So still only a once a week update, and there should be no excuses at all this time as I've been doing nothing but suffering all week. You would think I could break away for an update but I've kept the laptop away most of the time and have been using the tablet to read and play games.
The woman used this for her holiday Facebook posting. Not sure what she'll torture the rodent with for new years. A hat?
The drive out to PHX was pretty easy, 12 or so hours including a few stops for food, fuel and whatnot and the 4runner ran well getting 18-ish MPG. What's really amazing is that over the last few days driving out to hunt and around town on Arizona gas (instead of the shit they force on us in CA) I'm averaging 22 on the highway and 19 in town. That's doing 70 on the freeway too, not some 55 nonsense. Amazing what you get using fuel that's not E10 with a bunch of random stuff added in.
Yesterday I went "hunting" with a friend of the father-in-law up near Wickenburg. Supposedly we were looking for quail, dove and/or rabbit and saw pretty much nothing. It was mostly just hiking in the desert avoiding cactus, but at least I got 4 hours worth of exercise scrambling over hills.
If I really wanted rabbits, over-stuffed birds and pigs I could just hunt in the backyard. The mother-in-law feeds all these guys with some of the quail so fat they can't really fly.
Ironically, the most killing that was done on animals was done by the house. They have a problem with birds running into the windows and yesterday a dove smashed into the glass and brained himself. The girls tried to save him by wrapping him in a towel and hiding him under a bush so a hawk wouldn't get him while he 'recovered' but you don't recover from a broken neck.
This is just a cool pic I captured thinking it would make for an interesting background on the laptop. It's nice and bright and actually works pretty well. In real life the odd metallic moaning of the windmill at random intervals was super creepy. I should have recorded it.
Today I'm just hanging out while they go to the mall. I did go to a surplus store and get some dump pouches; that's the kind of thing you can't find in CA. I also programmed a few more frequencies in the car radio, I've got the 2m hailing frequency up now when we're on the road but so far it's been nothing but static.
Maybe once a week is all I get these days. :(
I finally brought mom's gift to me into the office. A hand made gourd business card holder complete with elk and tree pictographs and one of the ivory elk's teeth from my elk. Fancy. I need to get some tape to hold it on there or it's going to end up taking a dive when someone hits the cube wall (common).
Tuesday night we took a customer to the Plumed Horse in Saratoga based on my recommendation from the woman and I going in October. This time was a bit different because we got the wine pairing and I think they cut out some courses for the "business" type dinner we were having. We did get to sit in the private room off the kitchen so we could watch the show while we ate.
Yesterday I picked up my new hearing aids, and so far they've been really performing well. These have an external volume control/mute so when I go into noisy environments I can turn them off without having to take them off. I don't feel I need them in the car; the doctor says to leave them on all the time but why do I want to listen to car noises, wind noises, etc?
I'm waiting for my dough to rest before I roll it and cut out some linguine noodles. The woman brought some eggs back from Heather and Paul's chickens so we'll see if things taste any different with crazy fresh eggs. I know it was harder to make the dough because the eggs are all random sizes and mostly small so getting all the flour combined was harder. I had to keep adding small amounts of egg white to get the moisture level correct. We'll just have to see.
I made a cardboard template for my radio box project, this will hold the radio at an angle so it's usable either with the bag on the ground or if I remove the box and put it on a table. It's too tall if you mount it directly vertical so this was the compromise. The tuner, battery and charger all fit under the radio and the headphones fold into the space above the radio and it all pops nicely into the bag. Dad is going to cut that out of some sheet metal and we'll see how it does. Only the orientation of the screw holes and those two vents matter, the rest of the side of the frame is open to artistic interpretation which is why I didn't bother cutting the other side to match on the template. The piece in the back with the numbers on it will be horizontal and not at that random angle it's at now and on there I'll mount the external antenna connectors so it's easy to hook up from outside the box. I may mount one of those 4-pole Anderson connectors as well, I may want to be able to wire a solar array into the box at some point.
My parents stopped by last night to drop off/open giftmas stuff since they're not going to be around and neither are we for the holiday. I had bought a kit to make some of those survival bracelets (the latest tacticool nonsense) and was making one when they arrived. Turns out mom got me 3 of them as gifts. Oops. Oh well, you can't have enough woven bracelets and key chains. The weave on the ones she got was probably machine done which is why its tighter and more consistent than mine, but for a first effort I think mine turned out just fine.
The parents stayed the night unexpectedly as it was snowing at their place; they left this morning figuring the plows would have run by the time they got up that way.
