return void;

ok so to those of you who don’t know, crystal and i own a lutino cockatiel named birdie. birdie likes to fly and is very attached to her mother, crystal. since we moved into the new apartment, she has gained a new level of confidence in her flying ability, learning to maneuver much more gracefully and swiftly. he has learned to fly around the apartment and distinguish what room she is in and how to get to the one she wants to be in. for example, she could be in the bedroom on top of the tv, and if crystal started calling her name from the couch in the living room, she knows what door to fly to and how to get to where crystal is.

sometimes she feels like exploring on her own, which we usually find ok because that usually means she wants to perch on something high like the fridge. around tuesday this week, she fly out and was playing on our entertainment center (she likes to stare at the pictures of crystal). we were in the bedroom watching tv and she let out a shriek. crystal went out and got her and everything seemed fine. the next day, birdie started showing signs of having a limp. concerned, crystal called an avian vet in town and took her on friday.

come to find out, they think she pulled a tendon or nerve in her knee because there is no physical scaring or bruising. also, she is apparently malnutritioned from the seed diet. she hasn’t been on an all seed diet since we weaned her onto millet, but she’s still not eating the right foods. also, her excessive egg laying has become a health concern. in the last month, she has laid 9 eggs, 6 of them were about 4 times the size of the rest. the egg laying has taken its toll on her body, depleting her blood stream and bones of the necessary calcium. because of the diet as well, she is slightly underweight, weighing in at 84 grams, about 90% of the weight she should be at.

the vet took xrays, blood and fecal tests and standard physical exams. all of this cost us a hefty $230. this bird is as expensive as a child (well, not really, but still expensive).

they recommended she get plenty of R&R for the next 4-6 weeks. they clipped her wings so that she cannot continue to injure the knee. she hasn’t had her wings clipped but once in her life, and this is not exactly a change she’s used to. she has unsuccessfully tried several times to fly to her high perches, only to smack into a wall or land crudely on the carpet.

they also recommended keeping her in a 10-gallon fish tank for the rehab period. this will keep her from trying to fly away or climb out. we lined the tank with a towel to keep the floor as soft as possible for her. we also added her toys and food so she can have easy access without having to leave the tank. lastly, we found out that toys that are not stainless steel (i.e. galvanized metals) can be toxic for birds. this meant we had to remove her hanging wood chip/bell toy.

so far she has spent plenty of time sleeping (grinding her beak, which is good). we’re also trying to wean her to a diet that is more rich with calcium. the next 4-6 weeks are going to be tough, especially on crystal (treats birdie like a child, and injured child). hope she gets better soon.

if you haven’t read parts 1..3 of this posting, do so now. this is the last of the catch up bloggings in this series, titled “been a while”.

first, lets get the horrible bank story out of the way.

i almost forgot what a regular paycheck was like. in the months of unemployment, i spent every ounce of self control to ensure that we did not over spend. i had saved up a good chunk of change in the 6 months prior to the layoff (to pay off credit cards) and we needed to make sure not to spend it too quickly. needless to say, we burned through all but $600. i promise, this has a point.

right before we left san antonio, crystal and i wanted to open a banking account together; we wanted to share our finances like most all married couples do. one of our concerns was national availability of the bank/credit union. we thought compass bank sounded like a decent start. we spent 2 hours in compass opening an account in san antonio. since we had not found a residence in dallas yet, we had to use our current address.

after we had moved to our new apartment in mckinney, we went to the nearest compass bank in allen. after changing our address, we chose some checks (UT checks). after waiting for 2 weeks and still not receiving them in the mail, crystal called compass and inquired about the missing checks. apparently we had ordered checks that had been discontinued. thanks for the notice, compass.

now the good stuff. first, we started noticing that their online banking was rather lacking in design. pending debits made with the debit card were only made visible on the website after an hour and for only 24 hours, at which point they vanish until being completely processed.

