The big garage sale is over. My share of the haul worked out to about $14/hr. Wee. I would have rather had the day off. We got rid of a lot of stuff though. Tomorrow we'll take the remainder down to the donation place. 95% of what we had left was actually useful stuff (housewares, furniture, lamps) so I don't feel too bad about donating it. The pure crap (that didn't sell, people bought some of the pure crap) is going in the dumpster.

Tomorrow I'll meet with the realtor about selling the cabin and then head home in the afternoon. I've got homework and housework to get done when I get home.

I just checked the logs and my blocking script actually blocked two IPs. Good to know it's working. My dad has an AMD Am486 DX4-100 chip on his desk stuck in a card holder along with a "Whellus NCO Club Annex - USAFE Weapons Center" fake Zippo made in west Germany. He was stationed at Whellus, so that makes sense, but what's the DX4/100 doing in there? I remember when Dennis got his 99MHz Intel chip. Seems like so long ago.

Last night I put my ssh log scanner back together to start blocking IPs of the script kiddies. I set the threshold at 6 bad logins before the blackhole gets setup and last night someone hit me 5 times. Doh. Hopefully tonight I'll get a real attack so I can make sure it's working the way it should (and logging correctly too). I probably should put something in for the web site(s) too at some point, eventually there will be a hack for this version of apache.

Tonight we're going up to my parents for the garage sale tomorrow. Kristen will be selling crap, I'll be hauling pine needles to the dump. I'm also going to try to meet with the realtor and see about selling the cabin. Dad is being all wishy-washy about making it a rental (with him being the 'handyman') and to be honest I'm unsure about it as well. Rich folks have rental properties for a reason, I should take a lesson from that.

Last night's game was a killer, and I ticked off some people I think. Our barbarian had been killed, 3 of the others characters were paralyzed and there were 4 ghouls closing in on me. So, I ran. We got out of it (but the barbarian was still dead) but we were way over classed. These tournament style modules are 95% combat, so trying to have a sneaky type character is just not worth it. I gained a level and everyone said I should take a level of fighter or barbarian. That's a bummer, I wanted to make a rouge/sorcerer, not a tank. Next week is 1st level only again so I'm going to make a damn fighter. Not a ranger, not some monk, just a guy in armor that smacks things with a pointy stick. The rules are all geared toward melee stuff too, archers are 2nd class citizens. Humph. I'll adapt.

Two recruiters have called me today. I think my resume must have gotten in somewhere.

NASCAR pictures are up on the main page, looking a lot like the pictures from last years event. One thing that was different was lunch. Instead of standing in the way, way too long burger line we went to the really short beef brisket line. It may not look good in the pictures, but man was it tasty. You had to eat it with a fork though, trying to eat that thing by hand while walking around was just asking for a disaster. As it is I got some crap on my shirt and I was being careful. Mmm.... BBQ meat.

Traffic was worse this year, they changed how you get out of the parking areas and it took about an hour to get out of the lot. Even though several layers of sunscreen we both got burnt. My knees are crazy red and her shoulders are baked. The sunscreen must be old, it didn't seem like it was hot enough to sweat it all off. Otherwise it was pretty boring. The race was as expected but they got rid of a lot of the interactive games and stuff in the 'circus' area where all the vendors are. No chances to win t-shirts or tools or anything this year. Bummer. I did put the binoculars to good use in the stands though and watched the Red Bull hospitality bimbos bounce around most of the race. :)

I also got a good quote out of some random guy at the race: It's not that I don't like people, I'm just happier when they're not around.

Saturday I put my unexpected free time to good use though and dealt with the pile of paperwork that's built up on my desk (and the floor). I also went down to the motorcycle gear store and looked at summer riding pants. They've got some really nice looking stuff out now, but nothing that I wanted to get right away. I'm going to go ahead and use my good 'travel-only' BMW gear. I don't think it will wear out from a few seasons of use, it doesn't have much velcro on it (which is always the first to go).

Small victory at work today, I managed to get the memtest86+ stuff working via a serial console. I had to whack 2 lines in the serial code to get it to work with the strange serial setup we have here but other than that it just fell into place. Sweet.

I'm listening George Carlin's "Airline Announcements" skit and trying not to laugh my ass off while at work. It's old, but still completely true. Damn, they haven't changed those aircraft announcements in forever (at least since '88 when this skit was done).

Yesterday I went to the archery range with Seth after work and shot for about 45 minutes. Seth is in bad shape and his bow's draw weight is about a zillion pounds so he only shot about 30 times but he's pretty accurate at short range. I focused on 30 yards and my left-right variance is getting better but I'm still stringing up and down. It's hard without a sight!

