First real post in 2 years

So what’s been happening in my life?

We bought a new house in Ashburn in March. We moved in a few months before that, but were waiting to sell our townhouse. The house is awesome! It’s on about a quarter of an acre, in a great neo-traditional neighborhood. We’ve done a ton to the house already, and it looks great!

House

Shortly after we moved here, India our Rotti girl lost it completely. After several attempts to reverse her behavior, we had to let her go. Shortly after, we began looking for a new puppy. We wanted to find a dog that would be completely submissive to China, as well as just being an all around awesome dog! So we picked this little guy from a breeder.

Benny The Golden

A little over a year ago, I quit my job at MITRE, and went to work for a “startup” called OpSource. I was hired as the Sr. Linux Engineer for Data Center Operations. These days, I end up doing more management, than engineering, but it’s still a good gig. I mostly work from home, or any other random place with wifi. I’m starting to work in InfoSec now on top of my normal workload, with the intentions of switching over full time as soon as they can afford to replace me.

I could ramble on about the past 2 years forever, but I think I’ll take it one post at a time for now. Commenting is now open, but you must register.

So here it is…

I set this blog up originally a couple of years ago, and as I promised then, I didn’t update it at all. I was inspired by Doug, so I decided to revamp this thing. I imported all of my old entries from LJ, though I can’t figure out how to get comments. I’m over LJ, which is apparent by my lack of entries in the past 2 years. I still read it fairly regularly to keep tabs on my “friends”, but I just feel it’s impersonal now.

I’m not promising that I’ll keep up on this one, but I think I’m gonna try. I always have shit to write about. For now, I have comments disabled, till I get things set the way I want them (gotta keep those fucking comment spammers out).

So as most of you know, I lost my mom to brain cancer several years ago. Steph lost her mom to breast cancer. Every year (most natably in October), we try to do what we can to support finding a cure. When STV was doing well with memberships, we’d donate the entire months proceeds, and even match it. Some years, we can afford to do more than others. I just found this cool site. 3M is donating .50 (up to $100,000) to City of Hope for each post-it filled out. It costs you nothing, and requires no personal info. I urge you all to go write a note, and tell everyone you know to do the same.

Dine for America

I’m not one for sappy ass “I love America” bullshit, but I do like to help out those in need when/how I can. Tonight, thousands of restaurants around the country will be participating in Dine for America. They will donate all (or a percentage in some) proceeds to the American Red Cross Katrina/Rita relief funds. Go to their site and find a participating restaurant near you. You know you were gonna go out to eat anyway.

New Teef

So last night I was flossing my teeth, and I got to one next to my 2 temporary crowns. You aren’t supposed to floss them, but I always have (I’ve had temporary crowns on 2 teeth for the past 2 months). I’m just careful not to put too much pressure. Anyhow, I put the floss in and start to gently clean, and POP!, crown falls on my tougue! FUCK! I say.

So this morning I call my dentist, and tell her what’s up. I’m not supposed to go in for my permanent porcelean crowns until Oct. 2. She tells me that my crowns arrived from the lab yesterday so I’m in luck. Would I like to come in today to get them put in? HELL YES I WOULD!

So I drop everything at work, and drive up to the dentist. She pops out the remaining temporary crown, and starts my polishing. About an hour later, I had two new teef! I’ve had about half a tooth on each of them for easily 2 years now. It is so nice to actually have full teef there now. Aside from the slight pain I’m starting to feel from the needle going into my socket, and the packing of the two crowns next to one another.

So I’m pretty much “done” at the dentist. I still want to get some more cosmetic stuff done, but no hurry on that. My dentist put me on a 3 month cleaning schedule, since my mouth is still a warzone, and I seem to get more buildup than most.

. . .

So ummm… yeah.

I don’t really know why I haven’t updated this thing in a while. I never have been good at it. Any how. Things have been going pretty good. I’ve been busy with work, side projects, and life in general. Steph and I just got back from a short trip to Vegas. It was a nice getaway, and we got to meet up with some friends there. Unfortunately 2 of our other friends who were supposed to meet us there had to cancel at the last minute. So I’m just gonna have to bug the shit outta them to come visit us here in VA 😉 I finally got a new cell phone with a camera, so I setup a moblog on textamerica. Not much there yet, and I need to customize it a bit, but it serves it’s purpose.

