I'm taking tomorrow off to goof around, and I'm thinking of leaving early today. Screw you guys, I'm going home. No. No. Screw you. Home. :)

We went up to Napa to meet with the officiant chick again. She reviewed the ceremony, our vows, the processional and all those other details that are so important to the women folk. We'll have one more meeting in August or something to deal with the actual license and then we're set. Kristen is very happy that things are going so well.

After the wedding Kristen watched the NASCAR race and I sized and trimmed brass while keeping her company. Hand trimming 100 pieces of brass is a pain, but the results are nice. I used the high-end Lapua brass I got on sale; man is there a huge difference in quality vs. the Winchester or Remington stuff or even the Nosler. I guess you get what you pay for... I just hope it shoots as good as it looks. I loaded up a box using the neck sized only brass I made earlier in the week. If it feeds and fires OK (the dud samples I made feed OK) then I'll make up some more of it. The Lapua people guarantee a minimum of 10 reloads in their brass and the net wisdom says you can get up to 20 or 30 reloads per piece if you neck size only. I'm not sure why I gave up on the win748 powder, my test target from 4 months ago shows a group under 0.75" which isn't bad for back then.

We took mom and dad to see the Mars IMAX movie today. It was pretty damn cool, even if a lot of the stuff was CGI interpretations of what happened. Guess they didn't have IMAX cameras in orbit nor on Mars, so we'll cut them some slack. It's really interesting stuff, science is cool.

Here are some pictures. First is the shoot house (exterior) which isn't much to look at. The next is a pic of the Montero parked on the hill at the psycho school location. I think it looks sorta like the XP startup screen. The 3rd is the woman jumping last week. She's jumping higher now and moving faster so my little camera can't keep up. I missed a bunch of the jumps, and this one I caught is very blurry. I'll borrow dad's Nikon next time.

I just noticed the image counter on the Canon has rolled over. I've taken over 10000 photos with it. That's some good utilization.

No updates all week? I've been slacking. Lots going on, just no time to journal it. Today should maybe be a little quieter. Maybe.

Bah. I want to go home now, not in the mood to journal. Maybe later. Worst case I'll upload some pictures.

The keyless entry on the Montero went nuts last night. It won't respond to the remote anymore and it's gone into default mode where it locks/unlocks the doors when you start/stop the car. I downloaded the programming manual (the internet rocks!) and as far as I can tell the brain is dead or seriously retarded. I pulled the two power fuses to it and it still locks/unlocks with the ignition. It must get power from the ignition wire too which makes sense. I had to pull the main connector that holds the magic yellow ignition wire to make it at least stop being stupid. I'll try to rig up a status LED like the manual says at some point. For now, I'll just live without keyless. I hardly drive anyway so it's not that big of a deal.

Yesterday was a seriously long, 14 hour outdoor psycho class. It rained a lot, it was freakin' cold and generally miserable. In the night shoot part I got to run 2 "ATM robbery" scenarios, and I don't think they liked what I did. In the first one, the chick at the ATM was getting hassled by a guy, they were fighting over money or something. My reaction? Leave. Yea, I don't know him, don't know her, have no interest in getting involved or "saving" anyone so I just left. Did the same thing the 2nd time. Still not going to help out. Apparently I'm not a hero. No kidding. The other chick student that ran this role play got involved and tried to shoot the guy before he knifed the girl at the ATM. Well, the shooter hit the innocent chick instead of the bad guy. So in real life, the student would go to jail, get sued by the innocent chick she shot, probably sued by the bad guy, and who knows if the bank would want to sue her for putting a bullet in their ATM. All-in-all, a total lose for the gun-wielding student. I liked my answer better. If the victim had been Kristen or someone I cared about I'm sure I would have acted differently, but for a stranger? Too bad. I have too much going good in my life to risk it all for someone else who can't take care of themselves.

Major cleanup today. I got the laundry done from last night, and cleaned up all the junk I just abandoned in the garage last night because I was so tired. I had 6 layers of clothes on at the range: thermal underwear, t-shirt, sweat shirt, the handy dandy loaner bullet resistant vest, fleece jacket and my rain jacket. I had ear plugs in and had the headset over my hood holding it in place on my head, my wool beanie, and my shooting glasses. I had wool socks, my good hiking boots, thermal underwear and my thicker cargo pants on. All that crap was wet and stinky. Oh, and I love how "wimpy" the vest is. No fabric softeners, no bleach, no using the dryer, no machine washing, etc. It can stop a bullet but can't take a spin in the wash. Somewhat ironic I think. I wish I looked cooler in the vest, but I just look like a doof.

