I started working on my house this weekend. I was super ambitous and thought I'd get both rooms prepped and primed this weekend. I tried this orange solvent to strip the paint off of the nasty window frame in the bedroom. It seemed like it was working well, but turned out to be a pain in the ass to clean off. On my 4th (of 6) trips to Home Depot I picked up a cleaning bit for Ron's cordless drill to take the paint and solvent off from the small spaces. The brushes disintegrated within a few minutes and didn't get too much cleaning done. I ended up taking out my big carbide scraper and taking all of the paint off with that. My dad helped me fix the ceiling of the bedroom, there was some water damage and the plaster was coming off. I used my new cold chisel to take the plaster down. I then put up some gyp board and mudded it. On Saturday I took the carpet and padding out of the room. What was left was tack board along the walls and about 200 staples in the floor. I thought to myself, "Hey, I can take staples out no problem." The needle nose pliers couldn't get a grip on the staples, so I had to take a screwdriver and a rubber mallet to get them up a little. Then I took the pliers and pulled the staples out. My last project was to start taking the security bars off of the windows. I'm using my buddy Vince's grinder for this job. It seems to take about 3 minutes a bolt, not too bad. I'm wearing a tanktop on my head to cover my neck and face from the spark showers that erupt from the grinder (which looks pretty cool.) I got two windows cleared, just 8 more to go.

My house closed last Wednesday as I was sitting in Ron's truck on I-84 in Utah. Now I can get excited about buying picture molding hooks. I started my move last night by taking over a bottle of Vodka and Southern Comfort. I looked throughout the house and saw how much cleaning I'll be doing over the next few weeks. Fun stuff. The refrigerator is standing in front of the hallway door, so I think it's about time to get a sub-zero undercounter unit. I think the first thing I need is a pull up bar. Gotta have priorities.

Ron, Henry and I just got back from Moab this evening. It was an awesome time, we had good rides and no one got hurt. We rode Bartlett Slickrock, Monitor Merimack, Slickrock, the bottom of Porcupine Rim and Amasa Back. My brakes wonked out on me again so I ditched them to get some mechanical Avid disc brakes and they work really well. So I'll be trying to hock my other brakes after I get them warranteed. It was Jeep Jamboree week and we got to see the thousands of Jeeps and other four wheeled monsters. We hung out at Potato Salad to see if anyone would mess up their rigs, and came up flat. But we got to watch as people threw their vehicles up the wall and get heckled by the crowd. One guy in a Toyota was having a hard time getting up and got yelled at by a young girl "You want to use my winch!?!" That was pretty damn funny.
Jumping at Porcupine Rim

Last night I received a response from the Lewis County District Court stating that I only owe $300 now. So it was better that I wrote a little letter explaining my actions.

One of my projects at work is a data server that uses SOAP as its communication protocol. A year ago I tried, unsuccessfully, to make the server multi-threaded. This was a bust because in C++ the support libraries are not thread-safe. So I spent over 3 months trying to fix this and got no where. A co-worker stumbled upon STLport, a thread-safe STL implementation. It was supposed to be faster than the normal STL, and in our micro-benchmarking, it was. I re-enabled the server to be multi-threaded with the snazzy STLport and expected the program to scale better, that is to say, handle more concurrent clients without performance degredation. And it sucked. We actually had a slower performing program. 2 weeks later we realized that STLport was in fact two times as slow as the normal STL when it was run in a threaded environment. Super. The threads helped the scalability a bit, but couldn't over come the slow STL. Another option was to use a Apache module and have the server plug into an Apache process. I spent about 3 days working on that before I realized it wasn't going to be smooth because the support wasn't really there. I decided to take the Apache process model and apply it to my server. Old school programmers would normally do a fork()/exec() for each incoming request, letting the child process handle the request. This isn't so great because it's expensive to spawn a new process for each small request. So instead, I used a different model of just spawning multiple processes at the beginning that all listen on the same port. When it came to testing this out, we saw a whopping gain of 18% when using multiple clients. Why so slow? HP-UX is my reason. The CPU is maxed out with one process and we max out both CPUs when multiple processes are running. This should gain you about 80% (a guess, really) performance gain owing to the increased CPU time. But HP strikes again and you only see a 18% gain. There must be another bottleneck, like the memory, disk or bus. Really lame. It's kinda funny to spend over 4 months on a project to see a net result of 18% for all of your work. I keep telling anyone who listens that we need to ditch HP and get some Linux boxes. I get nods of the head, but I guess we're not in a position to come and use present day technology.

I was talking with my buddy at work Dipesh about my ticket today. He said I should try and get it reduced, as it's a very large fine. So I called up to the state of Washington and asked if it's possible to get it reduced somehow. The nice lady on the phone said I could have a "Mitigation Hearing", and since I'm over 30 miles away I can do it by mail. So I get to fill out some papers later and try and explain the circumstances of the ticket. I'm thinking I'll say that I was speeding but that I changed lanes to pass the guy in the left lane because they don't move to the right. This has been a pet peeve of mine for some time now - people in the left lane going slower than normal traffic. They have large signs all over the place that state "Stay Right Except To Pass". And these people aren't passing anyone, they just stay in the left lane. I doubt my line of attack being "I admit I was speeding and just went around this person because they don't pay attention to signs and are unaware of traffic flow" will get me anywhere, but it can't hurt. Unless they say "You sir, are a dumbass," and double my ticket. I'm not looking to get the ticket dropped, just changed to a speeding ticket instead of "negligent driving." I have visions of my insurance company calling me and saying "You sir, are a dumbass," and double my premiums.

I was driving back from visiting Sara and her buddies up on Puget Sound near Tacoma last night. So I'm driving a bit over the limit and get tired of people in the left lane going slow and not moving over, so I hop to the right lane to pass them. I look behind me and a burnt orange Impala is behind me, whatever. There was plenty of space so I hop back to the left lane and keep going. I look back again and see the Impala gun it and weave inbetween the two last cars with his car rollling from the swerve. I thought to myself, "What an asshole, what's his rush?" Cue lights. Oh, he's a trooper and his rush is to give my dumb ass a ticket. Shit. So I start to pull over to the left median and notice it is all gravely and has junk everywhere. So I go to the right median (signaling like a good driver.) 'You know why I pulled you over?' I thought I should say "Cos I'm an ass?", but decided just to say "Yes, sir" 'How fast did you think you were going?' "A little over 80?", as opposed to saying "Well, ya see, I was doing 110 on that last uphill." 'I got you at 86 [in a 70 zone].' I nodded. 'I radioed my dispatcher I was going to pull you over and then you weaved in front of that car.' Swerve? Man, I just changed lanes. I nodded again. He left and came back with a ticket, 'After seeing your record I'm just going to give you this infraction ticket.' 538. That must be the time I thought to myself. Crap! That's dollars, not even like pesos or anything! I figure it's been about 3 years, so it's time to get a ticket. As I slowly drove home I stayed in the right lane at about 70 and noticed people whipping by. "Where's the police now?" So, word to the wise, don't speed, and don't pass people on the right up in Washington. They're sneaky and drive in unmarked cars that roll when trying to catch you on I-5.

Alex, my buddy from Brown, came out from Chicago last Wed. to hang out for the weekend. His wife Susa flew out Friday afternoon too. I took them rock climbing and to Stanich's (the best place for burgers in portland), and finally to the beach.

Well, the house process is coming along, we are giving the owners a list of things to be repaired before I move in. Hopefully it'll push through soon.

So I'm killing time waiting for compiles by reading the Best of Craigslist. There is some funny shit in there. The one I like the most is this one, about going bald.