Wow, this got pretty long

10 months after I got my car, I finally got the body kit for it last week! I had just about written it off, and was going to just get the dealer to credit me the cost, and it magically appeared while I had my car in for normal scheduled maintenance. I am so through dealing with that dealership, and now thankfully I have nothing tying me to them. I wrote up a 3 page complaint about them, that I am sending to Infiniti consumer affairs. Hopefully they will break a foot off in some asses over there, so no one else has to go through the crap that I did. A new Infiniti dealer opened up in Chantilly, which is about 10 minutes from my house, so I’m gonna start bringing my car there.

I finally got my ass into the dentist a few months ago. I have undergone three 4 hour procedures to try to fix all the mess that was my teeth. I don’t have the total, but it’s been 2 root canals (in 2 teeth next to one another), gum surgery above those 2 teeth, somewhere between 10 – 15 fillings, and a deep cleaning of my gums and teeth. I still have temporary crowns on the 2 root canaled teeth that I have to get replaced with the permanent porcelain crowns in a couple weeks. And since dental insurance sucks ass, I have paid several thousand dollars out of pocket for this after the $1500/yr dental insurance limit. Next year, I’ll start work on the more cosmetic stuff, like trying to get my bottom row aligned, and some bridgework. The moral of the story kids… Don’t ever put off going to the dentist for nearly 15 years!

In other news, I’m in the process of switching my phone lines over to Vonage, to get away from Verizon. I pay entirely too much money for phone lines that hardly get used. I’ll be saving about $35/mo after all is said and done. In the process, I’m also gonna switch my alarm system over to a broadband monitoring service, which will save close to another $20/mo. I know it’s not as reliable as a phone line, but in the end, who’s to say either is gonna work when it needs to? We fool ourselves into believing that it’s actually going to help when/if the time comes, when in reality in most cases help is too late anyway. As far as I’m concerned, as long as the siren sounds, the alarm has done it’s job. Everything else, is just a bonus that may help a bad situation.

We’ve been doing some work around the house, trying to make things more our own. It’s funny that we’ve been there just about 5 years, and we had hardly done anything to the place. Granted, we picked out a lot of the stuff in the build process, but there were always a lot of things we wanted to change, like paint. So far we have only done the kitchen, but we are slowly working through the rooms one by one. We are both into a lot of asian/indian stuff, so that has been the theme. It’s amazing how much some color, or artwork can change the way you feel when you are in a room. I’m gonna try and get the yard landscaped in the next month or so, since it’s all dirt again. Feng Shui I say!

India, (our rotti/shar-pei mix) has been having some “issues” that we are trying to work out. We’re trying some herbal (magnesium) treatments to see if it helps, along with task of trying to rid the environment of whatever “triggers” we can. If the herbal treatments don’t help, we’ll have to try prozac. I am not a fan of psychiatric medication of any kind, but if it helps to balance things out in her brain, then I’m all for it.

I guess that about covers my life the past 6 months.

been a while…

So I haven’t posted in a while. Been hella busy at work lately. I’ve been in Boston since Sunday for Linuxworld. It was cool, but I don’t think I’d even go for the whole week again. A couple of days would be good. Unfortunately, it seems I know too much, cuz most of the conferences/seminars I sat in on were old news. I guess that’s not really a bad thing though, is it?

I forgot how great Boston is. I love this city. The architecture is fantastic. The people are mostly cool. I wouldn’t mind having a house up here, though I wouldn’t wanna live here in the winter. It’s pretty fuckin cold. As usual, I walked entirely too much this week. The only time I’ve used any other form of transportation I’ve used was the cab I took to the hotel from the train station. I walked about 10 miles the other day around the city, after walking around the expo all day. Today I walked another 5 or so to/from the aquarium, and all around it. It was fun, but I wish Steph was here to see it. It’s too bad, cuz there’s no reason she couldn’t have come, since she’s hardly working this week with the office being remodled.

Other than the trip, not much has been goin on. I’m still waiting on my body kit for my car. They called me today to tell me that infiniti hasn’t even started shipping the parts out. That’s what I get for getting a car barely off the assembly line right?

I decided that we needed a real vacation, so I booked us a trip to Cancun next month for our anniversary. We’ll be staying in the same hotel we stayed at for our honeymoon. It will be nice to just relax for a week. Been a long time since we took a real vacation.

How you all doin?

Current Weather – Temp: 10 °F / -12 °C Wind Chill: -11 °F / -24 °C

Yeah… so it’s pretty damn cold today!

Friday night, we had our holiday party, and it was a lot of fun. Thanks to everyone that showed up. It means a lot to Steph, and we hope you had a good time.

I finally picked up my car on Saturday morning. I’m still waiting for them to get my aero kit in stock, then I’ll bring it back in for the install of it, and XM. The car is sweet! More than worth the wait.


Check out mah grill