Dad called and said that mom is worried about me riding up and back to the cabin in one day to help out with the yard clean-up so she's going to help dad tomorrow and I can just stay home. That's good, I really didn't want to spend 5 hours on the road to do 3 hours worth of work. I'll help out next weekend putting all the pine needles in the trailer and taking them to the dump station. I wonder what they do with all those tons of pine needles? Burning is allowed but it must produce so much crap in the air I can't imagine they do it on a large scale.

I keep thinking pong has been hacked again somehow because now all my ssh messages are going into the main log file instead of the security log. I don't see any evidence of anything else, just this weird log behavior that started on Feb 20th. Did I upgrade sshd or something at that time? No, everything looks normal there. Hmm... this is annoying not remembering what I did. Perhaps I should start writing this stuff down, or at least putting it in the motd like a good little sysadmin.

Last night's game ran until 1am because we started late and because we were slow at figuring out some of the stuff. We had one guy die, and in the end I was one of only 2 people still up and moving around and we both had to run away and then sneak back later to get the unconscious bodies of our buddies. It was a non-trivial module, lots of the monsters could take us out with one hit.

On an unrelated note, I was the youngest one at my table last night. The gaming crowd seems to be either very young (sub-18) or getting to be a bunch of old farts.

Today I had to go in for my two cavities and when I showed up at 9am they said I didn't have an appointment. Hmm.... so they rescheduled me for 11am. I went to the bank and then went home and returned to the office at 11am with my appointment card that showed 9am. They still seemed doubtful. Anyway, the dentist said they were really small and that he wouldn't give me a shot to numb my jaw but instead would just have me suck on some NoS. I was pretty freaked out by that whole concept so he said that perhaps we should try it with no anesthetic at all. Whoa? He said the shot would hurt more than what he was going to do and he was right. It took him maybe 20 minutes to do both of them and it was not pleasant but it didn't really hurt at all. The guy is an amazingly gentle, fast, professional dentist. He's also 62 which makes me think I'll be finding a new dentist in a few years.

Now I'm just kicking back at home enjoying my 'sick' day. Since they don't do PTO at work and you actually accrue sick days that you use or lose, I've decided to be sick for the rest of the day to 'recover'. Stupid work policy, but whatever.

OK, so the BBQ caught on fire and I had to put it out with the hose. At least I saved some of the ribs. I think this is my second catastrophic rib failure. Last time the ribs just burnt, this time the whole grill went up in flames. Maybe it is time to get a new one. Sigh. My repair job is still good enough for burgers and quick stuff.

Friday after work (I bailed out around 3:30pm) I came home and worked on the bike. With the proper tools and parts it only took me about 2 hours to replace the seals, verify the balancer had been installed by the dealership correctly and change the oil and filter. I think the chain was off ever so slightly after my last reassembly job because it seems to rotate a lot easier now. I'm sure I'll get better at it as I gain some experience wrenching on the thing. You can tell this picture wasn't taken at a dealership because what's that on the floor there??? A new gasket? Why, who in their right mind would replace a gasket after removing parts of the engine? Just shoot some gasket goo on there and hope it holds until the customer is somewhere else!

Yesterday while the woman went with Troy to shop for the last of the wood for the table, I went to Gilroy with Seth to check out the archery shop and to replace those broken arrows (I only trashed 4 really, the rest were OK after cleaning... well, they weren't any worse than when I got them I should say, they weren't exactly good to start with). They replaced the main string on my bow as it was dried out from lax of maintenance in storage. Apparently you're supposed to wax the strings every so often. I picked up a dozen arrows with fletchings, knocks and target tips installed for under 5 silver pieces, uh, I mean $70 which is close to the on-line price. They cut them to length to match the ones I already had, so that's worth the extra few bucks. Unfortunately all arrows are pretty much camouflage colored but I got some with really bright fletchings. When practicing it's better to be able to find the arrows in the grass easily rather than worrying about being spotted by the hay bails.

We then went to the county park and shot at the range they have. It's pretty nice for being free. Seth's bow is very cool, it's a 75# draw (vs the 40# mine is) and has a sight and a trigger mechanism. The sight and trigger basically turn it into a short-ranged rifle. Having never used it before I made 50 yard shots with zero effort. If I stick with this, I'm going to have to get a sight on mine. It will make a huge accuracy difference and I know I won't want to settle for the 'aim down the arrow' method for long. I'm too much of an accuracy nut.

