Tomicles' Blog » Work

Are your text messages really private?

tomicles — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 23:15:59 +0000

I’ve posted a new blog entry over at Abrevity which talkes about some of the new issues with the recently ammended Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) and how they might make your text messages and other types of web communications available for e-discovery if your company gets sued, you know, the ones that you sent while you were at work. Check it out.

New boat blog setup!

Tomicles — Fri, 22 Jun 2007 04:05:38 +0000

I setup a new blog today, for use in my e-marketing class at sjsu. The URL is FAIL check it out. I’ll be blogging there about all my boat related activities.

August 22, Pickup Trailer, Work on Trailer and the rest of the week

tomicles — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 06:53:18 +0000

The boat trailer has been a pain in my ass for quite some time. It always seems that whenever we want to go sailing, something on the trailer doesn’t work, and its usually related to the lights. If you’ve been reading my blog you would know that I completely broke the trailer earlier in the year trying to pull the boat out of the water at Lexington Reservoir. The steel damage has since been fixed, but the remaining work to be done has been to get the trailer sandblasted and painted. Before I left last weekend for the lake, I took all the electrical and wiring off of the trailer, took off any interchangeable parts (such as the hand crank wench) and dropped it off to get painted and sandblasted. Monday morning I went back to pick it up and it now looks like a brand new trailer, painted black, with no rust at all except the wheel bolts. Now the work begins. Over the next three days I spent a total of 16 hours working on the trailer to bring it back up to a working state. The next weekend was my last weekend at the lake and I needed to have the trailer ready to pull the boat out of the water. After I picked up the trailer, I made myself a list of parts that I needed to put everything back together. This included 2 x 8 foot boards, carpet, stainless steel hardware to hold the wood onto the steel frame, new wire for the lights, black spray-paint, new wheel bolts and I’m sure a few more things I’m just not thinking of right now. I first went to Kragen in Los Gatos to pick up some new wheel bolts, some trailer electrical wire, a new connector to connect the lights from the trailer to the car. They didn’t have the bolts I needed or the wire in long enough lengths, so I just picked up the connector. Previously we had a little 4 pin adapter on the trailer, then a converter to connect it to the round 9 pin connector on the car. The adapter I picked up was a screw on connector of the 9 pin variety to directly hook onto the wires on the trailer so I no longer need the adapter. Next I went to Ace Hardware in Los Gatos, just to see if they had the wood boards that I needed. I was instructed to pick up some 8 foot lengths of pressure treated 6” wide boards. These boards are to mount directly to the steel frame and then get covered with carpet to actually hold the boat on the trailer. After Ace didn’t have the type of boards I needed, I went to Home Depot. It took me a little while to find the exact type of boards to get, but I found them, and luckily too, since they only had like 6 boards the length that I needed. At Home Depot I also picked up the carpet that I needed, with some glue to hold it on the boards. I looked for the bolts that I needed, but apparently nobody carries a selection of Stainless Steel hardware (nuts and bolds etc). Next I went to West Marine to look for my stainless steel hardware. They had quite the opposite effect, only carrying stainless steel hardware. I found what I needed and went home to start putting it together.
Cutting and putting this stuff all together took way longer than I expected. I already spent about 5 hours shopping for parts at a variety of places, and now the rest of the day was to be spent putting it all together. I had to counter sink the washer and bolt heads into the boards and mount them on the trailer before I could cover it with carpet. One issue I ran into was one stupid lock-nut that worked too well. I put the holes in the boards first, and hooked up the hardware to make sure it would fit, then I would counter bore the hole for a flat finnish. Well one of the bolts wouldn’t unscrew. First it broke my socket wrench adapter, the one that lets you put a smaller socket on a larger wrench, it just snapped. I found another socket that would fit directly on the wrench, tried to unscrew it, and boom, the bolt snapped in half. Back to West Marine again to buy more hardware. By the end of the evening I successfully connected the wooden boards to the trailer. No carpet, no electrical. The next day I put the first layer of carpet on the boards, and started to work on the electrical. It was a pain to cut the carpet to the right size, but I figured it out after a bit of trying. I ended up using the old carpet as a template for cutting the new. It took longer than expected to staple the carpet on the underside, and stretch it to fit evenly across the whole thing. And I had to do the process twice, as expected the second one was much easier.
Wiring the electrical was a breeze without the boat on the trailer. I had all new wire to use, and I recently already rewired it after the welding work on the trailer was done, so I was quite familiar with the process. After the electrical was done the only thing left to do was connect the riser that holds the front rubber bumper and the winch to pull the boat up onto the trailer. Another issue came up. Since the trailer was painted, I had no idea where exactly, closer to the car or closer to the boat, to mount the thing. Luckily i got it right on the dot, and didn’t have to mess with it at the lake. when all was said and done, it took me about sixteen hours over three days to complete the trailer. This would not have been possible if i was still working full time. I do enjoy my free time now.

