After our Costco run (Costco on the weekends is a zoo, very unpleasant) I went over to Troys to drop off some parts and he was there with his kid working on the car. His kid got a little squidly on an offramp trying to dodge some chick who stopped in the middle of the road to take a phone call (!) and ended up hitting the curb. The damage to the suspension was minor, maybe $200 worth of parts (plus the sway bar bit that he didn't get a replacement for and just torched and bent the original back into shape). The bummer part was that both airbags fired, even though there is zero body damage. That's a couple grand right there. Ouch. Plus the passenger airbag blew out the windshield. Looks like he'll be working at the hockey rink all summer to pay off that curb encounter. The good news is that he got a tow truck there and got his car out before anyone thought to call the cops or he would have a bunch of tickets to go with his trashed car.

I also got two propane bottles and got them filled. The exchange-a-cylinder thing is handy, but costs 2x of what it does to just get your own bottle refilled. Now I have two, so I'll never have to make an emergency propane run in the middle of a BBQ.

Saturday the woman competed in two classes in a horse show (pics on main page). She got 7th and 8th places, and I blame the horse. That old horse she's riding (no more after this, now she'll ride the new one she's leasing) sucks and actually refused to jump some of the jumps. That pretty much screws any chance you have of winning. I got some good shots using dad's camera for the first time, but he had it in some strange focus mode so it was picking up things outside of the center of the image. A guy at the show had the same camera and showed me how to set it back to normal, so now dad's pics won't come out focused on random sideline objects. I scaled them way back to my normal 1600x1200 web site size using Eric's 'convert' idea. Works like a charm, but it's really CPU intensive.

Last night's OSU alumni event was held in the 'rotunda' at the new SJ city hall:

It turns out that my dad built that dome, and all of the stairs and rail work inside the whole complex. Apparently the original plan had a large perforated aluminum shield that rotated around the outside of the dome tracking the sun and providing shade. They ran out of money and instead there are just some large white sheets stretched across the inside (although now that I look at the picture the blast shield is there on the left side in it's static location). He also said the whole project was a total money pit (that they profited from) dome aside. They had tons of crazy custom stuff like these $500 hand rail brackets that are in the back of the council chambers. They're really fancy, but no one can see them but the council members and the cleaning staff. Why not use standard parts at 1/100th the cost? Your tax dollars at work. They also used lots of special materials, aluminum instead of steel, strange sizes that had to be custom ordered, elaborate finishes, etc. Pork barrels galore. Who knew dad's boss had such contacts in the city? Or maybe it's like a Ghostbusters thing and the whole building is an antenna for talking to Zul!!! Aaaahhhh!!!! Run away!!!!

Monday's dinner with the NVDA crowd was OK. Most of them are doing well. Ernie bought two houses in NC as rentals (under $100k each!), Jason is engaged to his stripper, uh sorry, exotic dancer, girlfriend, Koga still has his drinking problem, Dennis has braces, JD says there are no women here and wants to move, Rod traded his Jeep for an MDX and still hates women, and Ed is now working at JDS Uniphase. I had a tasty thin crust pizza and was home by 10pm.

Tonight I have absolutely nothing planned. I'm going to go home and read for a bit and I'm sure the woman will make some tasty dinner and we'll end up watching survivor but in any case I'm going to be in bed by 9:30 and asleep by 10.

Oh, and dad brought his camera down so I could use it this weekend. However, he didn't bring the damn battery charger. He says 2 batteries are enough if I don't use the LCD, but it limits my ability to practice with it. He says I'll never take enough pics to use those two but I take 10x the pics he does and this thing has a 16 shot buffer before it ever gets to the CF card so you can go full-auto and get some good results. I may have to go to Fry's or something and see if they have chargers cheap, although they don't sell Nikon so maybe that won't work. Sigh. They're $14 on line, so they would be what, $50 at the camera store? Sigh.

Hmm... dinner with NVDA people last Monday, OSU event tonight. I'm spending too many nights out and eating too much crappy food! More later, I've got to go sit in traffic.

It may be a little too Ferris Bueller, but I did end up taking the dude from the detail day's advice and put the tires on little carpet squares. He says that if you leave low profile tires sitting on pavement too long without driving on them they'll get flat spots. Since it's unlikely the car will move much in the next month or so, I figured I might as well cut the little squares and park on them.

