First crack at an on-rifle dope chart. I need to mess with some shading, it's too hard to find the lines you need quickly... and my eyes seem to be getting older and it's hard to look at that tiny font up close.

The woman laughed at the tape but that's how you do it. Keeps it on there and keeps it dry. I also put some tape on the mag to keep it from rattling but that looks kinda ugly how I did it.

Talk about a re-branding. The dump (which I now drive by every day) used to have a little sign that said "Newbey Island Landfill" and now it's got a huge new fancy sign that says "Newbey Island Resource Reclamation Park". Park? Will there be a water slide?

We've got Chick-fil-A!! It's open and I went through the drive through and now I've got chicken. I'm happy.

Customer demo went well too, but whatever, the important thing is I got chicken! :)

CENTER>viertel nach zehn, im Morgan

Cocktail reception in the city wasn't bad, but the dinner after was. We went to Bluestem (menu, wines) and it seemed like it would be good but I just don't think they can handle large crowds like that. My salmon was over-cooked, and the guy next to me ordered a medium-rare steak and it was blue and cold in the middle. The bone marrow was OK but the mussels were sorta bland except for an overdose of fennel. The shining point was the wine, I got the '09 Zin from Klinkerbrick in Lodi. I've been there which is why I picked it from the list and it didn't disappoint and would have gone really well with a steak. I probably should have ordered one. :)

Another packed weekend. Saturday I went to Fry's to get a USB2.0 hub to replace the USB1.0 hub I was using to keep all my junk connected at work. I never noticed how slow the 1.0 stuff was since previously I had just been using it for keyboards/mice. With the air I have the keyboard, mouse, Ethernet, headset and my iphone all hanging off a hub and the network is really crushing it. Going from 12mbit to 488mbit should make a difference. I also got a little organizer thingy for my man bag, all the junk floating around inside the main pocket was starting to make it an actual purse, full of crap you can't find.

After Fry's I did laundry and other misc crap around the house, and loaded up some ammo for Sunday for the 200 yard range. Then I decided I should drive down and go rabbit hunting. Hadn't been at all this season and with the woman still gone I can spend a day doing something dumb without having to justify it. Before I took off I made up a 'cutting board' to take along. I'm always fighting with using a trash bag as my place to hold meat as I butcher the rabbits in the field so this time I did something about it. Good idea, now only if I had found some rabbits. For a number of hours I didn't see anything alive at all. No squirrels, no rabbits, no quail, nothing. Eventually I found a whole pile of rabbits hanging out in a field with a bunch of horses (all on private property on the back side of the public area). I couldn't figure out why they were all bunched up there but later on I saw a coyote run across the road. Ah, that's why they're all hiding with the horses, I bet that scrawny yote wouldn't come anywhere near a heard of horses.

Sunday I got up early to go to the 200 yard range as it's the 4th Sunday of the month and the only day it's open to the public. I missed the first relay so I couldn't put up a target but there were some scraps of paper left from the previous target which I shot at. No one thought I could hit it, and with that challenge I manged to shoot this group at 200.... gotta love an accurate rifle.

After getting a 200 yard zero set with the hunting ammo I took the rifle home and cleaned it up and set it up for the trip. I won't fire it again until I'm in Wyoming, at least I don't think I will. I also cleaned up the junk in the garage, all the clays stuff was scattered around and I put away my riding gear. The bike hasn't moved in two weeks now; if I'm not commuting should I just sell it? Will I use it enough to justify it taking up space?

In the afternoon I went to the barn for another horse lesson. I had to fetch, groom and tack my own horse, so now I know I can do all that. I rode for about an hour and half both in the ring and on a 'trail ride' in which the instructor just walked around the property up and down hills and I followed her. Good enough.

After horse stuff I finished the laundry and went to the store. Stupidly I got an artichoke for dinner and it took forever to steam so I was eating dinner at 8:30pm. Forgot to get bread too but I did remember get some granola bars to take to work, we seem to miss lunch around here a lot.

I've put the speakerphone widget in the car on the sun visor sorta right in the middle and every time I reach up to turn it on it on the phrase "you Devon!" pops into my mind. Amazing how 20 something years later we all have speakerphones in our car for $50 and back then it was a Knight Industries specialty. And how come sometimes KITT says that Devon is calling and puts the call through and sometimes Michael has to push a button to make it show up? More importantly why do I remember these useless things?

Woman is in Bristol, I'm at work trying to keep up.

APPL is up to a new record of $662, some may say I've made an even bigger mistake than originally estimated!

Speaking of money, I figured out my travel costs today for getting to work. Driving in a week in traffic and taking 1 trip to the range on Sunday and the 4runner still got 18 mpg. So, with my new shorter in distance longer in time commute.... If you assume $4/gal gas (which is low... let me go re-do it with $4.15 gas which is more usual around here). riding to Apple cost me ~$2.98/day. Driving to netapp costs $4.15/day. Figure 50 weeks of 5 days a week I'm paying $292.50 more per year to commute ($1037.50 total). What's interesting is that if you throw in a set of tires for the bike which are needed each year than you're actually looking at it being cheaper in the car which won't need tires for 3+ years. Service on the car is cheaper too, the big service on the 4runner every 90k is cheaper than the big service on the bike every 15k, plus riding gear... so yea, depending on how you look at the value of your time it's either cheaper or more expensive to ride year round.

