so i guess ive neglected my blogging duties for a while now, i think it may have had something to do with all the comment spam that i still need to clear out. Anyways, I guess i really never talked much about my new job, nor the fact that ive continued to ride my bike on the weekend since i cant ride durring the week any longer.

As far as my new job goes, its basically the same stuff I was doing at Cybermanor. Onsite tech support for small business up to roughly 50 employees, though most of our clients are smaller than that. Plus we wouldnt really have any clients bigger than that because those types of clients have a need for full time IT work and tend to just hire out their own staff to do that. On a day-t0-day basis, I try to be at the office by 0830 and i get to leave at 1730, with an hour for lunch. I tend to go home for lunch these days as I’m trying to save a bit of money and get out of debt. I figured out that eating out every day for lunch costs me over $200 a month, and its just not worth it. I still find that even though I know I have to get up in the morning, I’m still staying up to late at night. At work in the mornings, I’m usually filling out my timesheets on this horribly designed, time wasting, timesheet accounting web application. Since this site is very poorly designed, I’d say it takes me at least 15 mins per job longer than it should take to fill out my billable hours timesheets. The interface on this system just has too many pages and diffrent windows that pop up for entering data than it should. The page is also hosted on a saturated link at our Irvine office in Southern CA, thus making each page load very slow indeed. Other than dealing with timesheets, the job runs very smoothly. I usually have emails in the morning from the customers that are having issues which get scheduled for that day or sometime later in the week, and thats what keeps me busy. When Im not onsite, i have various things i can check up on for each client to make sure things are running smoothly from my cube at the office. When there isnt much to do, and no clients are having issues, I’ve been reading up on getting microsoft certified.

Ive been keeping up with my bikeriding on the weekends when I have time. Ive really cooled down on how aggressivly I come downhill since my little accident at the end of last year. Some things just scare me now while I’m riding that just didnt bother me before, mainly mud. Before, mud was fun, but now that the gound is very saturated and mushy, the mud isnt fun anymore. Istead of just getting the bike all muddy, and providing for a softer ride, the super muddy areas are extremely accident prone. Some mud looks fine to ride over, but then you get into it and the bike feels like its going to just fall over. Balance on a bike is achieved by steering in the correct direction with minimal movements, but in that type of mud, turning just a slight amount causes the bike to loose tracktion and fall over. In addition to being more careful, I also almost bought a new bike last weekend. Im glad that i didnt because now i have a new car. Soon enough though I’ll be buying a new bike. Im thinking about getting a Trek Liquid 25. This bike does just about everything i want it to do, but it would put me back a pretty penny around ~$2200

Well as i mentioned briefly before, I finally got a real full time job. The company I now work for is called the GDR Group, which stands for the initials of the three partners that started the company. More info about the company can be found at our website, but basically GDR Group is a total solution provider. Companies need many things to get started and to keep them running. Internet access, structured wiring, telephone deployment, web development, outlook network services via exchange, file and print sharing, firewalls, VPN’s, and the list could go on. The idea behind GDR Group is to have all of these services setup and maintained through one party. No longer will the customer have to call several diffrent providers and staff full time employees to provide these services withing their company. GDR Group sends out techs, uses its telco contacts to improve data and voice service deployment, and contracts out good voice and data cable companies to setup and maintain your business so you dont have to. Ok enough talking about what my company does, as for what I do, Ive been meeting the clients in the San Jose and greater bay area, and learning how each client is setup. The typical place has a t1 for data, another for voice, a sonicwall firewall, several vpn connections, several 2000 or 2003 servers providing basic day to day tasks that small to medium sized businesses need. my job is to drive to these companies, wherever they are, and perform routine maintinence tasks on their servers, install patches on their desktops, and troubleshoot and fix any computer, internet, or phone problems they might have. We are the people they call whenver they have any kind of comptuter issue, and we have decent response time.

With all that said, and almost a couple weeks now under my belt working there, im starting to feel more confident, and ive visited clients by myself now. Im also looking into getting a new-ish car to use for work, since ill be driving a lot. I think im gonna get a 2004 mazda 3 hatchback. 160hp 5 speed manual with 17″ rims and lots of extras for the price, and its a lot of fun to drive. The problem is finding a good used one for the right price. Since its still such a new car, there arent too many used ones out there, and the ones that are there are selling for close to the cost of a new one. zoom zoom.

