Some pictures from the IAS wine tasting event. Most the wines were just OK, but there was one chardonnay that even people like myself who don't like white wine were saying is good. I may have to get a bottle just in case I have some reason to need a white that doesn't suck.

I've been sick for the last few days, and yesterday and today were completely shot just laying on the sofa trying to recover. I did get some work done (coding up some sample apps using the filer API to prove to a customer it's not that hard to use) and cleaned out my closets (donating 30+ shirts and 10+ pairs of pants) but otherwise it's been a waste of a weekend. Would be worth it if I actually can function mostly normal on Monday.

Firefox was running really poorly suddenly, CPU pegged and typing in gmail was 1200 baud at best... usually I was out-typing it by a good 5-10 seconds. I updated flash, cleared my history, etc and now it's back to normal. Might as well be running a PC if I have to randomly start deleting/reinstalling things to keep them running normally.

Steamed all my shirts and pants and got them loaded into the now organized closets. Looks more adult now.

Also wanted to document the new daily carry knife. My trusty Delica which has been with me every day for 10+ years now has to be moved to weekend only duty due to it's clip. When worn in the pocket you can see that from the placement of the clip about 1/2" of knife sticks out. Not a big deal, but because I can't wear it in my pocket anymore as the dress pants are too wimpy I've had to move to a waistband carry. The knife goes inside between my pants and shirt and the clip rides at the belt line behind the belt. You just see the top of the knife sticking up and the bottom of the clip. Not ideal at all.

My fancy SOG mini x-ray has a 'deep carry' clip which puts the knife body below the pocket opening, or below the belt line. Perfect, and honestly the x-ray is a lot nicer knife than the old Delica (at 3x the price it should be). After carrying the x-ray for a few days it became apparent that it's kinda fat and I can feel it and it's not comfy. SOG makes thinner knives so I got one of the assisted opening slimjim XLs with the 4" blade. I don't care about the assisted opening stuff, I just wanted it skinny and with the deep carry clip and of course tip-up. After a week of carrying the XL it seems to be working out fairly well. It doesn't print when I sit down, even with that extra 1" of metal in there, and the assisted opening thing mostly works from what I can tell. It's very slow to get out but that's a function of how I have to carry it, not the knife's fault. As my stabbin' instructor says, just take the other guy's knife away from him and stab him with that, no reason to draw your own. :)

I keep forgetting to write down that I drove Jason's M3. Jason was the corporate manager at NVDA for a while when I was there and then he left to come to Netapp to be an SE. He moved from an SE to a TSE (overseeing 3 other SEs in a 'team lead' role) and now he's moved onto being a sales rep. He's pretty happy doing what he's doing and making good money so he bought one of the new M3s. I was skeptical because it had the SMG transmission but done right the SMGs really work well. You take your foot off the brake at a light and... nothing happens, it just idles there like it's in neutral. As you give it some gas you can feel the clutch start to engage, just like if you were doing it yourself. Let off the gas and it disengages and you roll, just like if you were doing it yourself. Amazing. Nail the gas and it just locks up and goes and the shifts are so fast you can't even feel them, the RPMs just seem to drop. You can double-click for downshifts and it blips the throttle and matches revs and shifts way faster than I ever could. No idea how long that setup will last, but when it's working it really works.

I've scripted my backups now using expect. I didn't like the idea of leaving ssh keys on the laptop and typing in a bunch of passwords was annoying so now I just have it prompting me once for the password for the disks to mount and once for my ssh password and then it mounts 3 volumes, backups 10 or so areas and dismounts everything. It's a good trade off in security vs. convenience I think.

I'm also trying to find out why my ssh connections home keep getting 'stuck'. They don't timeout and drop but you can't type in them anymore either. I had TCPKeepAlive set, now I'm trying ServerAliveInterval, maybe moving data through the tunnel every 15 seconds will ensure it stays alive? Or at least dies and disconnects rather than just hanging and requiring it to be killed off.

Looks like the 7 people living in the 2 bedroom place across the way moved out. Started as one couple, then they popped out a kid and then 4 other people (look to be their parents) moved in for about a year and now they're gone. The younger couple with the kid were living in the living room, we can see right in from the windows in our stairway as they always leave their drapes open and tons of lights on. Looked like a toys-r-us exploded in there all the time. The chick was getting fat, maybe she was knocked up again and was ready to pop and they figured there wasn't room for 8? At least they were mostly quiet unlike the last clan that was in there. Guess we spin the wheel of fate and await the new tenants.

Yesterday we went up to the city to have dinner with Loki and Anna (their wedding is documented in here somewhere). They picked the restaurant and while dinner was interesting, I do not think it was worth the price. We did 1 wine pairing because usually that's enough for two of us but they were pretty cheap with the pours at this place. It was good to catch up, but next time we're picking the restaurant.

Today we ran errands and I finally got a label maker. I've wanted one for a while now but just always used the one at work. Now that we don't have them at work I had to break down and get one of the cheapie p-touch units. The woman is not amused at me labeling everything now. :)

Just like last weekend this weekend I spent a bunch of time cooking and making jerky. I made a batch of ravioli, this time with a sage zucchini filling from here: http://nevadafoodies.com/tag/elk-ravioli/. The filling was tasty but we haven't cooked up any of the finished product because the woman made skewered beef with peanut sauce over ramen. Some Thai like thing she found in a magazine.