I taped them to the floor and everything. It actually makes parking easier because I can feel the car go up onto the squares so I know I'm lined up and far enough back in the garage.

Pong has been up for 302 days now, and I've restarted the squid cache twice in that time that I can remember. It must have a memory leak or something, I can't imagine it would let itself cache enough in memory to page so bad. Although maybe I've got it set wrong. Maybe someday I'll get ambitious and actually upgrade the OS too. It's running RH9, installed Sept 4, 2003 according to the install log that's still lying around. I think all that's been updated since is sshd and apache. Nothing else is running (other than NTP) so I could have security holes that could be exploited if they were turned on (and the firewall didn't do it's job).

I can't believe I've not done anything this year that warrants and entire camera dump.

Today was a wasted day for the most part, we didn't do anything of significance. I did re-gas the sentra though. No, not putting more fuel in... those stupid bugs are back so I pulled everything out of the trunk again, and pulled the back seat out and used some 'flying bug killer' spray and gassed the whole nest of them. I still can't figure out where they're coming from, I mean, I've stripped the back of the car down to bare metal at this point. I've gassed in every crack, every body panel, in the bumpers, etc. This AM I went out to check on my handy work, and sure enough more dead bugs. WTF? CN-20 didn't work, it may be time for the nukes!

Yesterday I had to negotiate the budget for our project. It was pretty much like an NVDA style negotiation with a room full of VPs, only the numbers were really small. The whole budget for capitol expense turned out to be around $250k. Big deal. Throw another zero on there, then double it and it would be an NVDA project. Oh well, the skills are the same. What's new about this one is all of the networking. I've never setup a 'real' connection to the net from scratch. I'm learning about real Cisco stuff, BGP, etc while dealing directly with Tier 1 carriers (L3, cogent, etc). More resume fodder for me.

I had a strange dream last night, something to do with being in prison and being filled with all sorts of despair and fear. Normally the feelings start to fade fast after I wake up, but I was freaked out for almost an hour after I got up. That's pretty wacky.

Dad stopped by last night to fill us in on the details of grandma's stroke, and it looks like she could recover. All she has to do is actually listen to the doctors and then do what they say. She's pretty stubborn though, who knows if she'll do it or just let herself die.

Yesterday I managed to bench 255 lbs, breaking my old record. We also had me try 260, but that didn't work, my shoulder just completely crapped out. Looks like I'm finding my absolute limit.

Pretty stressed out today trying to find an IP transit provider for our new project. I'm way out of my league here dealing with all these big network issues. I guess I'm learning by just admitting I don't know anything and allowing the sales guys to give me their pitches. I like buying hardware better, that I understand.

Six hours of work later, I'm done with the car. I finished with the clay bar, then got some scratch remover and did a few trouble spots, then polished it and then waxed it. That's a lot of passes over the car. Ugh. I also did the rear window cleaner stuff, and reconditioned all the leather. The woman says it actually does look different, and it's clearly smoother (the paint). It's an amazing transformation in texture.

In other news, I managed to waste 6 hours playing Icewind Dale II last night. All my characters are up to 7th level now. :)

If it wasn't so damn windy it would be a nice day out.

Whew, checked the jury duty web site and I don't have to report on Monday. That's good because I have about a zillion calls to make and POs to put in for the new data center build out on Monday. This last week was pretty busy getting ready to roll out the new cage in the PAIX in Palo Alto. Finally my "stupid" naming scheme comes into play. All the gear in the San Jose facility is named with a SJ1- prefix on the name. Now that we have a 2nd site, we have gear at PA1-. See? It's a good idea. At NVDA we ended up doing the same thing after a few false starts of bad naming schemes and once something is in production it's hard to change.

It's been raining all day but I still drove the Porsche to the club event. One of the local mechanics had a 'detailing day' where some dude that details cars for a living came in and showed us how to wash, clay and wax a car. The NSX club was also there, so you had a bunch of old fat white guys mixing it up with a bunch of rice boys. An amusing crowd. Anyway, I went to the auto parts store after the class and got a clay bar kit and tried it on a fender. Amazing! The paint is as smooth as a new car, I've never seen a transformation like it. I wonder if I could somehow use this stuff to restore some of the luster to the woman's Sentra? Hopefully the rain stops tonight so I can do the whole car tomorrow. The guy also showed us how to use buffing compounds, polishes and scratch fillers. The demo car was some guys ultra-red NSX which looked pretty good until the detail guy started cleaning it up. Everywhere he worked looked 10x better than the rest of the car.

