Merry Christmas!!!

We are doing 2 full up Christmas events at my house this year (10+ people for dinner) , Heather's family and mine.  This does rachet up the stress level for the couple of days leading up to the event but is very much worth it.

btw, I got all 3 James Bond DVD collections, which basically means I have all 20 James Bond films (over 45 hours), you might not hear from me for a while after this :) Here is a cool James Bond movie site with all kinds of nifty information on the movies.

Only down-note for the evening was my stupid neighbors shooting off aerial fireworks (30 feet into the air) which drives the dog absolutely bonkers.

We went to the Trans-Siberian Orchestra Christmas Eve and Other Stories concert Saturday afternoon at Next Stage in Grand Prairie (woo hoo, 17th row, center section).  You might not know the group by name but you have likely heard Christmas Eve/Sarajevo  on the radio.  Just like last year the concert was awesome with addition of more Lasers and the introduction of FIRE to the show this year.  The fire came into play during the sneak peak of a non Christmas production that is being developed to feature the music from the Beethoven's Last Night album.  They are hoping to tour with this production in the spring.

After the concert we went my company's Christmas party at Dallas Parkway and Legacy (also known as the other side of the world from where I live)

Other accomplishments this week include finally buying our Christmas tree, and hanging more ceiling fans.

This is an annual favorite of mine

Santa Claus: An Engineer's Perspective

1. There are approximately two billion children (persons under 18) in the world. However, if we assume that Santa probably does not visit most children of the Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, or Muslim religions, this reduces the workload for Christmas night to 15% of the total, or 378 million (according to the Population Reference Bureau). At an average (census) rate of 3.5 children per household, that comes to 108 million homes, presuming that there is at least one good child in each.

2. Santa has about 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 967.7 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with a good child, Santa has around 1/1000th of a second to park the sleigh, hop out, jump down the chimney, fill the stockings, distribute the remaining presents under the tree, eat whatever snacks have been left for him, get back up the chimney, jump into the sleigh and get on to the next house. Assuming that each of these 108 million stops is evenly distributed around the earth (which, of course, we know to be false, but will accept for the purposes of our calculations), we are now talking about 0.78 miles per household; a total trip of 75.5 million miles, not counting bathroom stops or breaks.

This means Santa's sleigh is moving at 650 miles per second-- 3,000 times the speed of sound. For purposes of comparison, the fastest man-made vehicle, the Ulysses space probe, moves at a poky 27.4 miles per second, and a conventional reindeer can run (at best) 15 miles per hour.

3. The payload of the sleigh adds another interesting element. Assuming that each child gets nothing more than a medium sized Lego set (two pounds), the sleigh is carrying over 500 thousand tons, not counting Santa himself. On land, a conventional reindeer can pull no more than 300 pounds. Even granting that the "flying" reindeer could pull 19 times the normal amount, the job can't be done with eight or even nine of them. Santa would need 360,000 of them. This increases the payload, not counting the weight of the sleigh, another 54,000 tons, or roughly seven times the weight of the Queen Elizabeth (the ship, not the monarch).

4. 600,000 tons traveling at 650 miles per second creates enormous air resistance--this would heat up the reindeer in the same fashion as a spacecraft re-entering the earth's atmosphere. The lead pair of reindeer would absorb 14.3 quintillion joules of energy per second each. In short, they would burst into flames almost instantaneously, exposing the reindeer behind them and creating deafening sonic booms in their wake. The entire reindeer team would be vaporized within 4.26 thousandths of a second, or right about the time Santa reached the fifth house on his trip. Not that it matters, however, since Santa, as a result of accelerating from a dead stop to 650 m.p.s. in .001 seconds, would be subjected to centrifugal forces of 17,500 g's. A 250 pound Santa (which seems ludicrously slim) would be pinned to the back of the sleigh by 4,315,015 pounds of force, instantly crushing his bones and organs and reducing him to a quivering blob of pink goo.

5. Therefore, if Santa did exist, he's dead now.

I took the day off Friday so that I could be at the house when the replacement microwave was delivered, the guy came to fix the chip in the tub (caused by the tile guy), and the touch up painter came by.  The builder sent the painter by to make up for the time it has taken to get the microwave fixed.  He spent over an hour touching up all the spots that I spent 2 hours marking on the walls, trim and doors.  Most of the dings were from construction but a few were from us. 

The microwave has been DOA since we closed, GE finally came by to deliver the new microwave on Friday, as he was unboxing it he noticed that the upper right corner was dented.  He offered to install this microwave so we would at least have one that works while they arrange to get us yet another microwave.

I spent Sunday morning assembling our new dining room set

I had a chance to see Dallas Parkland's Emergency room today.  My mother in-law was looking for something and twisted using her hips which twisted her new artificial hip out of place.  We started at Harris Methodist HEB, after they couldn't get the hip back in place she was transferred to Parkland Hospital in Dallas, where after a few hours of waiting they were able to get the hip back in place.  She seems to have come through all the activity in pretty good shape, her heart rate and blood pressure stayed steady the entire night.

