So sleepy.... must stay awake.... ugh. I'm not sure if it's leftover from Tuesday or what but I'm crazy sleepy today. Pretty weak at the gym too. I can't imagine my sleep schedule is so fragile it can't take one night of staying up an extra 2 hours.

Reading on the KLR site I see that I'm using the wrong Krylon to try to paint the plastic. They make a special version called 'fusion' that works directly on plastics. Great, now I learn that. I hope I can salvage things and get them back to somewhat smooth before I paint again. Gotta get more sand paper for sure, and maybe a small sanding block so I'm not having to hold the paper in my hands. My fingers are pretty weak most of the time now as are my forearms and my elbows hurt. Constantly burning myself out at the gym has drawbacks.

I filled out my registration and went to sign up for the level 1 game on the 12th of next month, and it had filled up already. There were 2 open slots during the day, and I didn't think it would fill up before that evening. Hopefully they'll get another DM in there and open a 2nd table.

Somehow the woman managed to break the garbage disposal. Not by sticking a fork in it or anything 'normal' but by somehow blowing a hole in the side of the casing around the blades or the grinding chamber or whatever you call where the stuff goes in to die. It's only a 2mm hole, so I epoxied a penny over it and we'll see if that will hold for a bit. Garbage disposals aren't expensive, but they look like a major pain (and mess) to deal with. So let's see, our oven is sorta damaged, the main microwave is dead and we're using the spare from the cabin, and the central AC is out (although it's been out for years now).... damn house is falling apart! I'm just waiting for the fridge to die, but it won't because I actually want to replace that. I'm sure it will plod along forever just to spite me.

I went to the PRGA game last night, ended up staying and watching the whole thing. It was crazy, lots of people playing not only these games but other games as well in the common room. One thing this game store has figured out that we never had in the 90s was to sell snacks and sodas right there in the room. Nerds need skittles and coke to survive!

The players were varied in age from 25-ish to 55-ish, and most seemed to get along pretty well and add some value to the game. I could see who the hard core people were from their setups, and they were also the people I seemed to be getting along with. The were pretty open to newcomers, even those who were 'old school' v1.0 and v2.0 players.

Strange going to class without going to work first.

We got the corn plants staked up and the porch cleaned, the car washed, the house vacuumed, the bathroom cleaned, the laundry done and a bunch of papers sorted. What fun.

Steve and I successfully made our way to the gaming convention today. We didn't play anything, but we talked with people and checked things out. There is a game store in Santa Clara we need to go to, they have games every Tuesday and Thursday nights (not the same groups) and the owner said there are lots of people like us (ex-gamers who want to get into a game once a week night). Maybe I can revive the hobby. They said that we could pick up on v3.5 of the rules in no time.

One thing I noticed that other than at the registration desk we only saw 1 computer the whole time. Some dude sitting in the cafe with a laptop.... all the games were strictly dice, paper and miniatures which I think is pretty cool.

Whoa, major journal slacking going on. It's probably all the time I'm spending at work, I don't want to be in front of a computer when I get home.

Today we drove down to Madera for grandma's 84th birthday. The Porsche got 28 mpg on the run down with the AC on most of the time. That's not bad for a sports car. There is some good in having a tiny little motor. Kristen was surprised that I used the cruise control, she said she thought these type of cars were meant to be driven, not just steered. Where did she learn to say stuff like that? Must be from NASCAR. Still, for long boring stretches of road into the central valley, there isn't much driver involvement other than staying awake.

Last night's dinner was pretty good. I managed to grill corn on the cob, turkey burgers and a salmon fillet (on one of those ceder grilling planks) all at the same time and everything actually came out cooked. Amazing. The planks are nice, but they're one time use items so there is no chance I'll do that again (unless the womans' mother buys them for my birthday again which is where these came from).

I pulled some bison meat out of the freezer to make jerky and it was rancid. How does frozen meat go rancid? I still wanted it to dry over-night so at 10pm I'm out shopping for hamburger. Weird crowd in Albertsons at that time, just a handful of super-stinky Indians and two teenie-bopper type girls buying gum.

Not sure what's on the plan for today. Breakfast is in the works and the woman is riding at 1pm, but I don't have anything pressing that needs to be done other than some homework and laundry. I was planning to wash the sentra, but only if it gets warmer out. I already got the oil changed yesterday (which took less than 10 minutes at the quickie change place the woman always uses). In another 5k miles I'll do an oil change myself and a 30k service. One nice thing about this old 1.6L Nissan engine is that it uses a timing chain instead of a belt. No major expense at 60k due to a belt swap. Sweet. The little mechanic shop that does the oil could also do the 30k, but it's nothing I can't handle. They estimated $180/side to replace the cv joints. Troy has to swap one out on his kids car, and I'll go watch that operation. If it looks easy I'll do mine, if it looks like a PITA, I'll eventually have to fork out the cash.

Speaking of service, the KLR is going to need a valve adjustment in the next month or two. There is a video available showing exactly how to do it, and I'm going to spring for it. Even with the cost of the video and a full shim kit (so I don't have to open it up and wait while I order exactly the shims I might need) is still less than half of letting the stealership do it. I also am not as likely to be sloppy and screw the job up and blow the motor up like they did.

