Today I flew up to Redmond to meet with my peers at MicroSoft. The boarding pass, when I printed it out, said to be sure to arrive two hours early. Sooo… At great expense in terms of sleep, I got to the airport at 4:30 for my 6:30 flight. So did a lot of other people, all of whom were waiting for the check-in counter to open at 5:00. Once they finally opened, checking in and getting through the inspection took all of 15 minutes. Nobody was carrying on much, so the inspection was very fast.
There may be some times when getting to the airport two hours early is a good idea, but the first flight in the morning is certainly not it.
Once we got in the air, the flight was smooth and fast. I had a window seat, and got to admire the Cascade mountains on the way up. Seattle was warm and lovely. I’m sorry that I forgot my camera in the rush of outfitting my replacement briefcase.
My brother Charlie and his wife Donna came out to visit us in San Diego last week. It started out well, with the usual trips around the coast and mountains. We were trying to get a glimpse of the recent burn, but never did. Then, while Charlie and Donna took in Balboa Park and the zoo, I went and got the small moving truck I’d rented, and got ready to move some bare necessities up to the apartment. The trip was pleasant. We went through the mojave desert, over the Tehachapis, and then up the San Joaquin valley. Charlie saw stuff he’d never seen before, and all was good. We unloaded the truck, and I decided that an old man shouldn’t move stuff himself, even with the aid of his not quite so old brother, but we did get it unpacked and things are ready for me to move up next week. Thanks, Charlie.
Then we decided to go visit San Francisco, and the fun started. We were parked near fisherman’s wharf, and when we got back to the car after doing the tourist routine, the car was open, and somebody had stolen Donna’s purse and my briefcase. Donna and Charlie lost both their passports, both of their phones, all id, and the usual sort of purse stuff. I lost my brand new laptop, my Microsoft badge, my ipod, and some junk. We went to the police station to report it, which took a while, but was evidently enough to let Donna talk her way through airport checkin. I toted up what I had lost and it came out to about $20 more than my insurance deductible. 
Important lesson: Your trunk is not secure. According to the police there is a device available that will unlock essentially any remote-control car locks with no skill required.
I’m now officially a MicroSoft employee, having gone through their new employee orientation course. Interestingly, it took a little over two hours to do in Silicon Valley. Had I been in Redmond, I understand that it would have taken a day and a half. In my estimation it had about 15 minutes of useful content, which I could have gotten myself from written or online material. Oh well, at least they fed us lunch.
I’m excited. I had trouble sleeping Monday night, and went to bed early after I got home on Tuesday. Since then I’ve been studying pretty much non-stop. In my spare time, I want to get all of the information I collected when I was working on HPCS transferred to my professional page online. This means carefully filtering out the stuff that is proprietary or confidential, which takes a while. I’m glad that I have an industrial-strength shredder for the paper copies.
This last week we went up to the Bay Area, both to do a final debrief at Sun and to locate temporary quarters to ease our move. Surprisingly, we accomplished both earlier than we expected, and were able to come home on Thursday.
We found a nice three-bedroom apartment, and we expect to move some basic furnishings up over the next couple of weeks. That way I can stay there when I have to be in the Bay Area, and we can keep working on reducing our load down here. When we make the big move, we can live there while we hunt for permanent quarters. It’s also supposed to be an experiment, to see if we actually can stand to live in a condo.
I’m flying back up later today, and I have my “orientation” session at MicroSoft tomorrow. It should be interesting.
Meanwhile, I’m trying to use eBay to convert bulky items into nice portable cash. It’s the first time I’ve tried selling rather than buying, so we’ll see how it goes.
Talk about heat waves! We had lots of all time highs around here. In La Mesa, where we live, it was 113 today. Oh yeah, we’re having a monsoon, too, so the humidity was 58% instead our our usual 15-20% when we get hot.
Naturally, this put all time record stress on the power supplies, too, and transformers were cooking off all around the county. Ours hit about 11:45, with a couple of bounces as it went down, and came back up about 1:15. Unfortunately, not everything came back. One of our main breakers (we have two, one per sub-panel) was hot enough to burn fingers, and crumbled into pieces when I tried to reset it. Off to Home Depot, get a replacement, install it. Oops, that one works, but the other main breaker refuses to reset. Off to Home Depot, get a replacement, install it. Oops, that one works, but one of the air conditioners refuses to run. After poking around with a meter, I discover the blown fuse. Well, it takes two tries to find a replacement because there’s been a run on those fuses today. Finally, Oh joy unbounded, the AC is working again.
