They knew that no one would wear a costume to work today, so our ever cheerful office chick asked everyone to just wear black, and oddly everyone (even me) did. The 9:30 status meeting looked like a wake with all the color out of the room. I also learned that I only have 1 black shirt. Guess it's just not my color. Not very tacticool of me.

Last night's earthquake was an interesting change of pace at the game. This was the last game at the old game store (they move tomorrow) so everyone turned out. We had 4 full tables running with some people just hanging out and watching. The mod was a 'core special' which means 3x the danger and 2x the rewards. A few people died, but not at our table so it was OK. :) When the quake started everyone just sorta stopped and looked around. By the time someone said "hey, it's an earthquake" I was already outside. I was almost the furthest from the door but I managed to get the hell out in a hurry. One guy said it would be better to stand in a doorway than to be outside because a car could flip on you. If the quake was that powerful I would rather take my chances dodging a moving car than being in a doorway under 50 tons of rubble as the building falls down. It's hard to dodge a building from the inside.

Kristen got a big box of swag from the PR firm; she's not sure how much of it she's supposed to bring. The fox sports people told her not to wear any driver paraphernalia, but the miller light people (sponsor of the contest) gave her some. My guess is she'll have to change a bunch of times depending on who's event she's at. I've got to take her to bart tomorrow so her car won't end up sitting in the lot for 4 days and being towed. She's going to go right from work to the airport, and then I have to pick her up Sunday at midnight or maybe Monday night depending on the flight. I'm sure she'll tell me at some point.

I didn't want to, but now that Kenny has commanded us to buy stuff from Amazon I had best get to ordering. Kristen said she needed some more small boxes, so now I have yet another reason to get some more books.

"cherry coke zero" and rum is pretty bad. Tastes like some sort of children's cough syrup. Ick. We should have gone to the store the weekend so we're not eating ramen and leftover crap for the next few days. OK, tonight is BBQ ribs but it's the last pack. Then it's ramen time (we do have two cases on hand).

I can't believe how busy this week has been. Lots of crap going on trying to get the release out, but the end is in sight, I think. Next Wednesday is go-live day. I wonder if they'll try to keep me from going to the game? Ah no wait, next Thursday. I'm safe. Whew.

On the car front I've been denied twice now. I found a Kia Sportage that was OK, but needed about $1k in repairs. Some dude offered the seller more than their asking price, and didn't care about the broken 4x4 system or anything. Whatever. Then today I was going to go look at a Jeep Cherokee but it had a bad clutch and before I could even dicker with them about some dude showed up and paid their asking price, bad clutch and all. What's up with people over-paying for used crappy 4x4s? It's like the housing market in '99 or something. Crazy.

I overloaded the shredder a few times, and it finally broke apart. The gear housing broke open and the 'rollers' or whatever those cutting drums are called started to come out. Fortunately I had some duct tape and got it put together again. Poor shredder, it doesn't like it when I save up a years worth of crapola to process. I did clean up 95% of the crap in the office though, including old loan docs, bills, etc. I also went though some of my school stuff and threw most of it away. I did keep this copy of the '90-91 schedule which shows my graduation requirements. ya know, in case they try to come back and say I didn't take the right classes.

I worked a little today, couple hours worth. Enough to keep them happy until Monday I hope. Tomorrow I told them I can't make the 9:30am con call and won't be available via cell until noon. I imagine they think I go to church. :)

Damn time flies when you're facing a deadline. Gotta update tonight, lots going on.

Yep, her stupid horse freaked out yet again and this time she came off him hard. Banged up her head, neck and back and we got to sit in the ER for 4 hours while they did all sorts of tests to make sure she wasn't going to go into 'spinal shock'. Another bad 80s band? Anyway, my shit ball phone managed not to corrupt all the images I took while we waited.

It took me 30 minutes to get the wireless going upstairs again. I had to manually try different channels until I found one that was clear. The scan shows most people using channel 6, but only channel 10 now gets upstairs with little enough noise to be usable.

