Steve C.

This just in: I got promoted! Yay!

 The Jesusita fire continues to get worse -- see this map of the evacuation orders for instance.

Almost everyone I know in town is either evacuated or within blocks of the mandatory evac warnings (including the condo we still own). My thoughts go out to all of them. 

Packing continues. We've got most of the auxiliary areas of the house done, leaving just (a) master bedroom, (b) master bathroom, (c) kitchen, and (d) living room and sun room misc. The plan right now is to make progress on the living room, sun room, and master bathroom tonight, with the goal of having everything but the kitchen done by Saturday morning. I'm pretty confident of us making it, so that'll be nice.

The other task we need to do is finish measuring the new house and then graph each of the rooms and our furniture so we can figure out how to lay things out. I think we should get that done tonight, and I'm looking forward to figuring out how to lay out the TV room. 

.... Graphing your new house is normal, right? Something everyone does, obviously. We're not overly detail oriented. We're normal! Honest!

N.B. No word on whether I got the promotion I'm hoping for. The results are in theory back, but I have to wait for my manager to schedule my review meeting. I'm trying very hard to not get my hopes up. Quick, everyone tell me I'm a failure!

Moving status: Great Success!

We signed the lease on Sunday and have arranged for movers for this coming Saturday. That leaves us with only 5 days to pack the house. Weeee. Since we're just moving locally (and not even that far - about 2 miles), our current plan is to have the movers take all the furniture and whatever boxes we have packed on Saturday, and then move the remaining stuff (mostly the kitchen, we think) ourselves over the next week or so.

Today has been a busy day of doing all those moving tasks everyone loves: cancelling/starting/switching utilities, changing our addresses with every living person in the world, updating records, etc, etc. Tonight, I'm aiming to finish packing the yarn bedroom and make a dent on the guest bedroom. Then I aim to collapse with my book.

Pretty darn psyched about the new house - we measured it yesterday and I hadn't realized quite how big the various rooms were. Lots of closet space, etc. Next week this time I'll be much happier! 

Solution to all the world's problems: post on my blog.

It's not a done deal yet, but it looks remarkably like we'll have a new place rented by Monday. The landlord people (husband and wife) actually want to check our references, so I hope Rus and Mike don't say asshole things, but it's clear that they really want to rent to us. So go team!

Now we have to figure out packing and moving and ... ugh. I'll try not to let Jen vomit over moving again, but she already almost did in the car driving home (it was a close thing), so no promises.

Tonight, though: margaritta's, dollhouse, and probably a netflix movie as well. No thinking about moving. Hopefully.

A few things:

I'm terrible at blogs.

I'm anxiously awaiting the results of the off-cycle performance review that's going on right now. In theory, the promotion committee has already met and decided my fate, but I have to wait for the appeals and ratification committees to meet before I find out. Sometime late next week. My manager keeps saying really positive things, which is getting my hopes up. Weeee. :)

We're looking for a new place to rent in the south Bay (sunnyvale, santa clara, mountain view most likely). We've got a couple of places to look at, but it turns out we have a ton of "deal breaker" things -- like we must have comcast cable available; they've gotta accept pets; we need washer/dryer hookups in unit; 3 bedrooms and 2 baths minimum; etc. Still, hopefully we'll find something as our current landlord is batshit insane.

We bought tickets for the Jamaica trip in June - woot! Looking forward to snorkeling etc.

I wonder what the chance is that I won't post on this blog again for another 6 months? :P

My wife is forcing me to post this because she's too lazy to do it herself:

From cats

This is pirate sleeping under our covers, which she sunk into during the 3 minutes between when Jen got out of the bed and went to the bathroom to brush her teeth etc and when she came back.

Pirate was still there at lunch, but those pictures didn't turn out so well. You people will just have to take my word for it. Adorable kitten is adorable. :)

N.B. It is so nice to have a heater working again. The house isn't freezing at all times anymore, yay!

Oh my god. I got this working. Woot!

So right now, I'm on the CA152, where there appears to be some sort of accidents going on. At my wife's suggestion, I'm posting to my livejournal using my android. Unfortunately, this interface blows. Traffic sucks. More later.

Due to irc pressure, I think I'm going to choose one of the top 10 topics Dave listed here and post about it in the near future: exold.com/article/the-top-69-subjects-for-top-10-lists-that-i-came-up-with-the-other-day-in-the-bathroom-while-i-was-getting-ready-for-work

I challenge all my other friends to do the same. Hah!