this only made the real problem even worse. there were a few debit transactions that apparently had caused our funds to become insufficient. after the first transaction caused us our account to be $0.56 in the hole (on may 26th), all subsequent transactions were STILL approved. after 4 transactions, we were assessed $36 per transaction. also, there were about $6 per diem fees for a week. lastly, i took my paycheck to compass on friday the 27th. the teller informed me that it would be over a week for the money to post to my account and that i should take the check elsewhere (i do not recall if the suggested i cash it and bring it back, i was so appalled).

all of this was going on without compass notifying us about the problem with our account. the teller did not mention the account showed a negative balance on the 27th and we received no phone call or letter. it wasn’t until crystal called compass for a balance inquiry that we found out. initially, crystal called the national customer service number and they were unable to help or explain the problem.

i consider myself to be a pretty relaxed guy; doctors have noted that my body shows no signs of stress. but when you screw with my money or credit, i become a very irritated guy with patience as long as a 4 year old’s attention span. i first contacted the national customer service line on my lunch break. the woman i spoke to informed me that the account was $180 in the negative!! she offer some slight insight as to what went wrong, but offered no help in resolving the problem.

frustrated, i called crystal and told her to be ready to go to the bank when i got home. we arrived and waited for 20 minutes until we were able to speak to a representative. they claimed that they weren’t able to help but the customer service manager might. we waited for another 20 minutes and told her what the problem was. she agreed that we should’ve been notified but never were. after a heated argument, she finally agreed to refund us one insufficient funds fee. apart from that, she wasn’t able to assist us any further and recommended we speak to the branch manager to fix the rest of our problems. the branch manager wouldn’t be in to work until the following morning.

first thing in the morning, we were at the bank to speak with the manager. after an hour wait, we were finally able to speak to the manager. the manager wasn’t very responsive. after explaining that the entire problem existed because they neglected to contact us, she continued to insist there was no bank error made. she gave us the number of the regional manager. the regional manager contacted me at work on monday and refunded all but 1 remaining $36 fee.

on friday, i went to bank of america to deposit the printed check that L3 gave me. we went in on saturday to close the account for good and take out any money that remained. come to find out, L3 also paid me that paycheck via direct deposit to the compass banking account!! paid twice, now that’s a problem most people would love to have.

whew, what a long story.

ok so the job has been good thus far. it took a meager 12 days to receive my clearance. i’ve actually started coding, which has been long awaited. i also started riding in a vanpool that meets 2 miles from our house because the hour-long drive to work is too much to bear.

i’ll post later about birdie and why she’s like a feathered child.

if you haven’t read parts 1 and 2 of this posting, do so now.

so at that point, i had to decide where to take not only my career, but also my life. i wasn’t just taking myself somewhere anymore, i had a wife to think of at this point.

so crystal and i debated back and forth, forth and back, about this decision. this was the cause of approximately 2 weeks of sleepless nights for us. we spent many a days in coffee houses making pros and cons lists. we asked everyone we knew for insight as to the decision they might make, hoping that their decision might shed light on a different aspect of the dilemma we had yet to consider.

it was no use; every time it was debated and talked about, the matter came down to one thing: proximity to businesses (so crystal can get a job) and proximity to a good university. we were afraid that crystal wouldn’t be able to find a job in boise as the market was pretty thin. boise state university was also fairly unimpressive; their CS department seemed to be the most under funded department.

on the positive side, HP was offering a research position. since i am extremely interested in doing commercial research and this is what made HP’s offer most interesting. the huge pay increase also made it all the more appetizing.

boise was a definite change from texas. it was roughly 20-30 degrees cooler in march. the mountains were snowcapped but that was about it. there were views of the foothills which looked very scenic (rolling and all). the downtown has maybe 3 or 4 towers but that’s about it. it looked like a cleaner and more empty austin. there was one highway which took you from one end of the town to the other in 5 minutes. the town in general had the feeling of kansas with some small mountains.

i have to hand it to HP; they know how to take of applicants. we received $250 in traveler’s checks the next day. we had flight and hotel arrangements made immediately (which is more than i can say for L-3). they set us up in a hilton on the banks of the city’s river (boise river, clever name). we tried to have an authentic boise dinner so we ate at a place (can’t remember the name) that was near the hotel.