With that tree root gone from the water main, we suddenly have WAY too much water pressure. You could etch wood with the water coming out of the shower head, it's actually painful to shower if you stand right under the spray. I've been meaning to get a replacement shower head, one that's more water-conserving, ever since dad installed that crazy high-flow one. Kristen can empty the water heater by herself when she's shaving, it just flows too damn much water and we don't have any way to control the flow at the faucet (it's the stock cheap ass one and it's totally binary).

The rest of the week was pretty much like the first half. Lots of late nights, cranky people and last minute scrambling. I really hope we can get this thing live in a few weeks. I know that I've not been doing any of my normal job since I'm doing all of my old boss' job (which the new boss mostly gets in the way with his paperwork and procedures since that's what he knows how to do at this point).

Yesterday we spent part of the day shopping for more crap for the woman. She wanted a jacket (which she found at some super-discount store and with all her coupons and stuff ended up paying only $17 for some designer jacket) and a voice recorder thing the real journalists said she should have. She's going to be in 6 hours of interviews each race day. Wow, talk about boring, but I can see how you would want to record all that and flip to the drivers you wanted to remember stuff about for your article. I suggested she get an mp3 player that can do recording, but the real voice recorders have 'real' microphones on them and I imagine they work a lot better since it's their only function to record voice. We also swung by Fry's and picked up a 2gb SD card for $15. That should hold her during the days and she can download at night if needed (which I seriously doubt)

Speaking of cameras, I dug out my old Nikon so I could take a picture of my camera and the woman's camera side-by-side. Not only is her LCD 2x the size of mine, with the same lens and 7megapixel vs my 4pixels, but her camera is half the weight and thickness. I still like the metal body, so I can live with the weight but damn the size on hers is handy. I wonder how well that large LCD will stand up to abuse? Mine has held up very well, but it's small and has a protective frame around it. Hers is just flush with the back of the camera.

After we had her taken care of, and after a lunch of tasty but oh-so-bad-for-you dim sum from the local hole in the wall place around the corner, I got some of my projects taken care of: laundry, cleaning and finding a place for all the new tools from the pipe project, putting another shelf up in the garage, heat-proofing by side bags, etc.

The shelf project was cool because I didn't need anything from the hardware store. I had 3 leftover brackets, a section of left over shelving and all the screws necessary. It's not a Kenny-quality shelf, but it's enough to hold the side bags of the bike up off the ground and maybe a few other light things that are always getting in the way (like my oil funnel and the tire pump).

The next project was to do something about the heat coming into the side bag on the bike. With the right bag sitting 2" away from the exhaust the bag itself and the contents were getting too hot to touch. Good for storing takeout food, not so good for anything else, not to mention the bag getting warped. At OSH I found what amounts to aluminum duct tape ('cause it's aluminum and used to seal ducts) and put a few layers of it on the back of the bag facing the exhaust. It looks ghetto as hell, but you can't see it when the bag is on the mount unless you stick your head under the fender and look. What it lacks in looks it makes up for in appearance. After a good freeway run the inside of the bag wasn't warm at all and even the outside was hardly even warm. I would say problem solved. Let's hope it bakes on there really well so it won't come off in the rain. The BMW bags have something similar on the bottom of them (since they sit over the exhaust) and it's known to come off if you ride in the wet a lot.

The last picture for this morning is just a shot of my portable loading setup. Kristen freaks out when I leave it in the living room because it's got powder in it and is technically kinda dangerous. She's always afraid she'll trip and fall into it. I guess it could happen. All I know is I can complete two boxes of .308 rounds during an episode of Buffy, and slightly more during an episode of Angel because I'm not paying attention to the show.

Uh oh, not good! Kristen just called, she got dumped off her stupid horse and is in pain and crying a lot. She's going to try to drive home, but it's not going to be pretty when she gets here...