I finally setup a backup script for the laptop. It just does a smbmount of the important directories and rsyncs them to the big disk in pong. I should move that data to nvidia for safe keeping as well, but need to come up with a quick and dirty encryption scheme first. Actually, I should do that for my whole web site which I backup a system at work. I'm sure there is a utility somewhere that does what I want.

Oh, and it's NASCAR season again. The Daytona 500 was today, the woman was glued to the TV watching it live. It's their superbowl, only it happens at the beginning of the season.

So tired! Another long ass day of scrambling to get last minute stuff done for the Uli integration on Monday. In Taiwan Monday isn't a holiday obviously so they'll be working as usual which means we'll be working as usual.

Tomorrow the psycho class starts at 9am, which means my carpool person will be at my place at 6:30am. The class also ends at 9pm which means I won't get home until midnight, and then I've got to work on Sunday at 9am. This is starting to suck. I guess it wouldn't be so bad if I knew it was good for something, but not having a boss who even knows what we do makes it hard to get fired up for working all the extra hours. We'll never get anything out of it, and I don't work for charity.

I ordered the New Zealand tickets today and biffed the on-line form. I had to call in to cancel the screwed up order and the lady on the phone that answered to direct my call had a total Kiwi accent. The person she forwarded me to had an India-style ring tone on their phone and spoke with an India accent. Hmm... He got my tickets fixed up (or canceled anyway so I could re-enter them) and that's all that matters. We're flying direct from SFO to Auckland now which is pretty cool, no extra jaunt down to LA first.

My parents and mom's sister were over for dinner last night for my mom's birthday. It was easier to grill some meat and veggies than to try to find a restaurant my aunt will eat in. She's hard core Ohio so nothing "funny" or "fancy" or "weird" or "Mexican". Great, so what does that leave? Pizza?

I'm letting MSFT update run and it's installing the "malicious software removal tool". Wonder if they'll find Firefox to be malicious?

Good weekend. After working on Saturday I went home and basically took a nap for a few hours in preparation for going out dancing in SF. The woman then learned that her favorite band will be the main performer next month at the club so she changed her mind and wanted to go then. That's fine, I was happy to get some extra rest. We went out for Korean BBQ and then watched a bunch of the Olympics stuff on the Replay. I also think I did some useful stuff around the house, but I can't remember what.

Sunday Don came up and we went to the range. While we were leaving we saw something that I've never seen at a range before and don't imagine I ever will. There was a chick decked out in full leather regalia. Not the trashy biker style stuff but the full-on Hollywood vampire look, glossy black pants, top, etc and I swear she had on 5" stiletto heeled boots. Very odd. Don asked "what kind of gun was she shooting?" to which I had to reply "there was a gun?". We need more vampire chicks at the range. :) I BBQed chicken for dinner (way too much, we'll be eating chicken again tonight and possibly tomorrow) and watched part of Heat and a classic A-team episode: The Taxicab Wars guest starting Michael Ironside. Yea, the a-team really does suck, but at least Don was entertained by the gratuitous use of mini-14s. After Don left the woman and I went for a walk and got some ice cream. It's still warm in the evenings, and is supposed to be 75 today. Looks like rain in the forecast for the weekend, and then back to sunny skies. Odd winter.

Ah, working on a Saturday. Wouldn't be as bad if we didn't have to start work at midnight, then go sleep and then come back in again at 8:30am. It's not going very well either, neither of the two "quick and easy" projects are going quick nor easy.

How did that happen? It went from freezing cold to very comfortable in just a few days. I've got the BBQ going now, steaks are broiling away and I'm not even wearing at jacket outside and it's 7pm. Crazy.

I think I overdid it a bit at the gym this morning, the muscles between my shoulder blades and neck are all screwed up.

I'm going to sneak out early I think. I'm tired. Oh, and there is no such thing as a "quick trip to Bangalore". I'm trying to figure out flights using our super crappy corporate travel site and trying to go to Taiwan and then to Bangalore and then home requires me to fly on United, India Air, Japan Air, Cathay Pacific and one other I can't remember. There just has to be an easier way.

I "won" at the vending machine today. Got a free snickers bar.

Another long day at work. I whipped up a 14 page presentation and since only 1/3 of the people who should have been there were actually there, I got through it all in like 20 minutes. A larger audience would have been nice, but I guess it was good not to have to answer so many questions.

