WalkerPad

Scary stuff. I was let go after a year and half yesterday. Apparently my function will be replaced with temp contractors. LOL will see how that works out for them.

Fear, doubt, worry… and maybe hope are what we are going through right now. I’m still technically employed until the 27th but that is my severance so I’m useing that time to find a new gig.

Same day we entered into escrow on our old house too, talk about a day full of highs and lows.

But, it’s done we closed the new house and are moving tomorrow!
We have a offer on our place and I’m trying to close that aggressively, so everyone keep your fingers crossed.

We had some fun dramma a bit ago, kaily lost her Hello Kitty doll. After a week or so of tearful bed times and me driving around to find it I finally bit the bullet and went shopping on my last day of vacation. This turned into a 12 store jaunt since her particular doll was only available at Christmas and so I had to go track down a store with back stock. Eventually success was had and kaily is none the wiser though she did note that boy Hello Kitty sure was clean :p.

No real fathers day plans. Think we will just be busy unpacking and waiting for direct tv to show up.

I finally got around to doing some post processing on my pictures and added some up to the gallery.

Still trying to get docs to the close the house, the lenders are acting totally nutty and throwing everybody curves by pretty much randomly changing what has been a pretty set business process for a long time, and just demanding weird things. Anyway with a little luck we might actual close this next week. Course then Charise would like to wait until schools out to move but I’m not sure I can handle a month more of waiting.

Busy weekend, Saturday we had Richard (my Mom’s hubby’s) Birthday party up in SF. We went out to Yang Sing which is a very good (and insanely exspensive) Dim Sum place. Then the kids put on a play :).

Yeah so no pictures yet, been busy with house stuff.

I did get a new toy the other day off of craigslist on the cheap, factory sealed. The guy had a pretty good story as to why he had it, so I’m telling myself it didn’t just fall of the back of a truck (they got a couple at cost then didn’t need them etc, meh, maybe).
It wasn’t that much cheaper then Amazon actually (a bit) but I could get it first thing in the morning and I really needed it to go find some place in Los Altos (charise needed her hybrid with the integrated one), so I’m calling it a win.

I have some mixed feelings on the unit over all, but it dose seem to be fairly solid for point A to point B type stuff and that is always critical detail and surprisingly not all companies get that little detail right :p. So here is a brief man on the street feature/impression type review as I discovered them.

Note the page breaks on the full article page. I’ll see if I can get a picture of my UI from it.

Argh, my 360 finally died. Was ok for years, recently I turned horizontal, and put where it got a less air flow (new entrainment center) and it dies within 3 months. bad manufacturing for sure. Interesting I think the main problem was warm air intake from other AV component beneath because it was in a hotter area for al long time to and ran (but it was vertical then).

Got a unkind letter from the IRS claiming we made a lot more money then we did (the options had been treated as income correctly accept one 16 dollar one). Our tax person Lisa Berling is getting it fixed, that won’t be cheap but it’s better then me arguing with them, Lisa tends to win :). Anyway I’m prety sure we didn’t do anything wrong and it’s a just a reporting reconciliation issue. Not like I have that sort of problem with socialtet stock :p.

House stuff is moving along. I think we are on the final leg. Big problem now is ours is not selling as fast as I had hoped which is making me real gun shy about putting money into the new place. On the other hand the Zillow property value graphs for the area comparing size etc still make the new place look like it will have a really great valuation after we put a of cash into the areas that are dragging it down. I’m less happy with the Zillow projection for sunnyvale :p, but Darren says we are still priced competitively priced and our disclosures show us to be in good shape. Ugh stressful. Probable drop the price a bit after this weekend if there is not a decent offer.

I should have some new kaily pictures up by monday switching around image apps has really messed up my work flow on that stuff.

Man… what a totally lame ass ending for a otherwise decent (if repetitive game). What a total let down. I waited months for Assassins Creed to come out on PC so I could enjoy it more (console controls usually leave me a bit flat). I think I will just pass on the sequel, if they are going to put that little effort into scripting a end they don’t deserve my money. I didn’t expect anything earth shattering but it was a totally lame non ending end roll credits. Feh.

Geeking out a bit today, tried out a some software for making HDR photo’s. I need to go back and learn how to do manual bracketing on my camera to to maximize the effect. Still kind of Cool, giving a lot of depth. Makes me wonder about some comment I read a year a so ago about the future being HDR photos off of HD video feeds rather then DSLR’s.

This was from when I was messing around up at Squaw valley and was perpetually scared of breaking my camera.

Image pulled. Looks like Zooomr is broken *again*. I might finally have to give up and move anything I’m not hosting over to flickr instead. I really like zooomr but it’s been nothing but problems for months and months. Its a one man army fighting the good fight there but there is a limit to what a user can take.

backup but for how long

Well, we are a long crazy way from being done but we have had our bid accepted and are now in a ticking time bomb of an escrow on our new place in Scott’s Valley.

I had run across this place last year, really liked it, got Charise all jazzed up about it, we put a in a low ball offer… the other agent jerked us around then they took a different contingent offer. We where pretty bummed. But I kept my little real-estate widget running and noticed immediately when it was listed again. It’s been a pain in the ass of negotiation, but I think there is a very serious long term upside potential to the new place so hopefully it will be worth it. It’s big(ish) almost 2300sqf on a court with a view. The lot is interesting not all of it is very usable (but not backed up to a mountain either) but there are a like of pretty tree’s and it’s a nice quit pocket where you can’t really hear 17.

