Quite the Workout

I'd like to extend a personal thanks to the engineers at Nordic Track for making their treadmills so friggin' heavy and hard to assemble. Laura and I just bought a treadmill that took Hurculean effort to get up the stairs, and took forever to put together. Now that it's together, it's pretty darn cool. We bought an additional piece that uses IR to control it via workout CDs from ifit.com. Now I just have to get my fat ass out of bed every morning to use it. I think maybe I'll tape the receipt to my alarm clock.

The Big Weekend

Well, here it is. This is the weekend Laura finally moves to Texas. She graduates on Friday, then we pack up the car and drive from STL to OKC on Saturday, continuing on to Dallas on Sunday. She starts BAR/BRI on Monday morning. Hopefully she'll have energy enough in the afternoons to go find us a house, because I don't want to live in this apartment for very long. It was sized perfectly for me when I moved here, but not for 2 people.

New Equipment

Blame Paco. I had been planning to buy an old, cheap notebook to experiment with Linux. But, Paco had to go and discover an impressive piece of equipment at Fry's Electronics... a Compaq Presario R3160. It's much more expensive than I had planned on, but boy, is it sweet. It has an AMD 64 bit Athlon, 80 GB hard drive, 512 MB memory, and a 64 MB nVidia GeForce4.

I tried to get Suse 9.1 to reduce the pre-installed XP partition so I could get Linux on there, but I ended up having to scrub it and re-install. So, now it has XP on 1/2 and Suse 9.1 on 1/2.

It has a 64 bit processor in it, but I immediately ran into trouble finding 64 bit versions of some of the Linux packages I wanted. So, I scrubbed it again and installed the 32 bit version. (I got a great message that said "great computer, but you're about to install 32 bit linux on a 64 bit computer".) I'm having better luck with that, but I know Paco will give me a hard time. I'll go back and install 64-bit Linux once it's more mainstream, I promise.

It's flawless in Windows, but I still have two outstanding problems in Linux: 1) the built-in wireless isn't supported (thank you, Broadcom for being Microsoft bigots), and there's a funky screen artifact when you go into X, then come back out. I'm sure I'll get that last one fixed... just waiting on Suse to tell me what to do.

The screen is beautiful on this thing. It's nearly widescreen dimensions, and it's very bright. Great for watching DVDs. I still can't quite get 2 games of poker on the screen at once, but it's close.

So, anyway, I thnk you, Paco, but my wallet doesn't. :-)

Avoiding the Kool-aid

When 802.11g came out, I didn't jump on it right away. I figured until my laptop at work and my TiVo could use g, I would stick with b. But, I always had it in mind that I would pick up the Microsoft 802.11g gear when I bought a house. No more. Microsoft just dropped the product line. Oh well, the whole reason for buying the Microsoft gear was that it was supposed to be easy to use and compatible with all the desktop games, but I suspect it doesn't play as well with Linux as I'd want it to.

Speaking of Linux, Suse 9.1 is out. I know what I'll be doing this weekend.

In Other News...

My wife, Laura, finally finished Law School yesterday. It's two weeks to graduation, after which we jump in her truck and drive down to Dallas (she lives in St. Louis for school). So, we'll finally get to act married. You already married people can tell me whether that's a good thing or not. :-)

Well, I Got the Job ... Now What?

I just got promoted at work, to "Director of e-healthSOURCE Development". e-healthSOURCE is our marketing term for all the infrastructure and architecture that power our healthcare apps. I had been team lead already, but this gives me management responsibility.

It's a pretty diverse team, spread over 3 of our offices, so my first goal will be to unify the team. We really need a unified identity, where this team feels compelled to collaborate because they want to, and to seek the best possible solution, not because it's mandated that they talk to each other. It's a great group of guys, so I feel like it should be pretty easy for everyone to see the benefits of that.

Beyond that, I guess I'm looking forward to working with them all on career development. Our team has traditionally been a "pile of programmers" working on whatever is hot this week. We haven't really had anyone looking out for us, to determine how to make us successful, and how to get us where we personally want to be, as compared to what the company wants us to do. I don't fault any of the previous department managers for that; it was just part of our culture. But, I plan to reverse that trend. Wish me luck.