I received possession of my new car on July 2nd. Meghann and Peter dropped it off after filling it up and running it through a wash. It's been fun to drive, for the little driving I actually do.

A few days after driving it around the car and I had a brief discussion and the car was christened: Eiffel. Contrary to what you might think, this has nothing to do with Paris but rather the group Eiffel 65 which had the one-hit-wonder song "Blue [da ba de]". Given that Eiffel is a very pale blue (or a very blue gray -- you pick) it seemed appropriate. That and the song was really popular when I first met Benjamin. Apparently I have a distinctive head bop that I do when listening to it which he finds comical.

I had the windows tinted on July 24th and the tint really helps control the heat from our bright Colorado sunlight.

After driving my new car for a month I finally stopped to fill it up today. I went 500.7 miles on 10.104 gallons of gas, or 49.55 MPG. This number is slightly lower than that reported by the car (50.7) but close enough. At $26.42 to fill it up, that's $0.053 per mile. If a 2004 model can get almost 50 miles to the gallon, why aren't all 2010 models in that ballpark? What the hell is wrong with the automotive industry?

Moreover I predict at my next fill-up that my overall MPG will be slightly higher because it wasn't until half way through this tank that I discovered the secret to Auto Stop. With the air conditioner off, when the car comes to a stop it shuts down the engine and starts it back up again when it's needed. But not always. For the longest time I wasn't able to discern what the magic sequence was to get the car to go into Auto Stop. I theorized that it was temperature related for a while but eventually ruled that out. After a few days of closely paying attention I figured out the key: the clutch.

When coming to a full stop I was correctly keeping the car in gear to enable the regenerative breaking but I was taking it out of gear without the clutch. Like any manual transmission there's that sweet spot when the engine RPMs and the transmission ratio coincide to allow slipping the car out of gear without the clutch. In Eiffel that point is just after the car stops the regenerative breaking process when coming to a stop. If you don't use the clutch, however, the car will not go into Auto Stop. This means for the first half tank of gas I was burning gas at almost every stop for no good reason.

Now that I know the secret I get a much more predictable entry into Auto Stop although there are still some times the car takes itself out of Auto Stop or just won't go into it when I expect it to. My speculation is that the engine turns on to maintain the temperature of the catalytic converter which operates optimally at specific temperatures.

For the past couple of months I've been lifting weights three days a week and doing cardio sprints the other two or three days a week. "Cardio sprints" is my coined phrase and seems pretty applicable to the exercise but also pretty generic, hence this descrption.

Requirements for Casey's Cardio Sprints: treadmill (or decent outside running weather) and a heart-rate monitor.

I start out with a 5 minute walk to get warmed up. Then I bump up the speed to 8.5 MPH and run until my heart rate is at 170 BPM (~90% of my maximum heart rate). After my heart rate reaches 170 BPM I run for 2 minutes then lower the speed to 2.5 MPH. After my heart rate drops below 160 BPM (~85% of my maximum heart rate) I continue for another minute, then ramp up for the second sprint at 9.0 MPH. The "2 minutes run at > 170 BPM" followed by "1 minute walk at < 160 BPM" pairing is one sprint. I do 5 of these at different running speeds finished off with a 5 minute cool-down. Note that during the running phase my heart rate goes way above 170 (between 180 and 200 depending on the speed and the day) and during the slow phase my heart rate goes way below 160 (usually down to the 130s).

When I first started I was doing all the running at 8 MPH and it would take me a while to both get my heart rate up to > 170 and then a bit to get it back to < 160 so the entire workout took at least 45 minutes. [Odd observation: initially my heart rate always seemed to get 'stuck' at 166 on the way up to 170. Not sure what the deal was but it would never fail to pause for a bit at 166.]

Now I'm doing my first run at 8.5 MPH and incrementing up 0.5 MPH until my last run is at 10.5 MPH. My heart rate ramps up and down much faster now so my entire workout is much closer to 30 minutes including warm-up and cool-down. The last 2 minutes at 10.5 MPH is killer and the first time I tried it I was only able to wheeze out 1 of the 2 minutes. Now I'm able to finish the entire 2 minutes with less wheezing at the end.