Now we just have to sell our place in this messed up market… but we have a pretty cute place and it’s a dam fine location so hopefully we will do well enough.

I’m trying hard not to think about some of the little down sides like increased commute time :p.

Course it could all still explode if any of the inspection reports are totally out of whack.

Next up: some snaps from Kaily’s first Ski trip that involved ski’s and a sled

The faster you want something to happen the slower it seems to unfold.
Anyway
Coming up, Ariana’s Bday is on the first, Kaily’s Bday is on the 5th. Mine is on the 29th (yay! I get one this year).
Kaily arguable doesn’t need anymore toys so thinking outside the box is a good thing.

I sense change in the air.

It was great to see Ariana after new years (the walkershaws too). Much Wii bowling was had by all.

Man, been a rather convoluted process but I think everything is pretty much sorted out now. I have been going back to re-add the photo’s I’m most of the way done. Kinda aggravating that. Anyway still settling on a new theme and I need to add the visual editor stuff back in to the back end.

Gallery2 update broke stuff, working on it.

Wow what a mess, the gallery2 upgrade completely hosed it’s self and I had to setup a whole new install. This should ’should’ have been trivial. It’s coming back on line now and it looks like the data will be intact but restoring the data seems to ha e tossed some of the structure so not sure old embedded images will work right.

feh, data base is going nuts. Not sure if it’s gallery or the host at this point but pictures are offline and not showing in the blog.

woo happy new year

Christmas v2 s.cal

I picked up a Kid Tough Digital Camera for kaily as one of her main presents this year.

She always has a bit of fun trying to take over my dSLR, and is always a good sport for posing for pictures (but only for that .5 second you have her attention). I thought it might be fun to giver her a bit more time on the other side of the lens with something a little less fragile. To be fair, aside from leaving it on the floor for me to trip on, she has actually been pretty careful with the Kid tough camera (just going to say KTC from here on out) so far, so a more breakable one might not have been the end of the world. Still, time and running might tell a different story.
The Fisher Price KTC camera gets a couple things really right and a lot of things really wrong. The bad things are mostly from what I can see, Fisher Price just totally cutting every corner possible on the guts, I guess they don’t think kids should get a good quality indoor shot.

I put it into high res mode (such as it is) and slapped in a 128 SD card I had lying around for Kaily to get going.

I shot the bellow one just to measure the KTC against a slightly steadier hand, and get a feel for the write delay (minimal but it’s so low res even at high res that is not a huge surprise).

I touched up all the pictures slightly in aperture, and discarded about thirty or so totally unusable ones (hey her average is already better then mine ).

What’s good about the KTC:

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Busy Christmas morning. Kaily got us up before 8 for presents.

Thank you one and all for a most bountiful haul of Kaily loot.

It’s now about 1:45AM Christmas morning. I feel a bit like we must have mugged Santa given the insane amount of stuff under our tree, mostly for kaily. I just got through putting out the last of Charis’s stuff and filling her stocking witch junk food, and taking a couple final snaps.
Tonight, well last night really, which is to say Christmas Eve, we went up to my Mom’s house. Where santa arrived promptly at 5:30pm to hand out presents to three very exited and shy kids age 2, 3 and 4. Who new my Mom had that kind of pull with anyone in red satan, but I digress.
We also managed to stop by the Walker/clearly/shaw party at Aunt Pam’s house. Sadly we managed to stay barely half an hour before we had to rush to SF. Where we managed to only be ten minutes late, which I maintain must have been a bit of a Christmas miracle in and of it’s self. That and I drive a bit like Santa must to make all those stops… ;).

Pictures abound, I’m still trimming but I dumped a good amount into the gallery for posterity. My connection has been pretty pokey all day (Comcast is probable broken again *sigh*) so it’s taking forever for the pics to upload.

So Amazon had a deal going, pick a HD-DVD player and get 12 movies with it. I picked us up the Toshiba A30 HD-DVD player. It was a bit of compromise, I wanted the slightly more expensive unit that supported 7.1 audio but figured this would be good enough.

I like the quality of of the output from the A30 but not the hardware it’s self. The audio and picture quality are quite good, so is the DVD upscaling (only tried out the 1080P over HDMI and 5.1 surround).

The hardware has a few seriously irritating flaws (I have the most current firmware).

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Some pictures from the Kaily’s last Gymnastics class of 2007. I liked her teacher for this last one (seemed to have a good sense of humor with the kids).

We have had a iRobot Roomba discovery for a few years now. It has has worked reasonable well, although ours is currently broken. Either the battery won’t hold a charge or something more serious is wrong. Just dies after a few seconds, and the process in the faq for fixing the battery doesn’t work for me.
The discovery is a bit like a lazy husband (takes one to know one), and unless you poke and prod it it dose at best a average vacuum job… but that is just barely good enough for how we used it, and some times have it is a great connivence.
Anyway, I liked the discovery enough despite it’s foibles that when Woot! had a sale on the Scooba for $99 I couldn’t resist. I should have.

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