KRHAiNOS

 Rombus

I did something last week that I had never “offically” done before. I handed in my two week notice at Time Warner Cable. My final day is the 7th, making it 5 years, 2 months and 28 days since I first started as a I/R Tech up in Akron. So why am I resigning? Melissa and I are moving to Alabama.

While Columbus has been good, Melissa has always wanted to be closer to her family. With her father’s stroke earlier this year, we started really looking hard at moving. I have been keeping an eye on over 40 companies, and put in about 30 applications since I started keeping track in June. Finally I got a bite, and interview, and finally a job. On September 12th, I start as a Business Customer Service Tech for Knology.

The job is a bit of a mix of what I do now and what I did in Akron. Essentially I’m a cable tech with a focus on Business and Fiber-to-the-Home customers. Yep, I’ll be doing work on Fiber! Melissa is going to help take care of her brother, and focus on her business. She already has an actual wedding cake she is going to bake for a customer, and wants to get into the cake decorating business. I’m still going to try and do development under my RomLabs business, but its on hold till October when the new iPhones come out. With iOS 5 around the corner, it makes little sense to try and develop for iOS 3, and I lack any good iOS 4 devices.

Of course, there are a few downsides to this move. First, for the immediate future, there is no wire based HSD options. My HSD connection will be a VZW 3G USB stick and a Cradlepoint router. I know 3G speeds and a 5GB data cap are not the best, but it beats the pants off a satellite connection. Satellite ping times might as well be measured in seconds! Second, I doubt I’ll be making it to another DasLAN unless I’m in the area. The upside is I’m planning on making it to QuakeCon’s more often, starting in 2012. PaxEast is a possibility, but I have to see how things work out.

In a way, while I’m going to miss Columbus and Time Warner Cable, I know its time to move on. So onward and upward! We move down on the 10th and hopefully be back online sometime on the 11th.

 Alison

 BobOmega

 Alkali

 Archangel

Has it really been more than a year since a meaningful post was done? I should probably give up and just turn this into my political whining :/

So… rereading my own posts… you all know I was married… that’s good. So what has the last year brought? Sadly, I don’t think this needs to be a long post. That isn’t to say I’ve had a bad or boring year, it has actually been quite wonderful.

First of all… I finally bought a house!!! If you don’t remember my saga have a look over here for a laugh… or cry. With my move to Hatteras Networks, my buying power increased a bit and Theresa decided it was time to look again. I wasn’t really in the mood so I let her pilot the process for a bit. We found a couple of town homes that were the right price and features (both were foreclosures if I remember right) but we weren’t able to get either. I was actually surprised with the second because we offered what the bank was asking for the home and accepted the “as-is” status. After we lost the second house, I fell back into the don’t care attitude but had more or less settle on the idea that I no longer wanted a town home and I didn’t want to move far outside of the town we already lived in. With that in mind (and the prices I was agreeing to for the town homes) Theresa went to task (with purpose I might add) and found two potential homes in a community not more than 2 miles from the apartment. We immediately fell in love with the first. The home was 8 years old but was immaculately maintained. Everything seemed to be in good condition and while the price was a bit high it really seemed like a place we could call home. The second house, which was bigger than the first and a better price per sq.ft., was a shit hole. It was a rented house, and the current tenants couldn’t even be bothered to go outside on a beautiful spring day long enough for us to tour the house. The carpets and doors were in abysmal condition and I don’t think we could trust the tenants to be nice to the house when moving out (I got the impression the house was being sold “out from under” them). After looking at the second house, it actually only took us about 10 minutes to decide that we wanted to make an offer on the first. We didn’t tell the Realtor that, we wanted to make sure we thought about it a little bit, but we were actually pretty set on it right away.