This week I’ve had really bad luck… in my previous post I talked about how I fell last Sunday and messed up my knee… On Tuesday I got back on my bike… it actually hurt my knee less to ride my bike than it did to walk. I did my bike ride with no problems at all, came home and rested. On Wednesday I rode my bike on the city streets so I could pick up my paycheck and deposit it on my way up the hill… as I was going through downtown Los Gatos; I came up behind a city bus. as traffic was going pretty slow, I looked to see if there was a bus stop and proceeded to pass the bus on the right. As I was right next to the bus it started to invade my space for riding my bike.. I don’t think the driver saw me at all. There was a little driveway in the sidewalk so I attempted to go onto the sidewalk, but my front wheel caught on the little bump from the driveway and wouldn’t go up right away… so it sorta threw me off balance. I finally made it onto the sidewalk to then right away clip my right handlebar on a tiny tree. this flipped my handlebars into a 90 degree right turn and threw me off the side of the bike onto the sidewalk. I think the bus driver saw it happened and slowed down, but I got back on my bike right away and continued to ride. From this fall I badly bruised the inside of my left leg, its all purple, and I also bruised my left thumb joint in the palm of my hand. It was a little sore but I didn’t thing too much of it. I continued on my bike ride through town and up the hills. I didn’t really notice the pain in my hand until the ride got bumpy on the way down. I made it home, but I iced my hand when I arrived because it was in pain. I also didn’t go by the gym after my bike ride as I had planned because my hand hurt.

I didn’t ride on Thursday or Friday… Thursday was a big day for me… I had an eleven o’clock Cybermanor job in Portola valley, and then a 3:30 job interview at Google. I cant say much about the job interview (NDA) other than that place is really cool and I think I did well. It took me an hour to get home from Google on shoreline blvd in 6 o’clock traffic; it only took me 15 mins to get there.

Friday was another good day. I didn’t have anything planned, so I slept in, and decided to go on a bike ride in the afternoon, but I didn’t make it on the bike ride. Instead I went to a bike shop called Supergo in Mountain View to buy some new clothes for biking. I needed some wet weather clothes as well as a 2nd pair of pants so I could be washing one while using the other. There was a very nice lady there that helped out a bunch… I ended up trying on several things, and purchased the ones I wanted. I got a nice skintight undershirt to keep me dry and warm, as well as a real bike jersey for riding. But the coolest thing I got, were arm and leg warmers. Instead of wearing full spandex everywhere, they make these spandex arm and leg extenders that go up under my shorts and sleeves, so it looks like I’ve got on full spandex, but I can take it off easily and put it in my bag when I’m no longer cold. I also decided to get shoes and clips. The new shoes almost look like normal tennis shoes, but come with a spot on the bottom to attach a petal bracket. In addition to the shoes I got new clip petals. This allows me to lock my feet onto the petals while riding, which gives me more power going up hill. I had never thought about it before, but it also gives me the ability to ‘jump’ the bike. If I jump while on the bike now, both wheels come off the ground, and I could prolly jump onto a sidewalk from the street while riding in parallel to the sidewalk. I had to come home and get my bike to have the petals installed. LGJeff came with me when I went back so I wouldn’t have to sit in traffic coming home the 2nd time. It was too late to go on a bike ride when I got home, so tomorrow is the day to try out the new gear. After we got back we watched a movie and just hung out for the rest of the night.

Saturday isn’t over yet, but my bad luck with bike rides got worse. I really liked using the new petal clips and shoes today… It gave me a lot more power, as I can now pull up with my legs instead of just pushing down. I was able to complete my usual bike ride in a much better gear than ever before… I had the petal gear set on the middle gear the whole time, something I haven’t done before. Just before I got to the top however, I was climbing up slowly, and got my wheel into a water channel. I didn’t remember in the split second that I had to unclip my shoes from the petal, so I just fell over sideways. I probably wouldn’t have been hurt at all, except for my hand that I hurt on Wednesday… I slammed it down on the ground real hard again and then couldn’t hold the handlebars anymore, nor could I grab anything with my left hand. It got a little swollen and I used the bladder of my camelback to cool down my hand. Wasn’t as good as ice but I think it was better than nothing. I made it down the hill very slowly after resting for a while at the top. It hurt real bad coming down the hill… the bumps forced me to use both hands on the handlebars, even though it hurt to do so. Once I got down to the bottom of Lexington Dam, I was able to ride home almost with one hand the whole way. Now I’m writing this, bummed out because I’ll prolly have to ride at the gym for the next few days… I need to heal more before I go back up the hill again. I also need to practice falling on the grass and burn it into my mind to unclip always (to unclip I have to twist my ankle outward a little.

Wow its been almost a week since my last blog, and I was trying to stay so on top of it… oh right, server was down, couldn’t blog. Anyways, Dan showed up last Wednesday and was around until Saturday. It was nice to have him back in town for a while because I haven’t really seen him since we got back from Rwanda. He arrived early in the evening and stayed at my house while he was in town. On Thursday Dan and I went to go pick out and have his new stereo installed.

