Leaving Florida is hard to do

Leaving my Mom's house is always a hard experience for me. I usually only see Mom & George once a year but at least I can talk to them. They also understand what is going on. They won't be suddenly surprised when they come out the next morning and we are gone (we leave very early when we depart here). The dogs on the other hand, will wonder where the people who have been petting them all week have gone. Brew, Mack, Spencer, Ebbie and Baily will wonder why their old friends have come and gone again. Star, and Kai will wonder where these friendly new people have gone. I will wonder which dogs I have just seen for the last time.

In the past few years, Bernie, Newt, Misty and Shannon have passed on. Mack is a HUGE Swissy who is now 9, and Baily is old with two bad rear legs. I also feel very bad for Star. She is a more recent addition and is a rescue. She obviously was mistreated by a previous owner. She is very timid and expresses symptoms of abandonment issues. Yes, I know she is a dog, but they have personality. The way she looks at you, the way she looks back when you let her outside, you can see she is thinking if she will be allowed back in to the home. She warmed up to me so well, that I am not sure how she will react. And Ebbie and Brew who liked to "break in" to the bedroom if we didn't lock the door and join us in the mornings will wonder why the spare bedroom is now empty. No suitcases, no clothes, no people.

So, while leaving family is hard, there is some comfort in knowing that they understand where you are disappearing to. They have a way to reach out and communicate with you. And they understand that despite your absence, you still love them. With dogs, you can't know what they understand you can only judge their reactions, and based on the past, I know that they won't be happy tomorrow, which makes it harder on me.

Believe what you want, but leave me out of it

Forward: This is post 1 of 2 that I said I had in mind for writing during my Christmas break. I waited to write this to avoid putting myself into the type of situation I am telling people to leave me out of. This isn't directed at any one person, it is directed at everyone that tries to cram beliefs down my throat.

I don't care if you give praise to God, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, Ra, or Mickey Mouse. As long as your beliefs don't affect me, I don't care (I'll get into this later). You could believe that your toaster commands you to hop around on one foot everyday for all I care, just don't lose your balance and fall into me. I do care when you come knocking on my door telling me I am a horrible person for not believing in X and that I will burn in hell if I don't immediately repent and follow YOUR way of thinking.

You are welcome to write blog posts, status updates, tweets, newsletters, or billboards about your beliefs. I might not read them, much like many people will choose not to read this. The fact that people won't choose to read this means I will have to tell them next time they try to preach to me that I don't want to hear it, so I would prefer they read this now, but it is their right not to read this. What crosses the line, at least for me, is sending me articles about how important it is for me to have X in my life. Saying that I must go to church. Telling me that I must believe in X or I am a horrible human being.

Personally, I am somewhere between agnostic and atheist, but before people jump down my throat about being the devil spawn: 1 - see above and 2 - how am I affecting you? I am not one of those people who feels like I need to waste the time of the Supreme Court debating whether "under God" should be in the Pledge of Allegiance. Do I think it belongs there? No. Nor does "In God We Trust" belong on our money. Those words being there doesn't affect me enough for me to care. So how do my beliefs about that affect you?

I keep saying "it doesn't affect me I don't care," but what do I consider affecting me? Well, here is a rough idea. If your beliefs say that you should kill me because I don't believe in your beliefs, that is something that affects me and then I will want to hit you over the head with a stick to either knock some sense into you, or give you amnesia so you forget that part. If your beliefs say alcohol is forbidden and you try to pass a law outlawing it, that affects me. If you decide to forever avoid me because I have a drink, that is fine with me, because obviously your beliefs are very important to you and odds are you would start preaching at some point. (That last point isn't directed at anyone running for election, or anyone I know...unless one of them starts acting that way). If you think alcohol is forbidden, but think that is your personally belief and choose to exercise that restriction on yourself and not get preachy if I have a drink, then we will probably get along.

I am tolerant of some religious influence on the policy of our country because I know it is impossible to separate people's religion from their personal views, but most of those influences are things make us civilized, that were put into religions early on to drive civilization in it's current direction. But when things start going all "the bible says" in the process of writing a law, then I get annoyed.

I wrote this while I was awake in the VERY early morning hours after not much sleep, but I think it captures most of my thoughts. With that, I will just hit "Publish post" and be on my way. I have TWO more posts planned now (the original other post I had, and a post about PR due to an on-going PR nightmare for a game accessory manufacturer) but I will get to those when the mood strikes me.

