Well, after about 9 and a half years with Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory 11/09 was my last day. Now, I wasn’t the only admin besides Jenny (thats the aquilino1@llnl.gov email you see there), but she was my closest friend and peer while I was there. There was a little poetic license there, but it was accurate.

It is hard to quantify the emotions about leaving LLNL. I do not know if I have the appropriate words to describe the feeling.

How about this:

Remember when you left the comfortable confines of high school? That microcosm was your entire world. You had spend the majority of your adolescent life being a part of that world; your friends, you responsibilities, and learning that environment. When you left high school, it was sort of scary, and it was hard to imagine how things would be after leaving high school. The only certainty was the regiment of “work” that you learned in school would continue on (hopefully to college).

Its a big scary world out there, and when you are “institutionalized” you may not want to leave even if it is time.

This is where I am at. It was time for me to forge a new path in my career, and I was starting to feel a little confined by the Lab’s philosophy of what I.T. is. I was also feeling a bit over-specialized. Not in what I specifically do, which is *NIX Administration, but things that only a national lab has to deal with. That is a bit more complicated, so despite the fact that I could have made a lifetime out of LLNL, I was not getting the fulfillment I require. I look for technical challenges, not inter-personally communication challenges.

Like high school, I will keep some of the friends I had made there. Also like high school, I will soon find myself in a different environment where my vantage point and perspective will be force to change and adapt to the new culture. There is nothing wrong with that as long as I continue to have a healthy respect for the past, it is after-all what brought me here.

Most importantly, I will have my anchor: the “work”. The core of my skill set may be re-balanced for the new job, but it will not fundamentally change and I am happy to accept that.

So far, after two full days have gone by, I’m pretty excited about the growing list of projects and tasks that we are facing. Renting in a shared house with two other room mates isn’t so awesome though, I’ll be a full fledged germaphobe (mysophobia) in no time. I clean my dishes but I sort of freak out of my sponge touches anything else but my dish.

Here is to new adventures!

The City only publishes this as a PDF image, comparing the year selected, and the previous year. It also only goes back to 2005.

To help view this as a possible trend, and not just a snapshot in time, I typed up all of them in Google Docs – City of Antioch Crime Stats

It does some some improvement after a few years of growth, it is still however an order of magnitude worse than other cities in California.

According to Homesurfer.com’s Crime report, even the Sister city to Antioch, Pittsburg had 323 per 100,000 “incidents” in one year (2008). While Antioch had 869 per 100,000.

Compare that to places like Moraga which had 35 incidents per 100,000 or heck, even Oakley’s 248, which borders Antioch on the eastern side.

Here is a decent table output:

I applaud the police department for making a dent over the past two years, and even more so for publishing this data (Concord and Pittsburg did not have this information easily accessible). Even with their effort, I don’t think I’ll be hanging around to see if it pays off.

I hope that Antioch becomes a nice bedding community again. The type of place where people like my grandfather, only had to drawn their weapon once during a domestic dispute, and never had to fire it.

Over the past year, my conscious mind has told me it really enjoys just going to work, and then back home, with no interruptions. It has told me that I’m not young enough, or good enough to continue with martial arts, and I might as well accept that and embrace my more passive hobbies. All the while, there was a voice in the back, whimpering, “But you do Wushu…”

This Sunday that voice got to scream and shout with all its enthusiasm, “YES, YOU DO WUSHU!”

Was I euphoric from the nostalgia of being there? Did I release a stream of endorphin’s from the vigorous workout? Did the time away clean the slate, and I got to enter a class without the gossip and drama that I began to resent? Was it because I did not have to worry about how I was going to make the tuition and what sort of IT support requests would be attached to that?

Yeah, it was all of the above, and I’m okay with that. I happy I was able to enjoy the class for what it was.

Last week I got an email from Mark, my good friend/coach who now lives in China. He was going to surprise Sifu Patti and stop by the Sunday class, with plans of going out for lunch afterwards.

This was a great reason to wake up earlier than I normally would on a Sunday morning, so I dusted off the old workout bag and drove to Berkeley.

I arrived a the best time possible, as Mark was hiding in the waiting room, and James pulled up just as I got out of my truck. Mark and I bickered over who should walk in first, so we eventually went in side by side, nearly squeezing through the door frame at once.

Patti was happily surprised when she spotted the two of us, and I may have put her in a traumatic state of shock with my fuzziness. We greeted, hugs all around, and then I joined the line up to salute and begin.

My own expectation of the class was something like this: I’ll be able to hang for warmups, and then die when it comes to the killer relays of sprints and frog-leaps that James loves to do; then I’ll get through a few lines of basics and finally crap out.