I feel like I've "mastered" this variation of the sprints -- next week it's time to mix it up a bit. I haven't decided if I want to aim for a higher BPM threshold (180 BPM would be 95% of my maximum heart rate), increase the speed, or just do something else altogether.

Maybe it's time to get back on the rowing machine...

During my cardio workouts I listen to a custom playlist of fast(ish) songs to keep me going. The list has songs from Pink, Maroon 5, Lifehouse, Matchbox 20, Jimmy Eat World, 3 Doors Down, and Barenaked Ladies along with a few others. I've heard all the songs enough times that I've pretty much figured out how I'd go about interpreting them into ASL should the need ever arise.

[scene location: SxSW]
Panicked Cop: Oh my God, is there an ASL interpreter in the house?
Me: I'm an ASL interpreter.
Panicked Cop: You have to help us, we have an emergency!
Me: What's wrong, is a Deaf person hurt?
Panicked Cop: No, much worse! Maroon 5 is about to perform and we don't have anyone to interpret for them!
Me: Never fear - I've been training for this moment for months!

The one major exception is several songs by Barenaked Ladies. Do you have any idea what the lyrics to One Week actually means? Eg: "Hot like wasabe when I bust rhymes / Big like LeAnn Rimes / Because I'm all about value" Yeah, me neither.

Maybe that one is a little unfair. But it isn't as if Some Fantastic is any better although I have a really great interpretation of "I can't stand to wait in line long / So I built a new machine / It just measures up the distance / and then eliminates the folks between" that I'm just dying to share with someone who will appreciate it.

Alcohol is a better but still a bit challenging due to the personification and direct address of alcohol in addition to another person ("O Alcohol, I still drink to your health" is said to alcohol but "A Malibu and Coke for you" is obviously not). By no means is that unsurmountable but does take a careful reading of the lyrics to parse through it.

The take-away is that you shouldn't come looking for me if BNL need an interpreter for their shows. Instead I'll show up to sit directly in front of the interpreter to see what he/she does with some of that crazyness!

Last Friday I purchased a car almost sight-unseen. After writing the sellers a check I gave the car back to them for an undetermined amount of time.

How's that for a lead-in?

For the past three years we've been a one car household. Because I work from home and Benjamin's school schedule allowed for some flexibility in car usage this hasn't been too arduous. Since he's started working full time it's become apparent that we needed a second car to prevent me from being even more hermity than I already am.

Because I've gotten along without a car for so long and because it's more for the periodic bopping around I wasn't all that picky about what car I wanted. Enter Meghann and Peter, good friends from Austin who moved to Colorado last year. They recently bought a beautiful home up in the mountains at the end of snow season and discovered that their two hybrid vehicles weren't going to cut it in the winter and that they really needed at least one 4-wheel drive vehicle. The car they were planning on selling was a 2004 Honda Civic Hybrid. We talked about it and they agreed to sell it to me.

At the time I purchased it, I had never seen the inside of the car, much less driven it. I knew Meghann and Peter took great car of their vehicles and that despite being a 2004 model it only had 59k miles on it. Add on that it gets ~50 mpg with a manual transmission and I was sold.

I borrowed the car from them this past Friday to get it registered (VIN verification, emissions test, etc) which was an ordeal I won't bother going into detail here¹. Then I gave it back to them on Saturday. Right now they need two vehicles until they make some time to purchase their new one. I on the other hand don't really need it. I have survived without one for 3 years already, what's another week or two (or three or four)?

The day and a half I had the car I really enjoyed it. It was fun to drive a stick again although it's a bit different experience than my Mustang -- not quite as much get up and go. I still have to get use to the optimal way to drive the vehicle. When driving the 'stang it was more energy efficient to shift into neutral when coming to a stop light or stop sign to let the engine idle. In the Civic (who does not yet have a name) the vehicle must be in gear to charge the battery so taking it out of gear to coast to a stop prevents it from charging. I grok the necessary change but it'll take a few weeks to retrain my muscle memory.

