Damn, a whole week without an update. I must be turning into Kenny. :) OK, not fair I guess he's moving away from writing html by and with vi, so I guess there can be a delay.

I've been slugging away at work non stop trying to solve some stupid ass FCAL problems. I should have had 2 servers running by today, with a bunch of stuff migrated over and a bunch of stuff staged for this weekend's move (which I wouldn't be part of as I'm just a contractor... plus I'm going to the gaming con in Sacto). Fortunately for me though, things got pushed out for at least a week or more so I can make up for lost time. Whew.

We've got the refinance going, we spent two hours last night going over the mistake filled paperwork they sent us and making corrections. I had to zip down to Kinkos after to get copies made so we could mail them out this morning. Let's hope their screw up doesn't cause us to lose the lock, that 5.5% rate is gone as far as I can tell. I can't believe we got that lucky, it only lasted 1 day. The appraisal is next Wednesday, I'm guessing it will come in at $620k, unless the stupid dog neighbors (who just sold) took some low ball offer since they're about 10' away from us and in the same size unit. Their place needs a lot of work due to damage from the dogs, and in today's market people won't look past that. Not that they should, but in the old days people were pretty desperate to buy anything.

My rifle is on-route, the tracking shows that it left Shrewsbury, MA early yesterday morning with a projected arrival of 4/1. I've still not figured out how to go get it since the guy isn't open on the weekends. Maybe I can drive in so at lunch I can drive right there and pick it up and take it home then grab the bike and make it back to work... all in 1 hour? Yea, doubtful. I'll worry about that after the FFL has confirmed it's arrived and it looks right.

Comcast switched my IP today, had to update DDNS since it doesn't seem to update on it's own. The cheezeball router never has worked right in that respect. Oh well, hopefully they don't update me again for a while.

Saturday morning I went for a quick ride up Hwy 9 while the woman went and did her horse stuff. After she got back we got cleaned up and went up to the city to finish up with her office move. She had everything organized but the pictures weren't up so we made quick work of getting that done. We had a lot of time to kill between the office and the birthday party so we went to the Haight district to check things out. The corner of Haight and Ashbury may have been hippyville back in the day, but now it's just a bunch of 20 somethings trying to be hip and us old fart tourists walking around. The original Ben & Jerrys is there on the corner so we popped in for a quick ice cream before dinner. I was starving so it made perfect sense to snack.

After browsing the thrift stores (and determining I look pretty good in a number of hats... or at least I think I look good in a number of hats) we headed back into the city core to find parking and dinner. We wandered around and by pure luck found a Zagat rated Moroccan restaurant. I had lamb kebabs and some sort of tomato salad. I'm not a tomato fan at all, but I ended up eating half of it, it was that tasty. They also had fries, and I'm not sure how authentic that is but they were tasty. Not Bouchon tasty, but good none the less. :)

After dinner we went to the tea house where Lisa was hosting her own 40th birthday party. There were lots of people there (and lots of hot chicks, half her friends are triathletes so body fat averages were pretty damn low) and a few people from Apple. One guy had left a year ago, he worked directly in-line with "the Steve" and said it was really crushing. Apparently Steve overrides everyone when it comes to design, every product is exactly his vision and his alone. Other creative types don't like that so much. The other guy work for .mac and was a total dork, I didn't talk with him too long. He must be bright because he's a total social outcast.

We left after the cake and were home by 11pm. I was pretty sleepy after my 1 beer, I was glad the woman was driving. Oh, and speaking of beer, she's been trying to get me to like Stella so that I'll be excited about going to Belgium. At Costco she found a 'best of Belgium' beer pack and I tried one of the Hoegaarten bottles. It's way better than Stella, and now she says I'm a beer snob who will only drink the most expensive stuff. I guess if you're only going to have a beer once a month, you might as well make it a good one.

Today was a lot more laid back. We walked to Starbucks, then to OSH to get one more tomato cage (and I picked up some cotter pins for the rear axle of the KLR, at some point I'm going to change the chain and sprockets and will need a fresh pin) and that's about it. I washed the Tracker finally and put some boxes into the storage hole along with the old KLR gas tank which should give me more cabinet space. We did cover one of the chairs with the new fabric to see if it looked OK but otherwise haven't been too overly productive. I'm hoping to clear though the backlog of Autoweek issues dad dropped off and maybe work on my birthday list. People keep bugging me for stuff to get me for my birthday and they don't want to get me stuff I actually want or could use so I'm having to come up with crap that I could possibly use but wouldn't normally buy for myself. That's not easy, I don't want a lot of crap. Why can't they just get me beef jerky, ammo or gift certificates to midway or GNC? You know, consumables they can get me every time a gift giving event pops up. I would never tire of getting jerky. Tire? Is that the right way to spell the version I want? Bah. Stupid English and it's word overloading.

