They keep babbling about there being snow today, except that it's 51F outside and the rain has stopped. Now it's revised to be snow tomorrow. There was snow on the OSU cam (which I still have up on my dashboard at work from a long time ago) but it snowed every year at school I seem to recall.

Last night on the ride home though the rain and traffic got so bad that I had to pull over for about 30 minutes to let things settle down. Fortunately I had the trusty iphone so I had my books with me so I sat under a ledge behind a strip mall and attempted not to freeze to death. The view from my resting spot.... guess that black and gray bike really does blend into the night pretty well....

Compare that the view off Calaravas road last weekend when I was out riding around:

It's been really hard to find the time to update this. Work has been crazy busy, not in a bad way, just in a way. Our VP rejected all the PR requests so no groups are getting any new hardware until we re-do the justifications. Unfortunately he didn't exactly say what was wrong with the current ones or what needed to be added. We've been spending a few days running around trying to guess what he wants and so far we can't get agreement on what we're doing. Not surprising since we're working in a total vacuum with no feedback, who's to say if we're right or not? The CAD groups are kinda pissed because no is 'doing anything about this', but what's to do other than try random things until something works? We can't force the VP to not act liked a spoiled child just yelling NO! at everything.

Last weekend's trip to my parents was a total bust as far as getting the yard at the cabin cleaned up, with over a foot of snow we couldn't exactly start picking up brush and raking pine needles. As you can see there was a lot of snow on the deck at my parents and the driveway was buried. Took 6 hours for the 3 of us to clear that mess out, and when we finished the deer decided to come out and inspect the work.

With the power out for a few days the house was running off generator power constantly and much of the time I totally forgot we were running it. Dad put a 20KW unit in so they can do pretty much anything without grid power. However, they can't do squat when they run out of propane. No heat, no light, no nothing and since dad refused to put in any sort of wood burning fireplace/stove, they basically can't do anything. Really bad design for a place known to lose power and have actual weather.

Meanwhile, the woman was getting sun burnt and having fun in Daytona with Kurt and the new Pennzoil team (those colors are just horrid though):

The iPhone needs a thermometer in it, I swear it's about the only thing it doesn't do.

Typically it's women that wear way too much perfume but one of the cad managers wears so much that I can smell him coming before he actually gets to our hall. That's crazy, the smell has to travel in front of him and around a corner to hit my office before he comes into sight. How does it radiate to strongly? Maybe it's called 'shock wave' or something, that would be a good name for a scent. :)

The woman is off to Daytona to see the 500 on Sunday. She's so excited, yet so worried that the hamsters won't be taken care of properly. They're rodents, I don't think they really care about her petting them, holding them, etc. They just want to eat and sleep which is all they're going to do while she's gone.

Everyone was somewhat worried that I was in the office at 6:45am today, I'm never the first one here. Just made sense to drop the woman at SJC and then keep driving to work instead of going home. I have to swap the vehicles out anyway, I want the car to take to my parents (baring any snow up that way of course). 38mpg is better than 17mpg in my book.

Typically it's women that wear way too much perfume but one of the cad managers wears so much that I can smell him coming before he actually gets to our hall. That's crazy, the smell has to travel in front of him and around a corner to hit my office before he comes into sight. How does it radiate to strongly? Maybe it's called 'shock wave' or something, that would be a good name for a scent. :)

The woman is off to Daytona to see the 500 on Sunday. She's so excited, yet so worried that the hamsters won't be taken care of properly. They're rodents, I don't think they really care about her petting them, holding them, etc. They just want to eat and sleep which is all they're going to do while she's gone.

Why does Don't You Forget About Me make me get all nostalgic? I didn't even really understand The Breakfast Club until years after it would be relevant in my life so how can I get all misty eyed about it? I think Coke Zero has some sort of gamma-aminobutyric compound in it that tweaks with your mind.

Haven't had any odometer pictures in the journal for a long time, mostly because I don't go anywhere anymore so I'm not racking up the miles. Today I hit 30k so even though I was on 280 I pulled over to take the 29999 shot and into a gas station by work to get the 30000. I made it into the garage at work and it hadn't clicked over so I re-took the picture of 30k since the lighting was more interesting. Well, as interesting as pics like this can be.

You can tell I just restarted the bike in the 29999 shot (had to take the keys out of the ignition to open the trunk to get my phone) because the ABS light is on. It doesn't go out until you move 3' to it knows it can read the sensor.

Random photo of a snake that was making his way across the walk by the house. We've seen a few of these guys in the bushes over the years.

Another random photo on the phone, a picture of me using fldigi on my XP vm at home accessing it via ssh/RDP over the wireless at the airport in SJC. Lotta technology just to try to catch old farts chatting on 20m PSK31.

Crazy busy week with the Austin trip stuck in the middle, probably should work a little this weekend but I've already missed a ton of activities this week being at work until 8pm every night.

Nothing too interesting in Austin other than I went to the wrong hotel. I went to the usual downtown Hilton Garden Inn just like the last 8 trips and it turns out I'm not there but rather at the Hilton by the airport. Oh. I felt a little dumb standing there but they said it happens a lot with 3 Hiltons (or Hilti) around there and lots of business travelers.

The airport Hilton is much nicer than the one downtown, the rooms are newer and the restaurant is way better. The service sucks but the food wasn't bad; they had some sort of crusted lamb rack with a spicy almost yogurt style sauce on it. Very Greek inspired, and served with sweet potato fries. I felt a little pretentious reading "Making of a Chef" while dining. :)

Today I've been playing some WoW while the woman is at the barn and I installed the hood locks on the Jeep since it's here. The extra 'security' will be nice but these also lock down tighter so the hood won't wobble as much at high speeds. That's a plus.