When Meghann and Peter hand off the car for good there are two very important things that must be done:

1. Give the car a name. I've been assured that it currently doesn't have a name so it won't get confused when I christen it.
2. Get the windows tinted. I've no idea how they survived in Austin without tinted windows!

¹ The short version: hybrid cars don't need emissions testing in CO; DL office != title registration office; Arapaho county != Denver county; was told I needed a Security Agreement form filled out by the bank but in truth I could have filled it out myself there in front of her instead of leaving, faxing it to my bank, having them fax it back, getting it notarized (by suggestion from my bank) and coming back later to wait in line again.

On the way home from the gym today I was listening, again, to Adam Lambert's What Do You Want From Me. It's been getting a lot of airtime on the radio recently. I find the tune catchy and the lyrics decent. What got my mind reeling after I really stopped to think about it wasn't the lyrics themselves, but what I had been reading into the lyrics the entire time: that it was being sung to a woman.

As I'm sure you're aware, Adam Lambert is gay. So there's no reason that the song couldn't be sung to a guy. Thinking that perhaps there was some line in the song that triggered this assumption I took a gander at the lyrics. Nope - no mention of gender anywhere in there.

Which means it's all in my head. For whatever reason I have hetrocentric lyrical tendencies. And frankly that bothers me.

Saturday marked my 10 year anniversary with IBM. It's very hard to believe that I've been here for a full decade.

When I started with IBM it was just before the dot-com bubble burst and companies were still hiring like crazy. I was courted by several different companies: FedEx in Colorado Springs, Ericsson in Dallas, Dell in Round Rock, among others. IBM offered me the most money and the job was in Austin, a fun-looking town after you got away from I-35. I accepted the position around November 1999 before I graduated the following May. The general mood of new-hires at the time, regardless of which company you went to work for, was that you'd be there for a few years and move elsewhere. Then the bubble burst <poof!> and everyone was quite happy to be gainfully employed.

Interestingly, shortly after I started working for IBM I discovered that I wasn't a very strong candidate for hire. It was only because one of the interviewing managers thought I had some potential and wanted me in his department that they decided to make me an offer. Oddly, I never did work for him. They were wary enough of me to give me the lowest starting salary offered at that time -- something I only found out the next year after my next manager said that while she was giving me a raise because of my great performance, she was also required to do so since the new hires would be starting higher than I was making!

I like to think since then they've changed their minds a bit. In 10 years I've gotten good performance reviews¹, 3 promotions, and 9 notable awards². I've been empowered to define my own position, which might as well be summed up by the word transponster 'cause there's no good title for what I do³.

I've had a total of about 6 managers during my career and each one raises the bar for the next one. Each and every one of them have been amazing people who care about their employees and their employee's career. To a one they have always watched out for me and ensured that I have retained a good work-life balance.

What's the plan from here? Keep on keepin' on. I'm continuing to grow into my new band and expand my sphere of influence. I'm working on increasing our project's overall bus number for performance which should free me up to focus on other things. I'll continue to work from home until it becomes impractical to advance without being in an office.

I always said I'd never go to a job I hated day in and day out regardless of the pay. I've been lucky that I am well compensated for a job I enjoy and part of a team that's top notch.


¹ I started to list the aggregate ratings but the definitions have changed enough over 10 years that it wouldn't be meaningful.
² This isn't counting the 24 Thanks! awards over the years -- 24 out of a potential 27 isn't bad!
³ My title listed in the corporate directory is "LDAP & DB2 Performance Peon" -- that's what corporate gets for making it a free-form text field.

Fedora 13 was released yesterday and I've decided to take the plunge on the laptop and upgrade it from Fedora 12. After I kick the tires for a bit I'll upgrade my desktop.

