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.

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.

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.

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’