And this is why we can't take the woman anyplace nice....

Apparently I'm 'no fun' anymore, according to my employees. For the last 3 months they claim they've seen my stress level rise, the amount of closed door work I'm doing rise and my 'sit around and BS with the guys' time go to nil. If they knew what was going on behind the scenes they wouldn't understand, but it's gotta stay quiet. All this fun political stuff is taking it toll, the worst part is that it takes so very long to screw someone over. We're about to be kicked in the teeth but they won't just do it quick, gotta treat everyone like shit for months first then they can tell you what they're going to do. I figure I'm safe at some level, but likely to lose my job with a single mis-step. I just have to recognize that step before I take it.

The good news is that I've made some awesome slides, my keynote-foo is getting good and I gotta say it's way, way better than using power point. Lots of the goofy 'let me help you do that without asking' things actually do help, vs the damn word/PowerPoint 'let me fuck everything up for you and make you spend 30 minutes trying to put things back where you wanted them' we saw so often. Too bad no one in the real world uses keynote.

Both the bike and the car are due for oil changes so I know what I'll be doing on Saturday now that our butchering class got canceled.

I finally got in contact with Kenny in a most unexpected way. I was playing with the radio and actually made a PSK31 contact. While chatting with the guy some 'jackass' started TXing with a ton of splatter and squashing our signals. He went away and we finished our chat but the guy said that someone should tell the offender what he's doing. I took a picture of the band mess to send to Kenny, and while I was typing the email into the phone I clicked on the signal to see if I could contact the guy and let him know what he was doing. Who's call sign came up..... Kenny's. Doh! I had to chase him around the band a bit to finally get to talk to him but once we got in contact he figured out what was going on. Problem solved and we finally got to 'talk' via the radio.

Here's a pic of the splatter (left side) and next to it is a pic Kenny sent of what my signal looks like on his end (right side).

Once we got the digital stuff done I suggested we try USB phone and that actually worked too. I could hear him easier than he could hear me, but it still worked. He made a recording just so I could hear what I sound like on the radio (when I remarked that he doesn't sound like himself at all): recording.

After we lost contact I went back to my power pole wiring project, which looks mostly like a bunch of junk on the floor:

From email I sent to foo21 today:

GM had one of those 'drive events' and somehow the woman got invited
(probably some nascar tie in thing) so I got to go too.  It was rainy
and cold out so the lines were really short/non existent so we got to
drive pretty much whatever.  I drove the cruze, the camaro, the
corvette and the volt.

First I gotta say that the cruze is a nice looking car inside and out.
 Drove about what you would expect with a crappy automatic but
otherwise it wasn't too bad.  Felt kinda small though inside, fine for
us but I can't see regular sized people fitting in there so well.

Camaro was fun, the corvette was as well although I liked the camaro
better if I had to pick and live with one... the trunk and whatnot on
the camaro is a plus and the styling looks more modern somehow even
though it's supposed to be retro.  I know the heads up display is so
80s but it did work well.  Never had to take my eyes off the road to
see speed/tach readings.

Haven driven the leaf, the volt and the prius (as a rental a few
times) I must say that if money was no object the volt is the superior
car.  We actually got to drive on public roads with the volt and it
seemed very prius like but without that annoying jerking as the gas
engine comes on/off all the time and it was quieter inside road noise
wise.  It's got a lot of generic GM bits on it (seats and controls)
but the center stack is pretty unique.  Overly complicated to be sure.
 The prius is way cheaper so unless you really take advantage of the
volt's electric range I doubt you'll save enough money to make up the
difference, and who wants to own a 1st gen GM built vehicle with all
that technology in it?

Also today I went to the battery store and gave them the spec for the battery I want them to make me. I know what the materials cost, I'll be curious to see how much they'll charge for labor.

Saturday I braved the rain and went for my lesson. When I got there we were going to cancel because the rain hadn't stopped but it let off for a bit so the instructor said we could give it a go and just stop if it got too bad. About 30 minutes in she called it because she was getting cold. I was too, but wasn't really noticing it as much since I was focusing on the clays. Water was pouring off the shotgun by the end and even thought I used the air compressor at the range to blow out a lot of water there is still rust on some of the non-critical bits on it (the front hand guard mount, sling swivels, etc). Would a nicer gun have just shrugged off the water? She didn't charge me for the lesson though, she said it wasn't long enough. OK, I'll take the freebie. :)

After I got home from the lesson the kitchen guy showed up and did a bunch of measurements, showed us samples from his showroom trailer, etc. Total cost for the kitchen was quoted at $83,000 + appliances + paint + permits + fixtures + door hardware. Um, that's a $100k for a kitchen? WTF? Pass! Here is a sketch of the design:

After the kitchen, the bathroom seemed like a bargain at $25k. Who spends that kid of money? Rich folk I guess, certainly not us.

