Troutmaster

State Of The Union

I'm anxiously awaiting Dubya's State of the Union speech tonight. I can't wait to hear what he did on his summer vacation, what cool bike rides he's been on, and the biggest fish that he caught. Other than that I guess I'll hear him out on the economy, foreign relations, and other mumbo jumbo.

Goodbye Tri-City

I went to Tri-City this weekend to say good bye. I can't believe they are closing. Where am I going to find good snowboarding gear now? REI usually has some stuff, but they don't excel in snowboarding gear. Any Mountain sucks, and Sportmart isn't much better. I'm not sure what to do. :-(

JBKC = 7

I'm running behind, but as of last week the Jack Bauer Kill Count is up to 7. This time he killed an assassin that snuck into CTU to kill him.

Photium

A colleague told me about Photium and I decided to check it out. Here is my photium page. I'll be posting photos periodically, so be sure to check it out every now and then. And if you reference my blog you can buy your first 5 photos for 25 % off. :-)

My SuprBlog

In case you weren't aware of my other blogs (or just didn't care to check them out), you can now see them all on my suprblog.

Costco Pastrami

Last weekend Timber and I found some pastrami at Costco. It wasn't just any pastrami, it was Carnegi Deli pastrami. I've never been to Carnegi Deli myself (never had time to make it there when I was in NYC), but I've heard that it is excellent. We got it and later made sandwiches, and it was excellent. So if you like pastrami you should get it from Costco while you can.

You Might Be A Redneck If...

It's not every day that a guy can have his wife go to jail, puff on a cigarette while he plays in a PGA event, and shoot a 69. But then again, not everyone is John Daly.

Introducing Wookie

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, and you too Bob, I'd like to present Wookie the Tibetan Terrier. After years of looking, consulting breeders, checking dog shelters and TT Rescue we've finally took the plunge with our newest family member, Wookie. I bet you'll never guess why he's named that. :-) We got him from the East Bay SPCA in Oakland and brought him home yesterday. He seems to be a pretty good dog thus far in that he seems to be house trained (no accidents yet), he is crate trained, and he's a joy to walk and hang out with. Our training of him started right away, and I'm sure he'll be the perfect dog in no time. I'll have more details about him later.

JBKC = 6

I'm finally caught up on 24 and the JBKC (Jack Bauer Kill Count) is up to 6. I'll be tracking it all season.

Jack Bauer Kill Count

I'm catching up on 24, which is the best flippin' show ever, and up to this point I am two hours into the season and Jack has killed 4 people.

Webfountain Mentioned

Webfountain is mentioned in this article. Here is what they had to say about us:

"The future may not be Google. Yahoo is a tough rival and if products like IBM’s Webfountain graduate to personal computers then the home page of Page and Brin may eventu ally disappear into a server archive. But the future will almost definitely have an ever-expanding and revolution-creating place for search."

Grizzly Man

I watched the documentary Grizzly Man this evening. It is hard to watch this movie and not feel strongly that either Timothy Treadwell was insane or that he was a noble person that sacrificed himself for the bears. I lean heavily toward the notion that he should have been checked into a mental hospital. He also started an organization called Grizzly People. Believe it or not, their mission is to "elevate the grizzly to the kindred state of the whale and dolphin through supportive education in the hopes that humans will learn to live in peace with the bear, wilderness and fellow humans." If you're thinking about going to Alaska and want to know what NOT to do when you encounter a bear, check out this movie.

Covert Crawler

I found this article about a covert crawler. Acidus, of SPI Dynamics released it at Schmoo Con. Ways to covertly crawl include trying to simulate normal user activity by:
* Spreading crawl across multiple IPs and time.
* Following paths to links -vs- deep links.
* Throttling crawl based on publicly available traffic stats and IP fragment ids.
* Dynamic creation of fake Google referrers to a deep linked pages based on content of that page
* Intelligent selection of proxies based on target country and website type.
* Randomized link selection and overlap
* Filtering of link targets based on popularity.
* Intentional Traffic escalation (Slash-bombing)
Luckily you probably wouldn't have to crawl the entire web this way, otherwise it could take a while.

Europe Complicit Over [insert word here]

This article gave me the idea. Here are some other words that can be inserted, have fun by inserting your own!
US Invasion of Iraq
Immigration
Middle East Peace
North Korea's Nuclear Weapons
World Poverty
The Spread of Democracy
Iran's Nuclear Program
Now that I think about it, what does Europe stand for?

