Mollie and I had agreed that we would wait to turn my home office into the guest bedroom/nursery to be until we reached the DTC milestone in the adoption. Now that we have, it was time for her to get started on transforming the room.

Of course, the first step was to get me out of there into what was then the guest bedroom. We took time planning how the office would look, what paint to put on the walls, how to arrange the furniture. We emptied the room, made a mess of the rest of the house and started applying primer on Friday. By Saturday, the room was painted (that's after spending a lot of time running around town and going to the CCAI picnic). On Sunday, we started moving furniture.

Of course, we quickly realized that my original plan wouldn't quite work. My desk was bigger than I thought it would be. As a result, the positioning of the furniture changed. Once the furniture was in place, it was time to reassemble the computers and network. That alone took a few hours since I made an effort to organize the cabling so it wouldn't turn into another rat's nest.

I think that the end result was well worth the effort. The last thing to do is to hang the frames back on the walls and organize my library so I can find my books again.

It is interesting to see how the news coverage spun the different rallies today. For some reason, the fact that the target of immigration reform is illegal immigration is hardly mentioned. People who were called illegal immigrants only a few weeks ago are now simply called immigrants. There were even shots of people holding signs stating that they were not criminals. How can people who have broken immigration laws claim that they are not criminals?

I am now a Legal Permanent Resident. I have a "green card" (It's not really green, but that's a whole different story). I earned the privilege of living and working in the US by following the immigration laws and processes, filling forms, getting fingerprinted, paying fees and waiting. It took a few months, but I was then able to adjust my status after being a legal H1-B guest worker for many years (one might almost say an indentured servant to a large corporation...) and a TN-1 worker before that. Even earlier, I came here as a student on a student visa. All along, I was careful to remain in status and within the bounds of my visa.

Now, Mollie and I are working with the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in order to adopt a little Chinese girl that we will call Sophia. Again, great care is taken to follow the immigration laws and make sure that she will be welcomed to the US as a US citizen. It is actually likely that she will be a citizen well before I am. We are now anxiously waiting for a document called the I-171-H, which gives us permission to bring Sophia back to the US.

I can certainly understand people's desire to live and work here. This is a great country, and it is the country that I chose to remain in. But I must insist that people coming here go through the same process and regulations that I had to go through and follow the same rules that I had and still have to follow. Not that they are perfect, or simple or even fair. But these are the laws of the land, and these are the rules that you have to follow if you are to live and work here.

After all, it's only fair to me, and it's only fair to Sophia.

I often wondered how my last day at Sun would go. Would I leave with a big bang? Or would I rather leave quietly? Would I make a happy dance outside of the door? How would I feel driving out of the campus? What about when I drove by the campus, as I do every day now that I work at OpenLogic?

Last Friday started pretty good. I got up, went through my morning routine, had coffee. I was smiling big throughout. It was going to be a good day. I thought about leaving a little early, maybe stopping by Village Tavern and have a martini before heading home. I drove to the Broomfield campus, listening to music and enjoying the drive. I even sung to some of the songs on my iPod.

Once at the office, I worked with Ravi to answer some more of his questions, attended my last standing meeting and development team meeting. I worked with Ravi to figure out what was causing issues with the Sun Update Services Delivery Server (found a couple configuration issues). By the time I was done, it was 5:00 PM. So much for leaving early...

So I gathered my stuff, dropped an envelope with my badge, Enigma card, Securid FOB and corporate American Express card in the interoffice mail. Chatted with one last person on my way out and stepped out the door. I had done it, I had done through my last day as a Sun employee.

So, what did I do? What was the answer to the questions above?

I smiled, whispered "Freedom" and headed to my car. I finally waved good bye as I drove off the Broomfield campus.

It was indeed a good day.

I decided to celebrate getting a new job and upgrade my cell phone. I used the same phone for over 2 years, and I felt that it was a little underpowered and under-featured for my taste. So I went all out and got the Motorola PEBL.

The PEBL itself is a a very fine phone. It supports Bluetooth, has faster Internet connectivity and it just looks amazing. It's also getting popular in the geek circles, which is a good thing.

It also has a USB port instead of the usual array of connectors found in other phones. You connect it's headset and charger to this port. This lead to the discovery that anything that provides power through a USB port can be used to charge the phone.

I was going through the normal battery conditioning process (charge the phone for x hours, let the battery drain. Then charge as normal). It so happened that the battery died while I was in the office, far away from my phone charger. I plugged a USB cable to the PowerBook and hooked the phone to it. After a few minutes, the phone turned on and continued charging.

