Phone battery.

I guess my phone battery was too low yesterday to receive calls.  I slept well, but I got 7 voice mails.  I needed the rest, because I didn't feel well.  Today, I feel great, but my to-do list is no shorter.  That means I might get a couple of hours of sleep, maybe.

I'm off to the gym, then to the library.  I'm getting my workout done, my calls returned, and my homework done before I worry about things such as sleep today.  I may be dead by the time I play hockey tonight, then work all night.  Wednesday, I will sleep, pack, go to class, and drive all night for a 4-day Oklahoma getaway.  I want to eat turkey, shoot a deer, and sleep a lot.

Busy busy

I've been slacking on the post frequency here.  I have a backlog of material to post.  I'm super happy to have no vacant rent houses and a full time job.  But all isn't well on that front.  I have a deadbeat tenant now, who is about to be evicted.  I have to do some due diligence, however.  There are some repairs which were deferred until he started paying some rent, but he's now told me that he won't be paying the rent until the repairs are done.  I suggested we make a contract.  If I do the repairs and don't see the money, I can then file the appropriate papers at the courthouse and make an appointment with the sheriff to put him out.  Either way, the repairs are necessary in order to show the house to potential new tenants.  It's a cute house, it just needs some love. . . and tenants who will pay the rent on time.

On the hockey front, I played center last night, but the wingers on my line had no passing skills.  I may as well have been playing defense, because I spent the better part of my shifts skating backwards.  In fact, the best scoring chances happened when I stole the puck away at center ice, rotated with the left defenseman, passed the puck forward to him, then followed the play.  Handing it off to a winger wasn't working.  I always look forward to playing on Tuesday with more skilled players.  I know where they are going, I can zing the puck to them, then I can get open in front of the net.

The nephew had his tenth birthday.  I helped him get an old computer working in his bedroom by swapping out a bad monitor and removing a lot of unnecessary software which was loading at startup.  At least he can play Starcraft on it now.

I attended Lake's birthday party for a couple of hours.  I didn't stay long enough for cake because I had to run off to work.  Someone's grandma died and someone had a kid, so I got scheduled for overtime.  I had intended to use the time to study and do homework on Sunday, among other things.  Now, I have more than I can possibly get done today and I have to sleep at some point.  I skipped my workout.  I'm still recovering from a hockey game, anyhow.

Fun weekend.

I had a stressful week followed by a fun weekend.  The theme of the whole thing was family.  I attended a great wedding and saw two great families come together for the formation of another one.  I also got some financial help from some family members to help me through some of my debt hurdles right now, for which I couldn't be more grateful.

I'm taking a finance class with my brother, which is required for each of us to get our Masters degrees.  This is going to be interesting.

Work is going okay.  There's a structure to chaos ratio which is starting to balance out for me there.

 

Wireless is cool.

I've completed the third day of Motorola iDEN training, so I'm getting a really solid idea of how all the features of currently deployed cell phone technology have been bolted onto the old stuff.  It is intriguing how the big iron phone switch makers have held their place in the wireless world.  The writing is on the wall for the old DMS-100 family and Lucent 5ESS switches to become completely edged out of the MSO picture, as more and more of the functionality is being replaced by packet and frame technology.  That's job security for me.  I can see how Motorola is engineering their way around the DMS-100 for their next iDEN system release.  B'bye Nortel.  Hello softswitch.  They've already incorporated the Cisco MGX 8850 into their Push-to-Talk (dispatch) offering.  It's not that big a step to plop a wireless softswitch into the picture and eliminate the bulky old circuit switched elements for making regular calls.  I don't even see that Nortel has a wireless softswitch offering.  I wonder if Lucent or Cisco or TELOS will win that market share.  Even Samsung has one now.  SONUS, Tekelec, and Spatial are the new wireless softswitch players.  I'm guessing that if one of them gets ahead, Cisco will buy 'em.  My biggest curiosity is if the Lucent Softswitch could eliminate the Nortel presence  in the wireless world altogether.

NOTE:  I found later that Nortel doesn't call it a wireless softswitch.  In true old school telecom form, they have created an acronym which is completely meaningless, P-MSC.

TGIF

Fridays don't mean as much when you're on a rotating shift schedule.  It's my Wednesday, but it still feels like a weekend a little, because I don't have anything on my calendar for tonight.  I can watch a hockey game on TV or read a book.

I want to say what a pain it is to work with Wells Fargo Home Mortgage when they misapply your payment.  I have four different login names on their website and depending which one I use, it might say I'm current or behind.  They have no way to tie all my accounts together with one login.  It's a similar pain if you call them.  I invariably get about four menus deep in their IVR before their system realizes there are multiple accounts and puts me on infinite hold-for-a-representative music.  The most aggravating part about that is that they routinely apply my payments to the wrong loans, and I have to send them my bank statement to prove that I sent them money and beg them to reverse any late charges or correct any default situations.  If you have a loan with Wells Fargo, don't ever get a second one, or a third, or a fourth like I did.  They officially suck at treating you like one person if you have multiple accounts.  If it weren't costly to refinance, I would do so in a heartbeat just to save myself the time of dealing with those bubbleheads.

Crazy week.

Monday evening, I took video of a bartender stepping outside of a Plaza bar and blowing fire, which is a stupid bartender trick, but the ensuing fireball was so large that I briefly thought we were all going to die.  Not a hair on his head was singed, so he knew what he was doing.  A group of people at the bus stop across the street yelled for him to do it again, but I think I was startled enough to just skip Halloween this year.

Speaking of danger, I applied for an interesting job in Iraq.  I like to think that they're not backfilling for some tragic reason.  There are a lot of personal and/or testosterone driven reasons why I would try for this job, even for the short term.  Plus, about a hundred thousand of them with no Federal withholding.  I don't have all the skills they're asking for, but I have most of them, and the rest can be attained by reading some books and some OJT.  It could be the adventure of a lifetime, or it could really suck for a while and set my resume apart somewhat.  It might make me wealthy.  Or, I could be maimed or killed traveling around that Allah-forsaken place fixing wonky network issues.  Maybe I could get a similar fix by skydiving, but I think braving a war where my skills are in demand might be more intense.

The past week.

I had some really great barbecue last weekend at the American Royal Barbecue, then I had a very busy week.  I got my 401k rolled over, showed a house to some potential new tenants, got to check out some radio controlled car racing, worked on a mid-term project for school, and managed to play hockey three nights, worked out four mornings, interviewed for a fat job at Accenture in Lenexa, and visited the doc for a checkup.  Once my 401k was rolled over, I borrowed some money from myself to pay off some higher interest debt and have some cash on hand.  So much for changing jobs.  Now I'm paying interest to myself instead of some predatory credit card company.  At 140,000 miles my '96 Jeep started having engine problems and burning oil, so I traded it for an '04 and paid cash for the difference.  So much for having cash on hand.  My blood test results were great.  >800 CD4  and <400 copies/mL VL.  So, it was a roller coaster kind of week.  My potential tenants may move in on the 20th, so I have some work to get that house ready to move into, like getting the utilities turned on and a few items fixed.  Plus, it needs a new garage door opener.  I paid a 24-pack fine for missing my hockey game last week.  I didn't play as well this week, because I didn't get enough sleep.  School is going well.  Making time to do homework is a challenge to the detriment of my sleep schedule.  I don't have time to watch TV any more, although I caught part of the UFC fights earlier. . . and dozed through most of it.  It was nice to show my newer Jeep to my brother and take him for sushi at Domo, the sushi bar in Brookside, which is my favorite now.