Lists make all the work worth while

Below is a list of this week's accomplishments.

1. Finish laundry ( 4 loads)
2. Hang uber-Mobile in nursery
3. Reposition wall-hung TV
4. frame and hang new door to laundry room
5. shampoo carpets
6. watch lectures, turn in homework #4
7. Take test #1
8. Have a baby
9. Bring healthy mom and baby home

Yup, its been a pretty busy week.

Its been a month since my last post.

What has happend? Taking a page out of Eve's book.. I will make a list of things I remember from the last 30 days or so:
-Some work travel (Buxton, NC.. look it up, I had too)

-Lectures that are hard to concentrate on

-homework that confused me because I refused to take the shortcut even though it was staring me in the face the whole time

-shopping for baby stuff (lots of that)

-Thinking of baby names

-Cleaning the garage and getting the motorcycles inside

-Cleaning up the front yard (good news, my truck can handle a ton of rock.. barely)

-Thanksgiving

-Holiday Shopping (yah for cheap clothes)

-Spending time with good friends

-lots of cake at work (3 days in a row.. weird week)

-Weather that can't make up its mind

Chugging along

My wife is making a baby.
I am making my grades.
Something seems a little unbalance there. Maybe I should make something else too. Yah, I should make a pizza. That should even things out.

I have been feeling the pressure lately and for no particularly good reason. Best I can figure is some last minute travel for work was enough of a disruption that everything else in my life the last few weeks has felt like is held together with duct tape and bailing wire. This isn't very remarkable except for the fact that it hasn't been. Things have been under control and run pretty much according to schedule.

Yesterday was a great "break" day. We probably should have done it last week on our anniversary. We went to the Desert Botanical Gardens, met a friend for a long and entertaining lunch, hung out at the Harley shop down the street for a rally/car show, and finished it off by watching RED. By the way, RED is a great freaking movie. It is just a genuine, doesn't take itself seriously, good movie. The good guys win, the bad guys lose, and the explosions follow the quality not quantity rule (and then sneak in some more quantity).

If I was a little more motivated this early on a Sunday morning, I would upload a picture or two from the butterfly house at the Botanical Gardens. Its Monarch season.

House Flambe

My house tried to kill me yesterday by catching in fire. It failed miserably.
Everyone got out fine, we are ok and the house is in pretty good shape. Electrical fire in my crawl space from the 220V line running to the water heater. The smolder of doom started above the laundry room and we found it before it really caught. The fire department ripped down the ceiling in the laundry room and half the garage chasing the smolder through the insulation. We are crazy silly ridiculous lucky. Insurance adjuster has already been out with a contractor and electrician. They will be back this morning to run new house mains and replace the water heater which means a little demo work in my office to get to the back side of the breaker box to replace the breakers and run the line. After that the real fun begins (work permits from the city, replacing ALL the insulation, structural engineer to sign off on the scorched ceiling beams, etc. etc.)
We are staying in the house tonight even though we where offered hotel rooms. I will skip the hot water for the opportunity to keep an eye on the abode that tried to kill me. Might post pictures of the torched wires, rafters, and missing ceilings.. might not.

My wife and I had both just returned home to meet with some friends (waiting in our driveway) to head out for the day. Kristina was bringing back the dog from getting its nails trimmed and other doggy things and I was coming back from the dentist. Our friends where leaving there 2 dogs at our house as we where planning on being out well into the evening. Because my wife had the dog she went into the house through the garage, and thus the laundry room and thought it smelled like burnt marshmallows. We started checking the water heater and following the smell.. mostly out of curiosity. There was a warm spot near the door and since I am freakishly tall I was able to touch the ceiling and feel a hot spot. Got the ladder and poked my head through the crawl space hatch that is in the laundry room and saw small wisps of smoke and blackened insulation and beams around some wires. Told Kristina to call the fire dept and ran out to pop all the breakers in the house. Posted my friend on the ladder with a fire extinguisher to hit anything if it actually ignited (felt confident leaving him there.. anyone trained to fight ship board fires can fight them in my house). Fire Dept came and was able to take care of it before it actually caught and turned into a real fire. Plenty of damage though.. the thermal imager the captain used was registering over 500 degrees on the inside of the ceiling.

Not quite the eventful weekend I was hoping for. My wife did a pretty good write up of the events of the fire. You can find it HERE.

Photos from Seattle

As promised I uploaded a few of my favorite photos from my trip to Seattle.

All growed up

I have completed my first week as a regular working stiff. It is slightly depressing, but the pay is nice.

