Pete was the step father of a good friend of mine, but I was very close to the family as a whole. I was included like I was a member of the family, and I considered them as part of my family. Pete was really a great guy, he was kind, and was a lot of fun to be around.

This situation is a bit worse because I have never had anyone really close to me pass away. I had a few family members pass away years ago, but we were not close. Pete and I were much closer and I wasn’t able to visit him while he was in the hospital, which makes it even worse.

I had two separate posts with resolutions last year, one for January 1, and another for my birthday, since that really is a new year. I am going to roll over my old ones because I had no time in 2009.

• Sell/trash old stuff that I don’t use anymore
• Spend more time blogging (project52)
• Take better care of my health
• Improve Django and Python skills
• Work on a startup
• Create an Android application
• Eliminate all debt
• Start dating again
• Create a solution log
• Move up in Google

I felt like getting a Slurpee so I headed out around 2pm and noticed that one of the homeless guys around here was in the park so while I was at 7-11 I picked up a hotdog and a bottle of water. On my way home I stopped at the park and brought it to him, as I was leaving, and he was thanking me I turned around and gave him $7 I had in my pocket. He was very happy to be getting both food and some money. I think that was the happiest I have seen anyone in a very long time. He said, “this is HUGE, how did you know I was in need?”, and I explained that I had been in a similar situation years ago and knew what it was like.

I don’t think I’ve ever blogged about this, but something very few people know about me is that back in 2005/2006 ago I lived out of my car for 3 months. The initial reaction from most is that it would be a horrible experience, and while parts of it were upsetting and difficult lessons were learned and I now know more about myself than ever. I was sleeping in a 95 3 Series BMW, which might sound nice, but it really isn’t, it is very uncomfortable, and you can’t sell it because you need transportation, and in this case a place to sleep. Access to a shower was limited, but I had a friend who was very kind to me and let me come over to her parents place. The difficulty with limited shower access is you have to be super careful about what you do so you don’t *need* a shower before you can have access to one. I ate Sabritones, a lime puffed wheat snack, when I didn’t have much money (they were $0.99 a bag and filling). The sad thing about that situation is I had a very very close friend who could have helped, and he did not. He was not obligated in anyway, it was my problem, but as close as we were and having a 3000 sqft house, he should have. Eventually his brother moved out and when he got his own house he let me stay there for 3 months or so, which saved my life, and I will be forever grateful to him for it.

So the situation is different, but I can relate, I know how hard it can be sometimes to keep it together. I know that giving him that small amount of money and lunch made a big difference for him, and he is enjoying it. With the upcoming load of stuff I will be bringing to CA, I am pretty sure there are things in there that I can give to him to use, but I wish I could do more for him today. He was a very nice man, and I feel bad for him because with apartment costs as high as they are getting back on his feet will be hard. I know that if I had not had family to go back to, I would have been in serious trouble.

Now that I have revealed more than I think I ever planned to on my blog, I will close with Merry Christmas, and have a Happy New Year!

So since this is MY new year, here are my resolutions:

1. Lose weight
2. Take better care of my health
3. Start dating again
4. Transfer departments at work to the department I would like to stay for the rest of my career
5. Spend more time blogging
6. Write an article or two for an online site, like I used to for Linux.com

Up to this point I haven’t made any progress on 3, 5 and 6, but I have started riding a bike again, while I don’t always eat healthy I have been making sure I have healthy food every day, and I have somewhat transferred to another role in the company.

At the beginning of October I moved to Mountain View, CA from Atlanta, GA to temporarily switch roles in the company. I may end up remaining in this position or changing, but I will be here until at least the end of March 2010. Because I am close to work I bought a Gary Fisher Cobia to ride to and from work, and will eventually bring my road bike out from Atlanta. Considering it has been about 12 years since I rode a bike over a few miles, I am fairly happy with the rides I have been doing. I rode 10 miles on the 18th, 15 miles on the 24th, 9 miles on the 25th, and 10.5 on the 27th. The ride on the 27th was to and from work, and I happened to get sick from riding in cold weather, but if I can do it sick I know I can do it any day.

Some of you know that my mother suffered from brain cancer, and after getting back into riding and gaining some interest in the things Lance Armstrong has done I have developed and annoyance with myself for not being involved in his Livestrong organization sooner. In the coming months I am going to start being involved in the organization and try to get other coworkers involved as well.

