32bit apache has a max file size of 2gb, so my spiffy new 2.8gb RPM can't be downloaded via yum. Damn.

I can't believe how easily the virtual hosts by name thing in apache works. I didn't even really read up on it, I just swiped some lines from an example config, made my directories and poof, it works. So many things really are getting easier with time.

I know it's dumb, but I drove the good car in to work today. Actually, I went home at lunch and got it (and chased our trash can down the street, the wind is crazy today). I've been reading too much about boxsters on the forums not to want to drive mine. It really is different. In the sentra you just get in the car and go. In the Porsche you 'get into the cockpit' and zoom off. Maybe it's all the black leather but you really feel like you're crawling into a compartment rather than just getting in a car. Or, I could just be crazy. Either way I've got to wash it this weekend if it's warm out. All that dust from the horse barn didn't magically fly off.

Some pictures from the weekend. The deer that were going through the yard, a deer that didn't make it (looks like a baby that died), and CHPs finest not at a donut shop. Picture taken while waiting for dad to get the oil changed in the truck.

Dad took some pictures of me testing the KLR on the fire roads behind their house. That screen smacked me in the face once while I was jumping through some big ruts. Guess that's why they don't run those off road.

Made it to my parents place OK, although it took 3.5 hours to do what is normally a 2.5 hour trip. There was pretty much solid traffic from the time I got onto 680 until I got to I5 past Tracy. I was lane splitting for almost 54 miles. There was one 5 mile stretch going down the Altimont pass that traffic was moving normally otherwise it was between 0-30 mph the whole way. All those new houses out that way are taking their toll on traffic.

Dad's knee is bothering him so we won't be riding anywhere today. He thinks he can make it down to the bank or to town, but that's about it. I wonder what will happen if his knee gets all wonky in Europe? This isn't a base-station style ride, he's got to be able to ride every day to make it to the next hotel. Oy. He should have got the knee surgery last year, or the year before when the doc told him too.

I just got a picture of a deer walking outside the den window.... here comes another one. That makes 3 deer sightings just this morning. Guess they're not that afraid of people, and I can see why mom's flowers get eaten on a regular basis.

Wednesday's presentation wasn't bad, other than it highlighted the fact that we're not saving enough. Losing half your money to taxes every year really makes it hard to get ahead, but I'm guessing that's how the system is designed. Peasants get restless if they have free time. The food was OK; everything was mini-appatizer style (vs. the heavy appatizer style we had at the wedding). There was lamb, some sort of duck thingy, crab cakes, sushi, quarter sized Kobe beef burgers, etc. It was a feast for a midget. :)

Tonight the woman is going to the horse races with her cop buddies and all of the grooms from the police barn. She's included even though she's not been a groom for a few years now; apparently she's still on the payroll even though she's not getting paid in case she wants to come back. While she's doing that I'm going to ride up to my parents place and then tomorrow dad and I will ride over the mountain to Reno or somewhere. We don't have a real destination in mind because we don't know how well I'll do on the KLR. This will be the first long distance run. The only bad part will be the 680/580/205/5 section (so the first 60 miles). The rest should be fine. Cruising at 7000 ft. is going to suck on the carburated bike though.

We finally moved our cubes today after the management posturing was completed. Oddly marketing lost their window cubes. I picked mine a long time ago, I'm in the corner by a window but with a solid wall actually next to my cube. I do have a fire extinguisher right outside my cube too. I should take a picture.

Oh, and the KLR list guys got a group buy going on the IMS gas tanks, so I'm going to order one. They're over 25% off which is pretty good, you don't normally get anything off these tanks. You can't paint them either since the gas will make any paint peel off the plastic so whatever color you order is mixed into the plastic itself. I'm going to get the military green, so I can paint the rest of my bike to look exactly like the military KLRs.

I had a German lesson today via skype as my instructor is in Germany this week. It actually worked better than I thought. I had all sorts of dreams about it not working, but in the end (and with a headset instead of that useless microphone I probably stole from Supra) it was fine. Even the shared desktop thing worked. There didn't even seem to be much of a delay. Impressive.

Tonight we're going to the Bernstein dinner event thingy. Mostly it's 1000 old people in a room being bludgeoned with power point stuff, but the woman says she's actually going to ask them to stop using so much paper, print things on both sides and don't use the heavy weight stuff to try to save trees. I tell them that every time I see them, but she's going to actually do it during the open mic session. Oy. Such a troublemaker.

