The Cat's Nuts

Okay, it's been 15 days since my last posting and things have finally calmed down a bit. Melissa and I are finally all settled into the new house, and that's going well. We got the keys on the 15th and did whatever work we wanted to do on the kitchen and bathrooms (there is still stuff to do) and overall we're really pleased with how everything came out. The kitchen looks amazing....1000x better than it used to. The bathroom is a huge improvement, but we still have some caulking to do, so that's on the plate. Melissa's mother has been staying with us this past weekend, but she left today so things should settle down even more.

I've not really gotten into what prompted out move, because well...I've been damn busy. Melissa and I were planning on taking the month of May to move out of the apartment. Nice and slow and at an easy pace. Instead, we crammed it all into a single weekend, didn't pack correctly and overall did a rush job. I'm going to write up a whole post dedicated to talking about that a little later on, but needless to say, it butted up nicely to my post of "if I didn't have bad luck, I'd have no luck at all."

I still have my car. I've gotten some hits on it, but nothing of real note except Bob. I've explained to Bob all of the things that have been done to the car and all the little nit-picky problems (well...not ALL of them...) and he's still interested. Rick and I have been working on the car a bunch recently trying to get it all set up and working and most importantly, turn off the damn check engine light. That thing has been driving me crazy. After really messing around with it, I think we're come to the conclusion that the light is on because of the the leak at the rear main seal. The leak is allowing air into the engine and bam....CEL comes on. Anyway...Bob knows this, I dropped my price to $9k, a $1700 loss from what I paid 5 months ago, but hell...I want a manual anyway, right? I have a hard time dealing with it, but I figure that's the price that we pay for buying cheaper cars. My next ride isn't going to have 100k miles on it, that's for damn sure.

With any luck, I'll have this car sold by the end of the week. Speaking of which, I am flying out west to do some Hyperion training. I FINALLY start on a project on the 12th of this month. The project is not in Atlanta, so I will have to travel some, but it's not really all that big a deal. I won't be working with OBIEE, I'l be working with Hyperion, so my skillset will expand a little bit there which makes me happy. Another thing to put on the ol' resume. I fly out for training on Thursday morning and back on Friday evening, so it should be a nice little jaunt. Nothing too crazy.

I've been getting more and more work to do while I am sitting on the bench, so that's been okay, but a little boring, as most of the work that's being done is "busy" work. Oh well, I'll be into some substantiative stuff fairly soon, so that'll be better. Anyway, I'm going to go and tend to that.

Posted by Michael at 01:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The past two weeks have been a lesson in patience for me, as bad luck has been coming at me from all sides. Let's first start off with my car.

I've decided that instead of tracking down all the small issues that are causing the Christmas tree lights to go off on my dash, it's time to just bail on this 1997 POS. I've currently got a check engine light that goes on, an air bag light that started to go on randomly (turns off when I make a hard right), the radio sometimes shuts off for no reason...like totally goes dead...sometimes while still playing music (which I then can't turn off), the sun roof broke yesterday, my car alarm goes off randomly and without cause....should I go on? It's not just one little thing, it's everything. So I posted up the car. Now, I paid close to $11k for this thing....I have it posted for $9.5k....and I've driven it a whopping 4k miles. So...the return on investment is looking poor. If that weren't bad enough, I've gotten a single solitary email, which the guy didn't respond when I wrote him back. Oh, and the car started to shake at 50mph (stops at 60), and sometimes doesn't start as cleanly as it should....shuddering and feeling like it's going to stall unless I stomp the gas.

Anyway, so that's my car issue. I'm going to be taking a solid 2k hit by the end, I know it. Ugh. Oh well, I just want that thing out of my life so that I can get something more reliable. Lesson learned there, that's for sure.

Yesterday, I went to pick up my new Soyo 24" Monitor from the office. I had purchased it from OfficeMax online and had it shipped to my house. I was quite excited, and quickly set it up once I got home. Now, I'm not one to chastise UPS, as I know their job is miserable and yadda-yadda-yadda, but the box was so beaten up that I took pictures of it before I opened it. It looked like someone put it on the floor of the warehouse and kicked it to the truck. Really quite bad. I opened it up, hoping that everything would work, and the monitor itself looked fine, and I was really hoping it would work. Upon plugging it in, the screen flashed to life, filling the 24" screen with color and glamour, and then it died. No reason....nothing. Just a black screen. The blue LED on the frond turned to red and that was it. I figured it might be some issue with my video card, so I plugged it into a laptop....same thing.

So off I went to a regional OfficeMax store to return the messed up monitor. I was pleasantly surprised with the service at the local OfficeMax. They took my boxed up monitor and grabbed me a new one off the shelf. Didn't even open the box.

