The weekend in the city was a success. Saturday we walked around, up to Pacific Heights, to check out the mansions and see one of the woman's clients houses. $21M for a really large concrete box (in the photos linked from the main page). It's got an incredible view and just the glance we saw through the front door window shows some impressive stuff inside. They have a back yard, that says something right there. We also walked around the Presidio where Lucas Films new digs are, and walked along the beach for a bit. It's funny how many of the marina girls were in 'uniform'. Workout or yoga pants and a hooded sweatshirt. Yesterday was red shirt and black pants day, today was blue shirt and black pants. At least half the chicks we saw were dressed like this, and unlike the south bay they weren't a bunch of fatties. All that walking must make a difference.

Dinner at A16 was pretty good. We had some sort of cheese thing for an appatizer as well as house made lonza which is like prosciutto but lighter in flavor and not as salty. Tasty. For mains the woman had the lamb shank and I had the rabbit. The rabbit comes two ways, parts of it are on a stick fired in a wood oven and parts of it as a spicy sausage. Double tasty. We were going to skip dessert but they had house made gelatto and the waitress convinced us to try it. Chocolate, caramel and some sort of orange/lemon/lime stuff. The fruity one was tasty and really cleansed your palette between bites of the other two. A fine meal, way better than the rabbit I had last week for sure.

Staying at Lisa's worked out well, even though we were hiding from her landlord. Apparently the guy is an ass so she didn't want him to know we were there when she was gone. Humph.

Today we went to Starbucks for our usual, then went over to the police barn to say hi to the guys Kristen used to be a groom for. We ended up staying there for 4 hours, good thing those guys don't actually have to work. We did get home in time for me to check the valves on the bike and change the oil. The valves were still all in spec, but they're getting close. I may not get as lucky next time and will have to actually pull the cams and replace the shims. I have a full shim kit, it shouldn't be a problem but it's still work I don't want to do. I've not had the tank off in 6k miles, it was kinda dirty under there. Let's hope I don't have to pull it again until 41k.

The woman finally got her sofa. It's darker brown in person, the flash much have washed it out (along with the carpet). Now she wants a new coffee table and end table, the black and glass doesn't match. Ugh.

Credit card is melting with all of the plane tickets. The woman has all our OZ flights booked now (even the interior flights) and several of the B&Bs booked as well. I got my SFO<->MUC tickets and put the deposit down on the tour. All these flights on airlines not part of any normal frequent flier programs kinda sucks but with the 'major' airlines charging 25-50% more for the same flights it's hard to justify.. Qantas and KLM, humph. Anyway, I gotta pay it off quick, I think they changed the grace period and can start charging interest sooner. Normally I just on-line pay the thing after each major purchase to make sure there is no balance but with all the activity I have to be really on top of it.

I've got a project management class tonight, won't get home until 9pm. The sofa is supposed to be delivered today, the woman will get to lounge on it way before I will.

Bad news today: one of my team quit today. He's the senior most guy, made a bunch of money in previous start-ups and made some cash out of the PA buy and he's had enough Apple BS and is going to retire for a while. Lucky bastard!

Good news today: Edelweiss is going to put on the scouting tour. I got the email about it today and talked to the chick on the phone about flights. Airfare isn't cheap, but it's not bad either. More good news? I got a bonus today and even after taxes it pays for 75% of my bike trip. Sweetness.

I learned to take screen shots in WoW today (well, Friday but today is the first day I got to try it out). Pretty boring, I'll have to do something spiffy and try to snag it.

Saturday morning I went in to work for a bit, Peter was doing most of the real stuff but I was there to help troubleshoot and act in a managerial capacity. After there I went directly to the range and managed to fire 21 shots before the phone started ringing. I gave up at the range and went home to deal with the supposedly horrible things going on, but they were actually pretty minor. What a waste.

While finishing up the work stuff dad calls to tell me that he's on his way to Fresno to buy a bike. He's got a bug to ride again after reading all those motorcycle touring magazines I gave him to read while recovering and apparently a nice cheap used bike to bomb around on isn't in the works for him... so... he drops almost $14k on an '09 Triumph Tiger (with ABS and bags). Crazy. I'll be amazed if he actually rides it enough to make it past the 6k service.