One thing people have said about me is that they can give me a goal and I will reach it, this has always been a work related comment, but I feel that while I do fail at some goals, they may not be total failures but may get put on the back burner until a point in my life where it makes more sense. One thing I would like to do, which I would place more under the dream category, is the Ironman triathlon. I say dream category because it is an intense race, and I don’t know that I can/will put in the time anytime soon to do it. I hope to eventually do something similar that is a real challenge. To give you an idea of another item in the dream category I have Everest at the top of that, but considering I get winded doing a lot of things I have a ways to go to do either of those. Not to mention Everest is very expensive. Thinking about how I must appear to my more recent friends I can see these two things as somewhat shocking, most people know I am ambitious, it isn’t something I hide, but a lot of people don’t know the more physical things I used to do in my life so I appear much more sedentary than these goals would imply.

Anyway I am a little sick right now so I am finishing this up and going to bed after I take some meds.

So as another year starts I feel some things need to change. I need to get out more often, and start to take better care of myself. With my mouth finally starting to hurt less I am taking fewer pain killers and can hopefully start taking my cholesterol meds again. I’m sure they don’t conflict, but I didn’t want to take any chances and forgot to ask the doctors.

My career is in my opinion starting to take shape and taking the shape I would like. While I have had to put a lot of effort into it, and worked a lot of hours, I feel the effort was worth it. I do feel that I may regret some of it later as I didn’t really enjoy life and instead pushed for the career. That may have been the wrong approach, but I have seen a lot of people spend their entire life working towards a career or their piece of the pie and I think that getting that out of the way early leaves you more available for the other stuff later in life. The people in my life who know what I have had to do, mainly friends from work, understand just how difficult it was because they have intimate knowledge of what we do and what challenges exist. Maybe one day I will be important enough that writing a book about my life will make sense, after all a book is a life goal of mine.

So since this is MY new year, here are my resolutions:

1. Lose weight
2. Take better care of my health
3. Start dating again
4. Transfer departments at work to the department I would like to stay for the rest of my career
5. Spend more time blogging
6. Write an article or two for an online site, like I used to for Linux.com

We’ll see how it goes, I don’t know that I do such a good job completing my goals that I write down.

1. Improve Django and Python skills
2. Work on a startup
3. Improve eating habits
4. Lose 40 lbs
5. Create an Android application
6. Drink more water
7. Eliminate all debt
8. Start dating again
9. Create a solution log
10. Move up in Google
11. Travel internationally

1. Improve Django and Python skills
2. Work on a startup
3. Improve eating habits
4. Lose 40 lbs
5. Create an Android application
6. Drink more water
7. Eliminate all debt
8. Start dating again
9. Create a solution log
10. Move up in Google
11. Travel internationally

I have already started all of these so we will see how they work out.

People also went nuts over the whole Janet Jackson breast incident, and that was a quick flash that was handled by her as a mistake (covering up quickly). There are people who are not going to handle a picture of a woman breast feeding as it was intended, a non-sexual photograph. I happen to know someone who is in the petition, a girl who just had a baby in 2008, she also happens to be one of the most argumentative women I have ever met in my life and would find any excuse to justify her being on that petition.

It isn’t that there is anything really wrong with the photographs (other than the 4yr old breast feeding), personally I think nude photos should be more accepted in our society, but that just isn’t going to happen. I don’t know that Facebook is the place for photos of women breast feeding and I hope that Facebook continues to remove the photos.

Thursday morning I started having these weird stomach spasm type things, it sorta feels like when you are starving and your stomach feels like it is eating itself. They went away by the time I arrived at work. The next morning I woke up with it being worse and back pain, which I have gotten a few times so I thought it might have just been related to that. The day continued and I didn’t feel better so I went home around 1:30. Saturday morning I woke up and still felt bad and after my manager mentioned appendicitis on Friday I decided to look up the symptoms. I was having enough symptoms that I felt it could have been appendicitis so I went into the emergency room. The page I found about appendicitis had said you would feel some paid to the right of your naval, which I was experiencing, but when I pushed in the general area of the appendix it never hurt. After talking to the doctor he was like “well your appendix is down here and your pain is on the center and right side of your stomach”. Better safe than sorry. I had eaten not long before going in so I could not have further tests done, but the blood and urinalysis came back fine and he feels it is something with my gallbladder.