I hit my goal today of being able to bench 250lbs. I started off pretty strong, doing light warm ups to get my shoulder to stop hurting and then when I managed to do 8 reps at 200 I figured it was time to go up. The trainer dude was spotting but didn't have to lift anything off me all day. I bet I could have done 255, but it's probably best not to push it too far in one day. Now I want to get up to 10 reps at 225. That will take a long time to get to.

As annoying as that game is to look at, I really want to figure out how to play it again but I don't see me having any time until Thursday night. Humph.

This damn game is going to eat up all my free time. It's got 150 page manual that comes with it and it's crazy complicated. At least they let you pause the live action so you can figure out what each character is going to do. The display is a bit off because I can only run it in 1600x1400 and the game wants 1600x1200 or something so the LCD is kinda freaked out. I can run it smaller and put it in a window but then it's hard to see. Anyway, I'm sure I'll figure it out. There were some crashing problems but I found the only patch released for the game (not at the manufacturer site, looks like they're dead) and it fixed the crashing issue I was having. Whew, on that one.

I met up with Jason and we went rode to Alices for breakfast and then to the coast, up 92 and then back down 85. He thought we would have the whole mountain to ourselves since it was the day after St. Patrick's, but alas it was not to be. Apparently drunken revelry isn't as popular as it used to be, or at least not among the motoring crowd. By 11am when we swung back through the 84/85 junction there were about 1000 bikes, plus a classic car club (model Ts are pretty cool), a corvette club and the miata club was coming up as we were going down. Crazy up there today, but the weather was good after the morning fog burnt off (we rode though the worst of it).

I got home earlier than planned (I was supposed to just stop by the barn on the way home) since Jason had to bail around 11. I ended up driving up to the bar and since the weather was nice I took the good car. Mistake, as there was a ton of dust getting kicked up by the barns. Looks like another wash is in order next weekend. The BBQ was good, the woman brought up some turkey burgers seasoned with our own hydroponic herbs.

Golf last night was fun, I beat the woman by 3 strokes but we didn't actually tally up who one team wise. I think we took them, but it wasn't the ass-kicking I though it would be. Sue was totally lost on the first 3 holes then she suddenly got about 1000% better. Not sure how that happened, but she was carrying her team by the end. I think she was sandbagging in the beginning.

After 3 attempts I found a battery for the Porsche. Not wanting to spend $180 at the dealership I looked for the Johnson Controls battery as mentioned on all the boxster forums. They sell them as Duralast at Autozone and as Costo's home brand (which is where I found it). Yep, Kirkland Signature special. Bolts right in, the vent tube matches up with the adapter they include. Perfect, for 1/3 the price. I don't have the logo though. I also got the $15 battery tender that goes through the cigarette lighter from wally world (instead of the Porsche branded one for $135 at the dealer) to leave attached while I swapped the battery to keep the radio from freaking out and to not lose any mods done to my ECU. Since the dealer turned on 'extra features' in the dash computer that the previous owner didn't exactly pay for, I didn't want to lose them during the swap.

Since I had taken a phone pic of Kristen with the bookworm at the half price books 'grand reopening' sale this AM, she thought she should take a pic of me swapping batteries. I still think she looks goofier.

We were looking for little glass jars to put all these spices we've grown into as gifts for the moms and grandmas but were having no luck and the local craft stores. We went to BIG!LOTS which sounds like a lame password to me but it turns out it's the store where things go to die. Almost expired food items, questionable housewares, etc. Kinda fun to see just what sorts of trinkets you can find. We ended up buying some close-to-death low fat triskets which I eat with my lunch almost every day and some energy bars. I'll eat them before they go bad and they were easily 50% off the regular store price. Even if they're a little stale, they're good enough for me.

We finally heard from Sue and Matt, they're going to be here at 7:30 so we can go play putt-putt. We are so going to kick their asses.

I've got to BBQ pretty quick if we want to eat before they get here. Guess I should stop dorking around up here and go. The woman did get me Icewind Dale II, a cheesy D&D computer game for $6 from the discount bin, so I've got something to occupy all my copious free time. Yea, like when would that be? Maybe we'll have a rainy weekend at some point.

Wow, everything was a cheap/discounted buying day. I wonder if we have some coupons for putt-putt? :)

I think I update at 10:30 just so I can write "half elf". :)

I got my Buff DVDs last night, they look perfect. No scratches, the jackets are all clean and even the promo spam paperwork is intact. I swear if it wasn't for the woman watching racing and basketball I would petition to get rid of cable again. I would rather buy shows cheap than give more money to the cable bozos. Now of course I read about the 'blue-ray' folks claiming they'll kill the DVD format. Whatever. I suppose I'll care about what's after DVD in 2017, since I'm just now catching up to 1997 TV now.

