Oh is it time for another weekend report? OK. Left work just about on time Friday, and met with Laura here at the house. Laura is going to be doing some work for me on the Nekodojo family of servers, because I kinda would like someone else to do the sysadmin stuff around the dojo for a while, and she gets some internship points out of it. Together we will work on migrating the servers to the new DSL, migrating charon services to neko-base, and other cool projects, time permitting. Excellent!

Also on arriving home Friday, my home PC seemed to be working fine but it was logged in as M and not as me, so I just decided to reboot it. It did not come back alive… After several failed attempts to boot safe mode, last known good, recovery console, etc nothing worked. I ended up reinstalling XP twice (once to get to my data to back it up, second time to nuke the drive). After the second reinstall, everything is happy again. I successfully reinstalled XP, Office, Outlook, PGP, Mulberry, Norton AV, Quicktime and a couple other things I forget now. The ironic part is that I just had the helpdesk guys at work reinstall my work machine, so I went through all that at work on Thursday with win2K. My laptop is getting quite a bit of play as a backup machine, still running 98 and being a champ. All is well everywhere again.

Saturday, we went out shopping or something, can’t quite remember. Oh, we found excellent gifts for the White Elephant at mallen/bha’s birthday, we just needed some wrapping paper. Miche decided not to go to the party because she was already starting to get tired at 5 pm. But I went and had a great time. I have determined that Lynette makes great beer (everything is better with your own keg and CO2), mallen makes great bbq pork ribs, bha looks quite fantabulous and blue in dancing garb, and Merlin makes just about everything he touches into great food, even when it is incredibly bad-for-you food. Hooray for all! We got to give away a couple things we have had lying about for a while (though sadly nobody took my unopened copy of Winblows98) and we inherited some nice bath things for M. We watched Scrubs and it was still cool, I have to figure out why our tivo doesn’t record Scrubs anymore.

Sunday, went shopping to get fabrics and also food, and then met Laura again for more Nekodojo geek work. Had Thai food for dinner, Siam Thai is still the best place I know in Cupertino/SantaClara area.

OK now it is time to turn in. Good night all.

Well the neighbor had some people over and they were all looking at papers around the kitchen table. And he took his “for sale by owner” sign down. So hopefully that means he will be selling and getting the hell out of here. Usually I can’t tell what is going on inside his place but he had the shades open, which makes me think he was showing off the excellent view to the people inside.

I remain hopeful that he will go away. Regardless, Miche and I have been having thoughts of moving as well. We might like someplace that is more townhouse in nature. So we will be meeting with our own realtor a week from now.

Thursday: Got a gift for M at Shane Co (earrings) and stashed it in the trunk for later. The initial idea was to hide it somewhere in the house and give her an innocent-looking box of chocolates with a clue at the bottom, but something else came up (see below). I arrived home and we left again to go look at futons for the spare room.

After choosing a decent futon of the “loveseat” variety (not as wide as a normal couch, it folds out and extends and you bring out the extra piece of futon to stick on the end to make a double bed). The guy took forever to write up the invoice, but we were in no particular hurry. Set up delivery for Saturday.

After the futon shop, we headed to California Grill for dinner. (The place is pretty high-end, the food is quite excellent; it is located in Valley Fair). Since it was the night before V-Day we managed to get seated quickly and the place was pretty empty. After ordering, I surprised M by saying “Ok I’ll be right back” and then heading toward the parking lot. I came back with the gift behind my back (inside a can of chocolates) and said “Happy Valentines Day Weety”. She looked kind of puzzled and said “Oh, you got me a… Almond Roca?” Yup. “Um, there isn’t anything else in there… is there?” Hmm, I wonder if there could be…

Anyway she opened the thing and found the real gift and she was happy. We decided going out to dinner the night before was much better that going out on V-Day (which would have been a Friday as well.) The waiter was quite nice and we gave him a huge tip.

A good time was had by all!

M’s parents were here most of the weekend. It’s great to see them! We didn’t really do anything special, just watched TV and hung around the house. That was fun and relaxing. We left the house to go to Fry’s once (with a stop at Cost Plus) and a couple times for grocery shopping. We had salisbury steak Friday, Chinese Saturday, and gnocchi Sunday. They left early Monday morning.

Covad guy came today and was actually successful in hooking up DSL. That is cool. Now I can change the new server over to Megapath and start migrating users over.

Wednesday: Crazy day before leaving, trying to wrap up all kinds of loose ends both at work and at home. I decided to work from home so I could run a couple of errands without losing too much time. I had one conference call meeting and one irc virtual meeting. I managed to get a large amount of crap done, both work and home, though I was up until like 1 am.
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