Thursday October 7th, 2004
Dan got a new stereo. With new speakers installed a week earlier, he still needed to get a new deck, a sub, and an amp for the sub, and have the whole works installed. Dan wanted to get an alpine deck that had an aux input so he could hook up his iPod to the car, but he didn’t know that when a deck said ‘iPod Ready’ it didn’t mean it had a line input, it had an optional data/power cable for the iPod which pulls track and playlist info onto the alpine deck. It was a hundred dollars extra for the iPod adapter kit, and it was well worth it. Just hook up the iPod, and you see it boot into ‘alpine’ mode, with a little alpine logo on the iPod screen. I knew we would see this type of deck someday, didn’t think it would be so soon, and the alpine version of the iPod adapter seems much better than the BMW version, because your not limited to using one of five playlists. After we were done fixing up the stereo, LGJeff came to pick us up, took us back to my house, and Dan and I went on a bike ride up Jones trail. Dan had a little trouble with the bike ride because the bike he had didn’t have a great rear tire, it was bald and therefore had no traction for going up the steep hill. After the bike ride LGJeff came to take us back to the car audio place where Dan got his new stereo in Sunnyvale. We went to Togo’s for dinner and then headed to he.net to pick up the server for it wasn’t responding. When we got to he.net and hooked up the colo-cart there were hard disk DMA errors on the screen… there was a bad disk in the system and it caused the system to crash completely. It didn’t even respond to sysreq commands. It was late by the time we got home, around 2am, and I still had to clean my room, because the clears would be here in the morning to mop the floor. It took me about another hour and a half before I was able to go to bed, but my room is finally spotless.

Friday October 8th, 2004
In the morning when I got up, I went to wake up Dan in the other room and we got ready to go on a bike ride. As much as going on a bike ride every day makes me sore and tired, going on a bike ride in the morning sure does wake me up. Dan did better on the bike ride today than he did yesterday too. The rest of the afternoon was pretty uneventful until we decided to have a party at the beach. But in order to use the beach house I had to finish one of my chores. Finishing washing the windows on the house inside and out was the task at hand and luckily LGJeff and Dan were there to help out or it would have never gotten done in time. We were meting some people at the beach at around 8 and we didn’t actually make it there until about 7:20. We unloaded the wood and waited for the other people to show up. LGJeff actually beat us there with Jacob and another friend, then Vess, Brian, and another Brian. Eventually Jeff showed up, and Dan went to go pick up Adam because matt and Janine were taking too long, matt had to work late. We finally decided to throw all the wood on the fire at the same time, and it made a very nice large fire. Another unusual thing that happened was the drives on the road that night. At like three different occasions a car would drive by the beach, just holding down their horn for like 20 second. Later Dan decided to do this himself. Dan took forever to go get Adam and while we were gone, the police came by and kicked us (and everyone else) off the beach. Apparently the beach closes at 10pm on Friday night in Santa Cruz. Those of us that were down there walked back up to the beach house and at about the same time, Dan arrived with Adam, and matt arrived with Janine. We all went inside, and tried to figure out what to go do, and eventually we decided to go try another beach… I think it was the 21st street beach near the AM radio station. On the way finding it we didn’t have the best directions, but Dan felt it necessary to hold down his horn while we passed what looked like a small party at some house. Once we got there we parked in the small parking lot and took the 13$ of wood that Adam bought at the store down to the beach. We went around the little rock jetty in the beach hoping that if they were trying to close down the beach we wouldn’t be seen, but sure enough, soon as we barely started to get the fire going, a police officer came by with a flashlight, and told us the beach was closed. He also had to make sure our cooler didn’t have any alcohol in it, which it didn’t. We left the beach and went back to the beach house, where we talked about stuff for the next few hours, during which time some people left and others stayed the night. In the morning Dan woke up early to go take Adam home and when he came back, he woke up everyone else; just to leave to go get the oil changed in his car. I ended up coming home with Jeff.