I was kicking around the idea of moving pong to a VMware setup inside my windows machine (it's got enough RAM and CPU to replicate a PIII) but I really don't trust windows to keep running. Automatic updates reboot my PC every month, and just this morning I came in and it was dead for no apparent reason. Can't expect more than a few weeks of uptime so the VMware idea appeals to me less. Now, running windows inside a linux vm... hmm.. wonder if the sound will work?

They took us out for Moroccan food today. I didn't even know what that was until they brought it out since we didn't get to order. They ordered for us to make sure we tried the 'real' stuff. Mostly it's just strangely spiced fish and lots of lime based marinades. It was pretty good, but not sure it justified the huge price tag. Glad it was on the company.

Other than slacking, I spent the day modifying my farm maintenance script runner thingy to run in parallel. Now you can specify how many processes it keeps forked off. Normally I'll still just run 1 so I can watch the output (and I modified the output printing to be really clean when running in serial mode) but when I have to restart all of something in the farm it will be sweet to do it 30 hosts or so at a time. This isn't my first piece of fork()ing perl code, but I think it's the cleverest. Although my network server thingy with the shared memory was pretty cool too. I wonder how many days that took to get working? Probably less since the threads were controlled by clients, rather than the parent trying to keep X children running while the rest are queued.

Reorg, yada, yada. I'm still drawing pay, I'll just assume it's all good.

So the other day I made my first Porsche mod. The boxster's airbox has a 'snorkel' in it which serves to make the car quiet, prevent lit cigarettes dropped from the drivers window from getting sucked into the air filter and to allow the use of high pressure car washes. Since I don't intend to take up smoking, and I won't be using any automatic car washes, I felt it was OK to do the 'de-snorkel' mod that so many drivers do. You don't get much of a gain in power (only 2 HP to the wheels per some dyno tests) but you do get an increase in the "authentic Porsche sound". Mostly when you get over 3800 RPM you get a lot more intake noise, and it really does sound cool. I didn't think it was that much louder, but the woman said it was. Hmm. It's a 5 minute job to put it back in if I get tired of it.

That's the woman's desk, BTW, not mine. Mine may be covered in papers and crap but at least I didn't have my printer explode ink all over the place like she did.

The advantages to on-line banking are not so obvious when the net is down. Comcast usually only drops the cable modems when it starts raining, not so often when it's sunny. I guess there was the time change last night, so we can't expect them to provide service though that whole mess. Hmm... I can't ping the gateway, but I can renew my DHCP address. It doesn't look the the IP the modem hands out when it's confused either, it looks like a legit IP. Can't ping the gateway nor DNS servers though, so something is wrong. Doubt it's worth calling them about. I wonder if there are any open wifi ports I can reach.... nope, no google wifi here, and we're out of range of the Starbucks for sure.

Speaking of Starbucks, I tried one of their breakfast sandwiches today. It's basically a glorified egg McMuffin, but without the extra helping of lard. More filling than my scone, but I miss the frosting.

Yesterday I went and cut a deal with the BMW dealer, and while it was a horrible deal for me, the bike is really officially gone now and I deposited the check. I'm down to the one bike now. Feels liberating.

After the bike mess, and errands (kinkos for copies for the woman, signing up for the hunters ed class at Reeds, some other stuff I'm probably forgetting) we had lunch with Darcy up in Fremont. She was down teaching some class and had a few hours to kill afterward before her next appointment. Of all the woman's friends I like her the best. She's always interesting to talk to, can backup her positions well without resorting to lame cliche answers, etc. She does think Don is "intriguing" so there has got to be something wrong with her. :)