I got two more bundles of tax papers in the mail today. I thought they had to have this stuff to us by the end of January? One was from smith barney and I think I've already got all the info on it put into my spreadsheets. They give you a summary, but I've used all the individual sale receipts to make my own. I don't like how they show you all stock history forever, it makes me feel so dumb. I know you can't predict the future so selling stock for a gain isn't a bad idea, but I don't want to see it after I've done it. The past is the past, let it go.

I swear this new version of Firefox is 3x slower than the old one. It takes forever just to load up.

What a happy day. It was pretty cold this morning on the walk to Starbucks, but it got warm enough to open the windows and air out the house and to wash and wax the bike. It was caked with all sorts of nasty bugs from the Phoenix trip, and riding around in the rain for the last month or so hasn't helped any. It's picked up a few more scratches and rock chips, but I do have 29k miles on it so it's gotta show some signs of being on the road.

After my morning of cleaning we went to some fancy ass paper store to look at wedding invitations. It took a long while, but we found 2 styles that we liked. What was odd was that we didn't find any we liked that were crazy expensive, everything we picked was about 50% of the price we thought it would be. Finally, we get a break on something. We don't have good taste in invites! Whew.

We had some soup at this fancy ass cafe next to the fancy ass paper store as a late lunch and now I'm not hungry for the ribs we were defrosting. We'll save those for Wednesday, the woman will start them in the afternoon and will be ready when I get home. So domestic she is on her days off.

The day was pretty much shot after the invites, so we stopped by two different malls and actually found me 2 pairs of pants that fit and that I like. Cargo pants are so out of style, which makes them hard to find. I guess I could update my look a little, but not yet.

Whoa, there is a 1987 turbo Sprint on CL. I gotta email the dude!

Just watched all the superbowl commercials (skipped the game by hand, oddly the Replay doesn't have a "skip the show watch the commercials" mode). MacGyver doing an add? Benny Hill themed stuff? Our generation must be in prime buying time.

What a fun week. Our current VP said in a meeting that Ed (our old boss) was wrong, our new CIO is right, that's the way it is and if you don't like it you can "vote with your feet". Hmmm.... so suck it up or quit. We all knew those were the options, but it was refreshing, I think, to finally have them said rather than just hinted at.

The rest of the week was crazy busy, I ended up staying later than planned on Friday night just to get my stupid expense report done from the Taiwan trip. Looks like I'll be going back the week of March 20th, and my VP said I should swing by Bangalore after and make a site visit and check on things. Great, "swinging by" takes about 14 hours, even from Taiwan, not to mention the 26+ hours it will take to get home from there. Ugh. I wonder if I'll have enough miles to upgrade out of cargo class? If not, I will after this next round, that's for sure.

Hmm... so what else. Kristen is teaching today so I've got the day to pretty much goof off. So far I've had breakfast and watched half an episode of A-Team and a quick show on how to actually make your own bio diesel. It's not that hard, but it could get really messy. Plus, I wonder how much the rig they used is? Well duh, I'm sitting at a computer and they gave a web address... http://www.freedomfuels.net which shows it's two grand. On the show they made the fuel for 70 cents/gal, you have to use a lot and have a free source of used oil to make it worthwhile. It would be really fun though, sorta like loading your own ammo. Not always as cheap, but a good hobby. You really need a nice room to do it in though, just having it stuck in the corner of the garage wouldn't work well for me. Maybe if I could get dad's bike out of the garage and move stuff around. Then of course is my lack of a diesel vehicle.

Apparently I asked too much of my old PC today. Running two browsers, excel and playing MP3s while I did my tax summaries pushed it into the ground. Even closing apps didn't work, I had to bounce it. Bummer. I also found that it's faster to run a browser on pong and look at it with VNC than it is to run Firefox locally. I guess pong, as a PIII/1ghz system, is the fastest I've got at the moment. Wonder if the woman would notice if I remote terminal-ed into her P4? :)

I went down to the school and had lunch with the woman and then screwed around with the bikes for a bit. Dad wanted me to get his out and run it around even though it's on the battery tender. It ran fine, but I'm sure it was good for the oil to move around and whatnot.

Now I'm just back to working on tax stuff. I've got a 5-part excel spreadsheet with everything they'll need to do the taxes. I've done as much of the grunt processing as I can, reconciling all the stock stuff and computing gains. I don't have my package from the investment people yet but I've done my Ameritrade account and my NVDA stuff.

We went to an awesome new restaurant last nigh with Troy and his woman called Darda Seafood. It's an Islamic Chinese place.... whatever, the food is awesome. Best Chinese food I've ever had. Way better than the place we usually go. He ordered some stuff I don't think we could get as it's not on the usual menu but I'm sure the rest of it is good as well. They use lamb instead of pork in dishes as well. Yum!