While I was out, I heard a report from one of the linemen who had been fixing electrical problems. “We start on the poles, but then things are blown all the way down to people’s houses, and even inside them. It takes a long time to get it all sorted out.” Maybe we should apply for a position as “poster child”.
Anyway, it all seems to be back together, and I’m convinced that the UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply) that I got for the computer was a wonderful investment.
Time to take a nice, cool, shower.
It’s all signed and sealed, and I’ve called most of my colleagues whom I wanted to inform personally.
I just accepted an offer from MicroSoft to work for them in the Bay Area. They are starting a new operation there with a focus on multi-threading compilers and tools, and it seems like it’s just made to order for me. I’m not mad at Sun or anything, but they don’t really seem to want what I want to do.
I’ll be moving up to the Bay Area over the next few months. It’s liable to take a while, though, because reducing our load to what we can put in a smaller house is sort of like a going out of business sale for Macy’s. It can’t really be done quickly.
I expect to maintain two households for a while until we get it all finished.
I’m excited by the prospects and ready to go. Until then, I have to do a lot of writing for Sun to get the stuff in my head onto paper for the next person who has to pick it up.
I haven’t had a lot of comments, but all of the ones I’ve had have been positive. The change is now official. ballfam.net is now the new website. There’s still a link to the old one if you want it. I’ll be getting to the help files as soon as I can. See the next post for why it might be a bit delayed.
I’ve got an all-new (except for the content) version of ballfam.net ready for it’s first outing. For the time being you can find it at http://www.ballfam.net/new. Try it out and see how you like it.
Family members should get a login id so you can post things to it. I’ve already created logins for some people because I know their usual passwords. I’ll send email to you individually about them. Anyone else can register for a login and password. I set it so that I’ll have to approve them, just to keep out idle strangers. I’ll certainly approve any family or close friends as soon as I can. It may take a few hours though, and in the mean time you can use the same login/password that you used on the old website. Please do get a personal login, though.
Anybody can:
- browse anything but family private data
- leave comments
Family members can, in addition
- Read private data
- Post or edit anything on the website
This is a test, and I’d like comments, praise, objections, suggestions, anything. If you find something confusing or ugly, let me know with email or comments, either here on on the website itself.Nothing is locked down at this point.
When and if people like it I’ll change over. At that point, I’ll write short “how-to” instructions on posting, uploading pictures, using the forums, and anything else somebody wants to know about.
This post is in a new category (Web Administration) aimed entirely At family who are interested in the ballfam.net domain. Anyone else reading this can just skip it.
I’ve been trying to install a new system to let anyone in the family post to the website, and in particular to post pictures. The system I decided to use, Gallery2, turned out to be much harder to install and integrate with the blogs than I expected. Worse, there appears to be no user manual. Searching the web has indicated that others have had similar problems, and I find comments like “It makes me want to cry”. I think I made a bad choice. I’m going to look for an alternative method of incorporating pictures in blogs and the website. The way I’ve been doing it is just too painful, especially when done remotely.
This is why the recent post on Columbus was so late, I was hoping to use Gallery2. I didn’t, I just did it the old way.
I’m also working on installing a forum system, and in fact got one installed. Then I discovered a more inclusive system that gives us more general capabilities, and I’m getting ready to install that. I just got sidetracked by the whole Gallery2 mess.
My goals for this are:
- Ballfam.net content that can be posted to by any family member
- A photo gallery that lets any family member post photos to ballfam.net
- A discussion forum (Bulletin Board) as part of ballfam.net
- Blogs for those who want them, with pictures fully integrated
- Access control, so that family members can post and read everything, others can read whatever we allow
- Simple instructions for doing all of these wonderful things
- Simple admin (for me)
I’ll keep you posted as things actually get done.
 On Sunday, Flo and I took a trip by ourselves down to Southern Indiana and visited a town named Columbus. I never expected what I found. This small town has, over the years, built up the most wonderful collection of architecture that I’ve seen. It seems that whenever they wanted to build a public building they went out and got one of the best architects in the world to build it. This inspired private companies, too, so a lot of the commercial buildings are equally wonderful. Kathy had suggested that we stop by, then go on to a state park. Instead, we got caught and used all of our time looking around Columbus. We only saw part of what they had to offer, and even then I missed getting parts of it on film because my camera ran out of power.
I think I’d like to spend a day or two there some time, and take enough time to see it all. There’s a wonderful park by the river, too, that shows signs of the same sort of care.
I am impressed by this town. It takes an extraordinary level of civic spirit and focus to create something like this. Some of the towns I’ve known in California would still be arguing about the buildings these people finished in 1967!
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