Week of 8/15/2005

tomicles — Tue, 16 Aug 2005 06:47:28 +0000

This week I had a lot going on. For starters, I took the boat trailer to get painted and sandblasted in santa clara and went on a nice bikeride to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill where I saw a very nice sunset. I went up to Sausalito again to help out my friend Alfonso with some computer stuff, as well as worked a bit for Cybermanor. Later in the week I went to the Control4 Real Tour off highway 92 with Gordon from Cybermanor. This was a small demonstration of the Control4 system and how they will integrate into homes of the future for home control and automation. They presented some cool aspects of home automation that I just never thought of before, including some major safety features. Some of these safety features include shutting off central air if there is a fire to stop the spread of smoke, and the flashing of exterior lights in the event of a fire to help firefighters find the location, if for example the flames and/or smoke are not visible. The whole control4 system communicates via 3 methods. It will use Ethernet, 802.11, or Zigbee. Zigbee is the slowest but also the coolest of the three, and is only used for sending control commands, like switching a light on or off because it is quite slow on the throughput, but it is a meshed network, and with a range that isn’t that great, you just need to add more zigbee devices, such as dimmers or switches, to extend the network further in the home. they relay signals off of each other, know how to figure out the quickest path, and will correct the path if a part of the home looses power.

Birthday Weekend

Tomicles — Tue, 10 May 2005 04:16:26 +0000

Thursday morning I woke up sick and called in to work accordingly. After about an hour and a half my medicine started to really kick in and I was able to do some work from home. I ended up driving out to a client as well for like 4 hours to install a much delayed T1 line. Friday morning my alarm didn’t wake me up, and I was much sicker than the day before. I stayed in bed all day, slept and watched like 5 movies, I don’t even remember now what they were though. Friday evening I started to feel a little better, and I took Jennifer out at 12 midnight for her birthday downtown Los Gatos. We went to C.B. Hannigans, which was pretty dead, then met up with her 2 other friends Brian and Austin and went to Mountain Charlie’s. I didn’t get to drink because I was sick, and was planning on taking Jennifer home when we were done. Mountain Charlie’s was kinda cool, it was smaller than I expected, and they had an $8 cover charge, but there were tons of people and most of them were dancing. After I dropped Jennifer off at home, I went and picked up LGJeff from a party in Los Gatos, and we just drove around for a little bit, stopped by Safeway since I was extremely hungry, and I made it home and to bed around 3am.

Saturday morning I was still sick, but nothing like Friday morning. After getting home late i slept in until about 12:30 and really didn’t do anything all day until Jess showed up later in the afternoon. We went shopping at BestBuy to get my mom’s mothers day present. Then we went out to eat at chili’s, I had a large margarita and too much food. After dinner we went to the mall to get sunglasses. I found a pair that I like and need but decided to wait for the next paycheck to buy it. $145 I don’t need to spend right now. We rushed from the mall back to my house to get ready to go out. We were meeting up with Jennifer and some of her friends to celebrate her 21st birthday. Before we left the house, Jess and I split a diet coke with 3 shots of vodka each to get warmed up and save a little money from the bars. My brother dropped us off downtown San Jose at a bar called the Britannia Arms Pub where we met up with Jennifer and her friends. We sat there for a while and rung up about $120 on the tab between the nine of us before deciding to go to the next bar. We found ourselves a few blocks down Santa Clara street at a place called ‘Toons’. They had a sign on the street advertising $1 drinks, so it was a winner. We played several games of team pool and had lots of drinks, and started to dance a bit. Personally, by this point I had already consumed 8 shots of vodka (mixed in various things) and two redbull vodka’s. The price was right and the drinks were good. After a while at that bar we wandered around looking for San Jose bar and grill but there were tons of people outside and we didn’t want to wait. We ended up asking some guy where we should go, and he took us around the block to this other bar that was quite nice. Actually I don’t know about the bar that much, it was long and skinny, and I was very drunk by the time we got there. That bar was all about dancing. I danced the whole time I was there except for the last 2o mins or so, when I was just too drunk to stand up by myself. I had 3 corona’s there and that was a bad call on my part. I was gone by the time the evening was over. I called my dad to come pick me up, problem was, there were so many cops downtown, that he couldn’t get to where I was to pick me up. I ended up walking completely shit-faced from 2nd and Santa Clara St. downtown San Jose to the arena. Don’t know how I made it that far, but I did.