My orange tree had 7 oranges on it, none of them actually turning orange.

Whoa, can we stop the ride now? It's fun, but I really do want to take a bit of a rest right now!

So here is a big update on all the stuff that's been going on. Last week I was hunting in Wyoming for elk, and I got one on day 2. Pictures of all that are on linked on the front page, other than the APRS map as captured when I got home:

The hunt was fun, although I could do without so much horse time. 5am-noon and then 4pm to 8pm on the first day, and 5am-1pm on the second. To be fair, I got to walk out the 5 or so miles on the second day as the guide and his sidekick had their horses loaded up with elk meat and couldn't ride so I walked too just to show solidarity... and to get off that damn annoying horse.

As soon as I got home, after a brief stop at my parents to drop off some of the 280+ pounds of meat I got back from the processor, I started making jerky and ravioli. 3 different types of jerky and they've all been successful. Even the woman says they're good and the batch I dropped off at Apple while having lunch with the old crew on Monday has been a hit. I've been getting emails/texts as the bag moves around the various buildings and people want to chime in with their encouragement for me to bring more. Haven't had the ravioli yet, probably get to try them this week now that I'm home more.

Wednesday after a long day of customer meetings we flew to Colorado for more customer meetings on Thursday. The customer crew in Colorado seemed to like me, I spent a bunch of hours showing them how they might improve their data layout and a bunch of other stuff. They said that they've worked with a lot of "nice people" at netapp who claim to have known about EDA, but that I actually seem to know. That's good, I've proven myself to someone at least which means it will give me the confidence to prove myself to others. The Marvell crew are probably our most aggressive customers, they're the ones I need to get in good with.

The Colorado crew likes meat, we went to BBQ for lunch and then Texas Roadhouse for dinner. Both places were just OK, the BBQ place isn't as good as Rudys and although the steak at Roadhouse was good the sides were pretty gross/lame. Everything tasted like it came out of a can. Probably did, although the web site says "hand made sides" which makes it even worse when you think about it. They're trying, and not succeeding. Oh well. What they have done which isn't represented on the web site is move to the "breastaraunt" style theme, and they can pull it off in Colorado. You couldn't find that many hot chicks here to work in a restaurant.

A pic of the weak BBQ brisket I sent to the Austin guys:

And to counter my weak BBQ, the Austin guys sent these pictures this morning pointing out how I'm missing the dove season opener:

I can't believe it's been a year already. Sigh. I've determined now that if people ask me if I'm a hunter, I have to say "yes". I made a page off the main page detailing out all the notable (first mostly) hunts and if you look at it I've been on 6 types of hunts and have gone after pig, pheasant, chuckar, quail, dove, rabbits, turkey and elk. That's a lot for a city kid. I probably should try deer at some point, and squirrels. :)

Today I've been cleaning up my junk from the hunting trip and putting things away. The 300WSM cycles a lot easier now that I've got the dirt and horse hair out of the action, and the 17 was filthy as well. It hadn't had a good bore scrubbing in a lot time and it was starting to show as far as on-paper accuracy was concerned.

I've also finally gotten around to fixing my thumbnail generator, with all of the various resolutions it's starting to look lame to have larger and smaller thumbnails. Now they'll all be the same dimensions regardless of the original size which is what I want.

Slept well last night, but did have a really long vivid dream about sneaking into dbag's staff meeting using a ring of invisibility. At one point they figured out I was there and managed to corner me. He kept taunting me to hit him, guess he knew it would blow the invisibility and they would know who I am. Who knew my dreams ran under AD&D rules?

First 'office hours' visit to Ericsson today, went pretty well. They seem like a cool bunch to work with. I did have to use my phone as a hot spot to get out, their network is super secure and they can't get me a port or wifi on short notice. They're going to apply for a pass for me for next time. If I can get a hard badge too then I'm golden.

It's amazing how just a few people can really screw up traffic. 237 is a major freeway and it's only 2 lanes after a merger of over 10 lanes into those two (mine is 2->1->4->3->2) and just one person who refuses to keep up plays hell with the rest of the world. You see these doofuses doing 15 mph as everyone tries to go around them and get up to speed; it really does look like a river flowing around a rock.

Yesterday I worked out at the company gym. The 'basic training' class had only 3 people in it which was pretty nice, not sure if that's because we're right off a holiday weekend or because the morning classes are just that quiet. My plan is to do classes Tuesday and Thursday mornings at 7am, and workout with free weights on Monday/Friday, with stabbin' class on Monday nights as well. That should be enough exercise.

Last riding lesson this weekend and I feel pretty ready. I was able to tack up and do everything I wanted to do, lots of low speed maneuvers, etc. The woman had her lesson at the same time I did so while she was jumping stuff I was walking in/around the jumps, stopping and rotating the horse so I could watch and so on. I also lead us on a short trail ride which was interesting. It was a lot easier to direct the horse when I had somewhere to actually go vs. just wandering around the ring.

The fly mask on the horse is because he's got some eye problem that is making his eye water and the flies bug him, and my eyes aren't exactly closed, I'm just squinting because it's so damn bright out.

Other than the horse thing, a little shopping, some organizing gear for the trip, washing cars... basically really nothing to show for the 3 day weekend.