I just got an ssh app for the iphone and tried to do a journal update with it. VI on a fake little keyboard? PITA. I need to make some sort of easy update thing for my journal where I just bang text into a file and it auto-adds it correctly to the html file.

Work, work and more work. Headed to SAN tomorrow, maybe I can update on the road with something interesting.

Yesterday, after much housework and whatnot in the AM while the woman rode, we went up to Concannon Vineyard and their "Underdog Cafe" for some food and wine tasting. They offer 2 oz pours of over 50 wines so you can try lots without getting trashed (important for us lightweights). We had a couple of 'flights' of 3-wine samples, a cheese plate, the burgers and sliders seen below, desert and brought a bottle of wine home all for only $110 with tip. That's pretty reasonable. The food was good and it was fun to try wines with and without food to really get a feel for why different wines are good for different things.

Today I put the 50 back together and tried to adjust the trigger. The same set screw that controls the initial 'creep' also controls the safety engagement so I can either have a really nice crisp 2 lb trigger with no safety, or a 3 lb gritty, creepy trigger with a functional safety. Obviously I left it with a functional safety, but if I can find a longer screw (perhaps from Don's collection of spares) I can have both. I also cleaned up my camping gear and got that stored away, and changed the oil in the bike in preparation for the SAN run next weekend. The chain still looks good, we'll just hope it's OK after the 1000+ mile run down and back again.

Back from Austin a few days ago, booked 2 more trips for the next two months and am just trying to catch up on being away for so long. Otherwise, not a damn thing interesting has happened.

Day 3 is already in progress. I managed to get up and get a workout in this morning at the tiny little exercise room at the hotel. A quick jaunt on the treadmill (because it's way too freakin' hot and humid even at 7am to run outside) and some free weights and machine work. Probably 25% of what I would normally do but it felt good just to do something other than sit in a chair and type.

Last night we went to some BBQ joint... oh wait I have the receipt in my pocket I can look it up... nope, no reason to do that they put the url on the receipt now a days. County Line BBQ. It was right on some river and would have been nice to sit outside, except for the oppressive heat and humidity. It's sorta like the Caribbean except for the lack of an ocean breeze and the requirement to over-dress for the conditions.

After we got back to the hotel I went for a walk down 5th or 6th street or wherever it is that has all the bars. There were 100s of people on the streets and dozens of bars/clubs on every block. There were even some cute chicks out! Amazing. The clubs had hawkers at the doors so I know that there was no cover and bottles and wells were $2. That seems cheap, but it was just before 11pm, no idea what happened when they fired up the cover charges but it's still 50-75% cheaper than back home. It only took me about 15 minutes to get tired of the noise and crowd but at least I've seen it and at least I got out of the hotel.

Close to end of day 2 here in Austin (again). I'm going to call today early at 7pm, no sense burning out today when we have all day tomorrow still to burn ourselves out. Making good progress though, I think we're going to be successful here.

Sitting in the shade in the quad working on hardware specs for Austin, using my macbook air, the shiny new iphone4 sitting on the table next to me.... damn, I'm a fanboi now. Where are my stupid jeans and messenger bag, and can I turn the vstrom into a fixie?

My boss' boss just walked by with the signed paperwork for the RW site, so now I have more work to do getting the DR site paperwork finished.

Austin was fine, hot, humid, raining, everything you could want in a work environment. I didn't get out to any good food places because it was just too uncomfortable being outside. Ah well, maybe when I'm there next week I'll eat somewhere other than the hotel.

This weekend I went to Parkfield again for some camping and rabbit hunting. The hunting turned out excellent. I hit my cottontail limit in about 30 minutes of walking/driving around. I took one rabbit on the road, then another, then it got interesting. I took one near a dry creek bed and while going to get him (with my rifle at low ready because the rancher said he saw some rattle snakes around the area (!) I saw another and got him too. Then when going back to the Jeep I saw another and got that one as well. It wasn't so much as hunting as it was 'harvesting' them. I saw lots more on the way back to camp, but with 5 rabbits to clean already I wasn't interested in going back out in the morning to get another 5 (limit is 5/day with 10 max in possession). I also got 1 jackrabbit to replace the one I made jerky with. I want to try that again. There is no season nor limit on jackrabbits, they're classified as an agricultural pest and can be taken at will.

On the way out yesterday I picked up a cheap LED head lamp at REI.... saved the day. I could field dress the rabbits with no light problems with that lamp on my head. Best buy in a long time as far as gizmos go.

Hunting may have been good, but camping sucked butt. I was woken up around 2am to water on my face.... it was raining. WTF? My 20 year old tent isn't water proof anymore and the rain fly wasn't on it anyway (because it was 95F+ all day it wasn't exactly cool at night) so I was getting water directly inside. In a wet, cold panic I threw the sleeping bag over my head/back, gathered up my supplies (including the rifle, I was still worried about rattlesnakes in camp in the AM) and climbed into the back of the Jeep where I ended up sleeping. Wow, talk about uncomfortable. Not as bad as sleeping in coach, but still not as comfy as the bag on the ground. At least I was dry.

Today I drove back home early after saying goodbye to the rancher who was packing up a quad with supplies to go fix a fence. I noticed he had a .357 on his hip; guessing that was snake defense unless he's dealing with some really ornery fence posts. I made good time, got the Jeep unpacked and all my wet gear laid out in the garage. Hopefully it dries without stinking, I already ripped the sleeping bag in the washer so I don't want to have to take it in to get it dry cleaned so soon.