So, this leads me to 2 conclusions:

1. No need to carry a cell phone charger with me when traveling anymore, eliminating the risk of loosing it and having to replace it (again...). A simple USB cord will do.
2. My PowerBook is indeed the world's most expensive phone charger :)

It's official since I got an offer today and turned in my resignation to my manager at Sun. I will be joining OpenLogic on April 3rd, working with the likes of Scott Davis, Rod Cope and Stormy Peters as a Senior Software Engineer. The time was right, the opportunity is right and the team is amazing. I am very much looking forward to work with them. It should be quite exciting.

In the mean time, I have to transfer my responsibility over to other team members at Sun and ensure that I transfer as much information as I can to the remaining people. Giving my notice was a unnerving experience, but it had to be done right? I must say that I am dreading tomorrow a little since my director is going to be in Broomfield, quite ready to try to convince me to stay. But it's time to go. I certainly wish the best of luck and success to my teammates at Sun.

It's looking like I killed yet another Linksys WRT54G. A few days ago, I started noticing a severe slowdown when browsing to the internet or receiving and sending emails. I started iStumbler to see what might be happening. I noticed that there were some large gaps without seeing any transmissions from the downstairs access point. Pinging it also showed some wild variations in the ping response time with some significant packet loss. Thankfully, the upstairs access point kept me connected and even allowed the VPN to maintain a connection. It was time to upgrade.

A while back, I chose not to run wires in my house and went with the WDS route to bridge between the network downstairs (which supports a TiVO, the MCI VoIP adapter and the cable modem) and my office (which has my mail server, printer and a few other computers). I really couldn't afford too much downtime since I normally work from home.

Initially, I used a WRT54G as my main access point/router, and a WAP54G as the upstairs access point. I had updated the firmware on the WRT54G to support WDS (using Sveasoft at first and then using DD-WRT). Configuring the main router for WDS wasn't too bad, but I was limited to WEP for encryption purposes. This in itself was a little worrisome considering how easy it is to break WEP.

Eventually, the WAP54G died, and I decided to use the Apple Airport Express access point that I normally carried with me (never know when I might have to setup a wireless network in a conference room.) I did get it to work using the WRT54G as the main station, but it wasn't straightforward and I was still limited to WEP encryption.

So I took the opportunity to get a second Apple Airport Express access point and configure it to be the main station and to use WPA2 Personal as the encryption protocol. I used the Apple Airport Admin utility to add the existing one as a remote station (after resetting it to factory defaults). Once I chose to update the configuration on the new Airport Express, the utility also configured the office Airport Express to act as a remote station. Automatically. With no fiddling or confusion on my part. Even better, everything seems to be going faster and be more responsive. This was certainly well worth the money.

Matt Raible is riding his way to the Auraria campus tonight for the DenverJUG meeting. In the rain, snow and slush. I would be a wuss compared to him if I didn't drive down from Broomfield in a nice warm Jeep (that has a driver side window that works now).

So I'll head over soon...

Saturday, Mollie drove the Jeep to run errands while I was being interviewed by our social worker. Her car was still downtown since she was a little tipsy after a good dinner at McCormick's Fish House.

Once the interview was over, she came back. She had the guilty look of a kid who knows that she is in trouble and blurted out "It's not my fault!" She then proceeded to tell me how she had the windows cracked, enjoying the nice weather. She heard a snap when she tried to roll the windows up, and the driver window started to sink into the door.

So I took out the driver door panel, took out what I later learned was the power window regulator and saw that the cable was no longer attached to the part that held the window. After doing some research on the web (Google and Froogle are your friends), I placed an order for a new regulator.

Driving the Jeep around wasn't too bad since we did have nice weather on Sunday and Monday. I did get nervous since I didn't hear anything from the merchant that I purchased the regulator from though. After all, we are supposed to get rain and snow tomorrow, and I did want to go to the Denver JUG meeting. It would have been very uncomfortable driving in these conditions without a window. So I called the merchant. They had just shipped the part, but it wouldn't be delivered until Thursday.

So I called a local dealership to see whether they had the regulator I needed in stock (they did). I drove down, picked up the part, drove home and installed it. It was pretty straightforward now that I had been through a learning experience on how to remove the door panel earlier.

I'll still have the extra regulator though. I guess that I'll go ahead and put it up on eBay once I receive it.

We had our first interview with the social worker on Saturday. It was pretty straightforward. She did a tour of the house and looked over the snow covered backyard. We then proceeded to answer her questions and fill up the SAFE II questionnaire. We'll have follow up individual meetings over the next few weeks to go over these questionnaires and answer questions that may come up. It is certainly a little stressful to Mollie and I since her report will help determine whether we can adopt or not (see Mollie's account of the visit).

We also officially started the paper chase by sending documents to the Colorado Bureau of Investigation (CBI) and to the USCIS offices in Denver. We will probably be able to start the document sealing process shortly also.

I received the actual card that document my status as a permanent resident. It makes it feel a lot more real.

Sorry guys, looks like I'll be around for a while ;) Of course, Mollie is very happy about that fact.

-- Fred

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