Well that just sucks ass. I freaked out at the doctor's office big time. The first clue was that they couldn't take my blood pressure. The harder they clamped down on my arm with the cuff thing the tighter I flexed. It took 3 times, and I wasn't even aware I was doing it. Next was the 'anal probe' which didn't exactly work. I'm sure my screaming and crying could be heard in the lobby. After I picked myself up off the floor, the doctor gave me a prescription for Valium and said to take that next time and have someone drive me to the office. Kristen said 10mg isn't that much. I wonder if one of her doctor friends can score me some more?

The doctor gave me a huge list of things I couldn't eat anymore either, including CHOCOLATE! Argh! Now what do I have to live for? I can live without ketchup, tomatoes, peppers, milk, nuts, popcorn and whatever else is on there; the chocolate will be hard. I'm going to have to totally re-do my diet too, I can't eat 75% of my lunch now as it's got tomato sauce (the lean pockets) and I'm trying to eat nuts every day (the woman says they're good for you). The jerky I just made up as spices in it (it's the hot-n-spicy flavor). Damn. Gruel I guess.

I'm trying to put my tax stuff together and it's hard to piece together the last of the NVDA stock puzzle without access to the internal web sites and whatnot. I hope they send me some sort of summary or I'm screwed.

Last night we went to Santa Cruz for Troy's 60th birthday party. His woman threw a surprise party for him at her place. It was raining like crazy, there were mud slides on Hwy 17, standing water 6" deep, etc. Basically a horrible drive. We took the fancy car (I though it would be fun to drive through the mountains, ha!) and it seems like it's not really a foul weather ride. Really wide slick tires may rock on dry pavement, but are a bit dicey in heavy rain. I did get the tail end loose at one point and recover with the woman none the wiser. :)

Today is going to be a wasted day, we're going to some sort of fund raiser thingy in Oakland this afternoon so we can't really go anywhere else or do anything too complex. I may try to sneak to the store to get some new gym shorts as one of the pair I'm using from the OSU days has finally split along the seams and has a 3" rip in the butt. Guess you can't expect more than 15 years of service out of a cheap pair of Fred Meyer workout shorts... wow. We're old.

I did break down an order the rear output shaft seal for the KLR for a whopping $3.16 (plus shipping). Even though I've got cardboard down on the garage floor catching the oil drips it's kinda ghetto having it leak all the time. I'm tempted to swap out the front sprocket to a 16-tooth (from 15) as it's a popular mod for people like me who spend more time on the freeway doing 80 than we do bumping down forest roads. I want to bump down some forest roads, but unfortunately all the roads through the forest within 100 miles are paved and have an entrance fee.

I'm listening to Loretta Lynn, something appears wrong with my brain.

I dropped the Kimber off with the smith last night, no ETA or price or anything of course. He's such an old-school cranky dude that things like time lines don't apply. You'll take what you get when you get it and be happy about it. :) He's also going to countersink the slide stop pin. Not that I think I'll suddenly push the pin half way out during some stressful situation or have someone to a John Woo rip-the-slide-off-the-Beretta trick on me, but it just makes the gun feel better in the hand when you're using it. Shouldn't cost much. I forgot to tell him not to re-blue the thing either. It's taken me years to wear the finish down to where it is now, that used but not abused look, don't want that 'cleaned up'.

I've had two cans of Coke today, I'm pretty jittery and I'm sure I'll be up all night. Ugh, that was stupid. We had our company BBQ today (I had to bring in the burgers, hot dogs, buns and a bag of charcoal) and I ended up having soda with my really crappy burgers. Gadi can't BBQ at all, he totally overloaded the grill with briquettes so it wouldn't light, wouldn't burn and only by the end of cooking were the coals good. I keep saying we need to get a gas BBQ for the office but he's a charcoal snob and keeps saying that "Jews and gas don't mix". Yea, yea, ha, ha, but the fact remains that he can't cook. Maybe I'm jittery from uncooked hamburger?

I ended up talking to the intern chick and the intern punk while eating. It's hard to talk to 22 year olds, they pretty much don't do much but drink and "hang out with their friends". Apparently they don't actually do anything while hanging out. Sounds odd, maybe it's a secret club and they don't want to say what happens in? The chick is kinda weird too, she claims to not be young and hip, but she is young and the only reason she would dress all funny like that is to be hip. Why else would she go into marketing if not to capitalize on her young/hip connections?

