Damn it's late.

Busy day, got off to a late start. Ignored the cell phone ringing at 9 am sharp, woke up for real at 10:30, was at Janice's at about 11:30. Took a look at her stereo speaker outputs and then at her Bose speaker connectors and got back in the car, hit up Rad Shack for an RCA speaker wire and a pair of barrel connectors, then went back to Janice's and found a pair of scissors to cut & strip the wires with. Got the speakers hooked up in about 3 minutes, they sounded great. The question now is what will she do with the other 2 and the giant subwoofer?

That done, I hauled out her laptop, and with some poking around in the Users control panel I stumbled upon the secret code. The problem was it kept asking her to do some extra clicks on exit saying why she was shutting down or restarting the PC. We had disabled that in the registry, we thought. Turns out we also had to change the login to "welcome screen" for that change to take effect. So I did, and we're very happy to have the mystery solved without re-installing Windows.

Went from there to the PO, but it was lunchtime and the line was LONG, so I went for lunch, and mailed the package after. Then to Jiffy Lube, and then home, where a notice was waiting for me that my lease expires on Nov. 30, and I need to tell them by the 1st if I'm renewing or going month to month. They are raising the rent another $150 a month, which means I'm pretty much outa here. Tomorrow I'll do some apartment hunting. Did some online, and the places I will go to first are the one I moved out of in 2002, one which I almost moved into the last move but they didn't have the right sized unit available, and one in which there used to be an AAMP (Asian Apartment Massage Parlor) many years ago. All are cat-friendly, I think all offer in-apartment washer/dryer. And all appear to be several hundred dollars less than my current rent. Also, just for grins, will re-visit a trailer park which rents out standard units. It's a good location, but do I really want to be both earthquake and tornado bait?

Did some fiddling with Vista on the laptop, then packed it up intending to go to Starbucks and do some more when the phone rang. That set me back to the point where it was time to go to IHOP for the Democrats' meeting.

Somehow got there half an hour early, so I did some more on the laptop before going inside.

Democracy For America, locally known as the Silicon Valley Dean Democrats, are an example of what's wrong with the Democratic Party. It's a sad commentary when the Bay Area Science Fiction Association runs a tighter meeting than a political party. Okay, BASFA currently is an excellent example of the intelligent use of Robert's Rules (though they sometimes veer off into Dread Pirate Robert's Rules), but the Demos just don't get it. A couple of things I did not like besides the lack of order and direction:

They are actively supporting Cindy Chavez for SJ Mayor. Chavez apparently paid her $15 dues and joined Silly Valley DFA.  She is Vice Mayor, and was present at most of the closed-door sessions which got Mayor Gonzales into trouble, but she didn't blow the whistle on him, or herself for that matter, and is running a campaign designed to make it look like she is new blood, and had nothing to do with the sordid past. BUT SHE DID!

They also seem to think that door-to-door campaigning is The Answer. I think it's annoying, but YMMV. Anyway, I bailed early, and won't be going again. There were no hot single chicks, anyway.

Did manage to catch the last play of the football game when I got home. And called the parental units, since I was out all night last night and didn't get a chance.

Next week will probably return to BASFA.

Plans for Tuesday are just apartment hunting, job hunting, and playing with the laptop at Starbucks.  

Vista

Just a few words about Vista. First impression:

MUCH less intuitive than XP.

Default font is harder to read.

Photos are noticeably more brilliant, especially on the ATI card tweaked for Vista.

It does not power up nor shut down any faster than XP.

They chose glitz over performance - windows slide and grow into place instead of popping up. I'd rather have fast on a 64-bit machine than fancy, thank you very much. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere...

IE7 is also less intuitive, and they have added tabs by default. I HATE tabs. I want my pages to open in separate iterations of the browser. They have also added many more annoying "security" alerts, which it took me forever to disable.

The download timer is whacked even worse than in XP. I was copying from a CD to the hard drive, and it originally said it would take 9 hours and 47 minutes. It kept decrementing that number in huge leaps, but never got close to accuracy. I still had 57 seconds left when it was done. The whole copy took 4 minutes. On XP, the same copy, the timer only misses by 2 hours at the start, and is caught up after about 30-45 seconds.

Enough already.

Lost of non-action

Day 2 of being unemployed ( or 2's Day to you all) was slow getting started, my alarms are all still set for 7, but my brain is on autopilot and turns them off or ignores them. Out of bed at 8:30, maybe, and online reading email.

Productive job hunting day. The wrap:

Avistar, the company which made me an offer after I had already started at Microsoft, apparently is hiring for that position again. Headhunter called and asked if she could push my resume that way, I said okay.

The recruiter who got me back to the Bay Area in 2000 is talking me up with 2Wire

Two SMS companies were interested in me until I said no tech support and no after-hours work

And had a phone interview for another contract at MS working with video encoders, they will bring me in for an interview this week, we hope. That one was courtesy of a guy I worked with in 1997-99 who is now at MS and passed my resume around. Thanks, Pete!

Also had about half a dozen hits from recruiters who had no clue, thought I was a programmer or database guru.

Left over from yesterday, a recruiter who thought she had something at Minerva (but it was a lower level job) has another company she is pitching me to.

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On the apartment hunting side, the manager was not in so I did  not get a chance yet to see if they would keep the rent the same. They probably won't. So I went to an apartment down the block, and they have a unit which is almost exactly what I am looking for, except no W/D and there are upstairs neighbors. The former AAMP apartment complex wants the same $$ as my rent increase would be.
The phone interview cut short my hunt for the day. Four more places I want to hit tomorrow. If deposits are refundable, I'll put one down if I find the right fit, the idea being if Avistar comes through I might want to move up the peninsula some, since they are in Redwood Shores.