Sunday wasn’t such a good day. My stomach hurt all day and I didn’t want to eat. I drank about 3.5 liters of water and finally felt more hydrated around 9pm. Jess and I hung out at Starbucks for several hours and then went home to sleep. I had work on Monday and she has two job interviews.

New Bike

Tomicles — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 21:03:22 +0000

So Friday I took the day off work since I’ve been so busy. It was nice to have the time off, but I still had to answer my phone and help out clients if they needed it. Friday was also Payday, and it was my first paycheck with my raise, but what do ya know… my raise didn’t show up on the direct deposit. Luckily my boss rules and they were able to cut me an advance for my next paycheck which was the difference that I was supposed to get paid on this paycheck. It was finally time to go to the bike shop with intent to buy. After visiting many bike shops over the past few months, I decided that Summit Bicycles was the best place to buy because they offer free service and a lifetime warranty for any bike you buy from them. They are a Trek dealer so thats the type of bike I ended up getting. There were two bikes I was choosing from, and the main differences were that the nicer one had lockable shocks, and it had ball barrings instead of bushings on the rear shocks joints. The price tag was about $400 more, but it will be worth it in the long run to have a bike that will last longer, and the lockable shocks help out a lot while climbing up the hill, since you want to put your energy into climbing up the hill instead of making the shocks compress. It also had hydraulic disc breaks instead of mechanical ones. When all was said and done, I walked out of there empty handed, because they didn’t have what I purchased in stock, they had to order it. Next weekend I should be riding on my new bike, a Trek Fuel EX7 seen below. I cant wait. In the mean time, they are letting me use one of their rental bikes, since I couldn’t walk out of there with the bike I have purchased.

A week went by already

Tomicles — Sat, 09 Apr 2005 20:51:35 +0000

So this past week Ive been very busy with work. For some reason my job goes in extreme waves and Ill have two weeks of nothing to do, then a week of extreme non-stop computers to fix for everyone and their mother. Last week I installed Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 on a clients system, a Dell SC420, same server I’ve got at home and tested on, and after installing the service pack, the system blue screened in every boot mode with ‘REGISTRY_ERROR’ I called dell and after the first guy asked what I had done, he filled out a ticket for a software guy to call me. About 20 mins later I got a call from the software guy at dell, and he instructed me on where I could go to get a bootable ISO that Dell had prepared to fix the registry problems. It was about 150mb to download, but this client apparently has very fast dsl and it came down very quick. When all was done, the server worked perfectly as it should with service pack 1 and life went on. Ive got about 2 more SP1 installs that I still need to do, but I’m a little more afraid of it now than I was before.

Ive also been working on my boat trailer. I’ve got this 1,100 rpm grinder and i get to grind off all the rust on the trailer before I can prime it with this rust crap, then with primer, then went 2 or 3 coats of paint. Oh joy.

Travel to Irvine

Tomicles — Fri, 25 Mar 2005 07:03:11 +0000

Well come Monday morning I had to wake my butt out of bed at 5:30am to get ready for a flight down to Irvine. I had a 7:30 flight on southwest airlines to go visit company headquarters and meet the people I work for. I didn’t get to bed on time as usual, partly because I wanted to get an A seat on the flight, and pre check-in online is available at 12:01 the day of the flight. I checked in at 12:08 and apparently everyone else had that idea, and I was the 11th one to check in. I’ve found that I really don’t sleep well when I have a very fixed deadline in the morning, such as a flight. I’m always afraid that I’ll over sleep and miss what ever it is that I’m supposed to do. I’m just glad I don’t have to do that sort of thing very often.

My flight in Irvine landed about 10 mins early, but my ride was already there to pick me up, only problem was, it was a 2 story loop, one for pickup and one for drop off, and since I didn’t have any luggage checked, I didn’t follow the signs to the baggage claim, and ended up on the top of the loop where people were getting dropped off. I would have gone downstairs but I didn’t know that it was an option. So after a few loops, and talking on the phone, Lacie finally made it to where I was and I had a ride to the office.