I played around with FC6 on my old laptop and I must say it's pretty disappointing. Not just because the wireless support I need isn't in there, but because it is in the knoppix live CD. The knoppix CD also has a better looking desktop and more useful apps installed right off the bat. I wonder if ubuntu or whatever Kenny is using is ready for prime time as a desktop OS (with wireless)? I'll have to burn some CDs and give it a spin.

I got my two OOTS books on Friday too; they did another printing of the original that was out of print. Yea, now I own them all! I realize they're just stupid comic books, but still, they make me happy.

While out getting the dry cleaning for the woman I went to Reeds and got my hunter ed. stamp. Getting the license and tags looks like it was about $50 so I held off, wouldn't want them to expire before we actually go.

It's supposed to rain tomorrow, but I wonder how bad it will really be. I don't want to have to drive in on a Wednesday, although with people off for spring break maybe the traffic won't be so bad.

Kristen's brother got me the DVD box set of Firefly for my birthday. That's actually pretty cool, I was just about to order it myself. I'm normally against presents, but for a good one I can make an exception. :)

Saturday was a long day. I went to the hunters safety class thing from 9am to 6:30pm and passed the test with a 99%. I missed the question on which is the best choke to use when turkey hunting, but there are really two answers (one when using lead shot and one when using steel shot) and I picked incorrectly. Ah well, good enough. None of my shotguns are fancy enough to actually take choke tubes anyway. After class my parents stopped by and we went for my birthday dinner at the Korean place. Mom got me a fancy book on grilling stuff and dad got me a Porsche hat and shirt. I actually like them both, they're not fancy and they're actually tasteful enough to wear to the office. Well, the shirt anyway, I don't wear hats in the office.

Today I got up early to go to the 7-11 to meet up with a guy buying some of my BMW parts I no longer need. Lots of flakes on CL but he actually showed and had cash. Very good. After that I went home and wrote out the checks for the taxes, cleaned up all the paperwork and bills, vacuumed, cloned my main windows HD in preparation for some VMware testing, etc. I'm sure I did something else in there but can't remember what. I had another guy to meet up with to sell some more crap to, but first I went up to the barn. The woman rode twice today, once on Cassie the old horse she's going to show at the end of the month, and Tigger the new horse she's going to try leasing with another student. She wanted pictures and videos of her form on Tigger so I took a bunch of movies with the camera. Boring, but she seemed happy with them.

For some reason Tigger likes sticking his tongue out and having people pull on it. I wasn't having any part of any tongue pulling. Freaky animal.

I also planted the corn today, I managed to stick 6 stalks in the box this year instead of 4. Their roots didn't grow out as much as I had though they would so I figure as long as I keep enough water in the soil I'll at least get more micro-ears of corn this year.

I think we're going to have to replace the stove sooner rather than later. First the hood fan went out, then the oven started failing after more than 30 minutes of use, and now the microwave portion make a huge "banging" noise and quit working. I had my parents bring my old microwave down from the cabin so we're not dead in the water as far as a microwave goes, but now that we've had 3 failures it's probably time to replace the whole stove/hood/microwave combo.

The phone calls came rolling in today, everyone wanting to say happy birthday. Fortunately no one at work knows anything. I've been pretty good about not opening my mouth about anything at this new place; although I'm still more open and social than a lot of the folks here which is saying something about how closed up most people are.

The woman made me an artichoke last night, and stopped by Chevy's to get some take-out chips and salsa. Not exactly a nutrition packed meal, but it was tasty. My rescheduled class ran late and I didn't get home until 8pm or so. Glad we've got nothing going on tonight, I can use some quality time doing nothing.

I had lunch with Wellington today at Midori. Nothing was up, he was just being social and since he and his wife can't get away, like ever due to the 3 kids, he can only hang out at lunch. I've not been to Midori in what, 9+ months? The waitress still knew part of my order and knew I didn't want wasabi. That's freaky. It's also freaky to think that we've been going there for almost 7 years now. No wait, almost 8 years. April-ish of '99 to April of '07. Wow. Double wow.

