This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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I haven’t posted all that much lately, so here are a variety of short notes to make up for it.
- Even though it is not on the menu, the coffee place at work does White Chocolate Mochas. This is a good thing.
- The wireless network at home has suddenly gone flaky over the last few days, so AbulWiki has been available intermittantly. Looks like the base station is flaking out. Will probably replace it. Of course, that machine should have a wired connection anyway, but we still need the wireless for other things.
- Everybody is sick at home except for me at the moment. Some kind of flu thing it seems. I’m sure I will be next.
- Roscoe is doing great and is learning how to behave as we expect, but he will still go to real training classes soon. He is a hoot though. Very funny dog. Very playful. Very loving.
- Amy’s school is great. She gets up excited to go in the morning, and we have to drage her out in the afternoon.
- Having money again is great. Just have to avoid the temptation to buy EVERYTHING all at one time…
- [Self-Censored]
- Waiting for news that you need before you can move forward on something sucks.
- Brandy continues to slog through the VA health system to have them properly deal with what the Navy broke
- Haven’t commented much on current events lately, but most are depressing.
- Work is good, but I have to beat whatever has been making me tired and groggy the last couple weeks, it is slowing me down. Two prime suspects: Lack of sleep, allergy meds. Am working on adjusting both. And drinking more coffee.
- Having a kid in prep school is interesting, as most of the friends (specifically their families) seem to be independantly wealthy, many of the “I joined Microsoft in the 80s” variety. This is not a bad thing or a good thing though… just interesting.
- My boss at work just got a new team reorged under him. In the short term I’ll probably do a bunch with that team as well as the folks I have been working with, but in the long term that team will proabably hire their own me.
- As of last night my computer at home is fully backed up and has an automated daily backup running to mirror the whole internal drive to an external drive for the first time since early January. This makes me feel much more secure. It is still only onsite backup though, I’ll have to come up with a good off-site backup solution as well, but this is a major step forward.
- Fishalump
- Antihypersyllabicsesquipedalian
- We picked a rental house to apply for last week. Theoretically we should know today if we got it. If so, we may be moving again within days, which will be good, cause the current place sucks with three people, a dozen or two fish, three birds a skink and a dog. It was fine with one person, but more… nope.
- I’ve never gotten into the RSS habit for some reason. Perhaps I’ll try again someday.
- I don’t watch much TV any more.
- I’m still way behind on things I want and or need to do at home. I’m trying to catch up each night, but never seems to happen.
- The meeting I was waiting for is starting, so I will stop.
 Not this last weekend, but the weekend before, Brandy, Amy and I went to see this. I had no real interest, but both Brandy and Amy are into this kind of movie and really wanted to go. So we did.
Short summary: This thing is mostly out of the theaters by now, but even if it wasn’t, don’t bother. And no real reason to Netflix it either. It was just sort of a big nothing. I mean, perhaps if it is hot outside and you need the AC in the theater or have a craving for popcorn with unidentifiable yellow goo on it.
Longer version: It was just missing something. It started out with the feel of a suspense horror type thing. Things in the shadows just out of sight that were going to get you. And it was starting to build up in that direction. And then it decided it wanted to be more like a Buffy/Charmed/Dark Angel sort of thing with teenagers with special powers trying to work out how to live life with those powers. And then it decided to be a big battle with a bad guy, and try to do Matrix style fight things. With one scene where the one guy throws CGI spaghetti at the other guy. Um… yeah. It just never came together, and you never really cared at all about any of the people. And then after the big battle, in the part where the cliche says that everybody is feeling safe, so there must be one last attack coming, or at least a glimpse of the bad guy crawling away to set up the sequel… there just wasn’t. Not saying that cliche is always needed, it is a bad cliche after all, but given that it was NOT there, you just kept feeling like things had built up, and then it was just over in a way that was so predictable you couldn’t quite believe that was REALLY how it ended.
Lets put it another way… Amy fell asleep during the climactic fight scene.
Amy and Brandy wanted to go to another movie tonight. I pointed out that we had gone to one pretty recently. Brandy said “But that sucked so much, it doesn’t count!” And that was that. I stayed home cause I had some things to do. But they went to another movie tonight. The Guardian. I hear that sucks too, so they will probably want to go to another movie next week.
We had another reorg. Woo!
Someone left. That person’s last day was Friday. So I the new org was official on Saturday, but this is the first business day, so I’m posting today… Here is my new org history so far at this job.
Jeff -> Kal -> Mark -> Llew -> Sam (36 days)
Jeff -> Kal -> Scott -> Llew -> Sam (74 days)
Jeff -> Kal -> Colin -> Llew -> Sam (145 days)
Jeff -> Brian -> Colin -> Llew -> Sam (Starting 23 Sep 2006)
I’m averaging 85 days per org structure so far.
There should be no short term effects on me due to this change.
At long last, the house in Florida is officially off our hands. It now belongs to the relocation company. They will in turn sell it to the actual buyer soon.
It has been a long and painful process with all sorts of problems and mis-steps and issues that came up at every turn, and this last month has been especially painful. We accepted an offer with the understanding that our involvemewnt would be all wrapped up within a couple of days when the buyer would present one last piece of paper and the relocation company would acquire our house. In fact all sorts of things came up and the buyer did not actually provide that last piece of paper until today, more than a month after it was supposed to happen.