After the late lunch and chatting, we headed down to Gilroy to the archery shop. Downtown Gilroy is pretty damn skeevy, and the shop is no different but the people were actually really friendly and helpful. Turns out the bow I was given is too long for me and is already adjusted down to as short as it can go so while I can use it, the guy said my accuracy was going to suffer. That sucks. He also said it's ~25 years old. Wow. You wouldn't think that 25 years of technology advancement on a 1000+ year old weapon would make a difference, but looking at the new stuff you can see that like so many sports it's taken off in the last 10 years. It was pretty much like comparing my old college era mountain bike to what they have today. Yea, the same basic components but the level of sophistication, materials and performance modeling that has gone into it makes it light years more advanced. The guy said that they offer a starter package that has everything you need custom fit to you with 5 1-on-1 lessons on how to use it for $375. That's not too bad I guess. He said that if I just wanted to learn to hunt with it and was only going out a few times a year than the beginner package would last me pretty much as long as I wanted. If I 'got into it' then the next step up would be a better choice as I would learn the limits of the beginner stuff quickly. He recommended against going high-end to start because he said I wouldn't know the difference, and by the time I did I would probably have my own ideas on what I want and the package I started out with would very likely not be it. Then he went on to talk about how you want a 'quiet' bow, and a 'fast' bow, and a 'short' bow, yada yada, when you really know what you're doing. Who knew? He did say to keep the one I have because it would be good enough for frog and fish hunting. Um what? He said they go out at night and shoot frogs and cook 'em and eat 'em around the campfire. It's supposed to be great fun and one of their most popular social events. The woman was not amused about the frog shooting and eating but she did well holding her tongue until we left the store.

While down that way, we stopped at the outlet stores so the woman could get some slightly irregular clothes for work. The stuff all looked normal to me, it was just cheaper. Seems like a good way to go. I got some slightly irregular jelly bellies at their outlet. Fortunately only the shape is irregular.

Today I'm going to go through the huge pile of mail and bills I've got built up and clear that out, then clean the house and garage, study, and maybe go for a ride since it's so nice out.

Oh, and medical insurance is a scam. My plan says that if you go to one of their doctors, they pay 100% of the costs after the co-pay. Yea, well, turns out they pay 100% of the amount they're going to pay, and you're liable for the rest. I've got a nice hefty bill from the doctor visits. Ouch.

The woman got back from her ride and meeting the new flea bag she might be leasing. Looks like a horse to me, but she seemed pretty happy about it, other than his name "Tigger". I'm guessing he was owned by some privileged kid who's outgrown him now that she's no longer 12.

That was the strangest hardware problem I've seen to date. The SATA disk was set to 3gb/sec transfer (which it's been set to for 9 months) and only now is it causing problems. And odd problems to. The system would hang during boot, it would run for a while and hang, or it would hang in the BIOS. Freaky. Setting it to 1.5gb/sec and now the world is right again and everyone is happy. I wonder how long it would have taken a tech on the phone and then on-site to come up with the disk being the problem like that? I only noticed it because after I couldn't clone the 2nd disk I got suspicious that somehow both drives would have suddenly gone bad, especially since one of them was the hot standby. There are only 2 options to change on the physical disks, and the first one turned out to be it.

I went to the Porsche dealer today to get some touch-up paint for our CEOs car. I offered since I wanted to see the dealership anyway, I wanted to get out for a ride at lunch (and wanted some purpose for going other than wasting gas) and I wanted to see if the spendy dealer paint is better than the stuff I got at the auto parts store. His boxster is blue, and I figured how many version of blue could there be? Turns out there are 4: ocean blue, cobalt blue, dark blue and metallic blue. Hmm... his is sorta a dark metallic, so would that be a combo of two, or is that what cobalt is? Anyway, he'll have to give them his VIN to figure it out.

Yea, my life is pretty exciting! woo!

Dad brought by the extended center stand last night and it bolted up with no drama and is actually the right size now. The bike sits back on the 'foot' of the stand so both tires are off the ground which is nice, if it holds. Unlike the BMW stand which balances the bike and let you tip it front/back a bit to get either tire down, the KLR stand just bends slightly when you push on it. Scary. Both tires always up is what you usually want unless you're trying to do the fancy trick of riding off your center stand (which I've never tried).

The chain actually looks tight in that picture, I would think it would have more slack when the rear wheel is off the ground. I guess it only calls for 2" of free play which it's got when I kick at it. Maybe I should actually measure it instead of just kicking at it? Naaa... that's not the KLR way! I love how the stand (and the spray painted skid plate) are black and nice looking whereas the rest of the bike is dirty and has a bit of rust on it. It's amazing it doesn't fly apart.

The DBAs are funny people. I keep pointing out that be replacing every piece of hardware in a box, we've essentially given them a new box. Only the name is the same.

I've got a DB box that keeps crashing and I've replaced everything but the disk (it's actually an entire new machine I swapped in so it's not even the same power supplies) and it's still crashing. I've even changed where it gets it's power from. At some point I'm going to have to point to the DB software or the iSCSI drivers as we've run out of hardware to look at.

I talked to the HR chick today, and it looks like my bonus is official and I'll see it in my next paycheck. Woohoo.