Ha, who knew stalling would be good. The rate is 5.5% today so I took it. We'll have to stay in the house 12 months to save the cost of the refi, but I don't see us going anywhere within a year.

The damn stock market is closed today, but I guess the fake holiday is why the roads were so quiet today. Oh wait a sec, there isn't any mail today either I bet which means the rifle guy won't get my check today. Argh! I hate all the fake holidays!

The trainer chick missed another session today. Not just mine but her 7am as well. She called around 8 and had some excuse about her kid again. Who has ballet lessons at 6am? I got a fair workout in anyway, although all this total-body stuff has really cost me a lot on my max bench. I was struggling to do sets at 185. I could lift it with good form, but couldn't pound out the reps like normal. Let's hope I'm just tired.

Our Taos rep came by yesterday and dropped off our new work cell phones. I only remembered because it started running in my backpack just now and by the time I figured out what the annoying music was, and that it was coming from my bag, and got the box out and opened and got the phone out it was too late. Fortunately they had caller ID blocked and didn't leave a message so it's safe to ignore it. They couldn't tell us how many minutes we had, or what sort of plan we have or if we have email/texting to the phones which would make them useful for on call work. You would think they would know those sorts of things. It's a nice small phone though with a camera and a USB port so if I can hook it up and make it look like a drive to pull the images off I'll be happy.

Also stopping by yesterday was Tamara and Ellen from the old office. Ellen is an Apple fanboi (fangirl?) so she was very excited to be 'inside' the campus instead of just driving around the outside. It was nice to have someone to talk to at lunch, although I'm reading some really good stuff right now so some alone time with a book will be just as good today.

David (guy in the office) is big into gold and silver and is trying to get the rest of us to buy more silver now. I'm tempted, those 100oz bricks look pretty cool. We'll see how the markets do in the next few days and then he's going to try to get a big order together.

I called Seekins and ordered the rings for the rifle, should be here in 2.5 weeks. I could actually have the rifle before the rings are here, that will be frustrating, but at least I can check the chamber size out and get loading while I'm waiting for parts.

Also yesterday I finished the on-line loan app to refinance the house again. We're at 6.75% and I can get 5.75% right now. It will only take us a year to regain the refi costs so it's a good long term move.

Also, also yesterday the woman got the tickets to the Cook Islands booked as well as the hotel squared away. Damn, we were busy yesterday. I think we even manged to get some work done around all that activity.

I went to order some brass to make loads for the new rifle, and it seems that the whole world is suddenly out of .308 brass. I finally found 4 boxes of mid-grade stuff in Kansas. Wonder what's going on? Is the 'war' really sucking up all the .308? I can see .223, I didn't think they used that much .308 anymore.

Went to Caib's house last night for a game. I'm really liking the at home games better than at the store. Not that I don't like the store people, but at home there is zero extra noise and it usually doesn't smell like a locker room. All those nerds in one room really gets ripe after a few hours. Anyway, he and his wife and 1.5' tall child live in a really tiny 2 bedroom duplex, can't be over 900 sq. ft. I couldn't figure out where we would play when I got there, the table only sat 4. Turns out though he's converted the small garage into a game room. Tables setup, tons of supplies everywhere, game maps on the walls, very cool setup. The only downside was that it was physically cold in there, around 11pm I had to put my riding jacket back on and Vickie was hiding under a blanket. He said it gets worse, it gets crazy hot in the summer so we should enjoy the chill. The game didn't break up until 1am or so, and I didn't get to bed until 1:30am at least. We got a box from Amazon so I had to open it up when I got home. :)

The trainer was pretty brutal yesterday, we did lots of sets to exhaustion, so there was no way it couldn't be tough on me.

I walked to WaMu yesterday, took me about 35 minutes to get there and back moving at a pretty good walking pace. I got the cashier's check and mailed it out to the guy in VT this morning, so now I'll learn (possibly the hard way) if he's scamming me or not. Odds are I'm OK, but it's still worrisome. Not so much for losing the $600, but for not getting the rifle! I'm looking forward to setting it up and learning to shoot in the proper 'hunting' positions vs. just sitting at a bench.