When I got home, I opened up the box, and it was perfect. No marks, no scratches, nothing. I plug in the monitor, DVI of course, and all seems well. It looks great. It's basking the room in a cool blue glow. I was very very pleased. Then I saw it. A single line of pixels about 4cm from the bottom of the screen.....all black. I pushed and pulled at the connector, at the sides of the monitor, changed the ports, even changed to a ...gasp...vga cable, and nothing. Monitor has a dead line of pixels. So I'm going to have to bring that back to OfficeMax today or tomorrow. Just another thing to do.

On a positive note, Melissa and I are going to be getting the keys to the house tonight, so that's really exciting. We'll finally be able to start the move in process, start to paint and start to get ourselves situated. It'll be quite nice, but I half way expect that something is going to go terribly wrong, as, like I mentioned before, I've not been having the best of luck.

Anyway, we'll see.

Posted by Michael at 09:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Normally, whenever I really get on myself, it's usually about writing in my blog. This time, it's more about photography. Ever since I moved out of NYC, I've pretty much stopped taking pictures. Why? I dunno. I just stopped. I used to have at least a new set of photos once a week. Stuff to play with and really for no other reason than to take pictures. Well, I need to get back into it. Melissa and I are soon going to be moving into the new house, and we're going to need some photography to adorn the walls, and well...it's going to be my job.

I think that I'm up for the task, so today, in celebration (no, not really) of this decision, I went to OfficeMax and purchased a 24" LCD Monitor. I've had the same 17" LCD since 2003, and I figured that it was just time to move onto something a little bigger. Ideally, I would have liked to get the 30" from Dell, but I just couldn't justify spending $1500 or more on a monitor, when I got this 24" for $300. Hell, I could get a 3 display setup of 24" monitors for considerably less than I would pay for the Dell. Hopefully it'll arrive by the weekend, but I doubt it.

Yesterday, I FINALLY sent out my damn Jui-Jitsu cancelation letter and infromation. it's been months, and they owe me around $600, but I doubt that I'll actually see that money. I may have to just bring them to small claims court. Who knows. I gotta see what they say first.

Tonight, Melissa an I are heading over to GeorgiaTech to go to a presentation about their MBA program. Apparently, they have an evening program for working professionals. While that wouldn't really work for me currently, as I wouldn't be able to attend classes if I were traveling, I may be interested in looking into taking a one year rapid paced degree. We'll see if that's really even an option. That presentation is from 6:00-7:30 this evening. I figure that I'll bring my camera and start my 2nd coming as a photographer there.

I posted my BMW on Autotrader last week, and still haven't gotten a reply. I figure it's going to take a little while to sell that car. Hmm..that's not fun. I took some pictures of it this weekend, but I've not gotten to update the ad as of yet, so I think that I'll get on that this evening.

I think it may be time to head home for the day.

Posted by Michael at 02:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This past week was hell. I sat through 4 days of training in Informatica. If you don't know what that is, then be happy, because your life can easily be complete and fulfilled without ever having to know it exists, but if you do know what it is, then you'll understand my disdain for it. Although the training was well presented, there's no way to get around the fact that the material is really quite dry and there's really no way to make ETL processess very interesting.

On Friday night, Mellissa and I headed out to the pottery studio and experienced the first annual chili cook off. There were a whopping three contestants, but it was still a good time. Other than that, our weekend was pretty relaxing. Hung out, watched some movies, started to watch the Showtime series Dexter, etc. Just your lazy weekend. The weather in Atlanta has been particularly miserable for the past week or so, and it's not looking like it's going to let up any time this week. It's possible that tomorrow is going to be nicer than it's been, but then there are cloudy skies predicted for the remainder of the week. Blek!

Last Tuesday, I posted my Bimmer on Craiglist, Autotrader and the Bimmerforums.com to give it a shot and try to sell off the beast. As of this morning, which marks a week of it being posted online, I've gotten exactly zero calls. Apparently, with gas prices approaching $4 a gallon, the desire to own an 8 cyl. automobile has wanned considerably. We'll see how it goes. I may end up just having to keep it and deal with it's quirky little issues, but that's really not something that I want to do. I purchased the most expensive plan with Autotrader, so a least I can run it until it sells for as long as I need to. I'm not all that worried, as I posted the car for $1000 below KBB value...so SOMEONE should think it's a good deal, becaue frankly, it is.

This week, I am working to finish up my presentation for the Lunch and Learn that I'm presenting on BI. It's going well, and I should have a fairly viable presentation in a day or so. I'm looking forward to hosting and presenting the lunch and learn, as it'll be a good time to practice my public speaking, as I've not done a whole lot of it in the past.

Anyway, speaking of which, I should get working on that.

Posted by Michael at 12:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)