August 2006 Archives

One of the other things I did with my free time on Saturday and Sunday during the wedding weekend was talking to Kelly's step father Dan's father.  I know that is a confusing relationship line, but I couldn't think of any other way to say it.  He is a very interesting gentleman who is around 80, I think.  He is still actively working and has spent a great deal of time in the oil industry both in the US as well as previously in Canada.

One of the subjects we talked about was the company he worked for and was something along the lines of partial owner or partner in.  He worked with this oil company in Canada in the 70's (if not much longer).  We talked about what happened in Canada in 1973-74 when OPEC decided to change the world oil price from $2.50 a barrel to $10.00 overnight.  This is known as the oil crisis basically.  At this time Canada was self sufficient for oil and were exporting it to the other parts of the world.  To protect the price of oil inside Canada the government capped the price in the country and slapped a $7.50 export tax on the oil.  I think the reasoning and result of this is debatable.  However I got to hear it from an insiders perspective.  From his perspective the taxation instantly killed the oil industry in Canada.  Suddenly his company went from making a profit of ~10% a barrel to losing ~25% a barrel.  Needless to say he gave up on that venture and the company had issues.

Just before the oil crisis he had been preparing to go to China as an official representative of the Canadian government.  He spent 2 years learning Chinese and getting ready to go.  Once the crisis occurred and his profits vanished he went in and told the government in colorful language to take the job and shove it.

He later moved to Austin to start over again in the oil business in US.  He continues to work in the oil industry to this day.  He mentioned his worries about some of the ideas bouncing around in congress about taxing the "extreme" profits.  He seemed to think that this could have a huge negative effect on the oil industry in the US.  I am sure there are many that will disagree with his view, however it is a discussion worth having especially considering his historic knowledge in the area.

One other really cool story he told me was about a former next door neighbor of his.  This neighbor used to come to Austin every year to join up with friends and go to superbowl.  Apparently on one of these trips he was at dinner one night and was approached by a young man.  The young man showed him a computer he was working on and wanted to begin selling.  The neighbor asked him what he needed to begin the business and the young man said he needed some capital and hoped to find investors.  The neighbor asked him how much he needed and wrote him a check on the spot.  Fast forward many years later.  The neighbor had passed away but his wife stilled lived next door.  One day she came over and asked for help sorting out some paperwork.  She brought over a box full of letters that she kept getting from Dell and other older paperwork.  It seems that the neighbor was one of, if not the, original investors in Dell.  The box was full of stock certificates, dividends and other related documents.  Once they went through the box it was determined that there was something on the order of low 8 figures worth of stock.  It was quite an amazing story.

Hopefully someday I will get to have some more chats.

This is a first follow-up from the post the other night about Kelly's brother's wedding. A great deal of pictures from a family friend photographer have been put online here.  The picture on the side is Kelly speaking to me in sweet tones.  You can click on it to get a larger version.

A couple of weeks ago I upgraded the software that runs my blog.  As a result a few tweaks needed to be made.  I hadn't updated the main layout of the page during many upgrades.  Several things broke due to not upgrading.  Last night I updated the main layout to fix a couple of things like the comment system.  I need to go back and tweak the template again to add some of the things I had on the side previously.  For now it is pretty simple, but it will be easier to modify in the future.  Maybe I can get a little more creative like  the template I added for my Home Theater Blog.

Kelly's brother Nicholas and his fiance Aviva got married in Cape May, NJ on August 20th.  The weekend really began on Thursday night with the arrival of Kelly's parents from Seattle.  We all went out to dinner that night.  It was the first time I had met Kelly's parents.  It was cool, especially getting to see Kelly and her mom interact.

Friday morning Kelly and her parents headed up to Cape May, NJ first.  I left about 3 PM to head up.  The drive up wasn't too bad not much traffic at all, took me about 3 hours after stopping at my place.  I arrived at The Manse at about 7 PM.  It is a bed and breakfast that we were staying at for the weekend.  The members of the wedding party that are related to bride and groom (and their guests) were staying at this location.

It is an interesting place, I had never stayed in a B&B before so it may be similar to others.  For me it was a little creepy staying in someone else's house with all their pictures and such.  There are 8 rooms and Kelly and I were in room 8.  Some rooms had their own bathrooms, others like ours had to share.  There wasn't AC in the house, but there was room units in each room.  Our room was also special in that it was the emergency exit room.  As a result we had no lock on our door, a light outside the window shining in and a glowing exit sign.

After cleaning up Kelly and I headed over to the rented house that all the rest of the wedding party was staying at.  I got to meet all of the other people in the wedding at the dinner.  Most were from the east coast (DC-NY) and a few from the Seattle-Tacoma area.  They ordered in Mediterranean food.  After dinner we all walked to the city center to get ice cream.