A rough time of year at work

It used to be there was one rough time of year at work where I had to do my performance write-up*. Then I would just have to update my resume to submit it with that for promotion consideration, and that wasn't too bad. Now the pain is twice a year.

First, I have to do my performance write-up in August. That is painful for me. I can boast and brag with friends to a degree, but I don't like to do it too much. When it comes to professionally, I have a REALLY hard time selling my own accomplishments. I think it is mostly because I don't see my accomplishments as major things. It is just a bunch of PHP code to improve some web applications and add features. Other people see programming as some black art, I see it as just another task.

So, if going through that once a year isn't bad enough, I have to do another performance write up soon that is the one that goes to management to try to convince them to promote me. It is a crappy exercise and made even crappier and more stressful by a freeze on annual pay increases and my next scheduled pay increase not happening till 2013.

Oh well, enough of a rant for today.

* When I say I have to do it - basically, the way it works with most managers is they give you your objectives, but you have to write what you did for those objectives and hand that to them so they can give you a score and pass it up the chain. Some bosses help you more than others, some won't lift a finger and expect you to do all of your self-selling.

Latest goings on

Figured I would shoot in a little update here since it has been a few weeks. I did in fact build my new computer and have been playing Battlefield 3. The graphics are amazing, online play is awesome, but the campaign kind of sucks. Lots of "Click the left mouse button here, tap space bar now, press e" in spots that could have been REALLY awesome otherwise. The story was great though.

Other goings on...I bought a truck. A VERY used truck. 2002 F150 XLT 4x4 with 239,000 miles. Why? We live a long way from work, a possibly bad winter is coming, and there are projects around the house I have been putting off because we didn't have a truck to haul things like mulch and gravel in large quantities. We might actually pick up some gravel this weekend to fill in under the truck. It is passed MD inspection and we just need to wait for the dealership in DE to finish processing the title to register it here (and pay the 6% tax to do so). I will try to take some pictures and add the them to the garage page this weekend. I will be working on posting the description of it shortly.

And then there is work, which has me over-extended on duties and understaffed (only me) on my primary project. The other project I manage has tons of people working it (3 interns now and 1 future full timer), and I can't redirect them to my primary project because they only came to the office to work on that other project. I still have been roped into doing some of the coding on that lately though in order to save the system from itself. (it was growing quickly and thus some very inefficient queries were dragging the server down) I am also left as the lead for a working group and doing the prep work for a related briefing in January (that I thankfully got a volunteer to help with).

So that is what is going on, and on top of that, I am considering going back into web work on the side. So, what's up with you (my 1 or 2 occasional readers)?

Thinking about a PC upgrade

I am thinking it is time for an upgrade. WHY? Because I want to play Battlefield 3 in all it's glory. I can re-use my case (and cram these innards in another case for possibly other purposes). So, when all is said and done, I am looking at about $760.92 for parts. I would start with two new boot Hard Drives (SATA 6GB, 250GB 7200RPM), I have a nice 2TB data drive to plug in, an AMD Phenom II X4 p65 Black Edition 3.5GHz Quad-core processor, 8GB of DDR 3 Ram, a 80Plus Gold certified power supply, a Radeon HD 6950 Graphics card w/ 1GB ram, an ASRock motherboard with two PCI-Express x16 slots, SATA 6GB/s, USB 3.0, Firewire, Gigabit Lan, and eSATA, and a SATA Blu-Ray burner.

So...to pull the trigger or not...Thoughts?

Well, off to water aerobics for the evening.

Anniversary Trip Recap

This year, for our annual anniversary trip, we headed in the same general direction as last year....North. Our destination was a bit different though. Our goal? Finish visiting the states of New England and see some sites along the way. How did we do? Pretty darn good.

Day 1: We departed work @ 2:30 and hit the road. Our destination was Milford, CT. It was a convenient stopping place for the first night, we didn't really have a plan in mind for there. On the way, we only hit a small amount of traffic at the George Washington Bridge and on I-95 in CT. We were a bit shocked by this, but it was very welcome!

Day 2: In the morning, we headed down to Silver Sands State Park and took a walk on the boardwalk there. I snapped some photos of Charles Island and some rock formations people had made in the sand. I am pretty sure this one was actually pointing due north:

Milford Beach and Charles Island

From there, we hopped on the road and started driving north towards White River Junction, VT. Along the way, we stumbled upon the Basketball Hall of Fame, and it was also a good time to take a break, so we went there (more on this later). From there, we continued driving along until we saw a sign for the "Bridge of Flowers" and decided another detour was in order. I would have loved to see this bridge during the spring when everything was in bloom, but it was still pretty nice, and there were some falls near by. After that, we proceeded on to White River Junction, VT.