Hours later we drove up to Alameda to make pizzas with the Mines family. There I tried Newcastle brown ale. Tasty.

Forecast shows 7 days of rain. Of course they also say it's raining right now yet I was dry the whole ride in. I'm sure it's raining somewhere.

I've been avoiding writing because work has been so bad that I can't think of anything really positive to say, and writing too much negative junk just makes me sad. Anyway.

Last Saturday was a pretty good clays lesson, I think I'm starting to at least get the hang of the basic theory behind how to wing shoot. One of the reasons I think things went better was that they grabbed a rental over/under that was sized correctly to me. Not fighting the weapon really let me focus on other things and it showed; the down side being that when I picked my Mossberg back up i twas clear how poorly it fit and what a general POS it is for clays. I think we knew that, at $200 you can't expect it to be really good at anything, but it does let you actually do everything (birds, small game, turkey, clays, home defense, etc). I tried out a few shotguns in their pro shop and found one that fit and that I liked, but it's 10x the cost of the Mossberg. In the world of over/under guns that's really cheap. Even then rentals are $1300. I do like the over/under form factor, and it's really satisfying to blast two clays out of the air then pop the weapon open and have both shells land in the empties bucket while twin smoke rolls come out of the chambers. Oddly satisfying.

This weekend I've got my lesson earlier because we've got that design guy coming in to take a look at the bathroom and the kitchen to see what we could possibly do with them. I'm not convinced we can really do anything to the kitchen other than get rid of the nasty counter tops. There just isn't room to get creative and the major layout is pretty set, but we'll see what he says. I'm hoping we at least have options even if we end up just doing something simple. The bathroom I've got figured out already, we just have to pick fixtures and whatnot.

Liz finished with my rabbit pelts, she's successfully turned them into a gun doily. They're stitched together and sewn to a backing cloth and I think it turned out about as well as could be expected. She said that she's done doing crafts with fur, it's too much trouble to work with to be worth it.

Also big this week, or maybe it was last week, the DVR died. Even I could hear the hard drive trying to spin up only to die with a horrible clicking noise.

Friday night we had a major license server outage and last night we had a major LDAP corruption issue. I'm tired of being at work so much and am really tired of stroking dicks trying to 'explain' how these things happen. 11 year old sun hardware acting as license servers is why, and if our attempts at replacing this stuff didn't always meet with such resistance perhaps we wouldn't find ourselves in this situation. This place is degrading into political fighting, might as well have stayed at NVDA at this point.

But enough of that, work will always suck. First up, yet another piece of test equipment for the radio. This measures IMD or Inter-Modulation Distortion which is the measurement of the first pair of unwanted sidebands to the desired ones. Right. Larger negative readings are good, and my -34 is pretty good. Guess I can tune my PSK31 setup pretty well considering it was only at -29 when I was tweaking by guesswork without the meter. One less reason for people to ignore me if I'm not all distorted or spewing junk all over the passband.

Just a cool pic out the window on the flight, uh to? from? AUS, I don't remember. Wait, it's gotta be on the way out. I sit on the right side on the way out, seat 17A. Coming home I'm in 3A so I can get out quick and run my ass to the connecting flight since the flight out of AUS to PHX is always late. 12C on the PHX to SJC flight so I can get up and pee since I never have time to between flights due to the always late flight.

Bunch of useless drama at work, lots of politics going on. I'm spending more time trying to CYA than I am doing actual work. No reward is worth this.

Just proof I was there! :)

I can't believe I forgot to write about the more important thing that happened last week! I ran the Milpitas ARES/RACES net on Tuesday night. It was a full featured net, we had 14 regulars, 2 guests and I even had late check-ins and doubles (two people trying to transmit at the same time resulting in a garbled mess) to sort out. Our EC said after that I did great, couldn't tell it was my first time. I spoke slowly and clearly and handled everything and didn't blow the script. Whew!