I spent much of Saturday evening playing around in Warhammer Online's open beta. Pretty fun, overall. As I usually do these days, I got my wife to help me create a character to play with (she generally chooses things I wouldn't choose on my own, forcing me to explore areas of the game I might otherwise skip -- which I like). She choose a "lion tamer", melee dps + pet lion. Was pretty cool.

So today I'm discussing the game with her, since I can't play (beta is over, and I only have a standard edition pre order, so I have to wait until Tuesday to play again). She asked, innocently, whether I'd play the lion tamer again.

"Nah, I don't think so -- too many bugs with the pet and the pet AI."
"Oh - like what?"
"Oh, if you send the pet to attack first, sometimes the server and client get desync'd, so the client shows the monster in one spot, and the server thinks it's in another spot. Your client only lets you use abilities when you're near where the client thinks the monster is, and the server..."
"OH. MY. GOD. What is wrong with you video gamer people? Don't you have standards? How can you design a game like that? I'm pissed off and I haven't even looked at it. GOD. This is why I can't play video games! Who let's that bug go through? Have they never heard of testing and QA? OH MY GOD. I am so angry!"

She continued like this for the rest of the drive home. 

Morale of the story: video gamers have no standards and this angers my wife. So please get some standards, video gamers, for my wife's sake. Say no to bad games.

(War is still pretty good, though, her anger won't dissuade me from playing it...)

Jen and I are going to vegas in a few weeks with some of our internet friends (and to celebrate our 2nd wedding anniversary). Amanda posted about learning the rules for some of the games, so I thought I'd go over the two games that I have spent most of my time playing in Vegas.

Pai Gow 
This game is played against the house (not other players), is usually manually dealt by the dealer (so each hand takes longer), and has very simple rules. You put your bet in front of you (usually $10 or $20 on the strip, sometimes as cheap as $5 off strip). You get 7 cards. You arrange these into two hands -- a 2 card hand and a 5 card hand. The 5 card hand must be "better" than the 2 card hand -- so if you have 1 pair, it goes in the 5 card hand, and then you put the highest two cards left over in the 2 card hand.  The dealer does the same thing with their 7 cards, then the dealer's two hands are compared to each players two hands (2 card hand vs 2 card hand, 5 card hand vs 5 card hand). If you beat both of the dealers hands (your 2 cards are better than their 2 cards, your 5 cards are better than their 5 cards), you win -- your bet minus 5% house fee (so $10 gets you $9.50). If you win one hand, lose the other hand, you push -- keep your money, but don't win anything. If you lose both hands, you lose your money. Ties go to the dealer. 

Because each hand usually takes 5-10 minutes to go through, and because the way things work your most common result is to push, you can generally play a long time on relatively little money. The best part is that the house plays deterministically (they have a flow chart which tells them, based on any combination of 7 cards, what to do) so you can actually show your hand to the dealer and have them tell you what the house would do with that hand -- you can also show it to your friends and find out what they think you should do. So it's a great game to play while drinking, since you can have the rest of the table help you out when you're not up to deciding for yourself.

Craps
This is a dice game, and it's probably one you've seen people play on any tv show or movie which involves gambling. One person gets to roll the dice until they "bust". The game itself is best thought of in rounds. At the start of the round, the roller is "setting the point". They roll the dice once -- if it comes up 7 or 11, everyone wins (if they bet on "pass"). If it comes up 2, 3 or 12, everyone loses, the dice pass to the next person. If it was any other number, that number is "the point"; in that case, the dice roller continues rolling until either they roll a 7 (everyone loses, dice passes) or until they roll the same number that was the point (everyone wins).  There's two broad ways to bet: pass or no pass. Betting on the pass line means you think the roller will not bust out (roll a 2, 3, or 12 on the first roll, or a 7 on a later roll). Betting on the "no-pass line" means you are betting exactly opposite -- wherever a pass line bet wins, you lose and vice versa. Generally, betting no-pass is betting against everyone else at the table.

