Just over a week has passed since I was RIF’d from my most recent job at AMD. It is taking some getting used to waking up in the morning with no structured day or firm place to go. On the plus side, I am using substantially less fuel than I was just a few weeks ago, so that must be good I guess. In the meantime I continue to look around for what my next gig will be.
Next on the list of things to be worried about is my flying or lack thereof. I’m at a point in my training where I must complete a written test before I can get any closer to getting my pilot’s license. It’s a bear, since it is an array of questions, numbers, arithmetic and other stuff that I have to know cold before I go in and take the test. I’m getting better, but rote memorization has never been my strong point.
Finally, I’ve used my abundance of spare time to go around the house and fix just about everything that is doable by myself. With that complete I’ve spent a lot of time visiting Liberty City (in GTA4) and Turkfrackistan (in BF: Bad Company). Sadly, neither of these locations helps me either exercise, meet women or get a tan. I do get to meet new and interesting people, then shoot them, so it does have some perks.
I’m not a sports kind of guy so while everyone else in the USA was busy guzzling beer and cheering for some football team or another I was tackling my own challenge: the tear down and installation of a new MGW short throw shifter in the C6. It certainly wasn’t a cakewalk to do but now that I’ve done it I have a better understanding of how the various plastic bits on my dash came to be together.
The whole goal was to reduce the shifting throw (the back and forth motion) during gear changes and on that part it was a success. The downer is that some parts of the instruction process were a bit vague and my parts on the car were a bit different than the instructions dealt with. An email has been dispatched to the company supplying the new parts and we’ll see if I can improve the situation. All in all, it probably wasn’t a super hard thing to modify but it did involve a lot of patience and ingenuity to get all the bits apart and then reassembled again.
Oh, and it wouldn’t be a complete day without me messing up something. I now have no emergency flasher button as I forgot to hook it up again when I reassembled all the parts. Luckily (sort of) that I have to do another tear down once the email comes back with advice on the fit and throw issues I raised.
If someone ever wanted to know what lengths I would go to in order to get high def TV programming, this is it. With a large helping of PVC pipe, fittings, caps, a half mile of coax, an indoor FM antenna, a UHF/VHF combiner, some bolts, wing nuts, washers and a bonafide real antenna (DB2) I have produced this monster eyesore on my patio deck.
It points toward Sutro Tower where most of the Bay Area’s HDTV transmission antennas are located and it doesn’t do half bad, considering I’m more than 50 miles away. It’s reasonably weatherproof and it doesn’t cost a fortune (at least not yet). It picks up almost all the stations I care about and feeds them to my DirecTV HR20 and Windows Vista Media Center PC. It is even reasonably wind-proof, as evidenced by recent 40+ MPH winds.
In short, it seems to work pretty well even if it is sad to look at.
December 2nd, 2007
11:27 pm
General
Since I always seem to be writing about flying, I thought that I’d deliberately throw in one post that has nothing to do with that. I have determined that my life is not complete without a Dreyer’s natural grape fruit bar. Sure, I’ve written about it before, but I now now that I really badly need to have a box of these goodies in the freezer at all times.
It is made of grapes, so it has to be healthy, right?
I can now say that I’ve fully lived through an earthquake. This week a 5.6 magnitude trembler rolled, quite literally, through the house at around 8pm. Furniture moved, things swayed, and dishes clanked. And it was all over in about 30 seconds. I’ve certainly been through earthquakes before, but strangely never at home and not one this big.
Nothing was ruined and only a few items fell out of place. Best of all there wasn’t a sense of real panic or desperation, just a feeling that something was going bonkers and that I should probably find a spot where things won’t fall on my head to ride it out. I certainly want to acquire some safety gear and supplies now, though.
It’s been a month and I’m still pounding out the daily work schedule and trying to sneak in some flying where and when I can. Along the way I’ve slowed down my corporate travel, but that ends this week, as I start hitting the road to see customers wherever they may be. That can only mean less GA flying and a lot more bad airport experiences.
At least I’m still employed, right? I could have ended up like these poor hosers.
It seems that I’ve been on the road constantly, and that I’ve done very little general aviation flying. Upon looking back at my schedule since January, it does appear that most every week and weekend I’m in another city or country, talking to a different customer or partner, eating at a new or similar restaurant and staying at another hotel chain. I certainly have the flight miles (and nagging cough) to prove it.
I also have started lacking in my ability to get to the local airport and fly, and when I do get out to the airport these day my skills aren’t what they used to be. That’s a bummer, as I feel like I’m going backwards in my training, and that really bites. The learning to fly stuff is what helps me keep my head clear of all the work related mumbo-jumbo, but when it isn’t going well its hard to have a good outlet.
Here’s hoping I get some serious downtime in the near future and can get back on the pilot learning curve, pointed upward again.
I’m going to try this new theme for a bit and see how it works for me. Maybe more photo’s will slip into the design if things are easier (and more fluid) with this layout. We’ll see.
I have just about recovered from the ordeal that is getting ready for, staging, shipping, demonstrating, and tearing down a full show load out for CES. I can’t say that I enjoyed it, or that I’d volunteer to do as much work again, but I’m glad its all done.
Severe pain came from the logistics of getting people (namely me) and equipment (some 80+ boxes of it) to and from the show. As the largest single event in Las Vegas, CES is uniquely positioned to stress out every part of the infrastructure needed to travel, house, transport, and sustain a group of nearly 200,000 people for a week. As much as I dislike the driving situation in the Bay Area, I now have to thank Las Vegas and their elegant street construction planning for reminding me of how much fun driving 5 MPH for an hour can be.
I now get to start planning for the next series of events, customer contacts, and traveling. One can only hope that things go smoother the next time around. A little less smoky smell and a lot more sleep per day can’t hurt, either.
After a short 3 days and change in OK, plus a day and a half in Tahoe, I get a short rest in San Jose for the next week. Well, that isn’t really true, as I must now scramble to get all of the work done to make it to CES this coming weekend and all next week. But at least for today it seemed a bit more subdued than usual, or maybe I’m just not sure what to call the time you have outside of work.
What did get me wondering about stuff is the temperature at the house, which is hovering in the 65F area and can’t seem to recover from that range. Perhaps its from a week of having the heater turned off, but the poor thermostat just can’t seem to catch up to the temperature/time settings as they arrive on schedule. In the meantime I’ll be wearing my fleece, thank you very much.
On the heavily annoying side of things are drivers who clearly don’t understand where they are or what they are doing, thus preventing me from making to or from any location in my usual speed and grace (which is to say I provide neither). I’m not sure, but it seems that during the holidays people must fly to the Bay Area and drive around like lost, drunken lemmings just to spite me.
Finally I am spanked again for not having all of my end of the year memberships done. I went to the R/C field to fly today and my membership in that club wasn’t completed, so I was sidelined. I come home to find my AAA membership expired, and I’m sure all of my magazine and professional organization memberships have lapsed as well. Can’t any of these things be setup on auto-pay?