Today we went to the mall to look for shirts for me (found nothing), a pasta attachment for the kitchen aid (ended up getting it off amazon since it was 50% less than at Macy's) and a 5.5" boning knife for the upcoming butchering class. While there, we made a not-quite-an-impulse purchase and replaced our pans with a bunch of All Clad stuff. We've been looking at it for a while and they had the MC2 set in stock and the 'bonus' they were including wasn't lame like it normally is so we pulled the trigger and got it. The MC2 stuff is cheaper than they bright polished stuff, plus you have to actually polish the shiny stuff. Who wants to polish their pots? Yea, the brushed finish won't look as spiffy hanging from the pot rack but we didn't get them to look at.

Did I mention I broke the tip of my knife? Same knife in my pocket for 12 years and I finally abused it to the breaking point. (ha ha). Sigh. Looks dumb but I probably don't need the last 1mm of the blade anyway.

Last night we went to Lavanda (menu) in Palo Alto with Felice and her... well baby daddy I guess since they're not married and 'boyfriend' just sounds not quite right. Anyway, I won't go into details about the restaurant or the meal because although the service was good as was the wine, the food was just not that good. The lamb on my mixed grill sampler special was not even close to as good as ours and the other meats were OK but not worth the price. The seasoned kabob wasn't even as good as the stuff you get out the back of Rose's market. The pick your own wine flight thing was fun though:

Saturday morning I went to Coyote Clays for my first shotgun lesson. The instructor chick had to work to help me 'unlearn' what I know about shooting. Shotguns vs. airborne targets is nothing like rifles/pistols/archery so I'm struggling. She's got me mounting the gun after I see the clay in flight. That's keeping me from trying to use the sights on the shotgun which you're not supposed to do at all for this type of shooting. It felt good to see the target, track it, throw the gun up into position and blow it out of the sky. I've got some exercises to do at home to work on my muscle memory for the motion of the mount... which I should probably go to now since it's getting on to when I'm going to start thinking about reading and going to bed.

I probably should mention something about the house we went and looked at, but really all you need a is a picture. Look at the size of that yard... and it's in our price range too. Nice, but not enough to make me want to fork out more money and actually move. We do really like our current place.

I intended to update things earlier, but it's been such an ultra-shitty week that I've not had much interest in doing anything I don't absolutely have to do. It's Friday, so only 20% of the shit can be in front of me, the rest thankfully is behind. Not that any of our issues have been solved, but at least I can ignore them until next week.

Last weeks 'snow' turned into nothing as you would expect; the media hyped it to death and then.... nada. Well nada here, the parents got another 1'+ at their place but that's not that unusual.

Saturday we went to a "wine and cheese" event at Fogarty. The goat cheese place on the coast was one of the participants which is why we went. Turned out to be more than just Fogarty wines, there were 6 vintners present. There was one, which I've since forgotten the name of but that we have the info for at home, that made the best wine I've ever had. Unfortunately it was $95/bottle and even more unfortunate was that they weren't selling any. It was just a tasting and food pairing thing, no sales. I thought that was weird, usually they want you to try and buy, not try and then have to wander off to figure out how to buy later. Bad business move I think but maybe they were trying to make it 'classy'.

A few pictures from the event, first the woman pointing out the 'snow' we did find up by the winery (don't know the altitude but it's way off the valley floor). Second is the view out of the window at the tasting room. Third is one of the baby goats they had from the farm. They only had boy goats there because the boy goats are either sold off as pets, or as food.

Sunday I went to Birds Landing with our sales rep from Netapp for a little pheasant and chuckar hunting. His friend came along to provide the dog which turned out to be some sort of lab. Whatever it was it was a flushing dog, not a pointer so rather than just pointing out the birds this dog just jumped them randomly. It made the hunting a lot harder since the dog was always in the way of the close shots and you had to either run right behind the dog to get close to the birds (since it wouldn't stop and wait for you before flushing them) or you had to take really long shots. Since I suck, long shots are not a good idea. We still got a lot of the birds that were planted, and only 1 was really damaged.

The highlight of the hunting day though was a group hunting the field next to us flushed a bird that flew past 3 hunters, all of them firing at it as it went by and missing completely... only to have the bird fly right into the side of a huge mental barn 500 yards away from them (right next to our field). *WHUMP*, it hit the side at full speed and took itself out. It took their dog 3 minutes to run to the barn to retrieve it. Strangest thing anyone says they've ever seen. No pictures of that, but I did stop to take a picture of the huge windmills that are going up in all the pasture land around the club. They don't look so big in the photo for some reason, but trust me, they're huge.

My abysmal performance with the shotgun vs. birds though has prompted me to sign up for lessons at the clays place in Morgan Hill. First lesson is this Saturday.