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.

I am tired.

Motorcycle is fixed, wife is in Japan, dog is now with Beth and Jimmy. Kitchen is all packed and moved and the remodel starts on Tuesday. Got an 84% on my final.
I am going to take a nap.

Turning it around

So.. its been a week.. my house is still a mess. I am still missing a large portion of my ceiling, but work has been halted while we wait for the inspector to sign off on the new electrical stuff. My attic has had all the insulation sucked out, so it get to about 80 in the house during the day and the heater runs for a good portion of the night.
The inspector should come on Monday and as soon as he is done they can start putting up new drywall. Hopefully I will be done with the repairs this week, or early next week at the latest. My wife and I are getting pretty eager for a return to normalcy.

Tom and I spent the better part of yesterday running cat6 to a few of my rooms, a job only made possible by the missing insulation. BTW, when I say "attic" I mean a crawl space above the house. It is only about 4-5 feet from beam to peak up there (I am 6'4"). It wasn't a very pleasant day. We got 4 runs done to 3 rooms and had our ass handed to us by a cross brace sitting in the middle of the wall in the master bedroom. Thanks to the slope of the roof there isn't enough room to use an extended drill bit and we decided it wasn't worth it to cut out a section of the drywall so we could notch or drill through the cross brace 2x4. Looks like the media center extender is staying on the wireless network. In the end I think I can accept a gigabit ethernet drop in the spare bedroom, the office, and 2 in the living room. I debated on putting one in the kitchen but decided the day had gone on long enough and even though the microwave plays hell with the wifi I just don't need it enough to make it worthwhile.

We are trying to make the best of the situation and taking this opportunity to get some other long delayed upgrades done. I got a motion light put in on the side of my house, since I had so much access to the "attic", and am moving/upgrading the lighting in my garage.
It feels nice to get some of these things finally done and done right.

because its early

I am posting this morning because I woke up at 5:15 am for no damn good reason. I was really hoping to get a good nights rests last night because I have a party to go to tonight and I don't want to crash early. Apparently my body has different plans. This is an important bit of information to know when reading the post because it helps explain why I am posting. I don't have anything really new to share or any great thoughts I need immortalized on the interwebs... I am just awake at 5:30 am on a Saturday and have nothing to do. Its too early for cartoons, I don't want to play video games for fear of waking up Kristina and its too early to start on any good chores (once again.. for fear of waking my wife).

I got my diploma in the mail yesterday. I guess I am now officially a graduate. There was a small snafu with my degree at the very end. Apparently one of 17 layers of administrative staff didn't pass my grade along so it was still listed as "NR" (I assume that means not received) and a hold was placed on my degree. A quick call to my instructor and it was cleared up by the next day, but I was pretty mad for about 3 days (1 day to find out, 2 days to get it fixed). The registrars office did send me a nice letter though. Nice thick stationary, dark and bold print, oh by the way you don't have a degree yet. Its nice to know that in these economic times the university still finds the money to spend on fancy stationary.
Just for the hell of it, here is a picture from graduation:


Work is good. I got moved from the BOI group to FRACAS. I am pretty sure it stands for Failure Reporting Analysis and Corrective Action System. We are basically level 3 tech support for rescue 21. This is actually a good thing for me since it allows me to work on RF issues (my new area of responsibility on the team). It is a much better utilization of my unique skill set and knowledge base and I think I will be more productive with this group.

On another completely unrelated topic, one of the benefits of GD is a free gym membership. Luckily it is to the same gym that Kristina has been going to for a while now. I have had 3 sessions with a personal trainer and that man is an evil son of a bitch. I bought 3 more sessions with him.
I have wanted to see a trainer for a while because I know I have some really bad workout habits that stem from some injuries I sustained a while ago and I need help correcting them. I can already feel a difference in my left knee. The last session involved a lot of squats and I have had no unusual stiffness or pain in the joint. Come to think of it, that may be because I just can't move afterward.
The gym really isn't my thing, and I don't enjoy going. I have never really enjoyed exercise just for the sake of exercise and I have grown to just about loath running. I have a number of friends who really enjoy it, and I have experienced the runner's high but I still don't consider running very fun. It is hard for me to find the motivation to just go do it. Unfortunately, I know it is a necessary evil, especially with my ever expanding gut so I will just do what I always do. Suck it up and keep going. That won't mean I won't stop bitching and moaning about it though, and I may stick to other forms of light cardio.

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.

Monthly update

I have realized this blog is only good for 1 post per month (I may have had this realization before but I don't remember it). When I started it I was really hoping for 2-3 posts a month at a minimum. Its not like I have nothing to talk about. On a weekly basis something will happen that makes me think "I should blog about this" but by the time I get home I have too many other things to procrastinate on.

The vacation was completely and totally awesome. It was a real change of pace and helped put everything into perspective. It also makes me want to be rich so I can afford the kind of personal service found on the cruise on a permanent basis. At the very least, a maid and a butler/personal assistant.
My wife posted most of the pictures on her flickr account. If you have access you should take a look. The rappelling in Puerto Vallarta made for some impressive pictures. If I get too bogged down in my homework and am looking for a distraction I may post some here.

E, e, and C came down for the superbowl. You know I like them a lot since it meant letting a known steelers fan STAY in my house. As you all know by now the Cardinals lost but I am still happy. We made it to the superbowl and the game wasn't a blow out. It was a close game that came down to the last few plays and the Cardinals showed the world that they do know how to play football. I just hope they can hold on to this team for another season or to and make some more play off appearances so that people don't call this season/team a fluke.

Little e is a pretty cool baby. He has good genes and I expect he will grow up to be a well rounded adult full of ambition, intelligence, and a slight loathing for the military-industrial complex (even though it is probably paying for his college).


I have a pretty easy semester on paper. Only 8 credits. I just wish the classes didn't take up so much of my time. One of them is an Individual Instruction project that is taking way more time than I though it would. I spend a lot of time researching material (papers and publications) for the class. I really wasn't expecting my instructor to say "go find the stuff that will teach you what you are supposed to be learning." It has led me to the opinion that our academic publishing system is flawed. There is a lot of crap papers out there. I never really agreed with institutions basing performance on works published by the faculty and the last few weeks have really strengthened that opinion.