3rd time is the charm? After a one week break, I'm back in Arizona to work on that high profile project. Security took forever, the line stretched out to the parking garage. One thing is surprising, the weather in AZ is chilly! Not as bad as norcal but I'm glad I brought my jacket.

It looks like the project is about to get moving which is fine by me. No more thinking about how to allocate my food budget for dinner during meeting marathons. I plan to go back on the sushi diet. Depending on how successful the pilot is, I may be here until Jan or Feb at the latest. I pay all my credit card and phone bills online anyways. I do have time off scheduled for the end of the year, no way I'll miss any snowboarding trips. Even if that means working remotely from the top of Tahoe.

I booked my hotel stay in advance, as opposed to the last two times I was here. The hilton hooked me up with an executive suite on the first floor at the same rate. Basically a room with an adjoining study, two TVs. It is right next to the gym and the bar. Open invitation for people to come visit.

My fantasy team is 11-1, much better than I expected. I have been doing a fairly good job at picking my lineups, although my bench outscored my starters 109-84 last week. Right now I have to think about the playoffs and picking up players to supplement my current lineup. Shaun Alexander is a stud but if the Seahawks wrap up their division early, they may rest him.

Almost December...  ¶ 9:21 AM 0 comments

  :o My co-worker came into town. Had an very good steak at the Drinkwater (along with lobster-mashed potatoes). Then beer, wine, and vodka. Drunk called some people, what else is new.

There are worse places to be than Scottsdale :)  ¶ 11:31 AM 0 comments

  :( bad sushi makes me appreciate decent sushi REAL fast. I went to this place Kyoto's on Monday. It had gotten rave reviews online and I'd been there once or twice w/o getting sick (my usual litmus test).

Anyways the prices were especially cheap ($4.75 for sashimi) and I went all out. Unfortunately I got what I paid for. First of all, none of the fish was fresh. The tuna was this lifeless blob of red/purple. The rainbow roll sported colors outside of the usual colorful array. Colors like "GRAY" and "DARK GRAY". Ugh. Even the tamago wasn't fresh. The only safe stuff was the interior of the rainbow roll and the spider roll. The rest I didn't touch.

After that fiasco I've only been going to Ra's since I know they fly in their fish daily. Some places will just truck in the fish twice a week, frozen in liquid nitrogen or something. King crab sushi is tasty.

Enough sushi, time to find some good steak.

I finally lost in my fantasy league, close match with my lil bro. At least I clinched a playoff berth, going to try to make some trades in the meanwhile.  ¶ 10:05 AM 0 comments

  booyah Living like a hobo, eating chinese food out of my hotel.

Yup yup.  ¶ 4:40 PM 0 comments

  another reason not to purchase music I smell lawsuit.

Genius move Sony.  ¶ 7:36 AM 0 comments

  more sushi went to Hiro's sushi last night, it was ok. More traditional than the typical Scottsdale sushi bar/night club. Yes, the guy slicing the salmon actually spoke Japanese. And the waitresses are not all blonde girls who only know "oREEEgato." Impressive ...

Toro was a bit oily, kitsho in cupertion is better.
California Roll: fuki sushi is better.
sake a tad oily too. Softer than Ra's tho.
hamachi was good.
sea bass was good but not as good as cali.
spider roll is probably the best in this area but nothing compared to Oga's.

The waitress was cute so I'll give it a B+. They also have toro everyday as opposed to other places. The portions do look a tad smaller than what I'm accustomed to. They had blue fin tuna but it looked rather opaque. Didn't try it.

- google adsense picked up on the "ahi tuna" keyword and links to an ad by ruthschris. heheheheh. I'm going there on Sunday for the filet mignon. w00t. I wonder how sophisticated the algorithms for adsense are. If I write "Terrell Owens is such a TOOL" is it going to link to NFL.com or home depot?

- Speaking of TO, his agent made that press conference a carnival. "next question, next question, next question." What an idiot.

- can't wait for Warriors to play some good teams to see how they do. $hitleavey is not worth that much money tho, not now anyways. Baron has to stay healthy for this team to have a chance.  ¶ 11:31 AM 0 comments

  :/ Hotel is kinda shady but as long as there is no funky smell, works for me. The workout room is a joke tho, the low ceilings really freak me out. Serves me right for not reserving earlier, Scottsdale gets packed this time of year. In a week I will be back at the Hilton. I tend to crash in my hotel immediately after dinner, then wake up at some odd hour.

