netmeter is a fantastic windows bandwidth monitoring tool. i have been using it for years now. but just the other day it stopped working. i thought that at first it was because i installed vmware and the virtual network interfaces were giving it some problems, but it turns out that it was actually the network interface that the bluetooth drivers i installed for my USB bluetooth receiver as well as the virtual network interfaces made by vmware.

i disabled all of the other interfaces and i’m able to see bandwidth stats again.

after hearing about the company shutting down, it put a hold on a lot of purchases that i have been considering for a long time now. these are purchases that i probably would have made if the company wasn’t going to shut down, but now that i’ve secured a new job, have a severance package, and am set, it’s time to splurge just a little.

projector
the first thing that has been on my mind for a long time has been a projector. yes, a projector, a screen, and all of the joy that comes with it will be fantastic, but the big question is how big should i go? ah, that question has been tormenting for me a long time now. originally, i was thinking about going the 720p route. the projectors are all pretty inexpensively priced and it just seems like a fantastic idea. after thinking long and hard about it, i think that this is going to be one of the first times that i splurge and get something outside of the normal value purchases that i usually make. i’m gonna go big with a 1080p projector.

originally, i wanted something like a 100″+ screen, but i have decided that for the distance that i am working with, that’s probably bigger than i can really handle. i’ve narrowed it down to an 84″ screen. still big, but not a monstrosity.

iphone
yeah, i think i’m going to take the plunge and get the new iphone. it sounds like christi can get a pretty decent discount on it, so as soon as it is available, i’m going to take the plunge. some friends of mine just got it and they had to wait in line for 3 hours at the valley fair apple location. people are STILL waiting that long to get their iphone?? nuts. i’m going to wait a few more weeks.

adam has told me that he’s looking into developing for the iphone. it seems like that’s a hot place to be right now for a niche market, but you need a mac to develop for the iphone and i just don’t have me one of those!

i wasn’t planning on going into the office today. i woke up this morning and felt that i had the start of a dreadful cold that may last the rest of this week and would have to use the remaining sick days i have, but there was some work that i was asked to do when i checked my blackberry so i ended up going into the office.

there is no one else from the company in the office. this is great news because that means that i have half of the entire building all to myself. this, by itself, is no big deal. what is a big deal is that that means that i also have the office’s internet connection all to myself.

this comes in good time because i needed to download the latest CentOS and VMWare server products and i couldn’t think of a better way to download it than at the office. it’s far faster here than at home. the office only has 2 T1’s, so i’m sure that people with fiber or cable are scoffing at the speed increase that i appreciate, but i’m on a slow DSL line at home, so anything that i can take, i will.

so here i am purring away at close to 400kB/s. looks like it’s still going to be a couple of hours before centos is done downloading. i guess i’ll go to lunch.

i’ve been interviewing now for the past three weeks. it’s been an interesting process. my first interview was a complete wreck. i thought for sure that i had tanked it. it turned out though that the interview process continued forward. it has been years since i last interviewed and i didn’t think that i would get nervous at an interview anymore, but it turned out that there were still some jitters.

after the first interview, though, i got back into the swing of things. i interviewed at a couple of other companies and it was an interesting process. at some companies, i feel like i had to really convince them hard that they wanted me. at others, i felt like the interviews were interrogations. at one company, i felt like i was being wooed. ah, to be wooed.

i ended up taking a job at a company that is farther than i really wanted to ever work. a lot farther. the commute is going to be awful, but i think that the opportunity is grand. so i’m pretty excited about the whole company and i think that it’s going to be a lot of fun. what isn’t fun is that they want me to start immediately. blah.

blah, i say. blah.

this job hunt wasn’t nearly as painful as i had initially feared that it would be when i first heard that the company was going under. sure there were some nervous times at interviews, but all in all, i’m pretty happy with how things turned out. i think that i will be able to find the passion in work again. it has been waning for a while and i think that i had been going to work out of obligation instead of out of desire.

here’s to better things!

it’s towards the end of the month and with that fast approaches the closing of the doors of my company. there’s a lot of last minute stuff that needs to be done to close things gracefully and so that has actually caused me to work some longer hours on friday.

it’s sort of a strange thing because i think that the mood of the company is one where finding motivation to get things done is difficult because we’re all out of a job anyway and we’re being evicted from the company that we all put so much of our lives into building up. so last week when i found myself working past 6pm on a friday, it was tough to really see why i was working so hard.