Anyway - you bet on the pass line and if you win, you get paid back 1 for 1. If a point is set (4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10) you can make a second bet ("pass odds"), which pays very close to the "true odds" that e.g. 4 will really be rolled before 7 -- these numbers are 2-to-1 for 4 or 10, 3-to-2 for 5 or 9 and 6-to-5 for 6 or 8.  To make tihngs work out money wise, you might bet $5 on the pass line, and then bet either $5, $10, or $5 on the pass odds depending on which of the three groupings the point is. You can also just bet $10 and ignore that figuring if you want -- but you want to make sure 2-to-1, 3-to-2 and 6-to-5 can be calculated without you losing money, or you're giving up odds.

Hrm. I think I did a terrible job of explaining craps, but it's fun and I enjoy it. Lots of table friendliness and fun.

My friend Mike pointed out that I'd be really slacking on my blog posts recently (always?) and that made me feel guilty enough to post. Exciting!

I've been playing a lot of Civilization 4 recently (the expansion pack "Beyond the Sword" is pretty damn good). The sad part is I bought that game from a store a long time ago, but now I can only find one of the two disks. So I had to rebuy it from Steam to play it -- but at least now I can't lose the disks! ... Instead, I can lose my steam password. Hrm. On the plus side, I installed it successfully on my laptop without any trouble, so I can now play Civ4 while sitting on the couch watching olympics with my wife.

Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course. *whistle*

Other exciting news, in new, easy-to-parse list format!

• I've now been at GOOG for almost 2 months and am starting to get the hang of things. I've become pretty comfortable with the "lite" version of the reviews we run and I did my first "full" review this week (which went pretty well, I'd say). A couple of the things I've reviewed have gone live, and I've caught a couple of problems pre-launch for some teams, so I'm really starting to feel pretty good about my role. Woot!
• I've met a fair number of people on the production side of the world of GOOG, but not that many of the software engineers. Instead, I'm mostly relying on friendships I made in college to meet people since it looks like 95% of Will Rice College is now working here. Who knew?
• My wife claims she's going to start working on a pair of socks for me soon. I wait with bated breath.
• I spent most of yesterday remembering how to write Lisp code. I wanted to automate the creation of an pretty, html-ized email from raw wiki content, and since I'm using emacs and I already had a set of functions to convert the same raw content into a pretty wiki table, I hacked it up and successfully reduced the tedium of creating the summary email. Woot!
• Wedding this weekend in Pasadena, then another wedding in 3 weeks in Santa Barbara.
  
• Babies are everywhere. I think there might be an epidemic. NOTE1: This refers to the MacKays. NOTE2: I had to add NOTE1 because I'm sure otherwise everyone will think my wife is pregnant. She's not. Seriously, people, you think I'd post about that on my blog before she told people? Really? REALLY?

That's all for now. I should add this to my daily schedule and try and make a habit of it. I know! I'll add a daily appointment to my calendar to update my blog. Good idea, Steve!

Long time, no speaky! So, faithful blog readers, what have I been up to? Actually, in these days of friend's pages and RSS readers, I suppose it doesn't require any real faith to continue to get updated when I post something new. Ah, for the halcyon days of yore, when a reader had to manually check each website they cared about. That was real dedication!

Anyway.

I'm now working for GOOG and learning lots of stuff, almost none of which I can share. Woo? We've successfully moved into our new domicile, a decent 4/2 house near 101 and Lawernce (for those who know the area). Unfortunately, the house is "special". Some examples:

• The flooring is directly on top of the concrete slab the house is built on.
• The above means that when the carpet ends (for a door, tile, or whatever) there isn't a sill of anysort. So the edge has tacks sticking up just barely through the carpet and it's quite possible to hurt yourself on them. Yay. I've been hammering them down when I think about it, but haven't gotten them all -- there's one in particular in my master bedroom (in the doorway to the bathroom) that I can only find between 2 am and 4 am while partially asleep.
• The "4th room" is really a sunroom they added on where there used to be an outdoor patio. It's pretty decent construction, has a bunch of big windows, and an AC unit. Sweet, right? Except:
• They didn't level the floor, and exterior patios are built to slope away from the house (so as not to collect water against the walls). So the floor slants.
• The doorway to the outside is flat. The floor slants down to it. Guess what? That means the door only opens about 30%. Yay!
• They didn't remove the sliding glass door, the window from the kitchen, or the gas and water pipes which are sticking out from the kitchen wall. Sweet.

We're learning to get used to it, but it's definitely an interesting set of construction choices. Tonight, even, our landlord is coming over with his handyman to fix our leaking toilet and sink. Woot?