I hate no-update weeks, it makes me think nothing is going on but obviously something is going on or I would have time to write it down. Wait, that's not right. Whatever.
Golf today was canceled because we've got a problem with a customer order. Apparently some "rogue partner" tried to cut into the deal and quoted out some random config that doesn't match what they wanted but it is cheaper so now the customer is "confused" and may not put the order in this week. I'm not exactly sure how someone can undercut what we're already doing, they're quoting Netapp hardware and as far as I know we're the only ones who sell that and we sorta control the pricing. Anyway, the customer canceled for today and Kathleen wants us to be available in case something happens so no goofing off at golf today. We've moved it to next Friday.
Made it to stabbin' class, and did the net and 2 boot camp classes, as well as the driving range this morning so I'm staying active.
I think that's about it. I did go through my pictures for the last 13 years and pull out every pic I could find with my parents in them, we're giving them one of those digital picture frames for giftmas because they were so enthralled with ours on their last visit. The woman wants me to load it up with some pics for them to show them how it works, then they can put their own stuff in there. She didn't want me putting in "goofy" pictures of her like her in a box or her in a pumpkin patch or her... well basically her being goofy. Since that's most of what she does I don't see how we're going to avoid it. She was worried people who didn't know her and saw them would think she's nuts. Who cares?
Date night on Saturday? Nope, hanging out at Kinkos copying the giftmas letters to include in the cards this year. Yea, what a life.
So a really busy week is finally wrapping up. All week I was in new hire sales training which is basically 50 hours of lecture, stories and visits from various higher ups in an attempt to get new hires in sales (and Netapp partners) up to speed on all the propaganda and whatnot and make sure they have a consistent message. Some of it was lame, some of it was really interesting. There was one guy who we only got to see a video of because he flight out of PHX got canceled that morning but it was an hour and a half and I was enthralled the whole time. Amazing speaker and his techniques were fascinating. I guess I have such a low opinion of sales people because I've only ever seen bad ones (car sales, people in stores, etc). The good ones are masters at subtle questioning and leading and you don't really know you're being sold to. The woman said it's all just psychology which makes sense I've just never seen it work before.
The longest part of the training is the team challenge where you have to prepare a sales presentation for a fake company (in health care which sucks since I don't know anything about health care IT). They give you a first and second meeting profile and a whiteboard presentation they want you to customize and then you have half a day to get your team to present it. There are 7 sections and 6 of us so in all the cases the guy who does the into also does the wrap-up. I was in the 2nd slot and did the "unified storage architecture" overview. The competition was on Friday and each team presents without notes to a panel of judges who ask questions and generally act like real customers. After they give individual feedback and then crown the winners who get the coveted leather jacket:
Our team actually won and we got coupons to get the jacket which I'll order at some point here. Everyone makes such a big deal about the jacket and who has them and who doesn't even though no one wears the jacket. For sales guys it's the ultimate prize, you're a winner and there is no second chance. Going to "club" (the annual sales reward trip for the top 10% of the sales people in the company) is very impressive among the sales jackals but getting the jacket is a one time thing; you can work you way into club but you only get a single shot at the jacket. I might have liked the 2nd place ipod nanos better really, I have no use for the jacket but it's a prestige thing.
Oh, and the other amusing thing this week as at the dinner on Tuesday. I was one of the only local people in the class (out of 60) and somehow I ended up getting to the dinner before almost everyone else since I drove vs. taking bus. There was only guy there so I chatted with him a bit and using my new sales training I asked "So, what's your role in the company?" and he says "I'm one of the founders". Doh! So, I made an ass of myself in front of this guy: David Hitz.
Another layout idea for the radio, make a frame, mount the radio and tuner sideways then mount the faceplate bracket to the side and presto! Kenny points out I might have cooling problems which is a good point, the IC7k runs hot away (it has a built in temp gauge) so cutting down airflow like that isn't ideal. I've got more ideas though, still thinking.
I canceled the order for the Nexus 4 and ordered a contract iphone 5. It's actually $150 cheaper than I was paying for the Nexus 4 (because it's subsidized by the contract that work is paying for) but the real reason I decided to stay (in spite of the shitty maps!) is the email client. None of the android email clients work as well as the one that's on the iphone and none handle gmail/yahoo and exchange all in the same app. It seems like a strange reason to stick with that phone with a smaller screen than every other modern phone but I'm living on email these days so that's a pretty important feature. There are rumors that google is going to release an iphone map app which would rock, but for now I'll have to use the crap map or google maps via the browser.