Offering on and negotiating on the house was a bit of a pain. The house was initially priced well over market value and at first the seller didn’t seem to think that was a problem. Indeed, we were offering on the house in less than 30 days of being on the market so he may have thought there was really high demand (although, that probably had more to do with their realtor), but it was hard to get them to budge. The process was pretty involved, but the one thing that stands out is how truly horrible the seller’s realtor was. Seriously, she nearly torpedoed the deal all on her own.. twice. The first time was when we were doing the inspection. We scheduled the inspection with full permission of the seller and then the night before the inspection we were told it would have to be moved because of work in the kitchen. Then, during the inspection, we found water near the dishwasher after testing it. I can’t think of any reasonable person who wouldn’t want to know what work was done in the kitchen after finding water in the middle of it. The realtor actually told us it wasn’t any of our business and not to worry about it. O RLY? I did get a little too angry at that, but fortunately my realtor was able to keep things together. The second time, was because we asked for a sit down meeting with the actual seller. Because of various odd communications and difficulties in negotiations, Theresa and I thought it would be easier to work out a few last issues face to face than with two realtors as intermediaries. Their realtor told us a meeting was unnecessary and that we had no business talking directly with her clients… O RLY? It also turns out that their realtor never presented them our request to meet and even refused their request to meet us! Really… thinking back… its amazing how much my temper has calmed in the last 4 or 5 years because in college I would have gone absolutely nuts on this lady.

We didn’t actually move into the house for a month or so after closing. The house was actually bought at the end of April, but the seller wasn’t ready to move because of how fast I needed to close (I liked my mortgage broker, but the industry is kinda shitty). I was actually a landlord for 30 days! The sellers turned out to be great people and its a shame their realtor was such a piece of crap. Because of her, I got the impression that the seller was going to try to screw me out of anything that wasn’t in writing so I was pretty much the asshole buyer that put every last thing in writing and demanded the letter of every clause in the buyers and renters contracts be followed. Things could and should have gone much easier.

The other big change for me in the spring was Hatteras Networks merging with Overture Networks. There has been some interesting fallout as a result of this merger, but nothing I’d like to put on the open internet. Unfortunately, I don’t have as much confidence in Overture as I did in Hatteras, but we have a lot of headroom for things to change and I’m being as open minded as possible.

Much of the summer was based around me and Theresa trying to get the house situated (and furnished). Not many of you own homes yet, but you’ll find out one day just how annoying $200 is. I swear, every weekend I was spending $200 on something for the house. Lawn mower (by the way, if you own a house… you need one), area rug, curtains, garage door opener… the list is actually pretty long. We did have a couple of amazing respites last summer. First, we had family and friends (thanks for coming!) down for a 4th of July party and house warming. We have some fun stories out of that one. Second, we took a weekend vacation to New Orleans since Theresa had to fly down for an ALA conference (btw, I recommend New Orleans for only a short vacation… the novelty wears off pretty damn fast).

Yet again, we did go to QuakeCon and this one was one of the most fun we’ve had. I think that is largely due to the fact that we didn’t do setup or tear down and managed to spent a lot more time away from the actual convention (last years convention was far more corporate due to Bethesda’s acquisition of id and a lot more generic than former cons). After 2010′s debacle with file sharing, we had pretty low expectations, so last years ended up pretty damn good by comparison. Despite that, some of us are considering ending our QCon trips on that high note and instead putting our efforts into a more traditional vacation; perhaps renting a beach house for a week. Probably more on that in a post to come (if I ever get around to it… I have other draft posts that will probably never be published).

That brings us into the fall which was very slow and sad for Theresa and myself. I did have a bit of good news… I bought a new Xterra PRO-4X (I’ll try to link pictures later) and took it off-roading with Tim (not my best decision). Sadly my fun was marred by other events. Theresa’s mother, after 19 years of various battles with cancer and a final 3 year fight that no one could win, passed in early December. I’m happy she’s not in pain any more and so very thankful for the same, but am deeply saddened that the world has lost such a kind and generous woman and that I won’t get to know her as Theresa did. We will move on and I hope honor her life in a way fitting to the person she was, which can only be an improvement over the person I’ve been so far.

 Manicbomber

This foot was earned earlier in the month, but it took quite a while to get a picture of the sixth foot. First, Eddy lost the foot. He said that he had it in the pocket of one of his pants. The foot could have fallen out or the washer and dryer could have gotten it; either way it was gone forever. This required going in to see the gym teacher to ask for another foot. I was prepared to make Eddy give her a dollar or however much it was going to cost to replace the lost foot, because it was his responsibility, but she just gave him another one. That was nice of her.

