August 2004 Archives

I picked up my new FJR1300 on Thursday, August 26th.

Jeremy has had his eye on buying a new Scion xA for a few months, and has been working hard to save up for the down payment. Carole spent a lot of time over the last couple of weeks working out the financing details with the credit union, and we got final loan approval on Thursday. We were good to go.

After a dismal but brief experience at Symes Toyota in Pasadena, we headed down to Wondries Toyota in Alhambra. We were directed to the fleet/internet manager, Tyler Pham, who was very professional and efficient. Happily, they had just the car Jeremy was looking for - an Indigo Ink (bright dark blue) with an automatic and no extra doo-dads. He paid MSRP (per Scion's no-haggle, Saturn-like pricing policy), plus sales tax and registration fees. The only option he wanted (mostly based on my encouragement) was a security system - the only way to get remote keyless entry, which I think is important for overall convenience and resale value. The security system will save on insurace, too.

After a very short time, Jeremy was on his way. Here's Jeremy taking delivery from Tyler:

Here's a short, 8mb Quicktime movie of Jeremy driving away.

I'm now the proud owner of a 2005 Yamaha FJR1300A. Here's the photos to prove it.

I made all the necessary arrangements yesterday - insurance, a cashier's check, and a 1:00pm appointment at the dealer. Justin drove me to work this morning, then came back and picked me up at 12noon for the drive out to LA Yamaha in Marina Del Rey.

The processor's name was Daisy, and she was quick, helpful, and efficient. The paperwork took under 5 minutes. She sent me back to the service department, where I found the guys doing some final checks on my bike: checking the tire pressure, installing the saddle bags, etc. When they finished the service manager took it on a short check ride.

When he got back, he went over the basics - starter, kill switch, ignition, headlights, turn signals, horn, seat lock, underseat items (tools, extra parts, owner's manual), and the side bags. I asked him about break-in limits, and he told me firmly not to baby it, to put it through it's paces and just make sure not to keep it at one engine speed for a long period of time. I put my gear on, had Justin snap a couple of photos, and away we went.

I arranged with Justin to take Venice Blvd. back to the I-10, to give me a change to acclimate to the new bike before hitting the freeway. I followed him onto the freeway, and we used hand signals to communicate. I knew he'd been fine once we made it through the downtown interchanges, and I peeled off to go north on the Long Beach Freeway while he headed to Carol's house to do the mail and watering. (Carol and Sheehan are on their mid-west baseball tour.) I needed to finish up some work at the office.

Almost no one takes the transition road from the west-bound I-10 to the norht-bound 710, and I got it up to 90 with no sweat. The V-Star would be shaking and buffeting at 85, but the FJR was smooth as silk.

After 25 miles, I'm very happy. There's a few changes I need to make:

• I definitely need handlebar risers. An inch up and maybe a little back will work nicely.
• I also definitely need to put on the FZ-1 mirrors. I couldn't see a thing behind me, and the extra width will make a big difference.
• I need to install an electrical socket for the V-1, but am waiting for it to arrive to make sure I order the right stuff.
• I want to put on better horns. I'll do this install when I put in the socket for the radar detector.

That's it for now. I'll post picture once I get home.

Dan called this morning with the VIN, and we arranged for me to pick the FJR up at 1:00pm on Thursday. I've finalized the insurance, and am leaving soon to pick up the cashier's check at the FECU branch down the street. Justin is set to drive me out and snap a few pics of the momentous occasion.

I called my friendly LA Yamaha internet sales guy Dan today to check on my on-order FJR1300A. Dan says I can pick it up on Thursday. Yee-hah.

Wednesday is paper-work day. Dan will call in the morning with the VIN, so I can finalize the insurance, and I'll stop by the local Credit Union branch for a big, fat cashier's check. Later on Wednesday Dan will call again to finalize the pick-up time, based on when the shop will actually get the bike prepped for delivery.

With luck, Justin and I will drive out early Thursday afternoon, and I'll bring it home from the Marina.

