In Pursuit of Mysteries

Saturday Hikes

Madeline came over last night (Friday night) to spend the night here. We have a spare bedroom with a futon here in the house. Her mother filled me with doom and gloom stories about her having problems with sleepovers recently and it being a “stage” that she's in. I was told that I might have to spend the night sleeping next to her or that she might scream in the middle of the night. Weird crap in my opinion and completely unlike Madeline normally.

As it turned out, it was a load of BS. She slept through the night just fine. Nary a peep. I even woke up before she did (or at least got out of bed). When I put her down for sleep, she got out her little tape deck and was listening to a tape for a while (she often does this) before sleep. She seemed just fine. Sometimes I wonder whether my ex-wife makes this shit up…

We got up this morning, had a little breakfast and then went over to Redmond to meet and company for a short distance day hike. R went and picked up and Autumn's bf, Chuck, and met us there. The hike turned out to be just past North Bend over at Twin Falls State Park and was, I am told, about three miles or so. That's three miles of up and down a ridge with some creeks and a decent sized waterfall with a wood bridge over it. It was reletively pleasent, death march comparisons notwithstanding. Madeline didn't have any problems with it and said that she had a good time but did say that she didn't want to do it again. heh. Too much walking.

I took her home, R and I did some grocery shopping and a Half Price Books visit, and then we came home and watched both halves of the Helen of Troy miniseries thing from a week or so ago. That was decently done though they took some liberties with the traditional Illiad story. It was better than most USA Network things that I've seen. I won't sing its praises but it was probably worth watching once. You gotta wonder about the standards of tv these days though. Let me see, lots of murder, death, child slaying (without being graphic but being clear), full nudity from behind and a fairly explicit rape scene. Well then!

Tomorrow I'll be going to the OTO's Gnostic Mass and maybe trying to catch up on some reading. I'm working through Broken Angles, the sequel to Altered Carbon, one of the current hits in the Science Fiction book market. I'm also working my way through Samuel Geoffrey's Civilized Shamans, which is his Anthropological work on Tibetan religion and culture (mostly the former) and R.J. Stewart's recent qabalah book. I should probably do some Latin flash card studying too. My vocabulary is still a bit week from my being gone so long.

I did survive the second day of the Leads Offsite. I may kill if I have to do any break out groups again soon.

Management Training

Today has been an especially long day. Today and tomorrow are the second annual Leads Offsite for leads on the Windows Client team at Microsoft. I spent my entire day at a nice retreat center sitting at a table while various people did presentations on client issues, engineering process, and various other tasks or issues. In between each session, we had a ten minute discussion at each of our round tables (with 10 people at each table) and then we had to stand up and give a take-away or three from the presentation as redacted by those of us at the table.

We did get a nice lunch and coffee was ever flowing but it makes for a long day away from the day to day work (which nags in the back of all of our minds). I then went from this to a coffee shop to work on my Latin homework for tonight and then to my Latin 102 class, which I missed the first couple of weeks of while in Greece. I'm catching up but I'm still behind.

I got home around 9:30 PM, made dinner and then finished watching Supercop on the Tivo with R. We're enjoying the device though I haven't had a chance to watch the Trigun and Cowboy Bebop episodes that I've started recording (I've never watched either of these before). R seems to like Reign, an anime that looks visually reminiscent of Aeon Flux. I haven't watched any of that one yet but probably will…

Off to bed now for a day of breakout sessions tomorrow. In the evening, my daughter will come over to spend the night and then we're all going hiking with on Saturday.

Tivo

So I bought a Tivo today…

I’d been looking at getting one for a while. A lot of my coworkers have them and they are pretty damned cool. I was going to get an old used one on ebay and then add another large hard drive to it originally. I didn’t want to pay more than $100 for it…

So, I looked at a bunch of ebay auctions and it was doable. I then happened to look in Microsoft’s internal classifieds today and someone had, today, listed a tivo for sale. It was a Sony one, which is the slightly nicer brand, and the owner had already added an 80 GB drive to it (for a total of 110 GB). It listed for $120, which I figured was a deal with it already being upgraded. I hopped right on it and, by the end of the day, I had a shiny silver tivo to call my own.

At the highest video quality (which is quite nice), it can hold 34 hours of shows. R thinks tivos are in the “kinda cool” realm but has philosophical issues with paying Tivo $12 a month for their service. The service is how tivo knows what shows are on and the metadata for those shows. You can teach the tivo to record all of certain shows or shows with certain actors and it can, over time, learn your preferences. All of this needs the service so I’m paying it myself.

I feel like a consumer but I’m happy with my bargain purchase. Of course, I’m going to stick a wireless card in it so I can pull the data off of it, encode it as divX and burn it to CD-R’s anyway… ;-)