We are going to do thanksgiving on Friday and certainly have plenty to be thankful for.

Odd Tip:  If you slow roast an 11 pound turkey for 10 hours at 250 degrees (spending the 10 hours at a hospital is optional)  the stuffing doesn't get done but the turkey is fantastic with the meat tender, moist, and literally falling off the bones.

Not much going on lately. Stil unpacking and doing various home improvement like hanging shelves, uprading bathroom fixtures around the house.  Saw my nephew participate in the Region XX All Region Orchestra concert Saturday.

Here is one of the MS Security Program Manager's (also co-author of the MS Press book, Writing Secure Code) Blog site http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/mikehow/ lots of good reading in there.

In light of the recent sploits, hacks and such here is a link to subscribe yourself to Microsoft security bulletins, I HIGHLY recommend signing up for these.  http://register.microsoft.com/subscription/subscribeme.asp?id=166

I changed up the style of the page today, like it? don't like it? send a mail to tony at the gaston family dot com to let me know what you think

We walked house today at 11am before closing at 1pm. When checking the appliances we noticed that Microwave & Sprinkler controller were not working. More things added to the post close list of items to be corrected.

We also noticed that the final inspections by the City were being done. Seems this builder just loves waiting till the last possible instant to get things done.

We closed on house without a hitch, then we waited about 2 hours for the loan to "fund" then we picked up keys and started moving in.

When we picked up the keys we presented bill for $700 to the builder cover my expenses incurred by their failure to have the house ready for Friday closing.

The only casualties of the move was a small plastic cart and a plastic storage box, that's right folks that's all we broke during the move, pretty amazing all things considered.

When we took the U-Haul truck back the manager credited me 2 days rental time to compensate for the down time on the truck, I couldn't really gripe for more days as I would have been storing the truck at their site anyway working or not.

Just when I thought it couldn't get worse,  it did

    Tony's Free Advice: Don't pack all of your clothes, if you do and the weather changes (say from 80 degrees to the 50's) you might be forced to go buy new things since you can't get to your clothes packed in the middle of the U-Haul truck.

I found out late Friday night that Shannon (our Sales Manager) forgot to call the mortgage company to advise them we were closing Monday.  This among other things pushed our close out to Tuesday. 

We went crazy trying to get the electric meters installed on Friday so that the house would be flagged as complete by the bank's appraiser.  The meters were installed Saturday morning.  When the builder called me to tell me that the meters were installed I asked him whether or not the water heater pilots were lit, he replied "They usually do that".  The water heaters are how the appraiser verifies that the gas service is working properly.  While inspecting the home on Saturday I noted that the thermostats for the HVAC system weren't installed, this prevents the home from passing the final inspection.  I contacted the builder and he informed me that the Thermostats were scheduled for Monday. We also noticed that the water heater pilot lights were not lit. At that point we called to reschedule the appraiser, unfortunately she was completely booked Monday, she scheduled for first thing Tuesday. 

Turns out our knight in greasy armor from the fleet services company wasn't all we thought.  U-Haul informed me that the reason the power steering pump did not work during the drive back to the U-Haul store was because there wasn't a belt on the pump.  Basically the mechanic did barely enough work to allow me to get the truck to the U-Haul store so the U-Haul store could do the remaining work.

Woke up with an almost flat tire on Sunday morning.  Later in the day I observed that the only tire shops that are open on Sunday tend to be really, really busy with a 1 to 1.5 hour wait to fix a tire.

We walked house on Monday afternoon only to discover that nothing had been done to the home other than the thermostats (the water heater pilots still weren't lit).  I had a very heated discussion with my Shannon (salesman) regarding the fact that the house didn't look like it would be ready for me on Tuesday.  He assured me that it would.  This assurance didn't reassure me as he also told me I would be closing on Monday, "No excuses".

We called the title company to find out the exact amount of the cashiers check we would need to bring to closing, the amount we were told was considerably less then I had planned.  I called my bank and my loan officer informed me that she hadn't received the updated escrow sheets from Shannon, apparently he didn't fax over the new escrow sheets to the bank to update them with the correct price and to advise them of how much money we were putting down on the home.  This caused our down payment to decrease dramatically, problem is I actually wanted to put more cash down to reduce my monthly payment.  To correct this mistake would have caused the papers to be redrawn and would have delayed my closing so I just left this be for the time being.

We were scheduled to close today. 

For the mortgage company to complete a mortgage they need an appraisal (verify house worth sales price) and a Final Inspection (verify house complete).  Both of these were scheduled for Thursday which would be cutting it close to get everything from the mortgage company to the Title Company (title company coordinates & supervises the closing process). Unfortunately the builder screwed up and did not get the house completed, namely there was no gas or electric, thus the appraiser could not complete the final inspection. 