Here is one good pic I took in wide-screen mode so I could use it as a new background at work:

Oh, and I did get to hear the 2m repeater down by Parkfield when I was there. I fired up the HT with the amp and called out but no one answered, but about 10 seconds later the automated repeater gave out it's sign so I know I got the tone squelch setting correctly (because I could hear the repeater sign). I don't know if the repeater just does that every so often or if I triggered it with a random pattern of TXes (like the runway lights at Meadowlake that come on when you trigger TX 3 times in a row). I gotta ask Kenny.

I think I found a flaw in the macbook air's power setup. I left it plugged in last night with an rsync running over the wireless and my iphone plugged in charging and when I got up this morning it was in sleep mode, the rsync was dead and the battery showed 1%. Apparently the power brick doesn't supply enough juice for continual wifi and USB and CPU usage. Now I'm stuck next to the power plug in the airport and won't be able to work on the plane like I planned. Sigh.

Business travelers have to be the biggest collection of douche bags anywhere. This too cool for school sales type guy is talking REALLY LOUD and all important on his phone in the middle of the terminal. If I can hear you talking 30' away and understand it, you're talking TOO LOUD. Of course he's on an iphone, and wearing a black belt with brown shoes is just a fashion no-no. Where's Stacey and Clinton when you need them? Or at least some self absorbed parent with a crying child... have them plop down and start trying to out-loud the sales droid. That would be funny (only because I have earplugs :).

I like these 3 day weekends when we have nothing to do. Yesterday we went to Alameda to Jan & Rex's July 4th BBQ which was pretty tame but enjoyable none the less. We got home in time for me to listen in to the MARES ham net as they were practicing communications while driving around looking for illegal fireworks to report into the fire department.

Today I whipped up a batch of jerky:

As you can see by the photo file name is cajun jackrabbit jerky. It's the rabbit I got in Parkfield last time, took me at least an hour to break that little guy down into 1.25 lbs of meat I could run through the grinder. I can see why people like chickens, pigs and cows, they turn into food mat a whole lot easier than rabbits and other oddball critters. Unlike many animals that have only a few tendons running through the limbs, rabbits (or wild hares anyway) have sheets of tendons along the outsides of their major muscles. Makes them über fast and tough but hard to clean and if you miss any it's hard on the grinder. I saw that bass pro has meat grinders that go up to $600 and can process 720 lbs/hour. Bet those don't choke on a few bits of missed connective tissue like our pansy kitchen aid grinder. The jerky itself is only OK, it's got zero fat in it and I dried it too long because we were out most of the day and I just left it running while we were gone. Doh. It's edible, but not the best I've ever made.

Where we went for the day was the goat farm. The woman loves their fresh cheese and petting the goats. We also tried to walk on the beach but it was freezing ass cold and we only had light jackets with. How stupid of us to think it would be nice at the beach in July. Inland it was a little nicer so we stopped at the Pescadero store and got a sandwich to snack on at a picnic area. Love that fresh baked bread they used for the sandwiches.

The woman is yelling at me to put in something about how I didn't like goat cheese until she made me try it today. It was good, you just can't think of it as cheese as much as a spread you put on crackers and bread.

I did get to drive up hwy 9 and give the Suzuki wagon a test in the twisties. Like Vareck's old 1991 pickup, it feels like you're going fast but you're really not. I was chasing a civic up the mountain and our top speed was 47 mph.... wee! Felt like we were flying though. They've lowered the speed limit again in some places down to 30. In 10 years we've gone from 55 to 50 to 45 to 40 to 35 to 30. In 2020 will the limit be 15?

The badges getting turned off were the least of our worries. About 10:30am the entire environment started melting down (damn you OSX LDAP servers, you still suck!) and it took us until 6:35pm before we could give the all-clear. Good thing it was the start of a holiday weekend.

Today was a bit of a bummer. I met one of the TAD gear guys at Grizzly Island for some rabbit hunting. I got up at 3am to get on the road at 3:30am and rolled into the sign-in booth at 5am. At the sign-in booth we saw some rabbits running off, and on the way in I almost ran over 2 of them. Pulling into Lot #2 at least 5 ran in random directions. Looked like it was going to be a successful day! Alas, it wasn't to be. I won't go into all the details (mostly because they're boring) but a combination of super high grass, really fast rabbits and being forced to use either bows or shotguns lead us to come up empty handed. I took a desperation 50 yard shot at one on a trail and it just laughed at me and jumped away. If we could have used the .17s we would have a cooler full of rabbits. As an added bonus, there were these Mexicans there driving around in a black suburban and shooting the shit out of all sorts of stuff (but apparently not hitting anything). They kept leaving their empties everywhere; we left and went to another area to get away from them but came back and cleaned up their mess before we left for the day.

The rest of the day today I've spent reading, fiddling with the radio, washing the car (it got pretty filthy on those dirt roads today) and generally relaxing.

Looking through some of Vareck's twitter pics I'm still convinced he's leading the coolest life of anyone I know.

Last night security decided to disable all the contractor badges so I've got 12 people this morning who can't get into the office. We're slowly having it fixed but requiring everyone to sign in and get the real employees to escort them around is just dumb.

Wednesday night I made my first actual HAM broadcast. I talked to the local ARES guy KE6TIM using both the car amp setup and just the HT while sitting upstairs in the bedroom by the window. He said the local repeater is only 35 watts and it's just supposed to reach Milpitas and not blast over the entire valley. My next steps are to get my 'emergency worker card' from the county so I'm covered being a volunteer at events and then I have to figure out how to join into the local net calls. The problem is they're at 7:15pm on Tuesday so I'm at archery at that time. Do I carry the radio and try to call in while on course? That seems way too nerdy.