The last time I did this I was frustrated that I had to download all of the packages twice, once for each system. This time around I decided to fix that. I discovered this page that talks about various methods of caching the download after the first time. My initial thought was to use the "rsync /var/cache/yum and keepcache=1" approach as it's by far the easiest to implement. The problem is that the IBM script that wraps around preupgrade to make sure that all the IBM pieces get upgraded/added properly has a nasty habit of 'yum clean all'ing at inconvenient times if you need to restart preupgrade which would clear the cache (yes that's a defect, they don't seem interested in fixing it).

So instead I thought I'd go with just the 'Squid with cache' route. That doesn't work nearly as well as one would hope due to all the various mirrors that could be used. The raw Squid cache might work well for a large organization but doesn't hack it for what I want.

I ended up with the 'Squid with IntelligentMirror' approach which seems to be working well so far. The RPMs are still being downloaded onto the laptop but I've validated they're correctly being stored on the desktop so when I get ready to upgrade it, the process should be significantly faster.

As a reminder to myself: use the intelligentmirror-0.5 package and not the intelligentmirror-1.0.1 package, despite what this file says. The 1.0.1 package just serves up the pre-cached files but doesn't actually do the caching.

As someone who sits in front of his computer at least 8 hours every day, I'm pretty picky about my monitors. Three years ago I forked out my own money for two 1600x1200 LCDs from Dell and love them. Oddly I've never poked around with the monitor's color temperatures.

Yesterday I stumbled, via slashdot, over Redshift. This little jewel adjusts the color temperature of your monitor to match the level of the sun throughout the day at your particular location on the earth. In other words, the color temperature of the monitor subtly changes throughout the day: warmer in the mornings, cooler during the day, warmer in the nights. (The "cool" and "warm" labels make intuitive sense if you see the colors -- the warmer colors have a red cast to them and the cooler colors have a blue cast to them --  although they are opposite of the actual color temperature measured in Kelvin and the actual temperatures outside at that time of the day.)

The first time I used it the change was very abrupt. By default my monitors have a very cool, almost icy blue, color. Redshift adjusted that up to a warmer color. Determined to give it some time I used my computer throughout the rest of the day and in all honesty forgot about it. The color setting was retained from the overnight hibernation and I decided that I liked the change enough to change my system such that it starts Redshift when my X-windows session starts. Doing so required stopping it, which adjusted the colors back to the defaults, and starting it back up again. Wow - the difference (excuse the pun) is night and day. The default icy blue color was noticeably harsher on my eyes.

I'm probably going to adjust the coolest color to be a bit blue-er but overall I think I've had less eye-strain yesterday and today.

If any of you have viewed your own Facebook profile recently, I'm sure you've seen that pesky dialog that popped up soliciting you to link your profile to Pages.

Part of me appreciates what Facebook is doing: trying to massage a group of arbitrary text labels into a more structured set of data. For instance, on my profile I have 'Michael Buble' under Favorite Music. If I accepted the request to link to the Michael Buble Page, the string "Michael Buble" is removed from my profile and replaced with a link to a page all about Michael Buble.

There's a downside however: information about what Pages you link to is completely public. So while you may have your information like your employer or education shown only to your friends, once you convert those to Pages that information is open to everyone, not just people who are logged into Facebook.

This to me is a grievous privacy violation. By changing this data, which Facebook is strongly wanting you to do based on the fact that the stupid pop-up comes up every time you access your profile, you're changing the privacy level of your information without even knowing it.

So far I've ignored the more-annoying-by-the-day pesterings to link my profile to the suggested Pages, mostly because I haven't decided which information I want being released to the world at large.

Edited to add: I just unselected all the solicited links and sure enough -- all of that data was removed from my profile. Oh well, I guess that's just a little less information about me floating out on the web. Facebook: you suck.

Last night B and I saw The Invention of Lying. Something I found very interesting was how they handled lies of omission. They took an almost pathological approach of avoiding lies of omission, meaning all the characters really did say exactly what was on their mind at all times. It made for some very interesting scenes! There was a whole slew of cameos too -- I was very pleased to see John Hodgman and Tina Fey among them.

If you haven't seen it, I think it's very worthy of Netflixing.