Saturday 9th of October 2004
By the time I got home from the beach today my parents had already left for the weekend. They went to a wedding in Washington until Monday. Sometimes its real nice to have the house to myself. I didn’t have any noise restrictions and could play music at a decent volume in my room into the wee hours of the night. Saturday afternoon I went on a bike ride. I decided to go to the top of Jones hill, and I thought I would try to do it without stopping at all. As I was almost to the top, non stop, I stood up on my bike to do the final sprint to the top of the hill about 20 or 30 yards ahead, and my chain snapped. I’m definitely starting to see the ware on my bike, as it sat outside for 4-5 years untouched. I’ve put some money into it recently to bring it back up to par, but its degrading quickly. I think the bike might last me another 4-6 weeks before it needs a full rebuild, basically keep the frame and rebuild the rest from new parts. I could keep repairing things as they break, but it’s going to get expensive and dangerous. I’m also getting to the point where I could really use a better bike. Full suspension and disc breaks would really help with the rides I’ve been doing recently, and they will only get harder as I get into better shape. I ended up walking the final 20-30 yards to the top and pulled out the phone, I called LGJeff and Jacob. Neither of them answered their phones so I tried again, and finally I was able to reach LGJeff. He agreed to take his mom’s car and meet me at the bottom of the hill. You would think that you could just ride the bike with no chain since it was all down hill, which is exactly what I did, but the pedals when there is no chain are very dangerous. They spin freely in both directions and therefore provide no support for down hilling. If my foot were to slip, the pedal would spin really fast and hit my shin when it came around the other side. Luckily this didn’t happen, but I was very afraid of it. LGJeff came over later that night to hang out, we watched some nip tuck, and then went on some errands. Luckily our errands were to two places that were open 24 hours a day. We went to Krispy Kreme on our way to hurricane electric to again pickup my server for maintenance. It was sort of a crazy trip around the south bay, we went form 17 to 85 north to 101 north to krispy kreme, then 101 south to 237 east to 880 north to mission to hurricane electric and then from mission to 680 south to 880 south to lark to home. It was a long trip but it was nice that we didn’t have to backtrack at all except for Winchester.

Sunday 10th of October, 2004
Someone came to look at the truck today at 10am, so I had to get myself out of bed, after having little sleep. I don’t think they will buy the truck, he seemed to like it but his wife didn’t. After I was done dealing with the truck, I ate some cereal, rice krispies with sliced up banana. After that it was finally time for my weekly, ‘long ass why did I do it what was I thinking’ bike ride. But first I had to go buy a new chain for the bike. It ended up costing me $30 and 30 minutes to have it installed before my bike was useable again. They had to size, cut, and install the chain on my bike. I asked to keep the extra chain links so that if I break this one, ill have some spare links to replace it with on the trail. Now all I need is a chain tool so I can actually do that. I decided to change it up a bit, and instead of doing something I’d done before, I flipped an old bike ride around, and I did it in reverse order. I started at my house, and rode down Winchester through downtown Los Gatos, then onto Jones trail and up the hill. I went all the way to the top of St. Joseph’s hill and talked to an interesting older guy at the top who had just hiked up there. I went down St. Joseph’s hill very quickly and it was a lot of fun. Once I got to the water, I went around towards the boathouse, but instead of going around the corner and up the hill to the boat house, I went up limekiln trail by the quarry and up to Priest Rock Trail, the four ways split you see on the map. Limekiln trail doesn’t meet at the peak of Priest Rock Trail, there is a little climb to the summit, and then it’s all a downhill descent to the boat house. Before I got to the boat house, I stopped and took some pictures of a really old tractor that’s parked and rusting on the trail, you can see one below. I finished the bike ride in a few hours, and went home exhausted. I don’t remember exactly what I did for the rest of the afternoon; I think it consisted of watching Nip/Tuck and fixing my server. I did in the evening take my finished, fixed server back to hurricane electric, where it now sits, and you’re reading this blog from. I was really tired driving home, but I made it safely and went to bed after I made sure everything on the server was working correctly.

Monday 11th of October, 2004
Monday I slept in. I was up late and didn’t have anything to do until 1:30 in the afternoon. I went for a meeting at Cybermanor, the company I worked at while I was in High School. They are going to have me do some things part time as needed. Finally some cash in my pocket, or something. After the meeting I went yet again on my bike ride. Just did the hilltop vista of St. Joseph’s Hill again. I swung by Cybermanor again on the way home, but nobody was there, their walkthrough went much longer than expected.

Tuesday 12th of October, 2004
The bike rides are catching up with me, and today I really noticed it. I had a hard time getting out of bed, and when I did, I didn’t want to do anything but go back to sleep, and I got 10 hours of sleep too. After I ate my breakfast/lunch I didn’t feel much better and I went downstairs to do a little work, and after getting frustrated I decided to go for a bike ride a little later in the afternoon. Today was the 1st day I thought about actually breaking my 3 week ‘rode every day’ marathon, but I didn’t. At the beginning of my ride, I was passed very quickly going up the hill of the Vasona dam, and it encouraged me to speed it up a bit. I caught up to the guy who passed me in the parking lot and passed him before crossing the tracks and we started talking as we rode down the trail. We sort of pushed hard all the way to the top of St. Joseph’s Hill and I think I may have found a new friend to go on bike rides with. I got his phone number at the top and hopefully we’ll go on a ride after my resting day tomorrow. This evening I finished the 1st season of Nip/Tuck. I’ve really got to stop the compulsive TV series marathons and daily bike ride addiction and take a rest once in a while.