The next morning we experienced the breakfast part of the place we were staying.  The owners of the place made a silly amount of food.  Fresh muffins, peaches and creme, ham, eggs and several other things I can't remember now.  The rest of the day Saturday my schedule was pretty free.  Kelly had to go to various brides maid related occasions.  I spent it relaxing, playing on the computer (they had wi-fi) and reading.  I also went to find a shirt for the rehearsal dinner since I forgot to bring one.  I found the only store in all of Cape May that sold men's clothing.  The majority of what they stocked was Tommy Bahama which is nice but really expensive, I found a shirt about half the price.  It is quite nice, if not my usual style.

Walking around Cape May was an interesting experience.  It seems pretty much no one actually lives there.  The town is full of B&B's, rental houses and small hotels.  Someone said the town has one of the highest population swings from on and off season.  Another oddity for me was the fact that you had to pay to go on the beach there.  I am used to places like VA Beach that have beautiful free public beaches.

The rehearsal dinner was on Saturday night.  It was held at a mansion that had a 50's museum in it as well.  The dinner was quite a bit larger than usual, like 80 people.  Basically anyone that was in town and related to the families was invited.  It started with a raw bar, fruit, cheese and various hours devours.  The main meal was a buffet style.  They had a bunch of tasty choices.  For dessert there was an ice cream social.  Everyone in town that wasn't invited to dinner was invited to the ice cream social.  There was about 150 people there I think.

Sunday we got up and had another massive breakfast.  This time it was homemade blueberry pancakes.  Kelly didn't get to have any since she had to begin the preparations for the wedding, she wasn't thrilled about that.  I again was free for the early part of the day so I just hung out and relaxed.

I left for the wedding a little after 2 PM.  There was a trolley to take people, but I drove myself so I could leave when I wanted.  Everyone started to arrive around 2:30-2:45.  It was an outdoor wedding in a vineyard.  They had setup lots of lawn umbrellas and were handing out water, lemonade and iced tea.  It was about 90 degrees and very high humidity as well.  Needless to say it was quite hot, people were trying there best to stay cool by removing jackets and staying in shade.  It could only do so much though.

The wedding was scheduled to start at 3 PM, but didn't get going until about 3:15.  This was the first Jewish wedding I had ever been to.  Many things are similar in the traditional wedding sense.  A good portion of the ceremony was done in Hebrew and then repeated at least in part in English.  It wasn't a very long ceremony which is always good, especially in the heat.

After the ceremony everyone adjourned to the garden right next to the chairs for more drinks and hours devours.  There was a large selection of snacks both on tables ready to go and being circulated by the wait staff.  The mingling went on for about an hour or so.  Afterwards people started to move to the tent for the next part of the evening.  It was a large tent to seat the 300+ people and had a dance floor and a live band.

The action in the tent started with speeches and dancing.  Then there was a traditional Jewish dance with groups in a large circle.  It ended with Nick and Aviva being hoisted up on chairs and carried around.  Later there was a ceremony with a Rabbi cutting a loaf of bread and the bride and groom eating it.  There were several other special dances that happened during the evening.

Dinner began with salad and rolls.  One of the things with a wedding of this size is it took quite a while for the wait staff to server the entire tent with each course.  Due to this people who got fed first were done and ready to get up and moving before the last people even got their meals.  People were mingling throughout the night.  One of the options for the main course was Alaskan King Salmon.  All of which was caught by Kelly's parents.  They have a boat and a commercial fishing license in Sitka, AK.  Neither Kelly or I are big seafood fans so we got the beef entree.  Almost everyone else had the salmon though.

After cutting the cake they began to bring around the primary dessert that was like a mini apple pie.  It was very good.  I wasn't sure if or when they would be bringing the real cake.  It was already getting late so Kelly walked me to my car.  I left a little after 8 PM and started home.  I had to stop for gas (full service required in NJ) and cash to pay tolls on the way home.

Traffic on the way home wasn't too bad most of the way.  When I got the Delaware / Maryland border though I came to a screeching halt.  The toll booth leaving DE was backed up for miles.  It took me at least an hour to go a few miles.  As a result it took me over 4 hours to get home and I finally go to bed about 12:30.

Kelly and her parent's stayed in the rented house until Friday.  She had a tough week of laying on the beach and reading.  A couple of friends came to spend time since I couldn't take time off from work.  When she came back her parents and I went out to dinner before they flew out Saturday morning.

On July 24th we finally got the server that I mentioned in this post.  It took a while to get all the data switched over from the old server to the knew one.  I finally finished last weekend on the 12th of August.  The new server is quite nice.