Still sick, but at work wishing I wasn't at work.

Didn't get to try the radio stuff with Kenny as planned, he got entangled in family stuff. Hopefully we can try it next weekend.

Other than lots of laying around trying to rest not a lot went on over the weekend. With the temps in the 70s I got to spend some time out on the patio reading and having the windows open was a nice change inside the house. The woman says that we're 20F above the normal temp for this time of year. Finally some up-side to this whole global warming thing. :)

Headed to AUS tomorrow, only once per month now that the data center is finished.

The woman requests a moment of silence, we lost another hamster today. "spice" passed away in his sleep sometime around 7pm tonight. The woman took it better than the last one, guess it gets easier as you go along.

I ended up coming home early today because I'm getting sick. Sore throat and itchy eyes and people told me to go away before I infected everyone. Guess that makes sense, and since I didn't want to be at work anyway I took the opportunity to bolt out. One of the other managers is sick, I probably got it from her since we were in the same meeting for an hour or so yesterday.

One thing today is that my new bolt knob widget arrived. A company is making a plastic bolt together 'tactical' bolt knob. Having a larger bolt knob installed is a very common mod (makes cycling the bolt a lot easier but it sucks on a rifle you have to carry) that runs around $150 plus at least a month of waiting. This thing costs $25 and took me about 3 minutes to install. You can epoxy it if you want a permanent install or just use the o-rings and screw for a temporary install. I don't want to expoxy so I'll just stick with the screw setup but everyone seems to say that works just fine. Clears the scope and stock, makes it easy to cycle and is cheap and DIY. What's not to love?

With my free afternoon I drilled the holes in the brackets dad made and got the 40m stick deployed via the vent. It's really hard to see up there, I think only 1 neighbor has a clear view of it, everyone else just gets to see this little thing sticking up above the roof. It's visible from the main drive of the complex if you know where to look but I dunno how much time people spend studying the roof. If you look at the bracket you can see that I had it made in 2 sections to make it easier to work with. I could twist the antenna mount any which way and then bolt it to the main support once it was out the vent. Worked like a charm and by grinding the metal bare it should make good electrical contact. I didn't have a drill bit large enough to drill the hole to allow the nylon spacer to drop into place on that stick mount so I got a carbide router bit for the dremel. Damn it cut that steel fast, way faster than I would have thought possible and it didn't seem to damage the carbine cutter at all. Yea for carbide!

The antenna tunes up well and Sunday I'll see if Kenny and I can talk. Those sticks are only 2-8% efficient so even if I've got it setup right I'm going to be pretty low on output power.

Got a picture through the screen of the squirrel enjoying the new squirrel feeder we put out. How do they know to lift the lid?

Also on the animal front today, the rabbit was back. The woman saw him while going to get the mail and spent the next hour trying to get him close enough to grab. Mostly she just fed it all our carrots and celery. She looks like she's in pain sitting there but that's her 'worried' face. She thinks the bunny will die out there. He's lasted at least a week and since he can eat the grass and plants out there and get water from the creek it seems like he's going to be fine (baring getting eaten).

Survived the Seattle trip just fine, only cut myself a tiny bit helping with the bumper install, didn't get too terribly upset that my radio works well with all of Kenny's antennas, etc. Catching up with Dennis was pretty good too, although his tails from the inner workings of MSFT make me sad as a shareholder. Who's running that place anyway?

Oddly, I took exactly 2 pictures the entire trip and they were just of the dash of Kenny's FJ where he's got his iphone mounted, I wanted to remember the name of the mount he was using.

One of the decisions made while Kenny and I were scheming on how to install an antenna at my place was that I should try a stealth rooftop install of a single 40m hamstick. The plan is to built a bracket that will let me mount the stick without going onto the roof... out one of these attic vents:

In theory they're as well hidden behind our trees as the neighbors are behind theirs; even with no leaves all those vertical lines are sure to break up the silhouette of a stick antenna. I've surveyed those vents again since I got back and came up with the necessary plans to make the mount. The trick is going to be getting a 7' long antenna out those louvers without damaging them (too much) nor the antenna and getting it vertical after it's out. The grounding should be easy as it turns out though. Normally a hamstick wants the car body to act as the ground but since there is no car in the attic I'm going to use that 70' random wire I installed a few weeks back. I've taken apart one of the hamstick dipole adapters to get the exact connectors I need to make it happen so it's not even going to be some hack to get it right. If this turns out to work for 40m I may have to upgrade to a tunable screwdriver antenna for multi-band use. I'll wait until the leaves come back for that though, someone may notice that big ugly thing sticking out when it's got a few coke-can sized widgets on the base of it.

Last night the woman was at a complete loss as to what to make for dinner so she suggested we order pizza. It's been a while so I was OK with that and we ordered and started walking to go pick it up. On the way she says "look at that rabbit eating out of a bowl on the lawn". WTF? There was a black and white rabbit eating out of a bowl in the middle of the common area lawn. There are lots of stories about Asians buying rabbits for their year of the rabbit stuff and then dumping them randomly when they're no longer are cute and it looks like our neighborhood is no exception to the story.

The rabbit was still there when we got back from the pizza place and the woman spent the next 3+ hours trying to capture it. My attempts just "upset" it and kept it running around. I don't know why the woman though I would be of any help, all I know how to do is shoot/clean/cook rabbits, I don't know how to capture them for questioning. Eventually I went back inside and she sat in the bushes with a box and some carrots trying to lure it into captivity. At one point she said some raccoons came around and she had to throw rocks at them to get them to stay away from the rabbit. Were they after it or the carrots she had put out? Epic struggles between rabbit, raccoons and crazy woman right in our own complex. I know she's going to be out there looking for it tonight too. What happens if she manages to catch it? That's what I'm worried about.