Damn this place is busy.

Saturday I worked about 5-6 hours installing a custom locking cabinet in the data center in one of our racks. A group that we're hosting some servers for has some crazy legal requirements that they're locked up and for only 7 servers I wasn't about to pull one of our racks so they could put in a big locking cabinet. This thing I had built was done off a sketch with only minimal dimensions so it didn't fit right. Holes didn't line up, hardware was mis-matched, etc. I had to dremel a lot of new holes and make some custom mounts up on the fly out of junk I found around the office. It works, but it's not pretty.

Neither the woman nor I can remember Saturday night, must have been a bunch of nothing I guess. Sunday AM we went sofa shopping for the 1000th time, but this time we got something. Basset does custom stuff where you pick from a few dozen options and a bunch of materials and they make you what you want. It's more than the stuff at Crate & Barrel but it's exactly what we wanted. 30 days to build it, then we'll finally have our chase lounge sofa for the living room.

Also on Sunday I loaded up some of those .416 Remington Mag rounds for Dave. I actually got a case stuck in the sizing die (first time that's ever happened) so I'm going to have to send it back to Hornady to have it repaired. It's cheap to do, just a hassle.

Sometime in the last few days I figured out a way better method of making sure the chain is lined up on the bike. Just run a broom handle against the tire and see i it's parallel to the chain. Super fast and easy.

Last night I took the heat shield off the catalytic converter on the tracker to see if it was what was rattling. It's not. It took a while since the mechanic tack welded it on trying to make it stop rattling, dremel-ing off welds while under the car is not a fun time. Of course some of the rusty bolts broke off, even using liquid wrench to try to loosen them, so the shield is only half attached. At least it doesn't rattle any worse than whatever else under there is rattling. Gotta hit OSH at some point to get more bolts to finish the job.

I'll put the pictures up now to remind me what to write about tomorrow.

Hellish on-call week so far. Ended up having to go back in on Tuesday night until about 3am dealing with a dead RAID setup. Funny thing, one of the redundant controllers blew and took all 5 drives in the array with it. Had to replace the controller and disks and recover from backups. Gotta love Apple's 'enterprise' quality hardware. Sigh.

Tonight instead of playing WoW while the woman watched survivor I actually finished up some code I was working on. Two of the stupid pages that woke me up on Monday were for things with an easy automated solution that everyone was too afraid to put in place. Some people don't like things getting auto-fixed, they want a person to wake up, log in and type the command by hand. Lame! Good thing about being a manger now, I can start to attack the old fearful ways of doing things with a little more authority.

It's been raining for a long time now, I don't think I'll be riding in tomorrow. At least it's a 'holiday' so traffic should be light.

Back from my parents, photos of dad's new knee and all the snow I had to clear are on the main page.

I was going to type a lot of stuff but I gotta go up to Pioneer now to help take dad home from the hospital. There is at least 4" of snow on the driveway at this point and he obviously can't plow it and mom can't either.

Here is a picture of the woman on TV in the background of some NASCAR show. She's the small blurry dot behind the crew.

Drove up to Pioneer this afternoon to visit with dad in the hospital after his knee surgery. He's supposed to go home tonight, tomorrow or now maybe Sunday. With all of the snow mom won't be able to drive up the driveway and dad won't be able to walk so I'm here to run the snow blower and clear the drive. Coming in tonight there were about 6-8" of snow on the drive, the tracker made it but it was getting dicey the last few hundred yards. Damn that driveway is long when you're crawling up it in 4-low hoping for traction.

While at the hospital I went out to get mom and I some food and got rear ended by a chick at a stop sign. The tracker seems totally unhurt but her Honda was a bit crunched. It was clearly not the first time it had hit something, she said she hit a deer a few weeks back. Anyway, while we were trading info she was clearly hitting on me, telling me how I could tell my friends I met a cool chick in an accident and how everyone was going snowboarding and she wanted to know if I was going, etc. I had to tell her my wife wouldn't be amused if I went snowboarding for the weekend. It did feel good to get hit on though. On, and in a totally stupid move I took some pics of the license plate and her insurance card (but not her license since she claimed to not have it with her) but I didn't take a picture of her. Doh! Also unfortunately the good camera was in my backpack in the hospital room.

While downloading from the phone I found this picture of Seth testing his new carbon arrows in his garage.