The real crappy thing is I am in pain, I feel like I need to go into work since I will be gone next week and I can’t get a doctors appointment until Friday afternoon. Friday night I am leaving to go up to Virginia and pack up my mom’s house. So I am going to be feeling like crap and having to move a lot of stuff. Oh well that’s life.

Over the past couple years I have seen severe memory loss, sometimes I would repeat myself four times in a 15 minute period, which doesn’t seem all that bad, but in the end she thought I was still at home, and her mother was still alive, etc.  For many years my mom has been changing, in her attitude and how she acts, so she has not been the mom I always knew.  That is the part that makes me the most upset, I miss my mom, the mom I grew up with.

So I will be going up to her home in Virginia and packing up all of her belongings soon.  Her situation has become severe and we have had to move her to her sister’s house.  After a few incidents we have had to move her into a nursing home to ensure her safety.

With that, finally registering my car, taking the dog into the vet, I am going to be dropping a significant amount of money this month on top of the money I have to spend on my day to day expenses.

I feel sorta bad too that I never update this blog.  I have been so involved with work and then relaxing when I am not at work I never feel like adding anything.  I also don’t feel like I have much to say about tech stuff anymore.  I have had to put my projects/businesses on hold because of time constraints and I can’t talk about what I do at work.

I think 2009 will be another good year, I can put a lot of the stress of 2008 behind me.

On July 21st my contract position at Google ended and my position as a fulltime Googler started.  With that came a new Macbook Pro, my first experience using a Mac.  For a long time I have had this view of Macs that the applications lacked a lot of options and most Mac users just wanted simple point and click and were willing to give up some funtionality.  I think Kevin Rose put it best when he said that Apple has picked X number of priorities with each OS X release and they do each of them very well.  Unlike Microsoft who choosed X*4 number of features and none of them are done as well as they could be.

Since getting my Mac I have absolutely loved the experience.  There have been some headaches.  One being the lack of home and end keys and that the combination of keys change in applications, but if you can adapt quickly it doesn’t really pose much of a problem.  The other thing was quiting applications, I always knew that command+Q would quit, but I am so used to WIndows/Linux that I was still in the mode of just clicking the X.  I sometimes miss being able to maximize a window with a mouse click, but I have gotten used to always leaving some space on the sides of my applications.  It really only took me a day or two of using it on a regular basis to get past these annoyances (if you can call them that).

This last weekend was tax-free weekend in GA so I grabbed a 22″ HP LCD.  I now wish I had grabbed the 24″, but I may go back in a week or two (when I have to pay tax grr) and grab it.  The glossy screen is really nice, if I had more lights on or had a window behind my desk it might be a big problem, but with my setup it is awesome.

I recently bought Ooma, which put simply is instant VOIP. You pay $250 for the hub and a scout and you just plug it into the network, activate and start calling. No monthly fees. You do have the option to pay $99/yr (8.25/mo) to have instant 2nd line, and some other features. One thing that can be a draw back is that it uses peer to peer connectivity to handle call bandwidth or something like that, so by paying for premiere you bypass that and go straight through their servers. All calls are supposed to be encrypted I believe, but I don’t really talk about anything that important on the phone.

I am going to try to keep this updated more often, sometimes it is hard to think of anything worthy of posting.

1. Start a business
2. Organize a group
3. Volunteer
4. Take an active role in your children’s’ activities
5. Start a family
6. Write a book
7. Learn an art
8. Run for office
9. Take up a sport
10. Set an outrageous goal — and achieve it!

I have done a few of these… Learn an art, Take up a sport, Start a business, but what I really want to do is write a book and start a family.

I passed my Offensive Security Certified Professional test, so now I have that certification and in a few weeks I will be preparing for LPIC and Linux+ exams. I would also like to start working towards my CCNA. I know nothing about routing and I need to work on my subnetting so it will be good for me.

I will try to post some pictures of the apartment, my digital camera took a crap so it will have to wait until I get a new one. I recently bought an LG42LB5D 42″ 1080p LCD TV and a Playstation 3… boy does 1080p look good.

I just moved to Atlanta, and I have stuff everywhere. This is one of those moves where your parents give you everything of yours that is in their house so it was a beast of a move. I had a couple people able to help me, but I had to load and unload a good bit of the 26′ truck. I also had some trouble with the auto transport so I have to get some money back from Uhaul for being a lame company and giving me crap.