopathy but my friend is on a waiting list that seems to be about 2 months out. If anyone can help, that would be very helpful.

Drive by posting!

Bravo!

Original Article Here – “The Ultimate Anti-Bullying PSA: Kid Fights Back With Devastating Body Slam”

Derelict…

I wonder if it is my lack of readership that has caused me to fall off into the abyss of most blogs out there.

Anyway… life has certainly been moving on without my posting… but here is a “quick” recap of things since last August.

• QuakeCon: Best and worst con ever. Best in the sense that I managed to get along with everyone for once and really enjoyed the entire time I was in Dallas. Worst in the sense that virtually everyone at the event cried the entire time that file sharing was blocked. Being a long term volunteer for the event, I don’t want to comment on the decision, but the community reacted very badly and not seldom in poor taste. The entire event was kids whining about DC++ (they even managed to get the headline comedy show to join in with a few chants) and trying to be clever about getting around the NOC – here’s a hint: don’t use DC++ – while all the older and tenured alumni bitched that no one was playing games. Add on top of that one of the main internet pipes went down and separately the traffic shaper died seemingly taking DHCP with it… it was just a very whinny event. Of course the volunteer staff then reacted incredibly poorly to some things compounding the problem to the point of a near revolt. I think I had more fun watching the whiners than anything, but we did get some good games of QL going.
• New Job: I find it very hard to criticize my old job at Cisco. I very much enjoyed my work and loved the people I worked with (and for). It is also hard to say I wasn’t valued enough as an individual considering I made more by myself than the “average American family” (although, I question where that statistic comes from). However, after about a year, I started noticing most of the people hired around the same time I was were getting promoted to the next engineering grade (which typically did come with more money). I started wondering why I (and one of my co-workers) was left off the list. All of my reviews had been extremely positive and the quality of my work was virtually never questioned. I had initiated several projects to improve our code base on my own and even learned the OpenSSL API at home to aide in the redesign of a subsystem that was 10 years old and was the worst case of jamming a square peg in a round hole I’ve seen. Still… my manager was suggesting a promotion for me was possibly a year away. I had a number of conversations with my management about my status, but one all-hands meeting really kicked me over the edge. Over the last year of my time at Cisco, the company had been recovering from the recession and promotions and raises had been forthcoming, but not so much in my business unit. It was actually to the point that many engineers were pissed. So, during the Q&A I asked my SVP, “You said that you’re proud that it is so difficult to advance in our BU, do you think that you might be driving away quality engineers with that mentality?” I don’t remember his exact answer, but it was short and was basically, “No I’m not worried. If they want to leave they can leave.” So, with that I opened up conversations with a head hunter who had contacted me a week before. Not to make the rest of this too long, I did end up moving to a new company, Hatteras Networks and am much happier for it. I’ve been working longer hours, but I feel like I matter to the company and that my work and ability is valued… Looking back… Cisco didn’t have to pay me any more money to keep me… just recognize the work that I had done and was continuing to do. Yes that meant a promotion to a new grade (since that is how Cisco values their employees) but I really don’t think that was too much to ask since nearly everyone I knew hired around the same time as me had been promoted nearly a year before.
• Marriage!: Anyone reading this was probably at my wedding so I don’t think I need to rehash of all of that. I will say that everything went great and I would definitely do it again if given the choice (with the same person of course). Even my dad managed to remain civil (for the wedding, the rehearsal almost blew up…). Thank you to all of those that came and to those that sent their well wishes. Having you all celebrate with Theresa and I was great.
• Honeymoon: This was only good because we wanted it to be (it was our honeymoon dammit!). I would not recommend anyone stay on the islands in the Bahamas for any length of time. The resort we stayed at was supposed to be luxury, but was not. To give you an idea, we had a king size bed with 2 queen size sheets. Outside the resort, I couldn’t walk 100ft. without someone trying to give me a deal on something I didn’t want or try to give me a bullshit story about something I didn’t care about in the first place and then demand a tip. On our first day into Nassau, we walked through a straw market and ended up on a wharf. While we were walking, a guy walks up to me holding a necklace, I told him I didn’t want it but he insisted it was free. I ceased my opposition since it didn’t seem to be worth the fight so he proceeded to put one on Theresa too. He then demanded a tip… I pulled out $5 and handed it to him and he had the audacity to say, “And 5 for the lady.” I reached my limit pretty quick with that and told him if it was a tip that was all he was getting. While we were there we also couldn’t help but notice that everything was over priced by at least 100%. We stopped at the HardRock Cafe for lunch one day and my burger cost $14. It helps that there is no sales tax, but really? Complaints aside, Theresa and I made the best of the time we had and did enjoy ourselves. The weather was decent so we were outside a lot. The food at the resort was decent for being an all-inclusive place. They even had 2 sit downs that we managed to get reservations at. On our last night there, it even turned out the resort was overbooked so they asked for volunteers to go to the Sheraton for the night… which we gladly did. 🙂
• Thanksgiving: Nothing remarkable this year… which after last year is a blessing. Because of our wedding, Theresa and I couldn’t go up to Ohio this year so we invited everyone down with us. Unfortunately, no one came so it was us and the dog… but I’ll take what I can get. It was pretty good anyway.
• Christmas: This was also remarkably drama free this year. I’ve no idea how that happened. The only part that sucked was the fact that I was driving somewhere every day and it got old pretty quick. Theresa and I have decided that holidays are going to be on our schedules from now on… in NC if necessary to get people to understand just how much of an onus they put on us. Sorry to my friends if we end up staying down here next year 🙁 Family is really a pain sometimes.

There aren’t any other huge things that have gone on, at least not in comparison to a wedding. I did finally upgrade my desk at home to something more mature than a desk I used when I was 6. I might get more pictures later… for now:

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