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I took an Imitrex around 3:45pm Sunday afternoon, and then had big trouble getting to sleep, finally dozing off fitfully just after 2:00am. The alarm woke me up at 5:45, and I felt tired but otherwise okay.

We used the ring finger again for the hemastat test, with much less pain then the middle finger. I couldn't find a movie that looked interesting, and wound up watching some annoying Olympics coverage on channel 4.

Justin, leaning heavily on family and friend's past test experiences, passed his driving test this morning on his first try.

Here's the actual examiner's test record.

Justin plays Counterstrike with a clan of guys that he's become friends with. He plays in the family room at home, and it's fun listening to their chatter while they play - lots of good-natured ribbing.

Anyway, he was invited to come up to visit for a LAN-party last weekend. Two members of the clan are a father and son who live with their family in Palo Alto, and they were hosting. I'd asked him earlier if he wanted to go anywhere - kids shouldn't sit around all summer - so I quickly agreed. We packed up on Saturday morning and headed up north.

After 14 years at MSC, my friend Connie was laid off on Wednesday. She's taking it as well as could be expected - better than some of the people she works with, who are genuinely bewildered.

It seems she got caught in some petty bureaucratic dust-up. For many years she was an Admin Assistant in the Development organization, when the bulk of the company was based in Los Angeles. A few years back the new CEO decided he wanted to work in Orange County, so most of the staff in LA was transferred to a new building in Santa Ana. (The company euphemistically refers to the location as South Coast Metro, SCM for short, because Santa Ana isn't hoity-toity enough.) The LA office was only left open to accommodate some very valuable long-term staff that apparently made it clear they would retire before commuting to Santa Ana; the rest of us got to stay to occupy the remaining offices.

A nice man named Jim Schulz worked in the LA office as head of the company's Sales Department. As the highest ranking manager in the office, he needed his own personal assistant, and Connie was the logical choice (since most of the senior management staff had moved to SCM). This arrangement lasted for six months or so.

Jim made the fatal mistake of holding his staff accountable for their duties, and was forced out in one of those boardroom purges that occur from time to time. With Jim gone, Connie was transferred to another Sales Manager based in the SCM office, but her duties reverted to supporting the Development staff in the LA office. Over time, she was assigned other duties, and lately was spending most of her time managing the company's growing portfolio of contract employees.

As you've guessed, none of these valuable tasks had anything to do with Sales, and ultimately the head of the Sales department was forced to cut-back. He offered to cover half of her salary if the head of Development would cover the other half (which seemed reasonable, given that she was working 80% on Development projects), but the head of Development refused. With the amount of money Development spends on worthless projects and boondoggles, you'd think they could cover half of an Admin's salary. This is the kind of thing that happens with management doesn't understand the day-to-day operations of the groups under them.

The reaction from everyone who knows Connie is disbelief. She's been getting good wishes from everyone, from managers to the DHL guy.

I will miss Connie very much. Over the last few years we've become good friends. I offered to help her get her resume in order, and pointed her to the Cal Tech employment web site. With any luck, she'll have a new, better job before her 3-month package runs out.

A few months ago I went over to Sheehan's house to help him change a flat tire on his new old car. On the way back to my house, we stopped at Pep Boys to have the flat fixed (avoiding the situation Jeremy often found himself in - driving without a good spare). While we waited for the mechanic to fix the tire, we wandered around the sales floor, and Sheehan decided he really wanted to have an Ah-oooga horn.

Carol and Sheehan went up to the Bay Area to visit Carol's friend Maureen and her new baby. With Sheehan's birthday coming up next Saturday, it was the perfect time to put in the new horn. Carol and I arranged things, and on Sunday morning, bright and early, I started work on the installation.

It took a little advanced fabrication, but I came up with a pretty good location. As directed I used a 15-amp inline fuse on the positive lead from the horn switch, and all the splices have inline connectors. The original horn wire is a little narrow for the new load, and I toyed with the thought of installing a relay, but finally decided to use the wire directly.