Today we made breakfast and then went over to give dad his fathers day present and to check out their new trailer. While on their road trip my parents ended up buying a new 5th wheel. It's 36' or something like that and the black pickup can't haul it so of course they had to get a new truck. At least he got a diesel this time, which I can try to run biodiesel in. Pictures of the new trailer are here. They traded in the old truck and trailer so once they have all their stuff out of it the dealership will send someone to come collect it and take it back to Phoenix. The previous owner of the truck put an 60 gallon auxiliary tank in the bed (which looks like a toolbox) so the truck now holds 100 gallons of fuel. Yea, it costs $300 to fill the tank, but it extends the range to 1100 miles while towing the 5th wheel (it gets 11 mpg towing). Without the trailer it gets 18-22mpg. Damn, almost a 2000 mile range. For some reason that's cool.

The dentist was going on about how good my teeth were, and how I'm the only person in is practice that has all their wisdom teeth intact, yada, yada and then let's me know I have 2 cavities! Argh! How does this keep happening? He said the 2 rinses I'm using aren't the best and I should use the milder version of Listerine. I'll give it a try. He also said to go back to using my Sonicare tooth brush. He said I could brush for 30 minutes with a regular brush and it wouldn't be as good as 2 minutes with the Sonicare. Interesting. He said it's good for my gums too.

Last night was the first RPGA game. The place was packed again, they ended up running 3 tables. I was in the back room ('the dungeon' vs. 'the arena') which was quieter and easier for me to hear in. I never would be able to play in the big room, my hearing aids aren't programmed for noisy situations anymore because I told the doc I didn't wear them outside or in restaurants so they're tweaked for meetings. The down side to the dungeon is that it gets crazy hot in there. 6 people in there sweating like crazy. Not pleasant.

The game itself was a lot of fun though. It was a little hectic in the beginning, and I ended up being stuck in a web spell on top of a wagon in the first encounter and was basically useless. On the next encounter I was pretty rogue like (important since I'm playing a baseline rogue), hiding and shooting from cover and generally causing trouble. I managed to kill the last bad guy with a critical hit 'sneak attack' (they don't call it back stab anymore, not PC) with a bow. I got to use the lines "one shot, one kill" and "don't run, you'll only die tired" to good effect and for the rest of the night when I screwed up I just said "hey, remember the shot in the forest??? eh?? eh??" which usually produced groans from everyone, but it was funny. In the last encounter we were getting our asses kicked by some druid dude with a pair of war dogs (we're 1st level remember, big dogs wearing chain barding are tough!). I had found these 'tangle foot bags' (check your PH page 129) earlier and used one against the druid who failed his save big time and was completely immobilized. While the rest of the group took out the dogs, I strolled over to the totally helpless druid, and well, ya know, practice my stabbin' a little. He never got a spell off. It was really fun, brought back a lot of good memories, although I've never played a non-spell caster before.

Hmm.... Cyric in the game last night, Kelly in Redding last weekend...

Made it back from the horse sanctuary trip intact (mostly) and am back at work (mostly). Pictures are on the main page. If you looked through the pictures for the first trip, you'll see they look amazingly similar. Horses, burrows, etc. Not too interesting unless you're into such things.

I'm pretty dizzy today for some reason, maybe it's from some funky food yesterday. Hopefully I stabilize soon.

Friday we went up to the land to run the pump and check on thing. Pretty much nothing had changed other than a bunch of mouse poop inside the shed. I can't figure out why there was so much on top of the generator. Why would a mouse be hanging out on top of the generator enough to poop so much? There is no food there, unless it's living on gas fumes. We'll need to bring a broom next time and sweep that and the spider webs out. Since we had time to kill, I brought the bow along and tried my untrained hand at hitting the foam target that came with it. I'm good out to about 35 yards and then I fall apart. Apparently there is no elf blood in my family. I'm not even really sure how to aim or anything, so I can't have expected very much. I did learn that arrows and rocks react poorly. I broke 3 of the practice arrows and it turns out they're like $5 each. Ouch. Most of the arrows her dad gave me were sorta worn out anyway and wouldn't be useful for anything other than target practice but still I didn't want to break them. I'll have to go to the archery place this weekend and see what sort of cheaper ones they have for me to use while I learn, and maybe get setup with some lessons so I'm not relying on luck.

Today our CEO brought in his wife's car (a new Prius) and offered for me to drive it. It's no boxster, but it's OK. It would really benefit from a stick though, the automatic is annoying and doubly so since it has the option of 'shifting' too soon (it's a CVT so that concept isn't exactly correct) or turning the damn motor off. I realize it's trying to save gas but it needs a 'sport' mode or a 'I'm trying to merge onto the freeway don't do stupid shit' mode, or just a manual trans. Otherwise the car seems pretty nice for it's price point, especially when you figure out how much of the cost of the vehicle is the engine/batteries. I'll stick with my bike.