Day 3: We began Day 3 planning out our route. Our first stop was Quechee Gorge (or as they like to call it, Vermont's little Grand Canyon). The view down into the gorge from the bridge was awesome, and I managed to snap some decent pics standing there. I haven't had time to do much work with the photos, so here is the best one I currently have posted:

Quechee Gorge

Our next stop was the Mt. Washington Auto Road which is apparently America's oldest man-made tourist attraction. It climbs to the peak of Mt. Washington, the highest point in the Eastern United States at 6,288 ft. It is also home to "The World's Worst Weather" being the location where the highest wind speed directly recorded at the Earth's Surface: 231mph. The drive up was amazing with beautiful views of the Presidential Mountain Range. We stopped several spots on the way to the top for photos, and then reached the peak and climbed the stairs to the observation post on top. This part of the trip was very reminiscent of Stelvio Pass in Italy.

View from Mt. Washington

From Mt. Washington, we proceeded on to our destination for the night, Bath, ME. Once there, being our actual anniversary, we went out for dinner and both had Lobster (we were in Maine, what else would we eat). It was a good evening

Day 4: Our first stop on day 4 was an old US Fort, Fort Popham. This fort was never completed and never attacked, but US forces were stationed at it multiple times.

Fort Popham

From Fort Popham, we traveled up to the Maine Wildlife Refuge. I managed to snap some great wildlife photos while we were there, and saw something that I had never seen (and will probably never see again): an albino raccoon. There were quite a few deer in the pen across the way, but the fences are short enough that healthy deer, if they so choose, can jump the fences and leave the refuge. We saw most of the refuge, but were both wearing down, so we skipped the birds and marsh areas of the refuge. The only other event for the day was driving through "The Big Dig". Having seen numerous TV specials about it, it was cool to actually drive through it.

Day 5: After crashing for the night just outside Rhode Island, we made our final push of the trip. On to the Statue of Liberty! When we arrived, the line was long and moving slowly. I had considered buying tickets online the night before, but I didn't have a printer, am always iffy about using the hotels public computer, and didn't see any benefit since according to the website, Pedestal tickets were sold out for the day, so we would only be able to visit the island anyway. Once we finally got our tickets, we proceeded to the security zone (1 of 2 we passed through). We catch the boat to Ellis Island, walk around a bit, and then hop on over to Liberty Island.

Somewhere between boarding the ferry the first time, and boarding it to visit Liberty Island, we realized that our tickets actually granted us Pedestal access. Great surprise there! So we headed straight to the statue and headed inside to get a view from the pedestal. This is where we were met with security checkpoint #2. After walking up 2 flights of stairs, we were in the museum in the pedestal. It had some interesting items, but we were more interested in going up, so we proceeded up another 2 flights, then caught the elevator to the top of the pedestal.

NYC From the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty

What an amazing view it was! We then started working our way down the various levels of the pedestal via the stairs until we finally reached ground level. Hot, tired, and ready to roll, we caught the next ferry back to NJ, hopped in the car, and sat in traffic. Somewhere on the turnpike, I hoped out of the driver's seat for the first time on the trip, and let Chrissy handle the last (mostly traffic free) leg home.

Now, about the Basketball Hall of Fame: we seem to have started a trend now. Last year we went to Cooperstown, this year the Basketball Hall of Fame, maybe Rock & Roll and Football Hall of Fames next year? Who knows. But I do know that the states we have left to visit are all to the west now, so it won't be as easy a trip to knock more of those off our list.

"Drop it like it's" a Volkswagen

At H2Oi, I purchased a JOM coilover kit from New German Performance. On Friday, Chrissy took it up to their shop in Aberdeen, MD to have the coilovers installed. So, now the Rabbit is riding low. I am not too happy about the noise of the suspension right now, but I emailed NGP about that to check if it is normal. I do remember even the stock suspension on that car making noise, just a different one. I LOVE the new stance of the car, and on the way home on Friday, a kid shouted out "Hey man, nice car" as I drove by. First time that has happened in the Rabbit ;)

You can see more pics on my Flickr account but I wanted to post one here on the blog.