Another weekend down. Seemed to be much slower than the last few. Saturday the woman rode and I went down to San Jose to look for parts for the Tracker. The little plug that's fallen out of the transmission isn't listed on any of the on-line parts fiches and now I know why. Oddly it's listed as part of the shifter mechanism and not the transmission, even though it's on the trans and lower down from the reverse light switch. The guy at the parts counter found it, and told me that the closest one was down in LA somewhere but if I wanted to just order one it would be $2. Um, OK, I'll pay the $2. Then he says they're only orderable in quantity 10. Great, so I'll have 9 spares in case it pops out again. I also ordered the missing dome light cover.

Riding back from the dealer the storm I was dodging around on the way south finally caught me. I could have tried to zip around the bay to the west and come back across the bridge to try to get around it again but I just blasted though; it was almost like washing the bike. Almost. When I got home I adjusted the chain and lubed it again. It still looks fair, the said I would be lucky to get home on it but I've got 2000 miles on it so far. I think they were just being sales people trying to get me to buy a better chain. Before the next long trip I'll replace both sprockets and the chain since I have new parts waiting for me in the cabinet.

Once the woman got home we went grocery shopping and I got a call back from the local FFL dude. I went over and we completed the paperwork on the rifle I'm ordering, so by the time it gets here my 10 day wait will be over. Sweet.

Dinner was pretty light and I ended up watching the Dresden Files movie. It was Storm Front which I've already read so I knew what would happen but it was still fun to see. They do a fair job of getting the books to come alive on TV, and they fixed "bob" as compared to the regular TV show. He's now back to being a talking skull instead of a ghost like guy.

I also got the chairs assembled and glued together, now we just have to get the stapler from mom so we can recover them with the new darker fabric.

Today was fairly laid back, I didn't go anywhere but I did clean my rifle and get from the hunt finally, and clean up the crap in the garage and do some laundry. We did get outside twice though, once for a walk to Starbucks as usual and then for a longer walk after dinner. Having it be dark in the morning is a good trade for having a lot of light late.

First real session with the trainer today, and she said that because we only had 30 minutes we only had time for 2 exercises. 2? Well, each one has like 3-4 moves to it and there is cardio in the middle so I was totally whipped by the end of the session. This could work out better than I thought. She wants me to eat more protein though, and take protein shakes. I hate those things. Ugh.

I'm not really sure why I'm still doing times and dates in German. At this point they're about all I can do, and I doubt I can say them correctly anymore. Use it or lose it.

I uh, had something important to write but I just forgot. Maybe it will come back to me.

Of the 3 terminal programs I use only Terminal on the Mac gets the umlauts correct anymore. Putty stopped working (I don't remember doing an upgrade, so I'm guessing one of the FCX updates broke it) and xterm stopped working as well. Not the end of the world, and I imagine I could fix it if I actually looked at the term or language stuff.

The trainer chick didn't show up yesterday, she had some problem with her kid and daycare so we did today instead. The first meeting was mostly just the assessment, body fat test and designing some workouts. I don't think the body fat thing is right, she said I'm at 20%. Once again I'm 'fat' according to the charts. BMI is always wrong since it's only for sedentary people, but the body fat chart hasn't changed in years. 20% eh? So working out 4x a week hasn't managed to make me even 'average'? How exactly does that work? I'm wearing the same size pants as I was 15 years ago (damn I'm getting old), so I must have been fat in college too. Somehow I doubt the accuracy of their tests.

Another busy weekend. Saturday morning we went up and got the table back fro the finisher. The woman is very happy with how it turned out. I must admit it looks better in the room that I thought it would. The Ikea chairs are a 100% match on the wood texture and color, but the white seat cushions have got to go. They're easy to swap out, we just have to pick a fabric we like and get to work.

After that we went and dropped the Tracker off at the mechanic and while the woman went off to ride I sat around and watched TV and cleaned the house a bit after running around to a few gun shops trying to find my rifle (no luck).