Not much else going on this week. I did get rained on riding home today but I think that's the end of the rain showers for the week. I don't really want to drive in anymore.

VMware may actually be cool. I've got it running on my linux box installing XP while I'm typing this. Hmm....

The weather has been great for two days now. The windows are open, I'm walking around in a t-shirt and it's not even cold, etc. Spring is right around the corner. I of course used the good weather to wash and wax the p-car since it got all dirty driving the coast in the rain. Before the woman went to the barn we actually took the lid off it and I drove it around as a convertible. Scary. It's really odd with the top down, you can hear the intake noise more than anything when you get the RPMs up. Now I know why people take the noise restrictor out of the intake, that sound is pretty cool.

I tried to take some pictures while out driving around, but there isn't squat for a good backdrop anywhere near the house. So, you get the trail head by the city, uh, water treatment plant? Don't actually know what they do at that facility.

After playing with the car I watched 3 episodes of Special Unit 2, which other than a parade of hot chicks is pretty worthless as a TV program. They had the same theme in 2 of the 3 (spider chicks or Medusa chicks seducing guys in bars and killing them). I can see why they only made 17 episodes.

Yesterday we mostly did nothing, but did go play pool for an hour or so and pretend we were on a date or something. The creepy old dudes at the pool place got a show, I doubt they've seen a woman in a skirt play pool in a while.

I did manage to BBQ some pretty good ribs, no charcoal specials like last time. I think I've finally figured out how the new burner works. I should have made extra so I could take it in my lunch. Doh.

Dad says not to worry about the center stand, that he can get it welded up in a day or two. Whew. That means of course next weekend I'll have to finish working on the bike.

Great, just great. The 'short' center stand that's supposed to go with the shortened suspension I've got on the KLR is too damn short. The wheels won't come off the ground, so it's pretty useless for working on the rear wheel and chain. I knew I should have ignored them and just got the regular stand. I'm hoping dad can weld in the missing 1.5" I need to make it useful, that's gotta be cheaper than trying to ship it back and get a new one. I've learned my lesson on trying to exchange things via mail order.

Sleeping in this morning really seems to have helped my cold/sore throat, as did the saline rinse. It's a nice day out, but I drove in rather than riding the bike. See, I'm trying to be good and not get really sick.

These podcasts are exactly what I need. The announcers read the news really slowly and pronounce all the words clearly and there is a text version I can read along with. They have different people reading them with different accents too which is bound to be beneficial. Wonder why they're so good to students?

I'm always amazed when code works when I'm not actively testing it. I was doing some mods to my host-db client apps and screwed up the url to the db (a real mistake, not testing the fail over to backup) and right away it got a bad read and said "can't read live data, switching to backup" and the app ran using the last good cached info. Crazy.

Damn earthquake scared the crap out of me. I hate those things.

It seems like it's been forever since the last update, but things have been busy at work. Not crazy-want-to-scream busy, but just actually getting a lot of stuff done and making progress toward releasing v3.0 into production. It sounds a lot cooler than it is. I have made some serious improvements to my coding style and learned a few new tricks.

So the German TV station that used to stream media can't stream to the US anymore due to some stupid licensing thing. Since I don't have a relay out of the US to bounce things through anymore like I did back at NVDA I'm sorta screwed. They do offer podcasts though, and I figured that was useless to me since I'm lacking an ipod, but they make podcasting software for the PC and I think it's working. They download really, really slowly but I guess that's the point in that it's supposed to get them over time while you're doing something else and then you end up with something to watch/listen to/whatever. I've got a little snippet working now. It's a guy reading the news very slowly and clearly for students. That's pretty cool. I need more time listening to real speech.

The woman is at a basketball game (ASU vs. Stanford or Cal or something). She sure takes her college basketball seriously. I'm just glad Jenny likes going to those things with her so I don't have to drag my ass up to wherever it is.

I can't believe my dad is a month late on paying me back for the tickets to Germany. I wonder if I could make him pay a late fee. :)

More Amazon madness today. Steve said that I really should watch the Buffy series for real (on DVD) all the way through. He said the first season is a bit lame but it really gets going season 2. I got the first season on amazon for $17 used including shipping. That's like $1/show or something, even I'll pay that much to watch TV. I figure if any of the disks are scratched, I can just download the torrent and feel OK about it since I bought a 'license' to watch the show. I'm sure they'll be fine, all those guys with the zillions of positive feedback scores are running real businesses out of somewhere so they can't be wasting time with bad product. My used books came in OK, so I'm beginning to have faith.