The color chosen this time was yellow, which is the first time that Eddy has picked a color that he already had. This is not for lack of there being more choices in colors. While he was picking out the foot to replace the one he lost I noticed that there was a white, purple, and black foot, but Eddy chose yellow.

 ZedX

New TV! Samsung 42” plasma.

 Lethal

 Darksquare

 Swiftwulf

 Eclipse

Quakecon 2011 started off the same way they all do, with Tim and his friends arriving at my house on Tuesday.  I was lucky again this year to get the time off work.  Since the Quakecon dates are rarely announced in time, I had guessed the wrong weekend to apply my vacation time.  We had a smaller group this year, almost the same people as last year.  Tim, Adam, March, Steve, Matt, Joe and Jo all came down.  Normally, they arrive early to help volunteer for setup.  This year though, a vacation was needed and everyone just used the time to relax and have a good minilan (the LAN before the LAN).  They do enough volunteering throughout the event, and it was good to finally see them.  Usually, between their staying at the hotel and their volunteering, it would feel like I never saw them. 

We were feeling a little skittish about the convention this year, after network outages turned Quakecon into IRC’con last year.  This year the Quakecon website was hacked and there was very little information available.  It seemed like no one really cared about Quakecon anymore and the magic was dying. 

Overall though, I think we were mostly happy with Quakecon 2011.  If you’ve ever been to one then you know what it is like.  Depending on what breaks that year, they are all pretty much the same.  The network was much more stable this year, due mainly to a routed network instead of switches.  AT&T sponsored internet was a very welcome addition.  But there was a flaw in the network this year.  Using routers instead of switches meant that searching for LAN games wouldn’t work.  To get into a game, you had to manually type in an IP Address, which is a pain to look up.  Lacking an official solution to the problem, I personally started keeping track of LAN Games and sharing the info over a twitter account and the IRC room.  It was a detriment to the LAN overall, in my opinion, but not a huge one.  My efforts seemed mostly futile as there just weren’t enough people following the twitter accounts and joining IRC.  Over time, we just started playing games online, since the speed was good enough.  In the end, it didn’t really matter if you were playing with strangers in the room or strangers on the internet.

I played mostly QuakeLive of course, and did decent.  The most fun, however, were the Left 4 Dead 2 versus matches we played.  There were 8 of us, which is the perfect number for a L4D2 vs match, and of us only 3 really play the game.  Dead Air had just been released, so we played a lot of that.  It was pretty fun to stumble around as noobs. 

The vendors area was borderline empty.  There was a Dell/Alienware setup, and some Rage.  I think a Silverstone booth sold some headsets.  I can’t remember the other ones and frankly I didn’t spend much time there.  Ventrillo again tried to give away a car and again I didn’t care.  Joe wasted a lot of his time standing around the QuickDraw stage trying to win a chance to play a game and maybe win some money.  Some money that they probably won’t pay anyways.  I stopped fighting over the prizes a long time ago.  I never win and why waste the time.

With Jo’s prompting, I went to more panels this year.  They had one which was an interview with some of the key id software employees which was cool.  John Carmack is a smart guy and it was interesting.  What was less interesting was the PC Perspective event.  Year after year we go hoping to win big prizes but as always, nothing.  I can’t remember anything actually presented there except Nvidia was there and I can’t remember what they were on about.  Nvidia Douche [1] [2] returned this year with a speaking role.  I noticed that every picture I took of him always comes out the same.  However, March, Jo and I made it interesting by (joining the crowd in) yelling crude things at them.  They couldn’t hear us but it was funny to those around.  What was terribly depressing was an actual fight that erupted over a PC case given out as a prize.  They wrestled and twisted and fell over each other and we all watched in horror.  Sad to watch people’s morality absolutely dissolve at the hint of material gain.

Though it was better than last year, we haven’t decided if we are going back next year.  There was an idea floating around of renting a place to set up a big minilan and just have the week to ourselves.  Maybe over time it will turn into our own convention.  Either way, as long as we keep getting together once a year that’s enough for me.