What's shaking

House: 
I am really ready to move back into our house.  We have been living in an apartment since last November.  We are in a Cherry Orchard apartment in Sunnyvale that is a decent apartment, but it is definitely not our house.  I am tired of dealing with El Camino street lights to get on the freeway.

We did a couple of 'upgrades' while we completely moved out of our house.  We removed every bit of carpet.  It is either a wood floor or a tiled bathroom.  Yay!  We had wood flooring in a house we lived in a long time and we really liked it.  The floor is called Spotted Gum Eucalyptus and looks like http://www.floormall.com/janka-rating-wood-species/spotted-gum-species-janka-rating.php# .  It is a lot of wood flooring for a 2k sq ft house, but its great. Carpeting sucks.

We also redid the backyard.  Our lot is tiny and we wanted to get the backyard space more useable.  We ended up cutting every tree down.  Every single tree was wacked except for a cool small Japanese maple.  One of the trees was a gigantic pine.  I do not think I could wrap my arms completely around it.  It was big ponderosa type tree that just made a mess with pine needles.  I am not worrying about gutters filled with pine needles any more.  Sweet.

We had the stairs re-stained; but so far, that project is not going that well, but whatever.  Other than that, we have put the house back together the way it was before the water damage nightmare.

Work: 
I am at my 3-month mark at my job at Adify.  Pretty intense.  The product and market space (targeted vertical network builder centric ad serving) is insanely complicated, and creates and churns through vast amounts of data.  We are working on some of the hardest scaling challenges I have seen.  It is cool to be a part of the team figuring out a way to make it scale.  We are going from specs to prototyping so it is getting real.  This scaling project is major.  It is big enough to make me nervous, but those are the best kind of projects.

Family: 
Allison (3 months old) is doing really well.  Growing fast, she is tall already.  Jennifer my 5 year old went from not being able to read to reading incredibly well in a matter of days.  It was just like a switch that turned on.  It is cool to watch your kids go through major developmental steps.  Jennifer has a dry clever humor that often takes you by surprise.  Lauren who is eight, is already scaring me with the teenage behavior, zoiks.  She is smart and does well at school.  Lauren is not a procrastinator, which is a great trait she gets from Aimee.  Jennifer and I however are terrible procrastinators.

We have had to lock down our computers hardcore because both of the kids will literally sit and watch for Aimee or me to get out of the chair.  They will jump on the computer before the screen saver locks it up.  We learned that typing the windows key + L is mandatory.

Iracing.com & Lime Rock: 
I signed up for iracing.com and picked up a cherry force feedback steering wheel.  Most people would find iracing.com boring and time consuming.  Actual car racing can be like that.  Most weekends the cars will be on the track for two 20-30 minutes sessions preparing for a single 50-minute race.  Two sessions and one race over 3 days ends up being a lot of idle time, assuming the car doesn't need a lot of work.  Iracing.com is a simulator.  It is not a game.  It is not like Gran Turismo where you can slam cars and keep going.  When you start out playing, you have to work your way to get pro licenses.  This is how normal racing works.  You have to start at amateur racing for a season.  You cannot just jump to SCCA Pro for example. 

The first track you work on is Lime Rock in Connecticut.  I know this track really well because I have raced it a bunch of times and I picked up my first SCCA Pro podium position there.  It is hard to explain the track because it is so different from typical road course tracks.  Its short course, only 50+ seconds a lap.  There is enough elevation change that in one part of the track, the car will literally be in the air for a fraction of a second.  Faster cars have to use a chicane because they will literally flip into the air. 

Then, there is super fast downhill turn that leads onto the front straight.  It is a turn that makes you find your stones as I say.  You start at the top and negotiate with your right foot to keep the pedal down and search for the line down a bumpy hill.  If you hit the line perfectly you can keep the pedal down completely.  If you miss the line for any reason, you have a high likelihood of a nasty off track experience.  That turn has destroyed many cars and most of the time the car is upside down.  If you are slow down the hill, you will be smoked going down the straight.  It is the most important turn.  Back to iracing.com.  I am just blown away at how well they have that track replicated.  All the little tricky bumps and high grip/low grip sections are exactly as the real track, it is amazing.  Again, it is not Gran Turismo.  Many people that use the website are real racers.  I dig it.  They have Laguna Seca and Sears Point, which are also done really well.  I do miss the real thing though.

Investment time?:
I am looking at potentially buying a house as an investment that would be rented and held on to for the kids to inherit or something like that.  I keep hearing that housing prices are down 40-60% but, it just is not true in many areas.  We looked at places in Willow Glen and Cambrian (southeast of Los Gatos).  We had information on purchase price and in what year, etc.  If I were to put a 'discount' percentage on properties, it is between 5% and 10%.  If you want the 40-60 off you need to go to places that are not that cool.  It was educational for sure.  I am also thinking about something out of California.  It is hard to pick another state though.  California is California and it rocks for a ton of reasons.  What if it was a place that was quiet, green and one can get a lot of house for the money?  Many people are going to North Carolina so I checked out what you get for equal money.  It is wacky.  For the price of a 2k sq ft house here, you can get over 9k sq ft with 14 rooms.  What would someone do with 14 rooms?  Who wants to buy furniture for 14 rooms just so it looks occupied?  No thank you.  Or for the same money again, you can get a killer house, horse barn, and 27 acres of land.  It is just a completely different deal over there.  It is hard to figure out the Los Gatos vs. Milpitas vs. Gilroy factor though.  Any suggestions on others states?

Jobs: 
If you have made it this far through my 'journal' entry, and you know of people who are operations people experienced with networking (bgp), sysadmin (windows), DBAs (SQL Server), or ops admins who can also write code, please refer them to me.  I have about five or six spots open.