Very hectic today, but no more so than usual. It rained a tiny bit on my walk, hopefully it doesn't dump until after I'm home tonight (which admittedly could be late as it's game night). Now that I just typed 'game night' I realized that I haven't updated my character since last game and I was supposed to print out some stuff which I had forgotten to do. Doh. Looks like I'm be scrambling before the game to get things done. Behind on my homework again.

Yesterday night the woman noticed that our water main was leaking. Since we don't have any tools to dig anything up with, we borrowed a shovel from the neighbor but it quickly became apparent that the tree roots and whatnot would not yield to a simple shovel. Kristen went to OSH and got me a pick, a real shovel and a small hatchet and I went to work (with our neighbor's help, he should have got out while the getting was good) digging up the busted pipes.

Today the plumber showed up and repaired the leak which was clearly caused by a tree root snapping the pipe. He said that my digging out of the pipe (and cutting the small tree out of the way) saved us $300 worth of their labor. I guess that's worth $63 worth of tools and a few hours of hard labor. I didn't even feel (too) guilty about missing the gym today with all of the work last night.

Guess NV guy was serious, he and his wife flew out from Vegas, drove the Porsche and after about 2 minutes of chatter made me an offer. I took it, and it's actually $200 more than I thought I would get only because I didn't have to do the crazy expensive CA smog crap since he's not registering it in CA. Sweet. Right as he went to head back to the airport to return the rental the skies opened up and it rained like were were in Seattle or something. Crazy. They were going to go to a SJ football game Friday night and then drive home. He should be there by now, hope all is well. The car was prefect so I can't imagine there were any issues.

My back is doing better, but I still can't lie flat without pain. I slept mostly on my side last night again, which is not very comfy for me. I'm hoping that tonight I'll be able to at least sleep through the worst of the pain and not get woken up every so often as I roll over. Fortunately I can still move around and drive and ride and all that, I just can't lie flat. Very strange.

Today the woman went on a shopping spree for stuff for her NASCAR blogging job/trip/thing. She got a digital camera and a laptop. With no prodding from me on the laptop, she ended up buying a newer, smaller version of the 7 year old laptop that we already have. It's a Toshiba Satellite something or another. Dual core and everything. So far Vista has annoyed us once by updating itself and rendering the CD drive dead, but I got it working again at least well enough to play DVDs and install software. No idea if it can still burn anything, but the odds she ever does that are pretty low.

The camera is an SD1000, the newer version of my trusty Canon S400. I love the display, and the controls are pretty much what I'm familiar with, and the SD memory is really small and helps shrink the overall size of the camera down. The only bummer part is that it feels all cheapie and plastic. I looked up a review on my camera and it says the body is stainless steel with a Cerabrite fish to resist scratching. Now that I look at it my camera is oddly unscratched. Yes, it's held together with tape at this point but it's not scratched. Poking around I found cameras that are the size of mine (which is 'big' for a pocket camera now apparently) that are metal bodied with 5x optic zoom lenses. Sweet. When mine craps out I'm upgrading. :)

Ugh. This place is killing me! Every minute is a new interruption with some new super priority crap, some of it so asinine it's unbelievable. I guess it's only going to get worse and we get closer to Nov 1 and they realize that the vaporware that they're demanding be written hasn't happened. I'm sure once the real developers fail it will somehow to fall to ops and ultimately to me to 'make something happen'.

I'm making a list of all the things that need to happen to be production ready. It's actually quite long, but I think most of them can be done. There are only a few that there aren't real solutions for, but they could turn into huge time wasters as marketing will be involved and they're never worried about the realities of actually having to do something as opposed to thinking it up.

The guy from NV that's supposed to be flying out Friday to buy the Porsche is worrying me a bit. He's not given me flight details yet. He could just be busy of course, but a quick email would put met at ease. He's got a frakin' iphone thingy, he should be reachable 24x7!