It is actually the last of the Xeon P4 based line.  It has dual cores with hyper threading, as a result it reports 4 CPUs for a single socket.  The server also comes with a Serial Attached SCSI controller.  It is nice since it can handle SAS and SATA drives with the same high end RAID controller.

One of the features I was really looking forward to was Single Instance Storage for the file system.  It enables redundant files to be removed without any change noticed by end users.  It happens at a level so the user doesn't notice.  On about 700 GB of drivers we were able to recover over 60 GB of space.  The nice thing is it works well in conjunction with VSS and NTFS compression as well.

This server pretty much has all the features I was hoping for in a Windows based NAS when we got the PV775 several years ago.  Hopefully this new one will lack the bugs of the last one.

On Friday August 4th Kelly and I drove down to Wolf Trap in Vienna, VA to go to another non-traditional symphony performance.  We went to see Play! - A Video Game Symphony.  The show was almost sold out, just a few single seats left.  Very much a different crowd than a usual night at the symphony.  The normal conductor came out and mentioned some other shows since the crowd was not a normal one.

The entire National Symphony Orchestra as well as a choral group was on hand for the performance.  There were three large screens setup to show both the performers as well as video from the various games.  The conductor travels with the show so he knows the material very well.

Almost half the show was Square/Enix games and primarily Final Fantasy ones.  The strange thing was that all but one of these games had no video footage.  It was especially odd since this show is a follow-up to one that was only Final Fantasy so one would think that the rights issues would be resolved.  They did show footage of Blue Dragon which is an upcoming game.

The rest of the show was an array of older games such as Super Mario Brothers and Sonic the Hedgehog to newer games like Metal Gear Solid.  The older games had new re-scored pieces since the originals were not very symphonic.  The newer games were more direct renditions of the original game music.  They premiered music from Prey as well as Blue Dragon at Wolf Trap.  I am not sure if they will do them at other shows.

My favorite music was from Halo.  I just never got into the Final Fantasy games so that music didn't do as much for me.  Super Mario Brothers was my second favorite and followed up Sonic.  It is too bad they didn't do some of the older PC music like that from Wing Commander or 7th Guest.

It was a really enjoyable evening.  Wolf Trap is really great place for things like this.  It was a bit warm but otherwise pleasant.

A few weekends ago on Sunday July 30th Kelly and I went to The Charles Theatre to see A Scanner Darkly.  We had listened to the unabridged audio book (which was read by Paul Giamatti) so we went in knowing the story and having some expectations.  The movie appeared to be sold out, which isn't saying a whole lot since it was in a smaller theater seating about 100.  This movie has a very interesting look to it.  The movie was filmed as normal but then the film was rotoscoped and cel shaded.  This actually worked well with the fact that most of the movie is spent watching people on drugs.  This movie is based on a book by Phillip K. Dick that was written in the 60's.  It is mostly a warning of what could happen with a populace mostly hooked on drugs.  It is truly a weird movie.  I am not sure I can really recommend this movie as it is so strange, but I did enjoy it.

Later in the week we watched Syriana at home in my theater.  I had wanted to see this movie for quite a while.  I had heard Robert Baer, the author of See No Evil which the movie is based on, interviewed several times and his stories are amazing.  The movie is really amazing and scary all at the same time.  The movie is more truth than fiction and that is what is scary.  To see what our government is doing in the Middle East and what the governments of the Middle East are doing to themselves and each other.  If for no other reason than to open your eyes I highly recommend this film.  It is a good movie even if you don't watch it for that reason, it has some decent action and intrigue.

For another total change of pace we went to see Clerks II on Sunday August 6th.  There was almost no one at this showing, only about 12-15.  Basically you either like Kevin Smith and his movies or you don't.  If you enjoyed Clerks and Dogma you will like this film, if you didn't you are almost guaranteed to not like this one either.  It is hilarious and just some really quirky scenes.  If you want to laugh and aren't easily offended I recommend it, otherwise stay away.

The final movie of the quartet is actually one we had already seen.  We saw it on Saturday night August 12th with some of Kelly's friends as a double date no less.  It was Little Miss Sunshine, which is the movie that I mentioned when we saw it at the Maryland Film Festival.  I still highly recommend it even after a second viewing.  It is especially good in a crowded theater since everyone can laugh together.  It is still expanding in release so I would suggest seeking it out.

Hey does this work?

Over the last month I have been receiving daily calls from Verizon. These calls come from two numbers. The first was 309-829-4411 and then switched to 309-828-6565. These are apparently coming from some hired telemarketer. The only problem is their dialing software seems to be broken. They always call me between 10 AM and noon and never leave a message or anything. Today I was home when they called and figured I would see what it is. No one was there, just silence. Great.