This thing is seriously load. I'm sure the neighbors were thrilled with the test blasts early on a Sunday morning, but there was nothing to be done about it.

Carol and I decided Sheehan would find it on his own without being told, and I got a call around 10:15 this morning. It was fun. I hope he enjoys it for years to come...

Jake had a party on Saturday, August 7th to celebrate his fifth birthday. Pretty fun.

My nephew Jake turned five on August 1st, and we were all invited to his birthday party on Saturday afternoon. Jason had a prior engagement, and Jeremy had to work, so it was me and Justin.

Karen called on Friday asking to borrow chairs. I made Justin load two patio chairs and three folding inside chairs into the back of car. He drove - he's actually becoming pretty good, but he has the common overconfidence of youthful drivers.

We were a few minutes early, and helped Karen out with the little last minute things that always need doing. Cary had setup a big Spiderman bounce, and all the little kids (and a few bigger ones) had a blast. They had a wading pool setup next to a three-lane slip-n-slide. Their newly landscaped backyard was in great shape.

Jake wound up with far more presents than anyone could want, but early reports showed no duplicates.

William came home with us to spend the night, which was nice. He leaves for drum major camp on Wednesday, gets back on Sunday, then starts band camp on Monday, so his summer is effectively over.

Here's some pictures of Jake's fifth birthday party

For my license usage reporting project at work, I need to convert a value known as token-seconds into token-years, but had a problem:

What is a year?

There are many different definitions for a year, but four primary values:

• Tropical year - the time between successive vernal equinoxes. The accepted length of a tropical year is 31,556,925 seconds;
• Calendar year - the average length of a calendar year is 365.2425 days, or 31,556,952 seconds.
• Sidereal year - the time required for the earth to complete an orbit of the sun relative to the stars. It is 31,558,150 seconds, or about 20 minutes longer than the tropical year because of the precession of the equinoxes;
• Anomalistic year - the time required for the earth to go from the perihelion point once around the sun and back to the perihelion point - 31,558,433 seconds. It is longer than the sidereal year and the tropical year because of the eastward motion of the line of apsides, which is caused by the slow rotation of the earth's orbit as a whole.

I'm going to use the tropical year value to convert token-seconds into token-hours.

PDF

I'm near the end of a long project at work on license usage reporting.

Currently, MSC's customers can only get accurate reports of their license usage by paying Macrovision an exhorbitant amount of money to buy a report tool called SAMreport. On top of the expense, SAMreport doesn't work well with MSC's MasterKey system, requiring costly customization to report on the underlying feature that caused the CAMPUS checkout.

The new system I've built has two components: an updated vendor daemon that outputs accurate usage records, and a Perl application that collects the data, rolls it up into usable chunks, and then creates web pages on monthly, weekly, and daily use by feature (and sub-feature for CAMPUS checkouts). It's really pretty slick.

One of the nice items in the web reports is a usage graph, showing usage as a percentage of total available licenses for various periods: 10 minutes for the daily pages, 1 hour for the weekly pages, and 6 hours for the monthly pages. I played around with different approaches for producing the graphs, but always hit a snag with IE's CSS incompatabilities. Finally, I came up with a way to use cascading tables that works well in both IE and Firefox. The div that contains the usage graph has a background-image with the graph layout - this works very well.

The basic setup is in place now, and I'm working on cleaning up some less-than-ideal code, adding some enhancements, and fixing up the user documentation.

They were just moving into the LEM after the explosion on Apollo 13 when I finished up.

The nice RN used my right ring finger for the mini-test, and it was far less painful - I'm going to ask for that finger from now on. There was a problem with a thermal clamp at the beginning of the donation, and I got a fine spray of blood across my nice orange shirt, but the nurse got it cleaned up nicely - I don't think there will be a long-term problem.

I was scheduled to go in on July 19th, but woke up in the middle of the night with terrible indigestion, and had to cancel.