The woman found out from fox sports that she's going to the last 3 races of the season, so she'll be gone the first 3 weekends in November. Lots of free time for me, and lots of stress on her. Scheduling her clients around all that activity is going to drive her nuts, and she's already told the barn she can't ride at all in November. They said they may not have a horse for her when she returns. Guess that's one way to force her hand and have her change barns.

What a brutal day, and it's not over yet. I've been swamped from the moment I walked in the door, and I've had to get cranky a couple of times already. People just don't seem to get it that you can't ask for something, get a 'no' answer and then wander away thinking it's going to happen anyway. There is just not enough time to do all of the 'critical' projects, especially as everything is now critical. Maybe they should hire more people, or better yet get rid of some people and only have us focus on doing stuff that's actually going to get the product out the door.

Yep, I'm sick. Nothing like Kenny's bout with bronchitis but I've been feeling pretty bad the last few days. We still went on our yurt trip (pics on the main page) but I spent a lot of time lying around and napping and we did almost zero hiking. We did screw around on the beach a bit and the woman found a few starfish and a pretty good sea anemone that looked like one you would find at the aquarium. The food there was over priced but not too bad from the little I could taste through my cold. I liked the 'make your own waffles' breakfast bar thing, just like the motel in Blythe. :) I took us 4.5 hours to get down there, not including a stop to have lunch with Don in Monterey. Coming home, not being stuck behind a line of jackholes going 35 mph on Hwy 1, it took 2.5 hours. I wasn't even pushing the car all that hard, mostly because we still had stuff in the cooler in the front trunk and the woman would get sick pretty quick from all the bouncing around.

The big news in and around town, such that it was, was the jade festival. It was mostly a bunch of stinky ass hippies sitting in a park selling bits of rock, but it was the most excitement to be found around the resort area if you weren't into spa treatments. I had no idea Kristen hated hippies so much. Apparently they're "anti goth", and stinky, and happy, and wear bright colors that don't match. Trauma from high school (apparently).

We agreed to no gift exchange for our anniversary (instead opting to use the money toward travel) but my parents got us the strange carved bowl thing. It's from some super rare wood from New Zealand and carved by a guy in Sacto who is from New Zealand. Kinda cool, but what are we supposed to do with it? I don't think you can use it for food, so it's just another trinket sitting on a shelf somewhere. Sigh. I must break my parents of their gift giving habits. I almost had them before the woman showed up and brought back christmas. bah. and humbug too.

I stopped by dad's place and picked up my packages that got delivered on Friday. He picked them up off the porch so they wouldn't sit outside all weekend. Good plan. I put the new barrel/scope assembly on Mossberg lower and I now have my boar hunting rig. Shop smart. Shop S-mart. (yea, buying gun parts from Walmart is just funky). Mmm... ported barrel.

Ah crap, I think I'm getting sick! My throat is sore and my nose is burning. It's going to be a crappy weekend getaway for me if I'm sick. :(

The new boss is having an interesting time adjusting. Like I was he's used to having the money and staff to do things right vs. what we have (which is almost nothing at this point).

Woo boy, the new boss is going to be a handful. He's a good enough guy it seems, but way different than Patrick and way too used to having money, time and people to do things right. Sorta like me when I got here. He'll have to get over it.

Today some private eye called me wanting to talk about a civil case I could have info on. They left a bogus call back number, and the foo21 guys are pretty sure I should just ignore the whole thing. I'm curious, but is it worth getting involved???

I found the reason the KLR was getting so loud and I stunk of exhaust smell. The middle bracket/clamp on the muffler had lost it's bolt and blown it's insulation sleeve out of the front of the muffler. Fortunately I caught it in time, the KLR FAQ says you can burn a hole in your airbox if this joint leaks too much. I dug around in the scrap KLR part box and found that the original sub frame bolts are about the right length and are exactly the right diameter to replace the missing bolt (the threaded part is built into the bracket rather than being a nut). One washer and one old frame bolt and I'm back on the road. 20 minutes of work and no cost, that's my kind of repair. I used lock-tight this time, shouldn't lose that bolt a 2nd time.