Jen is getting used to her new office space, and is taking advantage of the weekly yoga class in that building, though she's still in the market for another yoga class (she likes to go twice a week). We've gotten enough unpacked that she's back to knitting socks at least some nights, which is calming to everyone (especially the cats).

Perhaps I'll remember to update again in the near future. Perhaps! Until then, wish us luck dealing with our house and new locations etc. :)

The person who made an offer on our condo was completely unwilling to negotiate, so we're back to having our condo on the market and hoping for an offer. We did decide to lower our asking price some, but I'm not really feeling that hopeful about our luck, since we don't have much room between our new listing price and the minimum we're willing to take.

Bleck.

A day late, but we finally got our good news: someone made an offer on our condo! woot!

Unfortunately, it's at about 90% of our asking price, so we're countering in the middle and we'll see how that turns out. There's a pretty good chance we won't be able to come to agreement and then Jen and I will be sad, but getting an offer is a first step.

So woot!

P.S. All you baby people are silly.

Yesterday had some potential good news, but unfortunately the good news didn't show up. It's still potential good news, but I'm not saying anything more until it actually happens.

I think jackshandy was going to run a poll on what the good news is, but it appears he's chickened out.

The Good News:

I can't tell you the good news yet. Maybe later! But trust me, it's really good news! Maybe. OR IS IT?!

The Bad News:

Two weeks ago, we took my car into the shop because it wouldn't start (had to get AAA to jump it). No problem, they replaced the battery and fixed some other misc problems the car had. I drove it home, parked it and assumed all was well.

Yesterday, I came up with a fantastic plan to go out and get some grillable items, invite my friend Mike (HappyBunny) over for some dinner, beer, and hanging out. Great idea, Steve! One problem: car won't start. Completely 100% dead. So this morning I get another jump, drive it out to the shop and drop it off. They called back an hour later and told me my alternator needs to be replaced, which will take until tomorrow (waiting on the part from LA) and cost $400. Not terrible, but sigh.

The Moving News:

Most of the prep is done for moving, except for packing our suitcases and stuff. My wife is supposed to update our to-do-list with other things we want to get done this week before the packers/movers come next Monday. I'm ready to be on my way, and expecting the next 2 weeks to be really nerve-racking/boring/anxious.

Tick tock tick tock tick tock. So ready to get going...

My wife has continued her practice of bringing me 2+ bottles of tasty bubbly water each day for the last few months. I haven't reciprocated with posts to my Livejournal, so I think I'm 50+ posts behind at this point.

On the plus side, we're going up to the Bay tomorrow through Monday to look for places to move to, hang out with some friends, and check out some houses to maybe buy if our condo sells. Also someone actually took a look at our condo today, so all in all, I'm having a good end-of-the-week.

Now if only tonight's raid goes well to cap it off! :)

My wife has unrealistic blogging expectations. This is the second bubbly water so far today, and it's not even lunch! Anyway...

The Time I Got Hit In The Head, #2: (note: if you are related to me, please do not read this story -- thanks!)

I'm not positive, but I think it was during my Junior year of High School that a bunch of my friends and I decided to go skinny-dipping after hours at a local beach. This was early Fall, I think (though it could have been spring and me a senior, for all I know) and it was still decently warm. In my defense, I have no idea who came up with this plan, or why we wanted to do this. My group of friends was mostly pretty awkward, and there weren't any intra-friend sex/hookups going on, so I'm not sure what the allure of being naked under water, but in the dark and away from each other, was going to be. But we went anyway.

The beach closed at 10 pm but was fairly close to a friend's house, being just over the edge of their suburb on the city side. We arrived there in 3 cars (there were 10 or 12 of us as I recall) around 10:30 pm. We put some towels down at the concrete restroom/beach house, and then various people headed in -- I think some people kept underwear on, and some didn't, but hell if I can recall at this point. Not really the point of the story. There was some splashing and joking, but mostly it was kind of awkward and stupid.

A few of the people were still up on the beach (and never came in, I don't think), and my friend Julius got out to talk to them about something. A couple of cars came into the parking lot around then, and headed towards the beach house. One of the people on shore was expecting some other friends to show up, so she ran out to wave at them -- only they kept coming right for her instead of parking. She got out of the way eventually, but it was kind of close. Julius yelled at them and then decided to moon them as the cars sped out of the parking lot. That'll show them!

