Whole Foods Pt 2

But they don't have Bramleys. Incompetents.

Whole Foods

Food alert: Whole foods has "pork bangers". Four were purchased. They looked a little too thick but I will report ASAP when cooked for breakfast.

From One Extreme to the Other

Not a food related post this time, except for one minor detail. Read on..

For the past five years, I've been driving a very nice 2001 Miata SE.


It has been trouble free and has all the nice bits and bobs, like leather seats and Nardi wood steering wheel. This doesn't haul much except me and one passenger. So we have a 1994 Ford Ranger pickup with no mod cons at all. But it has a long bed and hauls stuff to the dump and from Home Depot with no problem. However, like the Miata, it has no back seat.

This has proved to be a problem when trying to move one offspring's stuff from her student accommodation to a new post graduation apartment. We had to drive up two cars to get around.

So a truck with back seats was called for. The ranger has been spending most of its time with another offspring at a different college so isn't available when we need it. However you can't just go out and buy another vehicle without getting rid of one first. For one thing, it gets expensive. For another, it is the start of a slippery slope at the end of which is rusty Buicks up on bricks on the front lawn.

So the Miata went up on Craig's list and by Friday it was gone in exchange for $10,000.

I had been thinking of a nice, newish, second hand truck with back seats. Say a Toyota Tundra or an F150. I could get one of them for $10,000 and I would be no worse off.

This is where wifey got involved and somewhat carelessly suggested that we wouldn't want to have to replace the truck if we wanted to pull a fifth wheel or a horse trailer or something in the future. We have neither of these, but could hypothetically have one or the other in the future, given a long string of unlikely events all falling into place. So the requirements went from a normal pickup to a 1 ton, diesel behemoth. By the end of Saturday we were home in a 2004, Lariat, 6.0L diesel, F350 with crew cab, long bed and a 4" suspension lift.

So I had gone from driving one of the smallest cars on the road to the largest pickup on the road, skipping over all the normal sized vehicles in between.

These trucks are not cheap. The new price would be about $50,000. The Kelly Blue Book price for this model is $21,000. We paid $15000. So something was up with it and whatever it was, it better had not cost more than $6000 to fix, or we would be out of the money. The randomly selected target was for the fixes to cost less than $3000. This is what is commonly known as a gamble. We will see if it pays off.

After driving it around for a bit and poking around, the problems started to emerge. The batteries won't charge, the tow bar connector was missing, one window didn't work, it smelled of cigarette smoke, the tires were bald and the sunroof wasn't there, the glass was broken. The trip computer was a brick.

So the challenge is on. The charging problem turned out to be corrosion on the terminals and so neither new batteries nor alternator were required. Just a good terminal cleaning and some anti corrosion goop. Score 1 for the gamble.

However tires (or tyres) are going to be next. That should be $800 ish.
$150 was spent getting a replacement trip computer off ebay, which came, was fitted and now works fine.
$400 was spent getting new glass for the sunroof. Again off ebay. But it has yet to arrive.

But for now, the beast is driving. This gets on to the important bit. There is very little evidence to suggest that if I tried to drive the thing through a McDonalds or Starbucks drivethrough, I would be able to come out the other side without serious damage to either the vehicle or the vendor.

So from now on I park and walk.

Lured Into Alcoholism By Hendricks

Preparing for July 4th, we raided the local liquor store and came out with a bottle of Bison Grass vodka (that wifey likes) and more importantly, a bottle of Hendricks gin.

Come July the 4th, we didn't get around to cracking out the gin or vodka and it languished in the fridge.

The problem with Hendricks gin is that it is the most quaffable, enjoyable, flavorful gin on the planet. So 2 nights ago, on finding the unopened bottle in the fridge, I poured myself a pint glass of gin and tonic (lots of ice, so it wasn't really a pint), quickly followed by another.

It was so good that I had another last night. Again tonight I cracked out the gin and had another couple.