James

To my surprise, and everyone else seemed pretty happy about it as well, I worked out the entire two hours with very few breaks, and most of my muscle memory came back to help me do everything. For the most part, my brain and legs said “Hell yeah, we can do this!” but only a few times, during the difficult jumps, did my legs disagree with my brain. My brain said “We remember this, lets do it!”, yet my legs were stubborn and refused to leave the ground.

Mark joined in after stretching, and he helped a group (including me) on some simple southern style basics:

Pierre, "Van" (which I found out later, works at LBL in IT supporting Juniper (FreeBSD based BTW...) equipment) and Mark

I did not catch her name, she was nice and a hard worker. Here Mark is showing her how to snap through the hips more.

James, in between leading the class, was also working on various jumps and twists:

One time when I landed like that, I had to stop for 6 or so weeks. Then I was super flexible...

After class we went to lunch:

Little Star Pizza in Albany, on Solano.

We collectively rallied against Patti and split the bill with out her. I even managed to finagle her credit card away from her while James grabbed the bill. Thats great team work right there.

A common theme between the group is we all take pictures at the same time.

Afterwards we grabbed a cup of coffee, getting a group shot:

Patti, Mark and Pierre

Mark, myself and James. Pierre was off to the side taking another picture.

I had a great time.

There is something about Wushu West that feels like home, and it was welcoming to join the class and feel like just a regular student there, doing conditioning drills and basic stances. My legs are the most sore they have ever been in a long time. Aside from my first rose peak attempt, I don’t think I’ve felt this much burning lactic acid build since I left Wushu West.

It was great seeing everyone, doing little interview for Mark’s students (see the camcorder there?), and spending a nice afternoon there.

Going back to Wushu West on a regular basis is just not in the cards right now, I cannot afford the tuition, gas to get there, and the time it takes to drive out there and back home. I’m not going to rule it out for the future though, I know I’ll aways be a student there.

I’m excited. The best part will be going into work on the Friday saying “WHAT?!”

• The ability to play the same music from my phone, my computer at work, my computer at home is pretty cool
• Everyone gets 5GB of space for free, and you can pay for more
• When you purchase (DRM free)  mp3′s from Amazon, it does not count against your Cloud Drive storage
• The player is web based, and the tools to download purchased music are usable on Windows, OS X and Linux

So, I uploaded some music, bought two songs from the comfort of my phone to play around with it.

What I liked immediately is it plays your music in its full original bit rate glory, however, this means streaming it over a cellular network requires more bandwidth, which also may require paying your cell carrier more money. You can set your smart phones Amazon app to either only stream music when you are connected to a 802.11 wireless network, or, you do not have to stream from your cloud drive, but you can download it directory to your phone. I think this is a good compromise.

The web player is pretty good, and it isn’t cluttered with Ads or some corporate propaganda to make you buy more stuff.

Web Based Player

I really like that between the phone’s app, and the web app, you can download whatever content you have.

A shot of the upload tool:

Uploading Music.

What I think are areas that need improvement:

• The Media Player on the phone (I’m using an Andriod based phone, the Motorola Droid).
  • It does not have a shuffle or repeat toggle. It just shuffles.
  • The interface could take some cues from the Zune Media Player (people may hate on the product and Microsoft, but the Zune interface is by far the best media manager I’ve EVER used, and I’ve given pretty much everything a try. My Zune died last year and I still use the Media Player). It’s artists/album sorting is pretty simplistic
• The Media upload tool does not support Linux/BSD, and it only supports a limited set of Media
• It would be nice if it supported importing/converting/exporting your own playlists. You can create a playlist right now though
• I prefer music not to fade in for song transition, and the phone player does this (and it didn’t appear you could change this setting)
• Logging into Amazon. It would be nice if you could tie your Google account to your Amazon account, and have a seamless federated login. My amazon account credentials are a real pain to type on a phone.

Overall though, its a cool concept, and even though I have more than enough tools at my disposal to sync my media from work, home, and my phone, this is pretty handy and simple. Using the “cloud” is also a good way to keep a backup of some data. I currently have 33GB of MP3′s on my server, so 5GB isn’t a bad start.

I’m pretty diverse when it comes to where I get my digital audio from, and I doubt I will always and only by through Amazon. They have done a good job to get me to purchase at least two songs just to use this interface. Good job Amazon.

We’ve spent a good amount of time traveling in either a car or a big rig, listening to music. I remember waking up at 4am during my summer vacation so I could accompany you to help deliver lots and lots of boxes to U-Hauls around California. Or, our trips to Santa Cruz/Mission Springs, (despite the fact that you maliciously left the AC off for the entire trip just so we would really appreciate that cool Mision Springs air :) ), it was always a lot of fun and I really expanded my musical palette. I’ve learned a lot about music traveling with you, and I probably wouldn’t have as much of an appreciation for the blues and bluegrass styles if it wasn’t for all those hours on the road. Heck, I’m listening to Robert Johnson as I write this. I need a tamale now…

For a while, between the years I listened to the radio and up until very recently, I felt like there just wasn’t that kind of music out there. You know, the kind of music that doesn’t feel like it was grown in a board room meeting, and where people really know how to play their instruments. I was wrong though, there is a lot of great music out there and I’ve always wanted a way to share it with you. We don’t take long trips anymore, but the internet removes those boundaries :)

All these can be listened to by clicking on the play button, and downloaded. I hope you have speakers ready.

