You are currently browsing the motyka.org weblog archives for February, 2005.

New Ride!

Posted In: Academic, Work life, Everyday life — February 25, 2005 @ 10:51 pm — Peter

We have been somewhat shopping for a car for a while now and have spent a considerable amount of time perusing ads and searching Internet listings for used/new Honda Civics. We decided that the Honda Civic would make most sense for us since I have a long commute to work and we don’t have money to throw around on a finicky undependable car. I have spoken with many Civic owners and they have nothing but great things to say about the car. This past Tuesday on my lunch break, I browsed http://cars.com looking for deals on a used Civic. I came across the usually listings, 2003-2004 Civics with about 15-20k miles for 15-17k dollars. Then this one listing caught my eye… It was a “used” 2004 Civic EX with 2650 miles for 16.5k dollars. For a Civic EX, this price seemed to good to be true for a car with such low of miles. Turns out the car was being offered by a Credit Union auto buying service. I have heard about these businesses from coworkers and they said they got great deals and service through them. So I called the place up and arranged to see the car. That same night, I was closing on our home refinance. The closing wrapped up faster than I thought, so I picked up Stephanie afterwards and we went to see the car. Turns out the car was everything we were looking for and more. Power everything, moon roof, CD player… the works. So, we are the proud owners of our first new vehicle. I have driven it quite a bit over the past few days and I love it! Some pictures of it parked on our driveway are here.

We took the car out for a cruise tonight and went to walk Shadow, Stephanie’s aunt’s dog. Her and her new husband are on their honeymoon in Cancun and we are looking after her dog. The original plan was to have Shadow stay with us, but we all agreed that was not the best idea. Stephanie’s aunt thought Shadow would feel abandoned and we thought it might be a bit overwhelming for our pets. I think going over there daily to walk and exercise Shadow will be sufficient. It is only for a week…

This weekend marks the official end of a 1 year 4 month project I have been working on at work. We migrate the final batch of users from the remote hosting facility to our inhouse servers tonight. I’m going to get to sleep soon because I have to wake up and ~1am MST to import a bunch of data and then sleep again to make it to the office by ~6am. Overall, the project has been a success. Like most IT projects, there have been a few bumps along the way… While I am quite proud of how well things have gone, I recently found out that our largest volume credit union will be leaving the service. My first reaction was to assume they were not happy with the service since being migrated to our datacenter, however, management assured me that this is not the case. While the credit union has not given a specific reason for leaving our service, it is believed the move is political and does not reflect dissatisfaction with our service or most recent migration efforts. Still a huge bummer :/

The hockey game was fairly light today, only 4 people made it to the rink. I played very sloppy today, it seems less people to pass to makes for a more difficult game. I fumbled the puck quite a few times, but scored a few times too. The puck we were using was warn out and kept turning on its side and rolling. This caused many of our shots to lift off the ground and the puck was flying all over the place. One unlucky wrist shot managed to get high enough to catch me in the side of the head. Thankfully I was not facing the other way or it would have hit me right in the face! This game revealed two things, I need a helmet and a new puck…

On top of all this, I have a huge assignment to get done for class. This Monday will be the final class for MSCC 610 and we have to submit a paper surveying technologies at the company we work at. A short 15 minute presentation on the paper is due also. I am about 1/3 of the way done and have most of the content locked away in my head still. I should have some downtime tomorrow while at work to spill some more out on paper. I envision the final paper being about 7 pages single-spaced. Amazing how fast these courses fly by. Unfortunately my next class is being held at the Interlocken campus which will add a 30 minute commute after being dismissed at 10pm. Hopefully this will be a rare occurrence of not having the class I need at the Lowell Campus.

Stephanie made blueberry muffins! Time for a snack!