For those far removed from my every day life, I am working at General Dynamics in Scottsdale. I am working as a systems engineer which is what I wanted to do (no settling here!). The difference between systems and say just plain electrical engineering is that instead of working on some sub component like a filter or an antenna, I get to work on the large level design and implementation. I don't design the radios, I design how they are used.
The project I was placed on is near its end, so there isn't any design work to be done but there is plenty of work to do since we are in the deployment stage of a national radio system. (new hire insite: that's why my division is called National Systems Division!)
I am currently working on Rescue 21, a Coast Guard project that "takes the search out of search and rescue." I am sure I have mentioned it before, but hey.. this is my blog so you get to hear about it again.
Rescue 21 replaces a wide range of aging, obsolete VHF-FM radio communications equipment currently in use ("aging" as in the original system design was something like 1970.. not a whole lot of digital there.) One of the biggest improvements (besides capacity, reliability, and quality) is the addition of real direction finding capabilities. The new system can locate the position of a call to withing 2 degrees. Using triangulation, this works out to a search radius of something like 11 miles instead of the old 3o0 miles. This is a pretty nice thing to have when all you get is a 1 second transmission of "HELP" and then the radio goes silent.
Here is a nice little overview.

Life at GD is an interesting affair. I worked for another business unit a year ago and got a good taste of the corporate culture there. Things are a little different here.. not better or worse, just different. The facility that I work at has something like 5,000 people. It is big. It is easy to get lost since the room numbers don't follow any real logical order other than 1000s is first floor and 2000s is second floor. There is an on-site cafeteria that has some pretty good food, but you pay for the quality. Think $7.00 for a sandwich and a drink (but the sandwich is better than subway).
As far as the computers are concerned you are your employee number. You employee number is attached to you name in everything... which I guess makes sense when you have 30 John Smiths (actually, I think there are only 2). We have an instant messenger client at work. Its probably reduces the email load on the servers but that's about it. As far as I can tell people mostly use it to find out what the plan is for lunch. One of the downsides to having so many people working there: NO FREE COFFEE!! To keep all the robots happy though they put a Starbucks in the building. You can get Seattle's Best from the caffeteria or get your caramel mochiato if you have a 9 figure salary and don't mind paying a 2000% mark-up on sugar and coffee. One of my tasks next week will be to find a coffee maker for my desk.

So far I like it at GD. The group seems pretty engaged and full of nice people, it took the usual 3 days for them to realize my competency and assign me additional tasks. My main job is working with the Bill of Information group to configure all the equipment for each deployed site (like the IP plan of all the equipment and frequency maps for all the radios). I am also getting spun up on deployment procedures and will be a backup for the deployment team who actually set up the equipment and fix any problems or implement system changes on site. There has also been talk of hooking me up with the RF group to do site studies for radio coverage issues.
I am definately not an intern anymore.

Things I do to avoid homework:

1. Check my email
2. Check the news
3. Make my wife breakfast
4. Fell a tree
5. Fell another tree
6. Put up more lattice work to make it harder to jump my wall using the electric boxes
7. Plan the bathroom remodel for spring break

Marital Bliss

Sad news folks.
The wife and I had a nasty spat last night, over socks of all things.
Like all nasty spats it starts out as a small disagreement over something trivial and escalates into screaming, yelling, crying, and throwing things.
Needless to say I am posting this on my laptop from my hotel's free internet access.
I would have gone to Tom's or Cody's or Don's but I just needed some alone thinking time (with free HBO).
I will probably be hitting one of you guys up (most likely TOM) to crash for another day or two until we get things straitened out.
Why am I blogging about this instead of calling you guys to tell you whats up personally? Because it is April Fools day. Suckers.

Don't feel bad, I fell for 2 slashdot articles before I remembered what day it was. Thank god for Tags.

sooo tired

Well, spring break '07 is over.
Alot happened. Don moved into his new mansion house, it only took a few days. Don got married. Don had a St. Patrick's day party.
Are you seeing a theme here? I spent most of my time at Don's house, both old and new. There was a very large amount of alcohol consumed and even more furniture moved.
On the plus side Don got a new TV so, as promised, I got his old TV. It is sitting very nicely in my living room surrounded by grudginly rearranged furniture. It is a beautiful 47" of 1080i goodness. Unfortunately the 4 year old set does not have an internal HD tuner so I still don't have HDTV, but the standard def cable looks good enough to me and I mostly wanted a bigger TV, I can wait on the HD (and by wait I mean I will probably order HD cable by the end of the year). DVDs look nice with my progressive scan DVD player (thanks C&E), and I am going to go buy the component cables to get the Nintendo Wii hooked up and using 480p as well (then maybe I will be able to tell the difference between a 6, 8, and 9 while putting in Tiger Woods Golf).

Needless to say it was a very full week of not-schooling and I am very very tired and still unusually sore. I want to go take a nap but I am afraid it will screw up my sleep schedule even more. The goal is to get to bed tonight around 9 pm and hopefully that will allow me to get up in the morning feeling rested enough to stay awake during classes. I find it really helps my knowledge retention if I am conscious when I receive the knowledge.