Gee Tony, what happens now?  We are not closing till Monday 11/10, an even better wrinkle, since we have already sold our old house so we are effectively homeless right now and living out of a Hotel, not too mention paying extra for storage, extra for rental of the U-Haul Truck, meals etc...

A little pre-history. 

We purchased a 2 day lease back of the house from the new buyers so we would have time to get moved out of the house after closing.  The contracts we signed for this lease back were dated for 11/4-11/5, when the buyer pushed the close date up one day to 11/4 I naturally assumed that my two day lease back moved forward to 11/5-11/6. 

    Tony's Free Advice: For future reference always make sure the contract states relative dates, like 48 hours AFTER close, not specific dates like 11/4 and 11/5.

When the new house was pushed out from 11/3 to 11/7 we contacted the buyers realtor and questioned if we could work something out to leave at least some of our stuff in the house.  The realtor informed us that the movers were scheduled for the 11/6-11/10 so we should just move all of the extra stuff in the Garage till Friday when we close on the new house and our movers could pickup the stuff.

Now it is 11/4 and we are at the title company to close on the old house we bumped into the new buyers, after the initial greeting they asked us if we would still be out on the 6th.  I replied that we had a 2 day lease back after the close but that after that the house would be empty and all our extra stuff would be in the garage per our prior arrangement.  Mr. Buyer (White guy in his 70's) looked at me like I was from mars and said, "Uhm, no, we have movers arriving on 11/6 @ 6am and we need the entire house empty including the garage (begin panic mode), Mr. Buyer's Daughter & Wife both chimed in, "we/they had a basement and will need the garage to be empty" .  I looked at their realtor and went "I thought we had an arrangement?"  he (Byron Montgomery) stammered "Well, we hoped the movers wouldn't get here this quick"  I replied with, "well this complicates matters greatly"  There was additional stressed but quiet conversation but basically we said, ok, we'll be out, Tomorrow night.

    Note: The website for the Texas Real Estate Commission is http://www.trec.state.tx.us

After we closed on our end of the deal several phone calls were made and Mr. Buyer's realtor informed me through our realtor that Mr. Buyer is a hothead and did NOT want to deal with me again, well isn't that a nice thinly veiled threat, I wasn't aware I was that imposing of a figure :-)

We noticed later that the lease back payment was not included in the closing costs anyway, so technically we got a free day (lots of headaches but a free day nonetheless)

Well, now we are in panic mode, we have about 60% of our things packed and now have about 36 hours to get ALL of it out of the house.  We called our moving company and they agreed to come out earlier than originally scheduled and pick up our big stuff on 11/5 (tv's couches, beds etc...) and store it till we are ready to move into the new house.  We went by U-Haul and picked up our truck a day early and with our neighbor's help started loading the truck.

Have I mentioned that it rained off and on all evening 11/5?

  About 5pm on 11/5 I moved the truck in/out of the driveway and noticed that the vehicle had no power steering and I was having difficulty getting the ramp back into the truck (i.e. both were broke).  I called U-Hauls 1-800 number and a mechanic with AF Fleet Services was dispatched, he looked under the hood and went "of course you don't power steering, the belt is broke, oops and so is this one, and this other one is thrown off."  Turns out EVERY belt on the motor was off.  The mechanic went off for a few hours to look for belts while Heather and I continued to pack and load the truck.  The mechanic returned to install the belts but they would not stay on, turns out the main pulley off the crank was warped/damaged, the mechanic tried to locate one but couldn't.  He informed us that he would locate one in the morning then return to fix the truck.  Seeing as we had no choice we said ok and bid him goodnight

  About 10pm I happened to open the utility closet doors to verify that the cabinets were empty, that is when I discovered that I didn't tell the movers to get the washer/dryer, great now I get to move these myself, they aren't heavy but they do take up a lot of room in the truck. 

    Tony's Free Advice: If you ever move yourself do yourself a favor and either rent or buy a dolly, (we bought one weeks ago for $40 at Sam's), the dolly saved us untold hours in the loading of the truck.

  We finally got done packing, vacuuming, cleaning the kitchen floor about 11:30 pm and left the house to find a hotel and some dinner, leaving a 100% FULL (top to bottom completely stuffed) 26' U-Haul Super Hauler truck broken in a driveway that as of midnight was no longer mine.  We put a note on the front door of the house to inform the new buyers of the status of the truck and the scheduled repairs.

  Now we are on to the morning of the 6th. The mechanic informed us about 9 am that there were unable to find a new pulley to install on the truck, so he was heading to another U-Haul store to cannibalize the part off another truck.  We later found out that Mr. Buyer called U-Haul when he arrived at the house and found the truck Demanding that they tow the vehicle immediately!, fortunately for them they refused to do so quoting liability for damage to the contents of the truck. 