Must Be The Shoes

I played soccer yesterday for the first time in three weeks and I thought I would be slow and lethargic since the only exercise I got during the break was 1.5 days of snowboarding. I think other people must have eaten more than I did because in my two games (one playing forward, and other playing goalkeeper) I scored three goals and got three assists (one as goalkeeper) and my team won both games. That is definitely the way to start the new soccer season. I also think I had a better touch on the ball due to the new soccer shoes that I got for Christmas.

Fantasy Football As Retirement

Since IBM is getting out of the pension business I have to find other ways to ensure a fruitful retirement. I think I've found one. Fantasy Football. I was in a fantasy football league this year that required each person in the league to pay $30 into the pot. I ended up winning the league and got $200 out of it. With my winnings I am going to send 10 % to Elgin as a thank you for trading Peyton Manning (who had a phenominal year) and deposit the rest into my Roth IRA. Now I need to keep up in my fantasy basketball league. :-)

Early Start

I got an early start to the weekend with an 8 AM Saturday blood donation up in Cupertino. Blood must be worth a lot because they gave me a t-shirt, movie tickets, and were really nice to me (other than sticking me with a large needle and extracting blood). My blood type is the universal donor, which is good for everyone else but sucks for me. It is good for everyone else because anyone else can take my blood, but I can only take my own blood type. I guess if I were on a desert island with a group of sick people they would be in luck. :-) Other than that I went to the Saratoga REI at 10 AM to check out a few things for an upcoming snow camping trip and saw a really long line outside the store. I went to the back of the line and asked someone what the line was for, and they told me it was a member's only returned gear sale. I didn't have to be anywhere for at least an hour, so I got in line and waited to get into the area where they had the sale. In the end I spent much more than I had intended to, but I made out with some mad loot that will be very handy for my snow camping trip in Yosemite at the end of this month. Now I just need to get a new lithium ion battery for the watch that I picked up. I know, that's crazy talk...

Happy Birthday Timber!

I won't say how old you are today, but I will say that it is a significant milestone. Congrats on making it this far.

6 Years at IBM

Today is my 6 year anniversary at IBM. When I hit this day every year I am amazed that I've been in the work force for this long, and at IBM the whole time. Only another 40 years or so of working before I retire. :-) A fitting development today is that IBM is changing pension benefits in order to save money. From this article, it looks like they are going to stop putting money toward pensions and put some money toward 401ks instead. That will definitely affect me in the future. One observation that I have on this is that IBM has consistently cut benefits every year that I've been here. It is a sad reality of the new world that we live in. It's dog eat dog and we have to take care of ourselves first.

Opinmind

A collegue sent a link to this site. Opinmind is a site that gives you the sentiment, based on blogs, on whatever you want to search for. Here are some of the terms I searched for (+ = positive, - = negative):
George Bush -> 37 % +, 63 % -
Vespa -> 99 % +, 1 % -
ipod -> 85 % +, 15 % -
United States -> 60 % +, 40 % -
China -> 71 % +, 29 % -
India -> 81 % +, 19 % -
IBM -> 69 % +, 31 % -
Microsoft -> 39 % +, 61 % -
Apple Computer -> 68 % +, 32 % -
Google -> 73 % +, 27 % -
Yahoo -> 55 % +, 45 % -
Berkeley -> 72 % +, 28 % -
Electrical Engineering -> 60 % +, 40 % -
Ford -> 58 % +, 42 % -
Toyota -> 74 % +, 26 % -
BMW -> 91 %, 9 % -
General Motors -> 17 % +, 83 % -
Germany -> 69 % +, 31 % -
IKEA -> 85 % +, 15 % -
Target -> 77 % +, 23 % -
Walmart -> 61 % +, 39 % -
California -> 80 % +, 20 % -
Alaska -> 79 % +, 21 % -
backpacking -> 95 % +, 5 % -
New Orleans -> 57 % +, 43 % -

Webcams Unleashed

For Christmas I got webcams for my mom and brother. We finally got to video chat yesterday. Things would work much better if Yahoo would release an updated version of Y! Messenger for Mac OS X.

Independence Air KO'd

I knew this was coming but it is sad nonetheless. Whenever I flew with Independence Air they were inexpensive and always ahead of schedule.

New Years Dinner

For New Year's we went over to J&R's house to have dinner and chocolate fondue. Dinner consisted of Timber's shrimp dish, rock lobster tails, filet mignon, chinese broccoli, rice, garlic infused bread, and wine. We were having the chocolate fondue with champaign as we rung in 2006. My first task of 2006 is to eat a bit lighter. That should be very easy to do. :-)