Category: Life News

The Job

For the last 21 years give or take a few months, I’ve been a “field” consultant. That means that in all that time, I’ve done IT consulting for customers, traveling the world or locally to their offices to help them implement solutions that work for them, the first 10 as IBM, the last 11 at Microsoft. It also means that in all that time, I’ve never had a dedicated full-time permanent position to make IT work for one specific company. And it also means that I’ve never had a real office.

Until now.

Now, I’ve taken a new position at Microsoft at headquarters in Redmond in the IT department helping to make their networks more secure. This means that travel is all but gone – no more business trips, no more leaving on someone else terms. It also means a relocation to the Redmond area. I have already started the position last month and we are in the process of working out the details for selling the Virginia house and moving all of our stuff out West.

Now, I’ll get to experience the rainy Pacific Northwest in all of its glory.

New Airport, New Country

Last month, I flew to Singapore. I have a new airport and a new country to add to my list.

Why? Because I’m crazy. I want to make it to 1 million miles this year, so I had booked that trip last year in order to get over 21K miles. Well, that trip is now over and done with and I’m that much closer. I’m within 12K miles and should get it this year – which is the bad news. That means I’ve been travelling again.

Not quite as fun as I remember.

I’d like to stay home for a while now…

A Little Closer To The Goal

I just added more miles to my “lifetime” pool. Now, I’m just under 940,000 – only 60,000 to go. In my old job, that would have been just another year of flying somewhere every week. Not so much now.

In order to speed up the “Million Miles” I talked about earlier, I took a mileage run to Guam and Tokyo – that added almost 19,000 miles in one swoop. So – that added two places to my travel map and two new airports to my list as well: GUM and NRT.

I’ll write more about the trip later.

Sometimes, It Takes A While

We’ve been back from our trip now for a full week and even while on the trip, I’m sure that we could have found time to edit and post some of our pictures.

But we didn’t.

No, we’ve fallen behind – yet again. Myself, it’s partly because I jumped right off the plane, so to speak, and went back to work. That tends to put a damper on recovery time and has really sapped my desire to do a bunch of “work” on our pictures.

Never fear, though. Eventually, we will get to them and put them up for all to see.

It just might take a while…

More DNA More Questions

After the last DNA test, I decided to expand the scope of my test to include the Y chromosome. This can be used to trace deep paternal ancestry back many generations – in fact, it can even go back into pre-history. The Y chromosome is normally passed in it’s entirety from father to son with only an occasional rate of mutation. This means that on that one chromosome, all male descendants of a distant ancestor will have near identical Y chromosomes.

For example, the farthest back I’ve been able to trace the Phillips branch my tree is a man named Solomon Phillips who died in North Carolina in 1797. He might have been born in Virginia, but I have very few records and they all deal with North Carolina land sales and purchases, plus a court document for distribution of his estate since he died fairly young [47] without a will.

By submitting my Y-DNA to a “one name project” [usually an organization dedicated to tracing a single paternal name through DNA and genealogy] for “Phillips” I was able to confirm that Solomon is indeed my ancestor:

http://phillipsdnaproject.com/ylineage/pedigrees-by-family-group/102-family-group-49 

There are only 3 testers in this family group 49: Me, a newly-discovered far distant cousin, and what appears to be one of my two male first cousins whom I’ve lost contact with. This test confirmed that both of these men and I are descended from Solomon – especially since the distant cousin was descended from a different son of Solomon than I was.

The interesting thing is that this distant cousin and I ONLY share DNA on the Y chromosome. No where else. But what we do share is only one tiny mutation off. That means in two different branches descended through 6 or 7 generations on a different fork, there has been only one minor transcription difference. That’s very close, and what they refer to as a genetic distance of “1”, which in the case of our shared ancestor, gives us a very strong statistical chance that this person is our common ancestor. Of course, with DNA, it’s all statistics and it could even mean that Solomon is NOT the common ancestor, but someone before him could be. However, based on our documentation, that doesn’t seem to be the case.

As for new questions, this raises more, such as “who was Solomon?”, “Where did he come from?” and many such. There are no records I can find before his move into North Carolina.

There are more questions, but I’m getting tired of typing now.

Aliens and the Surface Pro

I’ve been busy for a while with quite a lot of things, so I have not had much time to write [or rant for that matter] lately.

First and foremost, I will tell you that Laura has been painfully making do for the last several years with my “leavings” from my employer. She’s been using my hand-me-down extra laptops when I get a new one.

Lately, though, that wasn’t really working for us. She loves to do photo editing and also loves a good, fast, and stable machine. My old work laptop didn’t quite have a powerhouse of a graphics card [neither did my newer one] and eventually, it has slowly succumbed to entropy and now crashes frequently for no reason. So did my newer one when I put any kind of strain on the graphics engine, like, say, playing a game… If I were to do such things…

It was definitely time to get something configured for her that was brand new and with a warranty. I gave her two options. One: get a super high performance laptop that would do everything, or two: get two purpose built machines (one powerful desktop for home and one ultra-portable for elsewhere). Either option was about the same amount of money.

What she discovered is that the laptops which had the specs that she like were 10 pounds and had 17 inch monitors and were usually “gaming” machines. She also didn’t like the fact that if something breaks with your laptop, you usually need a professional to fix it. I can change parts in a desktop rather easily, so no calling the technicians on that one. She also couldn’t get quite the performance on a laptop that she could on a desktop that was about half the price. So that’s what we decided. All that was left was picking out the two pieces of the Laura Computing Environment, from now on referred to as “LCE”. 🙂

The easier choice was a desktop for the LCE. We’ve both always admired the Alienware computers, and now that they’ve been acquired by Dell, they seem to be more affordable. We chose a strong performer, but without the dual video cards [without a second monitor they are unnecessary], with 32GB of RAM, super fast CPU, and an SSD for the system drive. All of our data files usually are on the network so storage isn’t a problem. We chose speed over space with that disk, but it’s still 256GB.

Then, we had to chose the LCE mobile machine. We looked at several options, playing with them in some stores, but none seemed sufficiently powerful and robust enough when combined with light weight and touch screens.

Anyhow, after my employer gave me a Surface RT, I found that I kept finding it in her hands. Hmm… there might be something there, I thought. So, when availability of the Pro came around, we showed up at the store – to a huge crowd! We were able to miraculously obtain the 128GB Surface Pro [which, it seems, everyone else wants, too] that the manager said had a “damaged box”. Turns out it wasn’t damaged that we could see. Everyone else was now in line to reserve a back-ordered one.

So: the LCE now consists of the Surface Pro 128GB and my old laptop. The Alienware desktop has not yet arrived, but it will in about a week I think.

I’ve set up the Surface Pro for her and even tested it out in a café with Lightroom on it doing some picture edits and uploads for about 3 hours. I’ve got to say: it’s pretty amazing for such a tiny thing!