Fortunately for us Mr. Buyer's movers didn't arrive till about 10am, unfortunately the mechanic didn't arrive till about 11am, the buyer's movers (full 18 wheel United VanLines truck) parked across the driveway and blocked our truck in.  I called the mechanic and requested that he call me when the truck was ready as I intended to have Heather drop me off in front of the truck, and I was going to just jump in the truck and zoom out of the driveway to avoid a confrontation with Mr. Buyer. 

  The mechanic informed us about noon that the truck was mostly repaired but that the power steering pump was shot, he suggested driving the vehicle to U-Haul and have them replace it there as he knew we had a couple of days before we would move into the new house.  He also warned me that Mr. Buyer was yelling at him and that he almost went off on the old fart.   

  We watched the movers leave about 2pm and decided, well it's now or never, time to get the truck, as we were rolling down the court at the end of the street (where we sat waiting all morning) Mr. and Mrs. Buyer came out, we watched them get in the car and leave, Perfect! now I can avoid a face to face with them.  We drove the vehicle to U-Haul to have the power steering pump replaced and to store the vehicle till we move into the new house.   Storing the truck at the U-Haul store makes sense as thieves should not expect to find a full truck at the U-Haul store.

  Driving a 26' truck (18,000 pounds empty) full of all my junk without power steering took every ounce of my strength when turning slowly or from a start.  Fortunately the truck is a diesel with gobs of power, I took off in 3rd gear from a dead stop while fully loaded, oopsie 3rd is where 2nd usually is and 1st is a granny gear.

    Tony's Free Advice:  Per the Fleet Services mechanic, NEVER rent U-Haul, always rent Ryder, he stated in the last 30 days he has fixed over 40 U-Hauls and only ONE Ryder.

The buyer's realtor for our house went into the buyer's mortgage company 10/28 on to verify that everything was on track to close on Monday 11/3.  He was told that the entire office staff walked off the job and they couldn't guarantee that the loan would be ready Monday.  He picked up the entire file and took it to another mortgage company.  We still aren't sure how but he found a mortgage company  who said that they will be ready to close on Tuesday morning. 

If you've ever done a mortgage getting one from start to finish is less than a week is nothing short of a miracle.

"Turns out the right rear tire was in much worse shape than thought.  What happened was that the rear end basically broke loose at 75mph in a small curve where the road is in pretty bad shape. It was around midnight and dew was already on the ground so that may have contributed also.

Ferrari Before
Ferrari After
Accident Path 

The car left the road and was sliding sideways/diagonally, the front right tire hit the gravel driveway in the middle of the picture, this caused the car to flip over diagonally nose to tail.  The car came to rest upside down on the other side of the 2nd driveway ( top of the picture by the Jeep)  in the picture after probably flipping twice.

My boss was driving his neighbor's Ferrari ( Red 360 Modena) and in his words;
"...The Ferrari is totaled as it rolled several times. Before the rumors start this was not speed related. I learned even high quality tires don't do well on uneven roads when nearly bald."
"When I came to rest upside down tonight and realized I had no major injuries I first thanked God that I was alive...I've often wondered how a car can be worth $160K. The engineering of the Ferrari is second to none. This car saved my life. Any lesser car in this accident and I would not have had the gift of seeing any of you ever again."

Instead of How Stuff Works, this one is How things are Made

Added a fun page for weird things I come across

I went to my first race at Texas Motor Speedway this weekend.  The Chevy 500 was a 300 mile Indy Racing League race.  Words cannot begin to describe the sound and feel of 22 cars zinging by at 10k RPM and 220+ miles per hour.  Awesome, I'll be doing this again.  (Sound bite)

Time to start blog'ing again after a brief abscense

The sideways text coolness below I borrowed from a Windows Shell developer's blog site, http://weblogs.asp.net/oldnewthing/   Take a wander over he's always discussing interesting things about the shell and Windows and why things are the way they are.

From what I have read so far the downwards text should work in all browsers but for some reason it isn't :(

The dowards text is done by setting the style on the element (a div in this case) to, style="WRITING-MODE: tb-rl"

Downways Text

this one is done using DXImageTransform which is IE specific. I use the following declaration in a CSS then set that style on the element (a div in this case) .RotLeft {   filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Matrix(M11=0, M12=1, M21=-1, M22=0, sizingmethod= 'auto expand' );   height: 1px;   width: 1px; }

Upways Text

Here are some pictures of my work

Building	Building 2
My Desk
My Main System	Secondary/Test Systems	Secondary / Test Systems
Free Break rooms	Free Break rooms

Since it is all the rage I am starting a blog. This isn't a proper blog since there isn't a feedback mechanism or subscription feed but so be it.