I should also note that he hasn't test ridden the bike and in fact can't even really sit on it in a riding position, his knee won't bend enough yet. Obviously he didn't ride it home, they loaded it into the truck and he and mom had to get it out, in the snow. They had 4-6" at the house when they got there.

So the new bike is only half the picture. On Friday when he had mom's car in for service he was stuck at the dealership and somehow managed to trade in mom's car on a Mercedes ML (4 matic of course). Um, what? Yea, they didn't want to buy my tracker for $3k so mom could haul plants and go through the snow, instead they drop $30k+ to have her do that. WTF? They're never going to retire.

Last night we went to dinner with Scott and Lina at Zucca in Mountain View. I had the rabbit which was cooked well but didn't have a lot of flavor. The sauce should have been a reduction rather than a broth, but at least the salmon bisque was good. After we went and played some pool at shoreline. I wasn't shooting for crap, but the woman kicked butt and carried us to a victory 5 games to 1. So much for all of Scott's trash talking. :)

Today we made waffles and bacon for breakfast, finished up the taxes and our will paperwork to send in and the woman watched the race while I worked on the Tracker. I'm much closer to tracking down the annoying exhaust rattle. I found 2 missing bolts so far, one on the heat shield and one on a random (fairly large) bracket holding the Y pipe to the block. That kit of random metric bolts I got a few weeks ago is really coming in handy. No way I would have had all these sizes from just the collection of stuff I have for the KLR.

I also cleaned and waxed the KLR chain using the chemicals I got at GP on Saturday while we were going to dinner. We had some time to kill so we went there and stopped at wheels and deals so I could look at crappy used cars. I forgot we also went to Red Rocks Coffee in Mountain View while waiting. Their hot chocolate is different that Starbucks. Not better, not worse, just different.

The neighbors are making a ton of noise vacuuming and bumping around. Why don't they do that during the day like normal people? I vacuumed and cleaned the toilets at 2pm, not at 8:15pm.

One last thing. While surfing looking for info on the Tracker exhaust system (and some complaints about rattling due to rotted gaskets), I found this dealer info sheet for the 1998 Tracker. Kinda a funny read when the compare it to the other vehicles in it's 'class'. Those daytime running lights are sure a bonus.

Last nights dreams included: moving my robe closer to the bed because it was raining, getting trapped in a robotic wood pulp or processing plant and trying to hide from the robots, and being on a date with Tina Fey seeing a really bad Indian movie but being interrupted by an earthquake. I was actually 'awake' during the robe thing, the woman asked me why I was 'petting the carpet' when I was really trying to reach my robe on the floor while staying in bed. You're supposed to be paralyzed when you dream, dammit.

OK, off to the gym.

Finally got that stuck case out of the .416 die. The stuck case extractor turned out to be a bust, it works by basically pushing a rod down through the top of the die (with the expander removed) and hammering the shit out of it until the brass comes out. That's dumb, and doesn't work if you can't get the expander out which I can't since I don't have a threaded expander rod. I tried this method off one of the psycho sites and it worked perfectly:

You'll need:
1/4" X20 tap
13/64" drill
1/4" X20 bolt (1 &1/4" length should do fine)
4 or 5 fender washers of 1/4" or greater (the bolt must fit inside them)
Any socket, that will closely match the diameter of your die and allow the head of the stuck case in question to fit into it.

Chuck the die in a padded bench vise,
Drill out the primer,
Tap the hole,
insert the bolt in to a couple washers,
drop bolt into the drive end of the socket,
start bolt into primer hole and begin to tighten until it comes out.

13mm socket fit perfectly, and if I had been thinking I would have got a metric tap and bolt. I was going to buy a whole set of taps since they're cheaper in sets but the USA made tap set was $40 so I opted to just buy the tap I needed. Still paid for the USA made one, they seemed more solid than the Chinese stuff.