I got the airfare booked for the trip. The travel agent got the worst frinkin' flights and wanted $770 for them. I got sweet flights (leaving and arriving at good times with only one plane change in Frankfurt on the way and Heathrow on the way home) for $680. She said sometimes people get better deals on the net than they can get. That's really odd, I asked if she could match the flights and maybe get close on the price (I'll pay just a bit more to try to use the tour company's agent in case of trouble) but she said she couldn't. I wonder if its' because the agent has to give out paper tickets or something?

The gunsmith called me today and wants me to bring the Kimber over to him tonight. He's got my new rear sight ready to install. Sweet, after only 2 years of pestering him he's made me the sight I wanted.

Last night's first trial at 'preparation' for my 'invasive procedure' at the doctor on Monday went exceedingly poorly. I ended up doubled over in pain on the floor crying like a baby. Monday is going to really suck. They either need to gas me, pump me full of Valium or I need to drink a lot and pass out or something. Going in with no meds is not a realistic option at this point.

Patrick rescued me from my code problems, he had a little 5 line example of code I managed to turn into everything I needed. Whew.

Doh. The trip I was going to book is Aug 23-31 2008. Um, that's a ways off. I changed it to Sept 15-23rd of this year.

Generally all day today I've been pretty off; I've been trying to code and be clever about it but it's like I'm thinking through mud. No idea what that's all about.

I had better start practicing my German, I'm doing another tour. I talked it over with the woman and since Edelweiss is offering cheaper tours this year (using Hondas and Suzukis instead of just BMWs) it's possible for me to go on one of the short tours. Dad isn't sure if he can go with, but even if not I'm going by myself. Since it's near labor day weekend I'll only need to burn 5 days of vacation (which I should have by then).

It's like the Scotland tour in that you ride from place to place without a home base, but it's back in Europe. Should see some of the same roads I did on the first tour (which is not a big deal since they're so perfect for bikes) but we'll also see a lot of new ground. Looking forward to staying in Switzerland. I remember when we were on the first tour they told us the Dolomites were so awesome to ride. Guess I'll get my chance. Better get my passport renewed soon, it won't be 6-months until it's due before the trip and I know passports don't work in their last 6 months before the expire date. Wouldn't want to get stuck in Liechtenstein (although they don't check passports at the borders anymore when moving inside the EU).

The woman is now planning on showing at least one of the weekends I'm gone, so she'll be busy too. Next year we'll do a proper 2-week vacation together.

Yesterday we took my parents to the city for dinner (at some Italian place, I had wide pasta with rabbit sauce which was amazing) and then to see Beach Blanket Babylon. We weren't sure if my dad would like it, but he was laughing like crazy all night. Whew. We saw the show about 2 years ago but they change it so it was good enough to see again and it was more for them (as their xmas gift) than for us.

Before we went up to the city though I took a ride up 237 to the Calaravas reservoir and then back down 680 home. It was only a 25-30 mile loop but it took a while to do as the roads are small (1 lane mostly) and pretty beat up. Apparently they also have some interesting problems out that way....

Oddly enough the sign had no bullet holes in it.

Today I went drove the Porsche (just to keep the battery topped off of course) and fiddled around the house. I worked on the KLR a bit (changed the oil Saturday, today was just re-routing some of the HID wiring and moving the ballast to a better spot) and then sanded and painted the front fairing. It still looks like crap because I can't get the paint to stick evenly but from 5' away it looks better than before.

Oops. The new grill burner is a lot hotter than the old one and I burnt the crap out of the ribs that were supposed to be dinner. We finished them in the oven and I managed to salvage enough for me to take to lunch but not enough for dinner. Plan B it is.

The rains last night helped hold the heat in and since I go in later on Wednesdays I got to ride in today. Yea, it's been too long since I got to ride. Dad continues to insist the KLR is a POS, and it is, but it's so much fun to bop around on. Wouldn't want to do any serious miles on it, but for what I'm doing these days it's perfect.

I found a do-it-yourself wheel fixing article on how to fix curb rash on the painted Porsche wheels. It didn't look too hard, I may have to try it on one of mine that's got some scrapes on it.

Had lunch with dad today, I had to pay though. That's never good.

The chat with my crappy employee went OK yesterday, I was hoping for him to just take the package and leave on quasi-good terms but he wants to stay and fix things. That's never happened before. Maybe he'll pick it up and follow the plan or maybe he'll just become a flake like before and I'll have to fire him. Sigh.

