Busy weekend. Saturday I went up to Hayward and looked at a totally beat Vstrom. It was OK, but with 46k miles it was starting to show it's age. I would have considered it except that today by random luck another one showed up on craigslist... and I went and looked at it and bought it. Or tentatively bought it. We agreed on a price and now we just have to take it to get inspected. Unfortunately the guy is going to be traveling all next week so we have to do it after labor day. Hope he doesn't sell it out from under me, it's equipped pretty much exactly as I would want it. A few too many doo-dads, but they'll all come off easily enough. Here is a bad iPhone photo:

Yesterday after Hayward we dropped the KLR off at the dealership to have them inspect it and see just how bent it is (good to know in case I can sell it as a bike and not have to part it out) and then went up to Alameda to have dinner with the woman's old land lords. Apparently months ago I found some ad for a place called "The Trappist", a European beer house in Oakland. I had forgotten but everyone else remembered so we went there for some beer tasting. Normally I don't really like beer, but there were a few that were actually really good.

I had a full glass of the Abt12 stuff, nearly killed me. It was not nasty at all, nothing like I expected a brown beer to be like.

The woman is dangerously close to getting an actual pet (vs. the ducks and turtles that live in the creek behind us that she calls her pets). She's been looking at these dwarf hamsters for about 2 years now and now that I told her that if she bought the cage and crap used she could get one she's been surfing CL like mad... oy.

Almost forgot to mention that I worked until 10pm on Friday. We had a new box in that was not working correctly and I had to run over to the vendor and pickup some Ethernet cards (easier than going to Fry's and buying them myself). I struggled to get it working and emailed their support people at 9pm Friday and one of the techs emailed me back with the exact BIOS changes I had to make to get things working, all based on my random ramblings about the fact that when the OS was loading the ping times to the interface went up by 100x normal. I was thinking it was some sort of interrupt problem like in the old days. Apparently that's not the default cause of all woes like it used to be.

A whole week with nothing to report, but with work taking up so much time I haven't actually done anything worth writing down. :(

Double bike crash on the trip this weekend. I was stopped waiting to turn left into a gas station and dad ran into me. KLR was down and is bent up, his bike went down and ended up in a ditch. Dad's hand is cut up, my arm is scratched (wore through my jacket, looks like the textile stuff really isn't that good after all). Next up, dealing with insurance and waiting for that $500+ towing bill to get us to the U-haul place.

Pics are on the main page. No pics of the crashed KLR, I got my bike off the road before I broke out the camera.

OK, not a lot of text updates but I do have the dinner pics (taken without the flash so we didn't look like total tourists) and the pics from the rabbit hunt on Monday up on the main page. Other than that, just been crazy busy at work.

I did manage to get all the bike service taken care of so it's ready to roll tomorrow night on my trip up through Reno to the Shasta land and back with dad for his birthday.

Thing about writing reports, tickets and reviews all day for a week really makes it so that you don't want to write anything in your spare time. Went to the 4x4 club meeting on Tuesday but otherwise been working late and not even playing WoW much. Yea, it's that bad.

KLR turned over 40k miles on the lunch ride today. That's something. Need to check the valves, change the oil, replace the chain and sprockets and maybe even the clutch cable. It's hurting for some service.

There was a grass fire going when I got home from work on Friday. The woman called the fire department, I grabbed an extinguisher and hopped the fence to check it out (in case it was small enough to put out) and about 15 other people stood around and looked on stupidly. Um, hello? Why did no one else call? Were they waiting for it to jump the ditch and light the complex on fire before they did anything? Anyway, pics here here.

Just when you think "hey, we're actually getting caught up on our backlog of work" more crap comes your way. Not like real work, but it's review time. Of course they've skipped review for the last, well, forever and now all of a sudden it's a huge priority. Add to that the fact that they were supposed to start last week, but HR didn't tell anyone because they were waiting to see what the salary budget is (which we still don't know), means we're already behind schedule because we didn't know when to start. As an added bonus, they're not opening the review tool for another two weeks so we have to do everything by hand now, then transfer it into the tool when it's officially open because it's only open for a week as they're so far behind. HR sucks and they don't even know it (or care mostly likely).

I totally forgot to mention that the in-laws were here last weekend and the happy happy joy joy relief that they're gone. If I had my choice between reviews and in-laws, I would choose the reviews so I suppose it's not all so bad.

The woman said we're officially foodies now, we can't even deny it. We spent Sunday morning at the Fremont Art & Wine festival and passed up all the crap food (ie funnel cakes and deep fried whatever) and came home with truffle oil, apple wood smoked sea salt, ostrich jerky and some artichoke heart infused pasta. Say what you will but the pasta was awesome even with me cooking it. Top that with the fact we just made reservations for next Saturday at Fleur de Lys, that I'm worried Michael Chiarello will take down our boy Hebert on Top Chef, and that we're planning part of the Australia trip around which restaurants we want to go to pretty much seals the deal.

I think I mentioned it last week but never showed the picture, but I figured out how to get the bow to the range on the bike:

I guess 'figured it out' is a bit much, it's just bungeed on the back. More it's that I got up the courage to ride on the freeway with a huge ass wing on the back of the bike. It actually handles it just fine, the only downside is that airflow is now directed UP at my back which eventually catches under my jacket and make it billow up in a most annoying way. Next time I might take off the top case and just lay the bow completely flat on the luggage rack. Might make a removable platform to put it on so it's got more than 1' of support in the middle.

Got rained on today coming to work. Like real rain, soaked through my jacket and everything. Wasn't prepared for fall weather so soon!

I just got a copy of the review form that was sent out about me. Scary! All my employees get to provide input. That should be interesting.

My trusty old MP3 player I got free from Hitachi about 8 years ago (when 128mb player was huge) started flaking out. All the bouncing around while running with it was making the headphones cut out. I figured it was a broken solder joint since I doubted they had any strain relief on the headphone jack and figured it was just soldered right to the board and that's it. Popping it open it was exactly what I thought it was, using my jeweler's loop showed the broken joint. It was a bit tricky to do fine soldering with my crappy iron I only use for automotive wiring but it worked. Now I have stereo again. Take that disposable Chinese electronics!