The woman's office phone contract is up (?) so she was looking to consolidate off t-mobile for cell to ATT for cell/office/network. She doesn't care about having a smart phone so all the spiffy subsidized deals don't make sense for her all. I let her wipe out my old 3GS so she could put her own music and whatnot on it and try out some apps. I told her she could take it to the hacker store and they could unlock it and she could use it with her t-mobile sim card as a normal phone with texting and she could email and whatnot on wifi when it's available to see if she likes having a smart phone.
Looking forward to getting back to the gym and stuff next week; with that dumb training I had to be there at 8am so there was no time for the gym and traffic.
The woman sent me this picture of her car in the shop getting it's first service. Other than the routine stuff (oil, tire rotation, etc) it checked out fine. Wasn't expecting anything off but with these cheapie cars you never can tell.
My little orange tree in the pot has produced more oranges than I thought it would. One split open so I picked it and cut it up, it was actually edible. I figure another week or two and these guys will all be ready.
On the sad fruit front, the lemon tree got blown off the patio by the storm that came through earlier in the week and the largest branch broke off. It was packed with lemons that hadn't ripened yet. They'll at least make the disposal smell good when we grind them up.
Speaking of storms, the 3rd storm came through last night and this morning sometime between 9-10am the park totally flooded. It wasn't that way when we left for starbucks (decided not to walk in the rain). Apparently the park is the overflow area and there are huge pumps that take the water out of the park and put it into the creek. With the creek too high there was no where for it to go so it backed up here. It's gone now, so apparently it did it's job. Of course our neighborhood busy-body was out there talking to the reporters. Nice hat.
Yet another check from the SEC for some random lawsuit from way back. Thousands of dollars turn into, well, dollars. I'm not even sure why they bother but I guess it keeps the lawyers of the street making millions for themselves.
So lots of activity this week outside of storms and oranges. Friday night I went to my first "pathfinder society" game which is just like the Monday night D&D games I used to go to years ago. The game store is in the crappy mall over by Apple and I vaguely remembered where it was having gone to the movies there. It's really changed though, not only do they have the original little crappy store but they've taken over 2 more store spots in the mall and filled them with gaming table. There were easily 10-15 tables in the first room filled with people playing various games, and there were 6 tables setup for those historic miniature war games. I found this on their web site, it's about 1/3 of the setup:
I knew some of the guys at the game from the LG days so I wasn't too worried about not knowing all the new rules for pathfinder (which is a re-branding and minor update to D&D 3.5). Ironically I ended up at the old farts table, everyone was easily 35-60 years old and all very experienced gamers. Fun stuff, I hope it stays that way. I've signed up for 3 more Friday games for the rest of the month, then it's off to Arizona for giftmas.
Saturday night I went to the "Saturday night action pistol league" in San Jose. There were 5 noobs there and they put us through some rudimentary tests to make sure were were safe to draw and fire and stuff. There was some sort of grading going on to see if we made the cut to get into the 2nd group which does all the fun stuff. Of the 5 of us they only picked 1 person to advance, and it wasn't me. That's the first time I've lost out when it comes to shooting events. I don't know what the grading criteria was, the guy they picked missed 1 shot just like I did and there was this Asian kid who was out shooting us both accuracy wise. I don't know about speed since they weren't using timers. I have a feeling it was, to use the horse terms, more of a hunter round than a jumper round meaning it was some arbitrary judges decision rather than something hard and fast like points, time, etc. I do not have any tacticool looking gear and I think it was bothering them that I'm using a retention holster and wanted to shoot from concealment. They actually made me take my vest off as well as making the Asian kid take off his jacket even though we both said we had drawn from concealment before. Anyway, not sure if I'll go back to the next one to see if I can make the cut that time. Is the 2nd squad more fun?
Today I changed the oil in the truck, but when I went to grease the drive shaft u-joints my new grease gun broke. It worked fine when I primed it but when I actually went to put pressure on by attaching it to the zerk fitting the rear of the pump housing cracked. Cheap Chinese sand cast junk but I didn't expect it to fail that fast! The auto parts store took it back for a refund so no trouble there but I decided to not get another one. I'll just take the truck to the dealer next time it's due and have them do it. I don't trust jiffy lube at el to do the oil change right without making a mess. If you don't take the skid plate off oil ends up pooling it it from when you spin off the oil filter. That's what the mess was from before I got it and now that I've cleaned it all up I don't want it happening again.
My weeks now look like this, maybe a bit too much activity to pick up a Saturday thing too?
Once the golf stuff is done I'll go back to doing free weights on Monday/Friday mornings.