I love it when a plan comes together. I've got our auto installer running at 'the next level'. Not only can you totally re-image a box just by typing "re-image" and answering "yes" to the requisite "are you sure you want to format all disks and re-install?" question but it also now preserves ssh host keys during the re-image process so you don't have to update known_hosts all over the place. It now works on the brain-dead Dell systems with the mysteriously shifty NICs and the funky reversed wiring and can deal with AMD64 vs. i386 systems without any input. Now I just need to work on some dynamic kickstart files so I don't have to make a total custom file for each class of machine. I want to have a bunch of sections that get included based on a hostname by hostname basis. Instead of static files I'll have it wget a dynamic page. Sometimes work is fun; I wish I could get away with tweaking stuff every day.

Got home from yoga, and mixed up a batch of lamb jerky. Should be ready by the morning. I have no idea if lamb works like beef or if it's more like poultry (ie possibly deadly if not cooked). I'll test it on my coworkers.

Both Home Depot and the grocery store were out of fireplace logs, it appears that more people have got the idea of using fire for heat. The only thing I could find were those 'crackle' logs; having artificial little explosions in your log that could kick sparks out and burn your house down is not a feature. They also cost more. Double lose in my book. Probably why they were still available. I have at least a cord of real firewood I cut myself up at the cabin, maybe I'll have dad drag some down next weekend.

Pretty quiet rest of the weekend. The woman rode, I did some paperwork, did my share of the house chores and then loaded ammo. It was too cold to go to the range (and enjoy it, I guess I could have physically gone) so now I have 2 trips worth of ammo ready to go. I've only got 50 or so of the moly bullets left, then I have to crack into my 3 cases of non-moly. I'll have to develop a whole new load now with the loss of the moly coat, but whatever, shouldn't take too long.

I did pull the car cover out just to see how it fit, and it's perfect. Looks like it was designed for the Boxster. I left it on there since we're doing stuff with my parents next weekend it's unlikely I'll move the car for a few weekends.

This cold crap is getting old, if I wanted to be cold all the time I could move to Seattle and be cold and at least have a nice house and less crappy people around me. It was 35 outside the house (and 47 in the kitchen) this AM and the car thermometer said 25 at the low point on the drive this AM.

Wednesday we went to a Sharks game, not because I wanted to but the woman likes that stuff and we got box tickets. Can't be turning those free tickets down left and right anymore, they don't come my way very often at the new place. I told the vendor if he got any tickets to the kick boxing events at the shark tank to let me know, I would totally be up for that.

This morning we went for a run up Hwy 9 and to Alice's for breakfast. The woman did pretty good not getting sick on the way up as I was pushing the car pretty hard. It's amazing how it can run at 6500 rpm (which is just a shade under red-line) and not feel like it's out of breath at all. Sounds awesome too, I found myself shifting up/down a lot more than was really necessary just to get the engine to make various noises. The county mounties pulled up right after we got to Alice's, and I think they came up Hwy 84. Whew. The woman got a speeding ticket on 237 just the other day, didn't want to end up like her.

Can't think of much else exciting going on, although I can walk almost normal now. Just in time for another workout on Monday. I skipped yoga on Tuesday and went on Thursday instead to try to give my legs time to recover. Sorta worked, but I was weak in class too.

It's supposed to drop into the 20s tomorrow night, that's not good news for those of us on bikes. Eek.

The other day someone stole my USB keyboard/mouse adapter widget off my docking station while I was at the data center. People are just so frinkin' lazy, I mean we have them in the equipment cube so all they had to do was walk the extra 10' and get a brand new one off the pile vs. un-cabling my stuff. After replacing the widget (which I must admit flaked out on me 1-2 times a week) I used almost 20 tie wraps to bundle every cable to every other cable. It will be a lot of effort to steal my power strip or anything else from my setup, especially since I locked the tool bag with the snips in the closet. :)

The leg workout that the trainer put me through yesterday has left me a cripple. I can hardly get up, and walking hurts. Damn him and his 'forced reps'. It's like I'm starting all over again!

Saturday we finally got to venture to the mall and find me some pants. I found one pair, which isn't too bad I guess. The woman had a bunch of gift cards for various stores so she looked (a lot) for work clothes. I think she ended up with like 3 shirts or something lame after the 2+ hours we wandered around. Saturday night we went to dinner with Sue and Matt over in Palo Alto. The restaurant wasn't all that fancy, but the bill was outrageous. The 3 of them had wine, at $15/glass. What a rip. At least the food was good, my duck was particularly tasty and not dry or overcooked at all.