I have been a moderate, infrequent drinker all my life. I've got some sort of internal alco-meter that starts pinging at the mildly drunk stage and makes the next drink quite unappealing. So alcoholism is not a problem.

Now I've found a drink so nice that I could drink myself silly with it. Its a good thing I have a brain and can choose to stop. I'm told that my grandfather was an alcy and my teatotal mother was afraid I might go the same way if I took up acohol, but instead I turned into a lifelong moderate, occasional drinker.

So the advice of this post is.. Go get some Hendricks gin. Its so good that it can turn a non lush into a lush. Enjoy.

Now back to the fridge..

The end of travel as we know it.

For the past few years my job required me to travel several times a year and not little trips either, but all around the world for about a week per trip. The last few were..

- Levi, Finland
- Kona Hawaii
- Boston, USA
- Orlando, Florida, USA
- Madrid, Spain
- Athens, Greece
- Orlando again
- Denver, Colorado, USA
- Dublin, Ireland
- Kobe, Japan
- Dallas, Texas, USA
- Vancouver BC, Canada
- London UK, Brussels Belgium, Cologne Germany in one go.

This doesn't include the lesser trips to the bay area.

But this year I've moved onto a new job, starting Monday and it has been a travel cold-turkey.
I haven't been on a plane since April and that was just a non business weekend in Vegas. I am not, for the first time in many years, booked on any flight anywhere.

So this time last year, I would spend my time thinking of ways to avoid getting on planes. Now the reverse happens. Since there is no one telling me where to go, I'm free to choose anywhere and consider going there for vacation. Especially now that I'm not staring unemployment in the face any more.

So the shortlist of places to go is..

Maui, Hawaii. Probably in the winter. I've been to Oahu, the big island and Kawa'i but always on business. So a week in Maui without a job to do sounds like a good plan.

Japan. This time with the family in tow and no conference to attend, to see Kobe, Tokyo and a few other cities.

Botswana. It looked very nice on the #1 Ladies Detective Agency. No other reason.

New Zealand. I've never been South of the equator.

India. Don't know which bit. But the curry should be great.

Cuba. It's about time they started flights from the US and quit with the restrictions.

Wifey probably has opinions. We shall see..

Have you ever met an unemployed cryptographer? Part 2

The 5 job opportunities slowly whittled down to 3, then 2. One of them turned into and honest to goodness solid sort of job offer, with requisitions and approvals and everything. So yesterday I took it and I'm no longer a soon-to-be unemployed cryptographer.

So it was time for sushi to celebrate. If you haven't been there, try Syun in Hillsboro, Oregon. The lunch planner entry sums it up..

13) Syun at 2nd & Liconln in Hillsboro, the Old Library building. Best shushi around.

There are plenty of other places to eat. The lunch planner will tell you which one to eat at. By coincidence, it was suggesting Syun today. However I didn't find that out until after we had eaten there for lunch. Spooky. The odds of that are 23 in 1.

Remaining Employed, or 'Have you ever met an unemployed cryptographer?'

I happen to work for a very big techy company. These days, very big techy companies are in the habit of laying people off.

So on Wednesday, I found that I'm not exempt from this and they were laying me off. However the company doesn't just kick you out of the door. They put you in a special kind of purgatory called 'redeployment'. This is a two month period where your job it to find another job somewhere in the company. If you fail, then they kick you out of the door.

The screwed up part about redeployment is that companies who are laying people off don't tend to also be hiring people at the same time. So finding a job in the company during that period is not a likely thing.

Regardless, I sent out a one line message on the internal news server asking if anyone needed a security architect. One day later I'm juggling 5 job offers. It turns out that the techy world is very short of cryptographers and security architects. Every product group has some security or cryptography function in their products, because they have to, but by and large they don't have a clue how it works or what it does and they tend to know they don't have a clue and would love to hire a security guy if only they could find one.

Had I been tempted with a single job offering, I would have had to fight for it and I would be feeling relieved to be still employed if I got the job. Now I have a bunch of options, I'll be spending my days wondering if I picked the right job.

Eenie meanie miney mo...