Fast forward a little while, say 30 minutes, and we decide to get out and head home. Everyone retreats to the beach house, clothes are donned quickly, we grab stuff, and head for the cars. Teenage tomfoolery status? Nearly complete! Unfortunately, just as we're heading towards our cars, a couple of other cars enter the lot and park at the far end, past our cars. A bunch of guys get out and head towards us.

We get about halfway to my car when Julius suddenly says "Oh crap, forgot my towel!" and runs back to the beach house (a couple hundred feet or so). As we continue to our cars, the guys move past us in a gang towards the beach. I don't recognize any of them, and frankly they creep me out a bit. We get to my car about the same time the group of newcomers meet Julius, heading back to the car after picking up his towel.

They surround him and we can hear some loud discussion -- I can't recall if we heard what they said or not, it's all lost to the mists of time now. One of the other guys in my car stay outside our car, nervously, watching the crew about a hundred feet away around Julius. After a few minutes, they start shoving Julius and knock him down -- at which point my friend and I make what can only be described as wordless-battle-shouts (which succeeded in grabbing everyone's attention) and I ran over there (which also succeeded in grabbing everyone's attention).

I got Julius to his feet and then realized I was in the middle of a crowd of guys who seemed pretty angry. Good work, Steve! I started backing up towards my car, pushing Julius behind me, and trying to prevent anything else from happening. Que the crowd:

"What's the matter, asshole?"
"You trying to make something?"
"You want to go?"
"You think you're so tough?"
"What the fuck is wrong with you?"

As we back slowly towards my car, me trying my best to say soothing things (such as "no, no, I'm just helping my friend, we don't want any trouble"), I figure out that these guys are the same ones Julius mooned earlier. Well done, Julius!

Eventually, we reach the car, the gang of guys still surrounding me and still making threatening statements. I circle around, backwards, to the driver's side and say, "Julius, get in the car!". He does -- the driver's side. Then stares at me. "No, idiot, get into the passenger's seat". He slowly climbs into the passenger seat, over the gearshifter and other misc stuff in between the seats.

Unfortunately, while Julius is doing this, one of the guys is starting to get ansty, perhaps sensing that I'm about to get into the car and drive away. He pulls out a chain (one or two inch links) and starts waving it around and making more threatening noises. Finally, Julius gets out of my way, and as I get into the car, the guy with the chain whips it at my roof -- and my head. Both take a hit from the chain (smallish dent in my roof, smallish dent in my head).

I slam my door, throw my car into reverse, and get the fuck out of there as fast as I can -- one handed, since I have the other hand on my head, covering the dent. There's a lot of chatter ("what the fuck was that?") in my car as we drive away. I check my hand out while they're all coming down, and it's bloody from fingertip to elbow. Neat! Sadly, I suffered from fainting spells when I bleed, so I saw this blood and thought "well, shit, someone else has to drive".

So I put my hand back to my head and calmly announce that I would need to pull over, and someone else would need to drive. This conversation ensues:

"Why do you need someone else to drive?"
"I got hit in the head and it's bleeding pretty badly."
"Oh Steve, don't make shit up. No you didn't!"
"Uh, what's this then?" and showed the backseat my hand/arm covered in blood.

This was not the best decision I've ever made, as the resulting scream nearly caused me to hit a mailbox. I did stop the car, though, and laid across some laps in the rear while holding a towel to my head. Someone else took over driving and we made it back to my friend's house, where the cops were called and it was determined that my head wound was too small to even need stitches.

In the end, no one was even given a fine for the entire affair, as the cops distrusted us, since we'd been at the beach after hours and were clearly up to no good. I ended up with a small dent in my honda civic and a bumpy scar on my head.

The end.

Due to the pleas of various friends and wives (quoth Ian: "Do I have to FedEx you some bubbly water to get a new post or what?"), here's an update:

As 99% of probably already know, a few days ago I accepted a position as Launch Lead Engineer with Google in Mountain View, CA. I'll be staying on at my current job until mid-June and then my wife and I will be moving up to the Bay and I'll start my new job. (Since everyone asks: my wife is currently planning on staying with her present employer, presuming they can work something out for her to work remotely or out of a sales office up there).

This is really exciting and at the same time incredibly scary. New job, new people, new responsibilities, new technologies that I know nothing about. Lots of ways to screw things up! Weee! Nonetheless, I AM really excited. Just terribly worried too. :)

I now only owe my wife 15 posts due to bubbly waters from the last week or so. It's possible I shouldn't have decided on this plan....