Sunday Don came up and we went to the range for a bit and then drove around to a couple of bike shops. He was hoping that they would have the bike he wanted in his size, and one had something close which he took for a test ride. He brought his own pedals and the store seemed to think that was pretty normal for a test ride. After the last shop we were only 1 exit south of the woman's barn so we went by and watched the last half of her (very boring) lesson on ground work. It was a nice day out though, first warm weather in a while.

I should mention that Don managed to injure himself at the range. We were trying prone firing and he was having all sorts of trouble getting his rifle into position. Eventually he managed to get too close and whack himself in the nose with the scope; the bleeding was quite impressive.

Today I went to the DMV and got the car tags and transfered the title. It was a record appointment, only 8 minutes from the time I sat down until I was done and back in the car. That's almost unheard of in DMV time, those appointments help sometimes. I also went by NVDA and picked up some deer meat from Seth to make jerky out of and visit with Gayla before she heads off to Ohio or wherever she's going (maybe Wisconsin). The guys at the office were shocked to see me, and Decker was none too pleased to find me there. I had an escort at all times though, so I was all legal like.

In the data center again, gotta finish up the wiring and whatnot that I started last week. Hopefully I'm done with the majority of the grunt work today so I can do all the highly visible stuff by Wednesday and be the big hero. :)

Lots to update on the weekend, but not much time to type now. Actually going to get some work done. Scary.

Uh oh, one of the woman's friends is getting a divorce. She's on the phone with her now. Sounds like the dude cheated on her.

On a positive note, we've turned the unused bathroom into my hydroponic garden area with that widget mom gave me. As the things grow you just move the light up and then harvest.

I just wasted 6 hours trying to figure something out and in the end Eric showed me it wasn't possible. Doh. I guess I just gained some experience. Now I'm on to the next project of the day which isn't as hard in that it just involves lots and lots of perl code. I need to be smart about it though and not just brute force my way through. The F5 load balancers are constantly in flux and their config changes all the time. Trying to keep up will be a challenge.

Went to dinner last night with Troy and his woman. I didn't really want to go out last night, but they wanted to pay homage to the car and to go to the Muslim Chinese place. Kristen loves that so we had to go (and are too afraid to go on our own due to their lack of English skills and our lack of Chinese). You would think I wouldn't mind, I figured out enough while in Taiwan and HK but at home I don't like feeling like a tourist.

If the rain stops today I can ride in tomorrow for the first time in over two weeks. Yea!

I always think I should change the journal over to some sort of blog software or something more complex than basic html in text files but ya know, this will always work. No upgrades, no worrying about how to back it up, no worries about some file format changing or DB back end breaking or anything. In 50 years, this will still work, I doubt the same can be said of any blog package. So, 2007 will be text based once again.

Last night we stayed up watching The Aristocrats, the first two shows in season 1 of Rome and several episodes of The Girls Next Door. Bridget is my favorite. :) We didn't even have adult beverages or anything, we're getting old or something.

Today was a good 'getting stuff around the house done' day. We moved some furniture and decorations around, took down all the xmas crap, vacuumed and I overheated the shredder twice going through the pile of papers in the office. We also went for a drive just so I could show the woman why the new car is good in spite of it's lack of a glove box. We just did a part of Mt. Hamilton road and Calivaris out past the golf course. She got sorta stick about 20 minutes into the session, she's not used to that much turning. Some dude in a 540i BMW tried to keep up for a while but I lost him in about 15 turns. He had the power advantage, but man does the Porsche fly through the corners. Kristen isn't sure about the noise either, she says the engine makes a lot of 'whining' noises. Diving into corners near red line in 2nd makes some racket. :)

The woman also hates this picture of her from the other night when we were leaving for the club but I'll put it in here anyway so next new years when I'm going through looking for pictures to print for the yearly memory box I'll have this one handy.

Like Kenny, I'm not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow. Not because anything is really wrong at work, I just don't wanna be there for a few days. Vacation is going to be really slim this year; nothing over a long weekend is on the schedule for the whole year. We have the meerkat trip, the yurts, one NASCAR weekend (ugh), a trip to the land to run the pump and to go on the wild horse sanctuary ride and that's it. We've got to take a cheapie cruise somewhere, or go visit Cicely in Florida or something. Now that I'm not jet-setting with NVDA I'm going to miss the travel. Wait, did I say that?