All of my parts for the bike came in over the weekend, so I've got a whole box of seals, gaskets and random widgets to fiddle with on Saturday. Hopefully it will stop the last of the leaks! I've also now got the valve adjustment DVD so I can try my hand at that. As the dealer demonstrated last time, the failure mode is for the engine to grenade so hopefully I can follow the directions more carefully than their minimum-wage flunky. If I'm really lucky they'll all be in spec and not need an adjustment so I can ignore the whole thing until winter. :)

I walked to the sandwich shop for lunch today (ran out of the house without food today for some reason) and after I went to 7-11 to get an ice cream. The dude behind the counter was on the phone and when I handed him a $20 to pay he just threw it back at me and said something I couldn't understand (I've never even heard the language he was using). I asked what was wrong and if he couldn't make change for a twenty, and he just said something else I couldn't understand a short of made a 'shooing' motion with his hand. Whatever.

We had our 8:30am marketing meeting today ('cause of some special thing going on at 9:30). I was pretty surprised the marketing folk could get into the office that early. Mostly they're a 10am-5pm sorta crowd. I got away with hardly speaking, I mostly just sat in a bean bag in the back of the room and stared at the back of the intern's head. Woot, what a use of time.

Otherwise it was a normal day, although I did have to run down to SJ1 to swap a disk out. That 16t sprocket still continues to amaze me. It's so much nicer on the freeway. Same speeds, just lower down in the RPM band. I'm hoping this lowers oil consumption (damn 1984 technology piston rings don't work all that well).

I got my bike insurance ordered, did a little shelf reinforcement in the 2nd garage cabinet so I could stack some heavy crap in there, went to Starbucks... it's been a productive morning. I'm going to the barn with the woman in a while. She'll ride and I'll sit in the shade and do homework and watch her jump.

Oh, and she keeps bugging me to post these pictures (why I can't imagine since she has them and she can't see the journal anyway). In the bush outside our garage there was a birds nest and the babies are up and flying. Well, one of them anyway, we found a dead one on the ground just outside the bush. Seems like a dumb place for a nest only 3' off the ground. Good thing there isn't a cat for a dozen miles or so. I took the first photo but she actually went out and sat in the driveway for a while with the camera until the bird flew around. She's nuts.

I can probably sum up the day with the post I made to the KLR group:

	Thought I would get up early today and quickly change the front sprocket to the
	16t I've had waiting to go on and check out the leaking output shaft seal. No
	problems, right?

	Well, I flattened the bent washer and tried to get the sprocket nut off. No
	luck, other than cutting my hand open when the wrench slipped. Humph. So I 
	got the wife up and had her sit on the bike and hold the rear brake while 
	I turned the wrench. Even with the bike in gear, her on it with the break 
	on I still managed to just turn the rear wheel.

	Next we got the bright idea to put the front wheel against the garage door 
	while she sat on it and I turned the wrench. That worked... at denting the 
	garage door. Doh. Then we put the front wheel against the door frame and 
	tried again, and the rear tire just slipped.

	Next, we changed it up and I sat on the bike and held the brake while she 
	turned the wrench. She was amazed she could spin the tire too.

	Disgusted, I got the idea of going to the local kawi dealer and seeing if 
	they would use their air tools or whatever to break it loose and tighten 
	it to 72 ft lbs so I could get it off at home. No luck, they wouldn't do 
	it for 'liability reasons'.

	Double disgusted I went to OSH and after talking myself out of buying a 
	compressor and an impact gun, I spent $180 on a beefy craftsman electric 
	impact gun. When I got home I plugged it in and in 2 seconds the nut was 
	off. Didn't even have to brace the bike.

	

	Right tool for the right job.

	Oh, and after all that I found that I had the wrong seal. So, I've got a 
	16t sprocket on, and an order in for the correct part. What a way to spend 
	a morning.

Yep. Plus I went to Walmart and an Ace hardware trying to find the Krylon fusion stuff in the right color. The 'hunter green' color is blue, and the 'olive green' is brown. Can't these marketing retards at least make the name of the color close to the actual color?

At least it looks like my garbage disposal hack is holding.

Ah, BBQ 'meat' (I have no idea what cut of the horse, er, dog, er, cow that was but it was cheap at Costco!) and some time in the hot tub. Put me in a relaxed enough mood to update my resume on Hot Jobs finally. Looks pretty good I think. Can't believe I can check the "15+ years experience" box.

Oh, and we went to the game store and I picked up a Players Handbook v3.5. They had a spiffy leather bound version, but I opted for the regular boring one. Pretty sure it was the first time I ever used a ccard to buy gaming supplies.