i think a part of me feels a certain sense of obligation to the products and the people who are all in the same boat as me. we’ve been working there for 3+ years just to see that the company decided to shut down operations. i do want to make sure that the products are put in a place where they can finally be sunsetted gracefully and i don’t want to just stop doing anything and put the people who are left with the task of closing up shop high and dry. so it’s been a tough mix of caring about the people/not caring about the company that i’ve been struggling with.

but i think it was at 6:30PM on a friday where i finally reached the turning point. the products are stable, things look like they are working fine, i’m done. the rest of my time at the company is going to be spent making sure that things will be left running smoothly and training others to keep things running smoothly. the company is going to keep the servers running for a while long after all of us leave so we’re just trying to get things ready to be left on autopilot.

i feel pretty good about what i’m done at this company and i feel pretty good about where the products all are now. i feel like i’ve really done my duty in terms of what needed to get done to sunset the products and the hard work is done. these next two weeks, with the babysitting of servers and training of people should go by pretty quick and then it is off to new challenges.

well, it’s been about two weeks now since word that the company is closing its doors and the job hunt has been going. right now, i think it boils down to two companies. one is REALLY close. one is REALLY far. decisions, decisions.

i’m hoping to get this job stuff resolved soon so that i don’t have to worry about it during my last days at my current job. speaking of which, i have some work to do at my current company. it looks like a good chunk of work and i’ve been trying to figure out what to do about it.

christi and i have been talking about what it would take so that she can just stop working. it turns out, oddly enough, that i need to double my income. =P go figure, huh? so it doesn’t look like i will really be increasing my salary by double so i guess she’s gonna still have to work.

i’ve been using mac os x for a while now and i’ve decided to make the switch back to windows. it was a harder than expected move to switch back. i love the UI of the mac. from the unified menus to the wonderful effort app developers make into making their applications easy to use, i have to say that it has been a joy to use.

so why the switch?

Continue reading making the switch back to windows →

so it’s been over a week since i last blogged. a LOT has been going on here. it appears that it is no secret now that the company website is officially announcing it, so i think that i can talk about it freely now.

the company that i am currently employed at is officially closing its doors at the end of the month. this comes as a bit of a surprise to some of us, not quite so much to others. i think that i have a foot in each of those buckets.

so my days have been spent looking for employment elsewhere. it’s been one of those difficult job searches because i put very heavy restrictions on just how far i would work. i would actually love it if i could work at a job in the same city in which i live. that was my original criteria. and so i started the job hunt like that.

there looks like there are some interesting opportunities farther away from where i live and so it is now a matter of trying to figure out how big of an offer i can get and what makes the most sense. the longest commute that i could potentially look at is somewhere around an hour long. a little crazy if you ask me.

my very first interview was nuts. i thought for sure that i tank’d it. it’s crazy because i feel that i’m actually pretty strong at interviews, but this was just awful. awful, i tell you. i left that interview feeling very small.

it turned out though that they called me in for a second and third interview, so i guess i didn’t do quite as poorly as i had thought.

so anyway, that’s what i’ve been up to, interviewing and doing some soul searching trying to figure out what i want to do and how i can go about doing it.

anybody hiring for a donut QA position?

we are having some weird weather here in california. first it was blazing hot and now it’s been cooling down. yesterday it was so hot in the office that i had to turn on my desk fan and have it cool me off. this morning, i wore a jacket into the office. it’s getting warm in the office again, though, so i guess there must be something wrong with the airconditioning here. actually, what i saw was the air conditioning set to hold at 80 degrees for the office. that’s ridiculous.

oh well, i guess i’ll have to just make more use of my fan. it’s a little loud though, i think that i need to find a fan that is whisper quiet. this fan was bequeathed to me by a former co-worker who had left the company.

while tracking the package of a purchase that i had made recently, i saw that the latest event in the tracking log of my package was described as NATURAL DISASTER.

i’ve never seen that before, but i’m a little concerned about what that means. does that mean that my package was involved in a natural disaster? does that mean that it is delayed because of a natural disaster? there are many fires here in california raging, so i can see how those fires might delay shipment of a package.

it would, however, be a different story if my package were to say have fallen out of the UPS plane and into a natural disaster.