Wireless doesn't work when I am torrenting. Sucks. I need my Arrested fix.

EDIT: Somewhat disappointed by the last two episodes of AD. There are some great new gags but not as consistently funny as before. Like the mole custom and George Michael in the jetpack. Didn't really do it for me.

Woke up at 2am and couldn't fall asleep. Watched SportCenter, that VC jam over Alonzo was amazing. Especially since RGay got rejected for trying that seconds earlier. Not as good as MJ's move along the baseline and slam on Ewing, but in that category.

VC is sick.  ¶ 4:52 AM 0 comments

  :| Woot, found the vmware font. Google/Yahoo turned up nothing. Downloaded it off vmware internal. Myriad Pro.

I think I'll schedule my training Q1 of next year in Denver, then take a couple days to go snowboarding. Which reminds me, I better pick up some Drakes for the Christmas day Tahoe trip.

Visual Studio 2005 and SQL server 2005 are out. May have to check them out. I want to refresh C++ but have Linux and Cisco stuff on tap.

I straight up killed in my fantasy football game. Running the table will be difficult, but I will try to maneuver to put myself in a better position for the playoffs.

Work is going ok so far, I actually had some stuff to do. We are still ramping up for the main migration so I still have to sit through countless meetings. Looking forward to beer and food while watching MNF. Should have booked hotel in advance, oh well. Hotel hopping isn't fun.  ¶ 10:49 AM 0 comments

  Back in AZ, the weather is nice Went to Ra's for dinner. Salmon was a bit chunky and icy cold (I must have gotten the refrigerated leftovers). :(

I'll still go back tomorrow and try the seared ahi tuna.  ¶ 8:10 PM 0 comments

  Yahoo Maps Beta http://maps.yahoo.com/beta/

Google may have made maps better but the new Yahoo maps beta is even sweeter. Very similar functionality (in Flash instead of AJAX), slick interface, open API. The real-time traffic overlays nicely on this interactive map. The driving directions are improved, you can click on each turn point and see a subsection of the map. Plus it saves a history of your destinations on the left.  ¶ 10:51 AM 0 comments

  :D The expert test was very brutal. Most of the things I studied were not going to help me AT ALL. Almost harkens back to the Berkeley days, studying my @ss off and realizing that I was screwed after spending two minutes looking over the test. Of course this was a multiple choice exam, much easier. All conceptual questions, only a few were quick and easy. Reading each question took me quite a while. Going through all the questions on the first pass took me more than an hour. It was clear that I was not going to finish comfortably. The thirty minute mark brought upon random shrieks of frustration on my part. Luckily not many people were in the testing center. At the ten minute mark I fruitlessly attempted to memorize all the questions for my next attempt. That wouldn't have helped me much, this test does not cater to memorization. At the one minute mark I started cracking jokes to the proctor. When the last seconds ticked off, I refused to look at the screen, convinced of my failure.

... sometimes I amaze myself. Intuition and luck? Who knows. I'm relieved to have passed and can now retire the subject material (although I'll torture myself with a different test in the future).  ¶ 2:18 PM 0 comments

  Things on tap Dedicating all my brainpower for an upcoming event. Hopefully I'll know this EMC stuff inside out by then.

I was going to refresh my C, C++, HTML/AJAX programming skills but so much has come up since the time I made that plan. I'll be heading back to Arizona next week for two weeks. Then a respite the week of Thanksgiving. Then back to AZ again until 12/23. I'll have to do my Christmas shopping in a few hours but what else is new. Taking on this migration project meant that I had to push back my VMware training til next quarter. Oh well, hopefully I can be proficient in Quest tools as well as EmailXtender. I still hope to take it and pass the certification. I attempted to install ESX server in a VM using Workstation 5. The install process actually completed although the VMkernel wouldn't start. If it did work I'd probably run into a bunch of recursion issues with VirtualCenter.

I still need to get bindings so I can go snowboarding on Christmas!  ¶ 7:42 AM 0 comments