It took about 20 mins on ‘the’ 405 to get to the office, and once we were there, I got the ‘grand tour’. But that was interrupted by clients calling for me so I had to sit and do some actual work. For a trip to go check out the main office, I sure did get a lot of remote work done on Monday.

For lunch, much of the company went out together. I don’t remember what the place we went was called, but it was very good, and they had 200+ beer taps sold by the yard or half yard. Needless to say, I went back there for dinner and tried some beers :) I also got this video (plays with QuickTime)

After dinner I took the free shuttle back to my hotel, and watched a movie on HBO called ‘Sometimes in April’ It was a decent movie about the Genocide in Rwanda in 1994. Covers the basic history and goes into the killings with great detail. Unlike more recent movies ‘Hotel Rwanda’, this movie was shot in Rwanda, and has a mostly Rwandan cast too, they look like Rwandans and sound like them too. It was kind of cool to hear some of their language again, I recognized lots of it. Most of the movie was in English. I can’t wait to see the movie Shooting Dogs which hopefully will come out soon, as I’m in it along with my friends who went to Rwanda with me. I guess I should also go see Hotel Rwanda, which unfortunately was mostly filmed in South Africa, which might be the reason I still have not seen it. Maybe Ill watch that after I see Shooting Dogs to see how they compare.

I had a somewhat bumpy but quick flight back on Tuesday evening, got another A seat, and since it was an evening flight, I didn’t have to check in online at 12:01am. Oh yea, I got a raise while I was down there too, and my new business cards are going to say ‘Sr. Technician’

LAN Weekend

Tomicles — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 04:46:13 +0000

So this weekend I went to another small LAN. The cool thing about this LAN was that it was located in a private office of the KICU 36 Action 6 building in San Jose. The LAN seemed to be like much of the other LAN parties with this group, arguing and bitching about what game to play, nobody having any games installed to pay, and by the time someone is done installing it, everyone else decides to play something else. I played Gerry’s Mod for HL2 most of the time, trying to first make drivable vehicles, and then a flying vehicle. Both seem to be quite difficult, but i finnished with a hovering platform that was somewhat controllable. Danman was there, sporting his hacked Dell SC420 with nice ATI video card and new Dell 24″ Widescreen LCD (1920×1200), which is really the main reason I went I think, so I could check out his new screen.

On Sunday Dan and I woke up around 12:30 after going to bed around 3am. We went to Erik’s Deli for lunch and then he took off. After he was gone I went on yet another bikeride, in the rain. Tomorrow morning at 6am I have to leave for Irvine, to meet the rest of the company that I work for, and I wouldnt be able to ride again until wednesday. I had a good ride. I did the usual ride to the top of St. Joseph’s hill and then down to the launch ramp, then down the creek trail, arriving at home just before it started to get dark. I didnt make it to bed on time, instead I went to starbucks, worked on restyling my blog. I had to stay up until after 12:01am because thats when Soutwest Airlines lets you do early check-in online. I checked in to my flight at 12:08am and I was the 11th person to check-in. Aparently everyone likes to stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night just so they can do their early check-in to get a good seat on the plane. For those of you who dont know, southwest does not have assigned seating. Depending on when you sign in, you get an A, B, or C seat. A’s get to go on the plane first, then B’s and C’s. Its worth being an A because you can sit on the isle or window right in the front of the plane, so its much easier to get off when you land.

Power Supply went Kaput

tomicles — Sun, 20 Mar 2005 03:45:34 +0000

Yesterday I went to work as usual, plugged in my laptop, and then proceeded to visit a few clients without it. Little did I know that my power adapter was not working, so instead of just sitting there, my laptop battery was gettin lower and lower. When I finally returned after lunch, my battery was at 3% and the system started to shut down just as I was about to start doing something. I tinkered with the power supply a bit and could get the light to come on just for brief moments, just to have it go out again. I called my leet dell number (1-888-569-3355) and someone answered with no phone tree asking for my service tag so I could be routed to the right department. They transfered me to whatever department handles the Inspiron’s and I got to speak to some lady that didnt speak english as her first language :( Her accent wasnt too bad, but she talked real slow which was a little annoying. After I finnished setting up the RMA, I asked to be transfered to the spare parts devision, and I ordered two additional power adapters. The company I work for paid for one of them and I paid for the other, since I need to have one at the office.