A phone picture from Palm Springs. The woman is in her element, Belgian beer and Pommes-Frites:

Another busy day. We rented a fabulous U-Haul truck to carry about 75% of the gear we needed from the San Jose facility to the PAIX. It's amazing how it took so long to get SJ1 running so well and took a mere hour to take it all down.

Next week I'll likely spend most of my days at the PAIX wiring things up and getting everything stable. Once we've got our net connection up the developers are going to want full access to all the gear. Hopefully it will be ready.

The woman is having dinner with Darcy tonight so I'm at home eating frozen burritos and watching TV. :)

Last night Colin was in town and took the woman and I to dinner at Nola's. It's getting more expensive and the portions are smaller, but it's still an awesome restaurant. Glad we have nice vendors to pay for us. :)

I spent yesterday wiring up the new cabinets in the PAIX. We should be able to move some real gear in there today and perhaps have our net feeds live next week. We're getting close.

We made it back from the meerkat trip (pics on the front page). The woman really liked it, she's still going on about how cute they are, etc. They were fun to play with, but otherwise they're just little rat creatures. Stronger than they look, that's for sure.

Not looking forward to going back to work tomorrow, lots of stuff is pending I'm sure.

Spent the day at SJ1 learning how to make 4gb FCAL work in linux boxes talking to netapp filers. It was surprisingly easy, if a bit messy. Turns out IAS shipped us the wrong FCAL cards for the filers so we had to use the built-in 2gb stuff but it's going to be easy to switch to the new cards when they come in. Time well spent.

Tomorrow we're off to Palm Springs to see the meerkats. At least I'll get to read in the car for a while.

Since I missed the company BBQ yesterday and there was a lot of food left over, I had an impromptu BBQ today. I fired up the grill and make salmon burgers (the only thing frozen and therefore 'safe') and hot links. Maybe 8 people joined me outside so it was semi-festive. Beats the frozen burrito I brought in.

Last night's little '5 minute' trip to the data center ended up taking about 5 hours. That sucked, and here I am again sweating my ass off in SJ1. Why is the data center 82F? It's like being at NVDA building A all over again.

Ahh... much better. The woman is out to dinner with her friends so I went down to the pool for a quick swim. I don't use the pool but once every year or so but it's nice to have it that one time I want it. Now I'm just kicking back studying a little and generally avoiding TV. Maybe I'll get motivated again and try to install Ubuntu on this laptop again. I must like torturing myself with flaky wireless cards.

Dad stopped by to pick up the spice rack thing for mom (since we won't see her before mothers day) and to get his camera. Sigh. I was just getting into fiddling with the menus trying to figure out how to make it do what Vareck suggested.

Long ride home from Monterey today. Not so many miles, but the traffic sucked ass. Hwy 1 gets choked around Santa Cruz and Hwy 17 is just freakin' scary any time of the day or night. Getting there was slightly easier, but there was some sort of marathon going on over hwy 9 so I was dodging these stupid vans all day. The runners were on the sides of the roads but the vans were spaced along the road every 100 meters doing 5 mph. Annoying. I must have made a zillion double-yellow passes though. :) The weather in Monterey was awesome, the coast is never like that. Sunny, in the 70s and no fog anywhere.

Yesterday I finally got around to putting the larger military gas tank on the KLR. I'm a little worried because it doesn't have a locking gas cap (what, the military doesn't believe in locks?), not because someone will steal the gas but because some Beavis will stick something in there. I've got dual filters in there but it would still be annoying and I don't put it past someone to try it. I guess I'll just not park anywhere bad, like SF.

Yesterday we finished up the mother's day presents and put the labels on the spices. These were either grown in the hydroponic thingy mom got me for giftmas, or stolen from the landscaping around the house (rosemary). The meat rub we made up ourselves, no idea if it's any good but it's got lots of salt and pepper so how bad can it be? I'm sure the moms will be thrilled.

We also got out of the house yesterday and went to the big REI sale where I managed to find 4 shirts for work. Using Griffith's rule I now must toss out 8 shirts to make room for the 4 I just got. Should be easy, I've got some that are too small now that my chest/arms/shoulders have gotten larger from all the weight lifting. We also went bowling. Yea. Apparently Kristen was on some league back in 2001 so she's supposed to be real good, whereas I went bowling with T46 once and prior to that I was on a league in 1979. I won the first game but she beat me (by only 2 pins!) in the 2nd. She was getting her groove back so I'm sure she would have started cleaning up. I had no skill, just lots of power. She was upset because I was just blasting pins everywhere rather than hitting them in the right spot. I never claimed to be good!

Just a random shot of dad's camera which I need to get back to him. I like it for the big outdoor stuff but I like my pocket camera for road trips like today, and for macro stuff. The flash creates a big shadow where the lens blocks it. Doh.

Meh. Must journal some tomorrow or I'll forget what's going on.

Did I help Kenny's company out by buying the "slayers collection" of all 7 seasons of Buffy. The woman agreed it's good enough to watch more of and we're almost out of the set I bought. It's way cheaper to get them all at once rather than buying season-by-season. Wonder how much amazon gets as a cut on used stuff?