You are currently browsing the motyka.org weblog archives for the day Friday, February 25th, 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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