I thought I had lost my sunglasses, not something I usually do (I tend not to lose things). After much searching I found them in my homework bag. I swore I searched that thing twice, but they were on the inside where the books go rather than in the external pocket I usually put my glasses in. I must be getting old.

The trainer took my body fat reading yesterday, I'm at 16%. In November I was 17%, so somehow I've managed to stay the same weight, but have boosted my bench almost 40 lbs. 1% would only be about 1.5lbs of fat changed to muscle. That doesn't seem right, but I guess it's so. I've got less fat on my arms and legs for sure, and more in the 'love handle' area. Who knew it was so hard to stay in shape as you got older? I thought people just got fat later because they were lazy. Turns out even being mostly un-lazy isn't enough, you actually have to work more for less results.

Last night we had a minor work emergency and I had to reschedule my class for Wednesday. The woman is upset now because I inadvertently have now ruined some secret birthday plan she had rigged up. Guess that's the problem with secret plans, people just don't know to plan around them.

A pair of what looked like F-14s just did a really slow speed flyby of the building. Wonder what's going on at the air base?

Uh, oops. Troy and I tried our hand and cutting the old recoil pad off the Winchester stock, trimming the stock and reapplying the pad. Looks like I get to buy a new stock recoil pad. The gunsmith that installed the pad the first time looks like it did it off-center and just ground the edges down. When we tried to actually measure to center the screw holes the pad now sits off to one side. Doh.

I also think we cut the stock at a screwy angle, but I was voted down on that one. We'll see if/when we finish the project. After that Troy wanted to show me that he got his '63 Cobra running again. Man that thing is loud, and lots of people gather when you stop places. The gages are nice though. I tried to get a picture of us doing 120mph on I680, but he slowed down by the time I fished the phone out to take the pic.

One other picture in the camera, the Sentra turning over 125k miles. It's probably due for an oil change at some point. I did one at, uh, 120-something but couldn't reach the filter so I'll take it to jiffy lube or whatever this next time. There is no way I'm crawling underneath that thing to save a few bucks. That's another reason I like owning 4x4s, you just roll right under them with no jacks nor jack stands.

I'm technically a bit early, it won't be the first for a few hours yet but I thought I would rotate the journal now while I was thinking of it.

We got the taxes back from the bean counters. Looks like someone (ie me) underpaid by about $20k in taxes. Most of it was due to the fabulous marriage penalty, and the loss of half my mortgage deduction to the woman. That sucks. At least there were no real penalties. The whole packet of papers was over 2" thick.

I was cleaning out part of the garage to make room to store the hard top for the summer, and I finally went though all my boxes of books from work. Some were just old and could be tossed, some may have some value to Don or something (they're mostly all C, C++ or TCP/IP books) and some I actually want to keep. Even though my perl 4 book is ancient and falling apart, I can't get rid of it, it's signed (as of last month):

I would be cool if I could get Larry Wall to sign it too, but I didn't have the book with me when I met him... or at least I think I met him. No, it was what's his face, Mr. Sendmail. Yea, at Lisa in Monterey in some year before '99.

After we got the top stowed, we went for a little zip through the hills behind Milpitas. Not much a run, but enough to see what it was like with the top down. Very civilized compared to what I remember of the Miatas with the top down, but I can see why you want the wind blocker that goes between the seats if you have hair. I didn't put it in and the womans hair was going forward into her face the whole time.

While cleaning I also put a bunch of the leftover BMW parts on CL, as well as one of my two sets of leathers. Even if I go to a track day, I don't need to match the bike anymore. I'm not that hard core. I don't think I ever was though, so why did I get all the leathers to match the bikes?

Tonight we went to Evvia which is that fancy Greek restaurant that I got the gift certificates to from work 9 months ago. The food was awesome, the woman had lamb and I had goat! It was cooked in bowl with artichokes and some type of fat rice. Amazing stuff. Afterward we walked to the gelatto place down the street where I tried the pumpkin gelatto. I was trying to be adventurous after my goat. We've got enough left on the cert to go a 2nd time, so we'll have to try some of their other dishes. I was trying to avoid the fish just because you can get fish most anyplace but I bet these guys put a good twist on it.