HP was a big plant, spread across 7 or 8 buildings. most rooms in the buildings were cubical farms. part of the site used to apparently be a manufacturing plant for their printer division, but most of that had been moved to china. the first guy that i talked to was supposed to grill me over algorithms and general computing questions. i know this because i saw the cheat sheet the hiring manager had on his clipboard. the guy took me to get some coffee while we talked in the cafe. it became clear to him in no time that i was not lying on my resume. in a few minutes, he said that he could tell that i was clearly competent in my field and didn’t need to ask any more algorithms questions. at this point, he wanted to hear more about my school/personal projects.

the rest of the interviews were fairly plain. i handled them all very well and all of the interviewers appeared impressed. the only difficult interview came from the hiring manager. it was a very pressing interview, including many open ended and behavioral questions. the day ended well and i was invited to stick my nametag on a massive ball of previous interviewees’ nametags.

overall, i was very impressed with HP, more so than L-3. On the other hand, L-3 had the location card on its side. after much deliberation, we decided that L-3 would be best for our careers and lives. i decided that a master’s and phd from UTD is more important than one job. ten years from now, i won’t regret passing up my first choice job. the same goes for crystal; she will be earning her mba.

we spent the next 2 weeks making very frequent trips to dallas to look for a place to live. we were originally going to buy a cheaper home with no up-front financing. after seeing too many homes we were less than pleased with, we decided to find an apartment while we paid off our consumer debt and saved to cover closing and maybe some down payment.

as a side note, we decided against continuing our past dealings with the coldwell banker real-estate agent that we were using. he whined constantly, on everything from his imminent divorce to him not making a sale. get this: after we drove around rockwall with him for 2 hours and listened to him talk about his several properties that he owns here and there, he had the gall to claim that he would not be eating that night because we did not sign for a home that day!!

so we packed up and the usual crew helped up fill a u-haul. we rented a 24″ truck this time because the 17″ truck barely held my belongings when i moved out of sendero ridge. we are now living in a much nicer, cheaper and smaller apartment in mckinney texas. it’s a small town (pop 90k) 30 minutes north of dallas. the reason we chose to live there was because of the access to highway 380. that road is one of 2 routes to greenville (the sticks), where i work.

so here we are now, we’ve been here for 2 months and i just received my second paycheck, so things have started rolling smoothly and life is great. in my next posting, i’ll talk about some of our experiences since we’ve moved here. stay tuned.

read the previous part before reading this one, things will make more sense.

so i got to work looking for work. i had my newly fashioned resume and was ready to find a better life. my search was very systematic and efficient. i started by making a list of things that i would like to work on, followed by a list of companies who specialize in those things. i started initially with distributed development. i then moved on to companies i had heard of before. i continued until my list was roughly 50 companies large (give or take).

at that point, i started going down the list and visited every companies employment section. i applied to the positions that i felt i was capable of and that HR would find similarities in my skills with those of the job descriptions. i also used dice.com and the business section in the newspaper to build an even larger list of companies. dice.com proved to be quite a fruitless effort as most postings are made by headhunters.

i went through a few headhunters with no success. most of those positions were for contract work and i wasn’t that willing to be in a similar situation 6 months from now.

by march, i had applied to over 100 positions/companies. my success rate ended up being about 2%. lets just assume the market is very dry for new grads. i had my first interview with General Dynamics for a position in phoenix. i landed that interview through the school’s career counseling. the interview was awful. i ended up blaming one of my professors for my bad grades in this out of body experience where my mind was telling my body to shut up. needless to say, i received no call-back.

later, i landed a phone interview, with HP! it was more of an HR interview but things went VERY well. the next week, i had a technical interview scheduled. after much anticipation, the interview went very well. in fact, i ended up in a conversation with the manager about technology for over half an hour! unfortunately, i did not hear back from the company for a week.