The mechanic called and said that they got a P0400 code which is something to do with the EGR system and they wanted $625 to fix it. I said no and we went and picked it up. Doing some research on the net it seems that P0400 in the Tracker/Sidekick is very common and usually doesn't mean that any of the EGR parts are bad. It can mean that the various tubes are filled with carbon crap and need to be cleaned, or the tube that leads from the block to the head is plugged, or a couple of other things. There are test procedures to diagnose which of the 3 parts have failed if it's not a clog, and they said having your mechanic just replace everything (which is what they always want to do regardless of which part is at fault) is a waste as it might not cure the problem. I did the easy part of cleaning out the head tube, and there was some carbon crap that blew out of there when I hit it with the carb cleaner. I also tapped all the other hoses and made sure they weren't kinked. After that with the light reset I drove 30-ish miles running errands and got no light. The diag sheet says you have to drive 12 miles and go through 2 'driving cycles' (whatever that is) to see the fault. So, I either fixed it, or it's just waiting until tomorrow to rear it's head again. I've got about a dozen other things to try before I have to buy parts and since each one is testable by itself I can only buy the one I need. I hate mechanics.

Saturday night we went to dinner with Sue and Matt, and with their kid due in like 2 weeks it's probably the last time we'll ever see them. We ended up going to Nola's in Palo Alto and it was good as usual. I was going to get an adult beverage but no one was drinking as Sue couldn't, which I guess is good as it kept the dinner bill down. Downtown was busy with people walking around the Nola's wasn't hopping when we left at 8:30, it's usually packed by 7. Either no one wanted to go out to eat on a really pleasant spring evening, or their smaller portions and higher prices are keeping people away. I still got enough strip steak to cut the meal in half and bring it home for lunch today.

Today we went to OSH to pick up some plants and get the garden started. We got tomatoes (some for salsa and some tiny ones for the woman to eat), herbs, strawberries and instead of corn this year I'm going to try to grow a pumpkin. I don't see why the vines can't just grow out of the box and on the ground, they shouldn't have to sit in dirt to grow. I only got 1 plant, and it's in a pretty big box by porch standards so I'm hoping to get at least a single pumpkin for Halloween this year. Takes 100 days for the thing to produce. We also replanted the lemon tree into the largest pot (previously the corn pot) and get it some fresh soil and fertilizer. The woman was all jazzed about feeding the birds at starbucks this morning so we got a bird feeder and hung it by the front steps. I didn't have any twine, but I did have some fine quality tactical black psycho cord which as it turns out can be used to rig weapons, secure prisoners, make shelters and hang bird feeders. Who knew?

I also got my Amazon order places, a few books I had wanted finally came out in paperback. The site was down on Friday night, I couldn't check orders or get to my shopping cart. Never seen a 'maintenance in progress' page on Amazon before. The woman got me to throw the latest Bauhaus album on the order. It's her favorite goth/punk/whatever band from college and it's their first album in 25 years.

The woman said that perhaps I should see my doc about getting some meds to control my anxiety. I don't think it's that bad yet. It's more like an exercise program, you can get your heart rate up into the 100s while just sitting at a desk. It's like free cardio.

Yesterday the guy who retired from the job I'm in stopped by to visit with everyone. He seemed nice enough, and they he suggested that we ride to Alice's for lunch. Ah, cool. Only he, myself and Josh could go, but it was still a good lunchtime ride. We were a motley crew though, he was on a Goldwing 1800 complete with trailer (which it turned out had an inflatable kayak in it), me on the KLR and Josh on his VFR800. He's a good rider, if a bit aggressive with the throttle. He likes blasting away on the strait sections, and his bike smokes a lot so he must have been beating on it like that for a long time. Lunch was good and while not sunny up there it was still in the low 60s so we could sit outside with all of the other bikers that had slipped away for lunch. There was also a CHP training session gong on up there so maybe 20 CHP bikes showed up and rode around while we were eating. Guess they're gearing up to start hassling bikers on the mountain again now that it's getting warmer and the morons will be out on the weekends.

Hey, to JC emailed us the pictures he took at lunch yesterday. Here is the only one I'm in. You can see the Goldwing, and sorta make out the trailer with it's cooler full of diet cokes strapped to the front of it in between the cops there.

I'm learning to read those big automated signs that caltrans put up to try to tell you how long it's going to take to get places on the freeway. If it says it' takes 15 minutes to get to Cupertino, it will take about 15 minutes. If it says 18 minutes it takes about 25, and if it says 20 it means 30, but only if you're on a motorcycle. This morning it said 20 and it took me 30 minutes easy to get to my exit and that was using the carpool lane and lane splitting. 280 was at a dead stop a bunch of times. I can't imagine how they think it would only take 20 minutes in a car. They're still entertaining signs, but the numbers don't quite jive with reality.