We've got our OZ tickets booked, Oct 9-23. Saved a ton with their special deals so we have enough to do lots of fun stuff. So far I've got my rally day booked for the 17th http://www.extremedriving.net

Monday I was in a writing seminar all day and although it was a bit rushed it was useful. Not so much for what it taught about actual writing, but about communications styles. Apparently I'm not the only one who things the modern 'soft friendly non-offensive' style that so many business things use is totally lame. Unfortunately at least half the people do like the fluff so it's unlikely to go away. People who are annoyed by fluff are not so lame to complain about it vs. those who want their hand held and do complain if things aren't 'friendly'. Guess those people really do think their credit card companies, the cable company and the government have their best interest at heart.

Yesterday and today were a total blur of meetings. 1 on 1s with bad employees, planning sessions, vendor lunches, etc. Almost like the old days, except that here meetings are only part of my job, I still have to be the tech lead as well. Hopefully I can get Peter up to speed on that so I can hand it over.

So much for Friday the 13th and so much for the WoW guild meet-up. Oh, the meet-up happened but I wasn't there. About 5:45pm I was getting ready to leave and the license server (that's been flaky for months but that we couldn't take down because 'it's not a good time for an outage') finally died big time. Why couldn't I have been gone and let the on-call guy take care of it? Wouldn't have mattered, no one actually knows how our craptastic license server works but since I had been working on the replacement I was at least somewhat familiar with it I'm sure they would have been calling me anyway. Better to do it there than trying to diagnose things over the phone while at a bar in SF. Got done around 9:30pm, would have only been 3.5 hours late had I actually gone up. Oddly I chose not to. I called the woman and Ellen earlier so they were gone and not waiting around for me.

Saturday I went to the range and did really poorly, like worse than last time. So much for the magic rifle, guess I have to get my skills back in place. The afternoon we spent trying to trip plan for the OZ vacation which is still not that solid. Hard to get in enough interesting stuff without spending half the trip on planes.

Today the woman went to a baby shower so I had the afternoon to goof off. Went for a quick ride out 237 east to Senol, then went by the store to get the woman some flowers. I tried to use the easy-out to get that stuck brass out of the 417 dies but it didn't work so I ordered the actual stuck case extraction tool. If that doesn't work I'll just send it back in to Hornady and pay the money for them to get it out. Probably won't hurt for me to learn how to do it though.

One good thing that did happen on Friday (not sure how I forgot about this) was that Edelweiss sent out a notice about an Alps scouting tour. You ride a bunch of passes in the Alps (obviously some repeats from other tours but some new ones) and you stay on the top of them. I've seen some huts and resort like things as we've gone by, but this one would have us staying there. Not as luxurious but I don't care about that at all. It's a scouting tour so it's cheaper but it's also beta quality since it's the first time they've run it with customers. I put my name on the list, hopefully it happens and I can go. It's an 8 day trip, but I've negotiated for some more vacation this year so hopefully it works out. Otherwise I take it unpaid, I don't do anything else with my money so using it for this would be a good thing.

Here is the tentative map, not sure what all the stars mean though:

I just noticed it's Friday the 13th. Is that why the roads were so quiet this morning? Some new government or banking holiday? :)

Oh, they say we get our tax returns tomorrow. For once it could be an exciting day since I'm expecting a lot back from the quarterlies I paid but didn't need to. One small silver lining to an otherwise bleak market.

Speaking of bleak, I think I've officially met a 'normal' person. Ori, this geeky guy I met at the Taos giftmas dinner thing, and I had lunch yesterday since he's working here too. Or was working here. He's on contract via Taos and his contract is up at the end of the month. Taos says they won't be keeping him on or finding him a new gig because his function 'isn't in their core competency'. Um, yea. He's a tech writer and admits to having no real tech skills. He's got nothing to fall back on, no interest in anything else and isn't sure what he's going to do when he's unemployed (other than sign up for unemployment benifits). He's in his mid 40s I would guess, married to a really strange woman and has absolutely no idea what to do. Kinda scary. He's spending some cash buying some sort of automation program that all tech writers like to use, sounds like a fancy version of PowerPoint with some scripting behind it. Learning that is his only idea so far. I fear for the guy, he's going to be out of the market until things turn around enough that the need only mildly talented people to do trivial tasks.