at this point, crystal’s uncle had managed to land me an on-site interview at his company, L-3 Communications. the interview was scheduled for less than a week away. i bought a very nice kenneth cole pin-stripped suit for a very good price ($180). we drove up to dallas to meet with the company. the interview was a grueling 8 hour process, meeting with 3 different functional groups and 9 total people. everything went very well though.

one of the groups i met with did sat-com applications in a windows environment. another did general tools development. the last group that i met with did special systems and was called the “Human-Computer Interface” group. i was the most impressed with the managers i met with in the last group and was excited about doing this development in a linux environment. by time we had gotten back to san antonio, HR had called and wanted to extend me an offer!

here’s were it got tricky. i contacted HP to see if they were still interested in me. they were and wanted to schedule an on-site interview. i had to stall L-3 without looking bad, so i asked if they were able to run my background check before i received the official offer. i was worried about a few things i had done in my past so i didnt want to accept their offer if i was going to be unemployed in a few weeks anyways. they obliged and i told HP that i would love to meet with them.

L-3 stalled for 2 more weeks, and i made sure to abuse the time that i had. i was flown to biose idaho to meet with HP. my main concern about accepting their position was the location. lets just say that boise isn’t a business capital. we flew up there, crystal and i, and enjoyed several days worth of vacation on the $200+ of traveler’s checks that HP gave us. boise was nice, but had a small town feel. there were only 180,000 people living there and it was no more than a 5 minute drive anywhere. the cold was refreshing, but the allergies were not. the mountains were also not as impressive as i had originally expected.

the HP interview went even better than the L-3 interview. half way into the first interview, the guy told me that i clearly didnt need to answer any of his technical questions, so we chatted about some projects i worked on in school. there were fewer interviews here, each lasting longer. i interviewed with a single group, each person being twice my age. the group was fairly small (about 30 people total) and shared work with the systems engineers in CO. i was VERY impressed with the company and the work would be great (distributed development research).

in a matter of 3 days i had my second offer on the table. L-3 was offering me 20% what Secorp was paying me and HP was offering me 40% more than Secorp. Now I had a VERY difficult life decision to make, not only for myself, but for my family as well….

wow, it’s been a long time since i last posted, and a lot of things have happened since. let me try to recap what’s happened since before i do a real posting.

i was reading my last posting and i noticed that my last post was about moving to a new apartment, escalante. that move took place in december of 2004. i signed a six month lease. crystal quit her job in jan. this year and moved down slowly to san antonio in the new apartment. the new apartment was a 2 bedroom apartment. one room was used as my office. we had plenty of room for our stuff and it was a nice apartment. quiet even, considering that it was directly in the flight path (stupid s.a. city planners).

we didn’t go to australia like originally planned. as i went to book the trip, there were adjustments made to the price (due to riding gas prices) which doubled the cost of the trip. that made it basically unaffordable. we changed our destination to waikiki beach, hawaii. hawaii was gorgeous, and i don’t regret a thing. well, i actually wish i had rented a car for a few more days. i have about 800 pictures from the trip alone. we have about 800mb of wedding and honeymoon photos that i will eventually make publicly available later (more on that later).

then the shit really hit the fan, so to speak. i had asked trey, my boss at secorp, if things were stable at the company and he confirmed that everything was smooth sailing. in late jan, we learned otherwise. secorp had a major contract with a company called Pratt & Whitney. we lost this contract and were forced to evacuate the premises. at this point, we moved shop to an old apartment of trey’s to continue work on another ongoing contract bid. things were not looking good. i started polishing my resume and basically made it look like one lean, sexy beast.

i couldn’t have finished it at a better time. on valentines day, i arrive at work with trey already there (which was unusual). he basically stated that then was a good time to begin searching for a new job. there were 3 of us who looked as if we had heard the worst news this year. trey closed up shop and we went home.

i was now unemployed in less than a month of our marriage….