Got home at 1pm, from my last day at Intel. I put my remaining crap in a box, and then had nothing much to do until lunch with Michael, an old friend from my days in the mobile group. We had a very nice lunch catching up, and then I grabbed my football and IBM clicky keyboard and made my way out. In a nice coincidence, I ran into a bunch of my co-workers on the way out so I could bid them farewell.

When I got home I watched MORE of Rock Star:INXS. I’m almost done. It’s very interesting to watch, while already knowing who eventually wins. I also received the SS4000-e I ordered. I have been becoming more and more concerned about not losing all the data I have, and decided to take advantage of the Intel discount while I could to get this guy. It runs Linux – perhaps I can hack it, like my WRT54G or TiVo? I’ve been running 2 USB external drives in RAID1 but one of them is pretty flaky, and so I figured getting this would give me piece of mind in a relatively low-fuss way. It remains to be seen how fast it is…

Apparently BBBS has a potential Little for me? Cool!

It’s not surprising, I’m doing pretty much nothing at work. It should be nice but even when it’s just showing up, it still feels like work, and not vacation. Even worse, I said I’d show up next Monday. Ecch, after the goodbye lunch, that should be it I think.

Meanwhile, my list of things to do after I’m done at Intel grows:

Definitely:
– visit family and friends
– relax
– ride bike a lot
– play some musical instruments and/or compose something
– work on websites/business ideas (not right away)
– be a Big Brother (if accepted)
– get house in shape
– get me in shape

Maybe:
– other travel
– start a rackspace cooperative like bandwagon.to in PDX?
– read a lot
– attend local happenings
– take class at community college on something interesting
– attend oof’s event to see Snakes on a Plane
– reverse-engineer and write Linux driver for my M-Audio audio interface

Anyone have any other ideas on things I should do?

Jen and I went to Borders yesterday to escape the 100+ temperatures, and I ended up buying Ubuntu Hacks, an excellent resource on cool things Ubuntu (and Linux in general) can do. I *did* know some of these already, but many of them were new, including 1) mounting a share with sshfs, 2) sbackup (a great backup tool I would use if I wasn’t already using backupninja), 3) Drivel (the blogging tool I’m using right now!) and 4) Unison, a tool to keep dirs in sync across multiple machines, and 5) lots of ways to tweak GNOME.

Leaving my job. Voluntarily. Last day of work July 31. I am so excited! I’ve been messing around with Python a lot, maybe I can get a new job (after a longish break) working on that. The low-level stuff, you code all day and then you’re like “ok, now I can allocate memory for my driver without it leaking”. With Python, *each* *line* actually does something worthwhile!! I’m thinking if I could have my website take off (coded in Python naturally) or maybe become an expensive contractor/consultant, that wouldn’t be too bad a way to go. I mean, I do well enough, I don’t *really* want that much more money…I just want to only work 6 months a year :)))

Seeing a lot of concerts. Kool and the Gang were pretty damn good, I remember listening to Emergency with Mary back on 7211 Parkdale. Ozzfest was…woah. SOAD was amazing. Ozzy…kinda sucked. Sorry. There were a lot of other bands who all kinda sounded the same? Disturbed and Lacuna Coil also were good. Coming up: RHCP with Mars Volta, should be memorable! Seeing bands makes me want to at least get up on stage for an open mic night or something.

Biking around a fair amount this summer… definitely going to do the Bridge Pedal again I think with Jen and Timmay. Also, maybe I’ll be able to make more progress on the back yard now that the stump has been ground.

Latest hack: for all you into RSS, I now publish a feed with a new Dr. Fun cartoon each day! There was a Dr. Fun RSS feed with new cartoons, but it died (and Dave Farley stopped drawing them) but I know I sure haven’t seen them all.
http://groveronline.com/feeds/drfun.xml.

Is anyone else watching Rock Star: Supernova?

OK guess that’s it. Colin’s great Scotland post inspired me to at least make an effort.

Siblings, when I’m there (late Aug?) what do you think about some backpacking? CGro I also wanna try that grappling thing or whatever and have you hand me my ass.