Sounds like Kenny is having a rough time of it, he gets the snows of winter and the pollen problems of spring. Gotta love WA weather.

Parents came by yesterday, they were down in the valley taking care of tax docs and dad was getting a haircut. He's up and around and can walk short distances with no assistance and longer with a cane, he's way off the walker and crutches. Modern surgical stuff is pretty amazing, his knee is bending better now than it has in 40 years. The doc told him not to run very much as it will just wear out the parts faster and since he's technically young for a total knee replacement it's likely he'll outlive the MTBF on the parts. Wonder if they can just cut it open and swap out the worn bushings? They must think of that stuff.

Busy day of meetings, I'll be glad to be getting home.

Pretty complete weekend. Saturday I went to the range with Don and did pretty poorly, even the magic GAP rifle can't make me shoot without practicing for 5 months. After that the woman and I went for a walk, went to starbucks, and eventually got cleaned up and went to dinner and a show. Dinner wasn't all that, just PF Changs downtown SJ but after we went to the Northside Theater Company and saw The Unexpected Guest. It's an Agatha Christie mystery and I thought the show as pretty good for such a small setup. The theater held maybe 50 people, so there wasn't a bad seat in the house. Priced at only slightly more than a movie, it's worth it to see live theater. We'll be going to their next show for sure, this one is almost at the end of it's run so we don't have to wait too long.

Today after another walk and more starbucks (it is pretty nice out in the mornings now) I changed the oil in the tracker and then went for a ride. First time I've taken a pleasure ride in a long time; almost forgot how to ride in the twisties it's been so long. There were only a few cars in the way and only one cop on the mountain so it wasn't a big deal to zip around. If they're up there hassling bikers this early in the season I'm going to hate to see it when it's actually sunny and warm.

One pleasant change is the 76 station in Saratoga. Instead of charging 50-75 cents per gallon over the going rate like they did before they went out of business, the new owners seem to be charging market rate and actually selling some gas. They also have free bathrooms now (vs 75 cents before and they wouldn't make change at the cashier) and coolers of sodas. Apparently they're trying to attract some of the bike and sports car crowd that would ignore the place before. They're also now proudly selling this:

Now I'm not saying I would pay $8/gal for gas for the KLR, but at least one sport bike guy was filling up with it. Hopefully this new customer focused business model works better than the 'screw the fool that tries to use our gas station' method the previous owners used for so long.

Work is really bad, but rather than folding in I'm making a power play. We'll see how it works out.

Downtime went off right on schedule. First time ever! Proves that something it would take me 10 minutes to do at NVDA really does take 5 people and 1.5 hours to do at Apple.

I'm really surprised that Kenny is looking forward to more episodes of Dollhouse. I'm a Joss fan as much as the next guy but faith (or whatever the actresses name is) just can't pull it off, she can't do the traditions between totally new people well enough. Or maybe it's just because we still think of her as faith? I dunno, I'm not all that impressed but I'll watch them all anyway until it either dies or hooks me in. Joss deserves that much.

The woman says that me working every weekend and playing too much WoW (although she still insists that I don't play too much but she does complain about it at times, weird paradox) are starting to make things boring around the house. We're not going anywhere or doing anything because I'm always burnt out and tired. True enough. So yesterday I came up with a list of 4 plays, 2 comedy shows and 1 random event she could pick from for this weekend. Looks like the murder mystery play (The Unexpected Guest) is winning so far. She also wants to go out for pool and dinner with Scott and Lina which is fine too, we'll do that in a few weeks. Let's hope I can still play pool, they were shocked that I could kick their butt at wii bowling considering I had never played. I keep pointing out that the wii is not real life and you're not really learning how to bowl or play tennis, you're learning to line up stuff on the screen and fake out an accelerometer. My view isn't popular.

Ah, another Sunday morning at the office. Downtime starts at 0830 and I'm hoping this one goes smooth and by the numbers. Wait, they started at 0830? Uh oh.