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Le weekend~*

Posted In: Everyday life — February 21, 2005 @ 6:08 pm — Stephanie

The rapist was finally caught, and the neighborhood collectively exhaled with relief. Since Saturday morning, people have been out and about, whereas last week, everyone was inside with shuttered windows. This creep terrorized the part of Denver we live in. We were lucky to escape his concentrated “efforts”, since his crimes took place between 1.5-2.7 miles from our house. Wayyyy too close for comfort. The vermin raped a grandmother and her grandchildren, an 8 year-old boy, a 9 year-old girl, a 20 year-old woman, a 40ish year-old woman, and a 52 year-old woman. He didn’t discriminate, so he held everyone in a grip of terror. It seemed like no one was safe, and he was getting more and more violent. I’m home alone now, and feeling a whole lot more relaxed than I felt a few days ago.

What else? We didn’t do much, really. Peter had some schoolwork to do… We rented Man On Fire, went for walks, took Iris to the dog park, and did housework.

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself…Sad.

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Serial rapist off the streets of Denver

Posted In: Editorial, Everyday life — February 19, 2005 @ 10:01 am — Peter

This past week has been a very difficult. Reports of 6 sexual assaults within a 3 miles radius of our home made it clear there was a serial rapist on the loose in metro Denver. After the 5th incident, the DPD had determined the identity of the man as Brent J. Brents, a man who served jail time and has been deemed a dangerous sexual predator. I can’t help but ask, why was this man back out on the streets? What value did he contribute to society that the prison staff felt he sound be released from prison early. From the information that has been release, he served 13 years of a 20 year sentence, released early because of good behavior. Within weeks of his release, he assaulted an 8 year old boy in the eastern suburb of Aurora. This person is a life long criminal and should be euthanized just as an aggressive dog would be at an animal shelter. Actually, it bothers me to know he will likely receive a near life prison sentence and my tax dollars will contribute to his meals, healthcare and other recreational activities at the prison. I would much rather see those dollars go to innocent underprivileged children in the metro area. Oh well, he is caught and Denver is now a safer place to live. I have not seen this type of crime since we moved here and I hope nothing like his surfaces again. I really enjoy living in the city and don’t want to be forced to move to a suburb because criminals make the city neighborhoods inhospitable.

Denver Post Article about the case

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Cleanliness is next to godliness

Posted In: Work life, Everyday life — February 17, 2005 @ 7:57 pm — Peter

Our house is very clean because the appraisal person came today. We thought having the place spotless would result in a higher appraisal. He was a friendly man that thought Iris was adorable although she spend the entire time barking her head off at him. He was supposed to arrive around 4:45pm but ended up being late. This worked out great since we have some last minute cleaning to do. Based on his remarks, our frantic cleaning was obvious. He said things like “Are you sure you live here?” and “It looks like Better Homes & Gardens here!”. The second comment was obviously flattery since he caught on to the fact that we are very proud of our home. I gave him the grand tour and pointed out all the home improvements we have done over the past year. He assured us that our appraisal amount will be in the top tier of similar recently sold homes in the area. We didn’t really go through all the trouble of cleaning to score a few extra thousand on the appraisal, we simple didn’t want someone coming into our house and thinking we are scums. Now that this is done, we will be closing on our refinance next Tuesday. Amazing that Countrywide was able to move this process along so quickly. Had I stuck with Washington Mutual, I would probably be on another wild goose chase trying to find some obscure piece of personal financial trivia to satisfy their underwriters…

Work has been so so over the past few days. I hit a less productive slump over the past few days as I am getting burnt out on documentation. I am working on three documentation projects and all are nearing completion. As a change of pace, I started coding up a few enhancements to a web application I maintain to break the monotony. I am now caught up on a interface design issue, trying to find a way to maximize screen real estate. I grabbed a few javascript menus from SoftComplex and started experimenting to elicit some feedback. So far, I have decided to replace this long form select box with a more attractive tree menu. This gives a facelift to a rather boring looking webapp and saves quite a bit of space when the nodes are collapsed. I might experiment with a few other components from SoftComplex and consider purchasing the Professional versions if any of the extra features would be useful. If you have not tried their products, I strongly suggest trying them out. They are very simple to use and it is quite easy to populate the menus with data from a database.