Gov’t Mule – By a Thread

Railroad Boy

Buckethead – Population Override

Earth Heals Herself

Buckethead – Captain EO’s Voyage

Captain EO’s Voyage

Cage The Elephant

Tiny Little Robots

Smog – A River Ain’t to Much to Love

Palimpsest
Although Smog is now just “Bill Callahan”, he has a great voice and a simple style.

First off though, we didn’t charge the battery for our nice camera. We were not prepared at all this year. So, the nice family portrait was not taken by us this year, and I don’t have a copy.

Here is the other part of my lack of preparedness… I sort of forgot to tell Michele that this was the weekend we were going to my Dads. I sort of got confused, because not only did my Dad tell me MONTHS ago to mark this on my calendar, but everyone else also had told me to “mark this on your calendar” for other plans. Not only did we have Christmas in Feb, but we also had arrangements to go over my friends house, Caralyne was going to spend the night at a friends house, and my other sister, Jessica, was having her birthday party at my Mom’s place the next day.

I was completely over booked, and even my Smart Phone cannot save me from myself.

To no delay this post any further (its been in draft for two weeks :P ), here are some pictures to accentuate the good time we had:

Coda is an awesome dog. Owen is quick to point out how big he is. Seriously, that dog could swallow him whole.

I thought it was pretty funny how Coda nicely curls up on a bad he has smushed into a pancake :)

Miles and Charlie

Tessey and Caralyne

Owen handling large bagged gifts like a pro

Little Eve

This camera has a cool new mode called "Anachronistic Lense". It can show the past/future of an object :)

We had fun, and afterwards we rushed over to Chris’ house and stayed until 5am, hanging out in the freezing cold with a fire pit. What a great Christmas.

Amnesia is a great horror game, and one of the most immersive games I have played. It has a dark HP Lovecraft inspired story that you, the protagonist Daniel discovery throughout the game through flashbacks and diary notes.

The game starts off with you, Daniel, waking up in a Prussian castle with a note along the lines of,

“Hello me, I took something to make me forget the terrible things that have happened. Now go kill this man in the basement…”

It is a sparse starting point, and that was a nice way to ease into the game. From the beginning, the atmosphere and ambient noises are unsettling, but manageable. Once you reach a particular point, the game becomes horrifically efficient at being scary.

Did I mention there is no way to defend yourself? So, while there are only a few monsters at a time, you cannot dispose of them. You have to sneak around them and try to avoid even looking at them. Why?

Amnesia has a “in/sanity” effect. So if you witness something spooky, you start to breath hard and your vision blurs. If you hang out in the dark too long, you might see cockroaches run across your screen. If you literally run into a Brute, your become so terrified that your escape turns resembles a bad dream. The kind where you feel like you are running through molasses and they big scary thing is right behind you at all times. It really does get your heart rate up, so sometimes I could only play for a few minutes at a time. Then I would have enough energy to run a few miles…

I took about 20 hours to go through it, and being that the developers and others say it is only an 6-8 hour game, I must be a big sissy. That is okay though, it was worth every panic’d minute.

They had a rotary table though, and it was awesome. I decided to put up a clip, through Picasaweb.

From 2011-01-09

I don’t like having any media content outside of my control, however, I also don’t have the required bandwidth to stream videos of any decent quality. So, I might try using this for now.

The Graveyard Book

It feels odd to read a children’s book, but it was very engrossing and a fun light read. I blew right through it though, partially because I didn’t want to put it down, and also because even for a 300 page book, the font and text padding was larger than normal.

Oh sure, I felt like a literary machine, reading 100+ pages in one sitting. Combine that with a nice cute story where there are no hard moral choices, a clearly evil bad guy, and no big words… reading hasn’t been easier since I read an X-Men comic!

Stroking my own ego aside, it was nice to read this in between the other two books I got. Because they make me feel stupid and put me to sleep.

The story is about a toddler, who after serendipitously wandering away from his home while his family is murdered, becomes adopted by a pair of ghosts. They do this to protect him from the murderer. From then on he is know as Nobody, or Bod for short. He grows up in the Graveyard, and he lives in their ghostly world. Of course, being how stories like this are, he learns valuable life lessons there, and eventually meets up with his family’s murderer.

This is best described as a different take on The Jungle Book.