Last night's game was OK, ran a bit long and I didn't get to bed until right before midnight. I made 6th level which doesn't give me too much new to play with, but the even levels rarely do. It's kinda a bummer than the campaign world is ending this year, I really want to try out a few more character types but there is no time to do it and get them past 3rd level. I will be happy with the new rules changes. Not because I think the current rules are bad, but it's just that there are so damn many books and all the 'power players' have them and it really makes things unbalanced for those of us who aren't carrying around a whole library worth of stuff. Maybe I'm just jealous or something, but the 4th edition puts us all back on a level playing field.

Finally figured out why some of my off-site backups are going weird on me.... the mac filesystem is case insensitive. Apparently I've got a few folders of images that are foo.jpg and foo.JPG, obviously from some movement from a windows box and there is some code in memtest86+ (why I'm backing that up I don't know but it's in one of my backed up directories) has foo.S and foo.s so it's always copying the files over the top of each other which then shows up later in the rsync diffs.

This morning's workout took it out of me, I think missing yesterday gave me enough rest to do today right. I got a call from the gym too, they have an opening with a trainer... but it's a chick. David (guy I share an office with) says he's seen her at the gym and she is pretty hard core, so I guess I'll give it a try. I had to check with Kristen first, wanted to make sure she wasn't going to wig out or anything. No idea why she would, but she deals with enough clients that have been cheated on that it's good to clear these sorts of things first.

My off site backups at work are encrypted now, my external disk just has one big encrypted .dmg file on it. I could leave it on the root disk of my iMac I suppose, no reason to keep the external disk around other than I feel somewhat better keeping my stuff on my hard drive. I was using truecrypt to do it but now I'm just using a standard mac disk image. It's less portable though, but it's not running fat32 as it's file system like the truecrypt stuff wanted to do.

I didn't even notice that there were 29 days in February, I just kept updating the journal like normal and got lucky.

Saturday we moved the woman's office, she's in her new building now that's nicer, safer (24x7 security and lobby people) and cheaper. I hope there isn't some fatal flaw we're missing! The move went pretty fast, we had 4 of her friends helping so there were people to stay with the truck to fend off the homeless (there were at least 4 of them hanging around while we were unloading) as well as people to help move the sofa. Kristen was so worried we would never get it out of there but it was a piece of cake. Guess my high school job of moving furniture pays off sometimes. One of her friends did note that my dad and I are 'just not city people'. We both remarked that Market street smells like urine, and she said you just get used to it. The guy sleeping in his own filth in front of the sandwich shop really didn't make us want to stop and eat. Why SF people put up with that crap is beyond me.

With the move done and me back home by noon, (the woman BARTed up so she could have lunch with her friends and organize her office) you would think I got some stuff done. Alas, it wasn't to be. I spent the afternoon reading, watching TV and generally not doing anything. I had a lot of projects on the list, but nothing looked better than doing nothing. :)

One interesting thing was that we finally heard back from Sue. Her Agilent email stopped working, she didn't return calls, etc. We hadn't seen any movement at her house in forever so we either assumed she was dead, moved back to Boston, or was pregnant. On Saturday she called and said they were at the townhouse showing it to potential renters and we should stop by. We did, and she's 8.5 months pregnant. Ha, I knew it. We're supposed to get together with them next Saturday for dinner. Sue says that she's trying to reconnect with all her friends, she's pretty much ignored everyone for the last year due to the impending kid, but claims that they'll have more time to be social after the kid is born. Um, I don't think that's how it works, but it's a nice thought.

Sunday we did errands in the morning; took me 3 times to find an auto parts store that was excepting oil for recycling. The one closest to the house is actually going out of business which sucks because it's one of the last 'real' auto parts stores. The next closest two stores mostly sell crap like floor mats, chrome naked lady mud flaps, neon kits, about 10000 types of wax, etc. I'm sure it's popular with the Mexicans but isn't so good for trying to actually fix cars and get parts. I guess it makes sense though, they stock so little that you end up ordering everything and if you're going to order, pay sales tax and shipping you might as well do it online and have it delivered to your house instead of making yet another trip. Wonder where the independent shops get their parts?

We also spent some time at the craft store trying to come up with big key chains to put the bathroom keys on at the woman's new office. After coming up with at least 4 good ideas, we finally settled on some small flat wood creatures (a ladybug and a turtle) that I would drill holes in and attach the keys with some small chain. They turned out pretty good, I should get an A in arts-and-crafts this semester. She also wrote MEN and WOMEN on the backs just to make sure people figured it out. In SF, it's hard to tell who's a ladybug and who's a turtle. :)

The rest of Sunday was shot with me going to a game, and the woman watching NASCAR and writing her article.