Tomorrow is hockey day! It is not going to be as nice as it has been the last few Fridays, but you never know… I recall a forecast of high 40’s last weekend and it ended up being very sunny and we played in t-shirts. Hopefully all the snow has melted from earlier in the week and the rink is dry. I don’t mind it being cold, but wet patches on the rink make it quite tricky to play. In addition to hockey, another game has been popular at work. Some people have signed @ Red Hot Pawn and I jumped on the bandwagon late last week. I lost my first game by making a stupid move, but I’ll make up for it. I have not played chess in a while and am quite rusty. Actually, I just got a great idea! Perhaps I could challenge my Dad to a match! We loved playing chess together when I was younger and it would be so fun to play with him again. After I wrap up this post I’ll give him a call and walk him through the process.

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Dear Ken

Posted In: Everyday life — February 16, 2005 @ 2:02 pm — Peter

This morning around 9:30am, my annoying mobile phone ringer started to chime at full volume. I didn’t recognize the 708 phone number on the caller ID but answered anyway assuming it might be my parents calling. To my surprise, it was Ken. Ken is an old friend of mine from the Chicago area that has maintained sparse contact with me over the past 5 years. We were pretty close friends when I lived back home, however, we have grown apart as our lives have gone in drastically different directions. Ken seems to be stuck in perpetual adolescence, namely the later years of drug experimentation and chronic irresponsibility. How he manages to remember me a midst his drug-induced episodes is beyond me. For a while, he routinely called while heavily intoxicated, subjecting me to his rambling and incoherence. Don’t get me wrong, there were times when I really enjoy talking to Ken, but these times have been less and less frequent over the past several years. Ken is quite an intelligent guy, but he seems to be plagued by making poor decisions. For example, he has found a few contract gigs doing some computer maintenance. Instead of completing the job from start to finish to earn the trust of the client, he will try to find a way to swindle computer hardware out of the deal. The last time I spoke with him, he mentioned a new small office network he was maintaining. I was so happy to hear he was back behind a keyboard earning some money! Then he elaborated on his plans to prune memory out of the workstations for his computers at home. I simply don’t understand why he would risk a legitimate work arrangement for a few sticks of RAM. I imagine the next time we speak I’ll find out that the gig fell through after he went on a two week binge drinking spell, neglecting to return phone calls. It seems to be a fairly predictable pattern with him, which is why I believe he needs professional help. From what I gathered from our last phone call, he seems to be addicted to several types of prescription drugs.

I have made an honest effort to avoid calling Ken over the past few months. I have even gone as far as removing his number from my mobile phone memory. The simple truth of the matter is, I call him because I don’t really have many other friends. I tend to have problems establishing new friendships, so I hang on to what is familiar, however, Ken has become less and less familiar over the past few years and has little to offer a friendship anymore. I figured not contacting him would encourage me to befriend other people, perhaps people I have more in common with. I quickly ended the call with Ken this morning by telling him I was at work and could not talk. I told him I would call him later but I doubt I will find time for that. Before hanging up, I asked him if he was checking email. I would be comfortable emailing Ken, as that would be asynchronous and less time consuming on my part. But of course, he still does not use email…

So Ken, I doubt you will ever read this, but here is what I wish I could say to you when you call. I am not really interested in maintaining contact with you anymore. I have attempted to coach you through your drug problem, urged you to seek help, and have cheered you on through your various attempts at getting your life on track. To put it quite simply, you have disappointed me and are flagrantly wasting the talents that could get you out of this rut. During all of this, you continue to ridicule me, insisting I am wasting my time in college and accusing me of somehow abandoning you by no longer living in Chicago and being your business partner. Our conversations over the past few years affirm the obvious reality that we no longer have anything in common. Mind you, it is terribly stressful to me to see you waste your talent, realizing you have the potential to be a successful IT professional. I feel quite silly taking so much time to vent over Ken… About all else I have to say is, please be careful and don’t drive a car intoxicated again… Next time you might kill yourself, or worse, kill an innocent person who happens to cross your path…

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