I got my annual review on Thursday. They said congratulations on your promotion, but no raise. They are giving me a gift card though. Ooo.... very exciting. $25 to TGI Fridays is way better than a raise.

I put a new chain on the KLR this morning, took me about 20 minutes and most of that was cutting the old chain off with the dremel. I thought popping the safety clip off the master link would let me take the chain apart but it was on there very solid. Good to know, better than having it fall apart on the road.

I'm sun burnt, wind burnt and got rained on today. A trifecta of misery. This weekend was the first psycho class I've done in over a year, and I'm pretty sure it's the first time I've fired a handgun in over a year. My hands are really chewed up, all my shooting clauses are gone and my hands are pretty soft from lack of any real physical work without the use of gloves. The palm of my hand got cut up from the edge of the grip safety, something that should be smooth but has somehow become pretty sharp. How have I missed that all these years? Probably just lived with it. The gunsmith guy was at the class this weekend and he took my grip safety home on Saturday and smoothed it out and refinished it. It's not blued because it's a stainless steel piece so it's got some other funky coating on it. He said Kimbers are a mix of types of metal and now I can see it since I now have 4 distinct finishes on different parts of the gun that have worn out/broken over the years.

I think I did OK for out of practice I was. There were a couple of air force and a couple of army guys there, and they all had Iraq stories. Some of their gear was pretty cool, stuff they've obviously brought back with them but what was interesting was none of them were using M9s. Apparently the M9 isn't that popular of an issue weapon, although I doubt any of them actually had handguns while on duty.

This is the same instructor I had for the rifle class so I reiterated my desire to go to his next precision rifle class. He says I'm on the list as soon as he gets one scheduled.

I finally got over my hangups and went and drove one of the SRT-4 Neons that have been sitting on the dealer's lot for 6+ months. Now I know why. Yes, the dealer has them marked up 30% over what they're worth on the real market but I think the real reason they're still there is that they're not that fun to drive. Supposedly they have 240hp but they don't feel all that fast. Even at 3/4 throttle a Prius was beating us up the on-ramp. A Prius? What's up with that? I also thing that one had be de-riced. There was a turbo timer in it, and the airbox looked way too clean to be the original since all the other plastic in the engine compartment looked cooked. My guess is they put it back to stock before turning it in, so who knows how hard it was run for the 40k miles it has on it. Another car taken off the list.

Speaking of cars I got the Tracker back yesterday. Total damage to my wallet was $1300 for the clutch and rebuilding the transmission. In reality that's not too bad. I found rebuilt transmissions for $1600 and I would have had to put it in myself and shipped the core back and I still wouldn't have had a new clutch. All in all it was better to have it done.

The new dishwasher is in, actually has been for a few days I just finally got around to posting the pics. Still not happy with the trim, or lack there of, at the top. The piece I got looks kinda funky and doesn't fill the gap as well as I thought it should so I've got to make another home depot run. I need one that's 1/2" thick and 1" tall, the 3/4" quarter round isn't cutting it being wrong in both directions as it turns out. Couldn't really tell what would look right until I got it in there and said 'yep, that's not it'.

I also got around to knocking the rust of the KLR exhaust and repainting it. I used rustolium BBQ paint and it worked really well. I'm not sure what the propellant used is, it seemed a lot different than other spray paint. It almost looked like alcohol or something, it evaporated off the surface really fast. The paint must also be designed to cover over old rust and grease and whatnot because with even the minimal prep I did with the wire brush the finished product looks pretty good. Supposedly the header pipe will turn brown again in a few weeks, or so say the people on the klr list who have done the same thing. As long as it's not rusting that's good enough in the end.

Saturday we went to Scott and Lina's for dinner. Their crazy daughter was there for the first part but then went to go hang out with her friends. Turns out that 'hanging out' to a 16 year old now means drinking, smoking and drugs, and her parents are convinced they can't do anything about it. Scott just tells her not to do it in the house, Lina says all kids do it and she has to learn on her own. Seems a bit lax on their part to me, I don't really thing _all_ kids are doing that, just the ones on the fast track to being welfare leaches. I think they'll be in for a shock when she gets her first STD or gets knocked up. You know it's coming, you can't be reckless for years and not have something happen. Those teenage moms come from somewhere.