I forgot to mention my going away party. ~35 people showed up for drinks and BJs and after just a few of us went to dinner and then to see Total Recall. The movie didn't totally suck, but it did look just like every other movie they make these days. Same shaky cam, same quick CGI cuts, same, same, same. Even all the previews looked pretty much the same. Yawn. Now I have yet another reason not to go see movies.

Got the horse pictures from the woman:

Got my phone switched over to the new corporate account, and unlike Apple, Netapp actually lets you use tethering! Woo! No more carrying a separate 3g widget on the road.

Day 3 of the new job. Day 1 was crazy, first the new employee orientation and then a lunch with our IBM reps on one account and then 3 hours of planning meetings after that. I didn't even get to touch my (slightly used) mac until almost 5pm. Then I got to enjoy how shitty outlook 2011 is, you would think it would be a lot better than 2003 but I guess they just don't learn much over the years. Day 2 was more meetings and some quality time getting my phone switched over (I now have tethering!!!), getting the rest of the machine setup and trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing.

Today is a 9am meeting and then I've got about 10000 classes to sign up for. Some are on-line web based, some are just video and some are classroom based. I need to learn a zillion different technologies, it's like I know nothing about the industry suddenly.

I decided to keep my iphone for a while, too many changes and my head (which is already full) is going to explode. I did migrate my bookmarks and stuff over to the new "radio PC" upstairs and I'll be using that now instead of the VM. Not sure why, just to mix things up I guess. The next thing I may do is replace the big system in the garage with the other laptop... again, not sure why. It's not like I don't have other things to work on.

I need to get some pictures from the horse lesson on Sunday, I did OK but I'm still sore from the combination of that and stabbing class on Monday.

Marc stopped by today to pickup the rifle and smooth out the feeding issues. I'm sure I could have handled it but he wanted to make sure I was 100% happy so he'll take care of it. Probably better that way anyway, but more hassle. I had to pull the scope and rail off which means it's going to need a re-zero at the range next time. Good thing I didn't lock tight it on there (the rail). >P>Had lunch with my sales rep yesterday, the food was actually pretty boring (we went to the Red Crane which has been good in the past) but we chatted for 2 hours which is a good sign. I think we'll get along OK as needed. One amusing bit was during a story she called a guy a "douche bag", and when I asked her about it she said she sometimes shortens it to "DB". I told her I use "dbag".... so at least our profanity is in sync. She warned me that there would be a social aspect to the job, so Sharks games, Giants games, golf, etc. At least they do luxury boxes for everything... but it's going to be work in any case. Odd how the world goes around.

This morning I went for a run before Marc was scheduled to show and managed to find a bit of quiet in the crazy world. I stopped by the pull-up bars that are on the running trail and while resting I squatted down on the embankment a bit and watched the sun come up. Sorta like sitting on a hill in the wilderness watching the sun come up which I try to do every time I'm out hunting. It's very peaceful to just quietly watch the day start.

Ah, meetings with HR, what fun. Oh wait, I'm not in a meeting with HR, I'm sitting outside the HR chick's office wasting time. She won't respond to email or meeting requests even to say "no", she just ignores you. I was trying to take care of a problem employee before I left but it looks like it's just going to have to wait until the new manager deals with it. Sorry, I tried. Maybe I can bring it up if she shows up to my exit interview. :)

The wireless in IL5 is super fast, probably because there is no one here, it's like a ghost town.

Drove in today since I'm going trap shooting this evening and it took ~30 minutes to get here, up from the usual 22. Not too bad really. I was going to try to go 237 to see how bad the new Netapp commute will be but it was backed up and they wanted $2 to get into the Lexus lane. I'll have 1000s of chances to do that drive in my future, no reason to start before it's necessary. I also tried to check out using light rail since it goes right in front of the office, but the estimate for me to drive to the station and take the 2 trains to go all of 10 miles is about 1.5 hours. WTF? How does anyone use the damn train? That's either got to be wrong or their "plan my trip" app sucks nuts. VTA, twice as fast as walking!

Stabbing class was a lot of fun last night, I've not sweated that much in a long time doing anything. We did drills almost the entire time, not a lot of chit chat just a lot of stabbin' and disarms. Oddly it's my abs that are killing me.

Two pictures from this weekend I should have posted before. The first is the group I got out of 3 rounds of the hunting load I'll be using in Wyoming. I didn't measure it but you can see it's damn small and an incredible group for hunting bullets. They're the Barnes all copper tipped triple shock. Triple shock sounds like some sort of ale. Someone also pointed out that I was using a 50ft airgun target with my 100 yard center fire rifle. Yep, that's how I roll. Once you get groups under 1/2" there is no reason to shoot at 5" circles. The second picture shows where I'm having a bit of a feed problem. The opening into the receiver is just a touch too small right there where the round comes into the feed ramp area. The gunsmith is going to pick the rifle up at the house tomorrow morning and fix it and hopefully get it back to me by the weekend. I've got a little more ammo tweaking to do before I complete my dope chart.

Shopping, and more shopping. I've now got 5 pairs of pants, 10 shirts and 2 pairs of shoes suitable for my new job. Suddenly my old wardrobe feels as old and juvenile as it looks. Oops.

On top of work clothes, we went to bass pro today and I got a few pairs of pants and shirts for the hunting trip. As long as it doesn't snow I should be OK.

Also this weekend, a range trip with Don and dinner with Scott and Lina. We went to Straits, which was good in the past but last night the service sucked something awful.

Should write more but I've still got lost of chores to do before the night is done.