I thought about going into all the dirty details of what happened with regard to this, starting way back in January and going up to today… but I’m not going to. At this point I don’t care to rehash any of the stressful events of the last few months at all. All I care about is that it is over and we are done. And although it was nowhere near as much as we had initially hoped, we still walk away with a check and the selling price was more than we paid for the place (barely).
So… we are done. We are moved. We are now officially Bellevueites. And the stress of living on a significant month over month cash flow deficit should now also be over, and we’ll be able to start getting the debt paid off and start rebuilding the savings buffer which was almost completely depleted between the last employer never delivering on their promises and the transition of the last nine months.
Whew. Whew.
Of course, the hunt for a more perminant place to live than the tiny apartment we are in now also begins today…
 The new Series 3 HD Tivos are out. This is now better than the Tivo/DirecTV combos, even the HD one. And with DirecTV trying to move away from Tivo, it is time to move. Unfortunately the fake cable company here at the current apartment is really just a redistibution of Dish Network, so it doesn’t support Cable Card and this won’t work with it. Not to mention until the house finishes selling there still isn’t money for such things. But after next time we move maybe… not sure it ranks with all the other things to spend money on though. It may still wait awhile. I’m thinking a 3rd SD DirecTivo might happen first. So that each of us can have our own. I want to hook mine up to a Slingbox (with no TV) so I can just watch on my computer. The Mac client is due out in public beta within a month or so. Or perhaps a StreetPilot 2820. I am really feeling the lack of one. When I came to Seattle I left mine in Florida because it had a big yellow spot in the middle, plus I didn’t know where all the stuff was I needed to load Seattle maps. Now it is in a box in storage somewhere even if I knew where the other stuff was. And it had that big yellow spot that made it difficult to use. and the new one is sweet. Or a computer for Amy. Or new cars. Or many other things.
Oh well. For now, all such things still wait.
Speak of the devil…
Accent Technologies, Proposal Software and eVestment Alliance Announce Integrated Set of Solutions to the Financial Services Industry at New York City’s PAICR Conference
Three companies with best-in-class solutions for different critical processes faced by financial services firms announce that they have established common interfaces for their products that allows sharing of data, thereby creating a powerful, integrated suite of solutions that covers activities from database updating, through proposal creation and management, to digital document management and presentation/pitchbook generation.
The three-company data sharing technology partnership involves Accent Technologies, Inc. (Accent Librarian(TM) is the leading presentation and pitchbook management solution); Proposal Software, Inc. (Proposal Management and Production System, Financial Edition v2006 or PMAPS® 2006, is the leading proposal management solution); and eVestment Alliance (eASE Exchange, is the leading tool used to update consultant databases).
I missed it when it happened. I think I was asleep, but I hadn’t done the calculation yet of exactly when it is anyway. And I always forget that it is usually a day earlier than expected because of the crazy leap year business, but at 08:24:53 UTC this morning (1:24 AM Pacific, 4:24 AM Eastern) I was exactly 35 years old. Woo. Go me.
Paying attention to the calendar date instead of how many 365.242… day years have happened since the exact time I was born, the anniversary date is actually tomorrow. But never the less, the actual moment has already passed by some 12 and a fraction hours ago. Yes, I am old.
I think I’ll celebrate by going to get a soda from the vending machine now.
Oh, one other note. Exactly one year ago was the day I got my first “modified” paycheck from my then employer cutting my salary by some 22%… in theory making it up with imaginary “commission” for sales I was to help generate. They had told me they wanted to do that, but had never told me a date when that would start or confirmed the exact terms or put anything at all in writing. I found out when I looked at my paystub. Thank you very much for the lovely birthday present. And of course this was after already not having delivered on much of what they had promised me monitarily (and otherwise).
Thank goodness I am at a much better place now.
On Sunday we went to the Humane Society so Brandy could sign up to volunteer. Of course, the completely predictable thing happened, and Brandy fell in love with a dog. A dog who had been there for awhile and she had seen multiple times over the last few weeks on their website.
After some discussion of just which things needed to be in place before we could get a new dog we set a list of things that needed to be done before we got a dog. Four days later having partially accomplished two of the things on the list and deciding to ignore the rest, we went back and got Roscoe during my lunch hour.
Roscoe is 3. He was at the Humane Society one month after having been transfered from another facility. Roscoe is the name they gave him there, we do not know his original name. He is very friendly. He is a mix, but seems to have a lot of Bluetick Coonhound in him, but a bunch of other stuff too.
He will of course be kept away from the avian and reptilian members of the family.
Anyway, Brandy is as I write probably at the petstore with Roscoe getting some necessary initial supplies and then will be taking him home for the first time.
I think Brandy really needed him. And Amy and I liked him too. So this should be a good thing.
And I’ll go back to taking my allergy meds religiously. :-)
Zuri pooped on the bottom left hand corner of my iMac’s keyboard while i was having a video chat with Cynthia. i wiped it off, but now the left shift key only partially works. “QWERtyuiop ASDFGHJKL ZXCVBNM” See, the right half of the top row doesn’t work with that shift key. i can still get them caps by using the other shift key or the caps lock key, but that does not come naturally to me. All i can say is this better work once it dries.
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