Long time without an update. Not having the computer downstairs anymore really makes it a chore to do updates, I actually have to go upstairs and sit down at the desk to do it which makes it less spontaneous. Perhaps I'll give in again and move the laptop downstairs.

Trip to RTP was a success in some ways, a bit of a letdown in others. Pics are on the main page, but the highlights are that we didn't find a house we liked, the office is pretty nice as are the people, gun ranges are mostly private, food is expensive. Looks like we'll continue to phase 2 and make another trip in July.

Getting fancy with the jerky now, moving on to vac packing so it keeps longer. Not sure why since I just eat is all in a week anyway. :) Easier to share this way though, people can take it home or whatever and not have to carry around jerky in their bag making everything smell like a smoke shop. Easier to take to CO too if we go again.

Friday night I went up to visit mom, took an extra hour to get there as I had to lane split for ~60 miles between home and Stockton. Wreck on I5 didn't help either, I thought it would be smooth sailing once I got past Tracy but that didn't work out. On the way home Saturday I stopped at Wendy's, it was freaky hot compared to what I've been used to lately which is a good excuse to get a frosty.

Sunday I played golf with Ed, Ed's kid and Rod at Coyote Creek. Sorta a work thing, sorta not. I did OK, all things considered (long course, my lack of skill, etc). We played the tournament course which had less water.

Today was infinite ball day at the range it seems. I got a bucket of 60 and as I was finishing up the guy next to me got called to the 1st tee and he left a bunch of balls behind. I moved over and hit those, and as I finished up the next guy got called up and left a bunch of balls so again I moved over and kept hitting. I think I got 120 balls in this morning. Crazy.

237 continues to get worse, now even the back way and on ramp are screwed up in the mornings. Might as well be Seattle. Also, I got a pic of the RV that the beggars that are working those intersections are living in. I've seen them climbing over the embankment and you can see they've got an old RV parked down there.

I'm not sure what's going on, but suddenly I feel, well not smarter, but a lot more focused. I'm writing code at work for the first time in a while and I'm getting regexp correct on the first try, the data structure I'm trying to use work, etc. At home, working with the Arduino thingy I'm getting circuits correct and actually understand some of what's going on and have no fear when it comes to trying things.

An example is the back light on the LCD, I wanted it light sensitive. I remembered the bit about parallel resistors and tried that and it didn't work and on Eric's suggestions I tried 2 other things (pulse width modulation) and got it working by driving the light off a transistor and the direct 5v supply instead of off the digital output pin of the controller. Not rocket science but I knew what I wanted to do and did it.

Is it the lack of stress that makes it so much easier to concentrate? Is it the cortisol manager? Am I just getting old?

A while back Kathleen ran into some trouble with our counterpart in Singapore and she said (while on mute) "don't make me come over there and cane your ass". It's been a running joke for a month or more now so I took it to the next level by providing a little bamboo stick in case a caning is required. OSH wouldn't sell the little sticks like this so the woman swiped one from a display plant outside. Criminal.

Another busy weekend. I tried to get an update in yesterday but it just didn't work out; got busy doing random stuff.

Saturday I hit some golf balls, made a crappy breakfast (ran out of toast and bacon so I made some frozen hash browns left in the freezer to go with the eggs) and accompanied the woman for her spring clothes shopping. Oddly, she got nothing after 4 stores and gave up, whereas I found all sorts of stuff I could have picked up. Men's clothes are so much easier.

Saturday night we went to see "Good vs. Evil" which was a lecture/show/something or another with Anthony Bourdain and Eric Ripert. I could only hear about 50% of what was gong on, even with my ears in and in one of the reviews after people were complaining about acoustics. I don't think even hearing everything would have made it worth the expense to me, but the woman got to see Eric in person and that makes her happy. I still find it ironic that she has a man crush on a chef who's primarily a fish guy, and she doesn't eat fish. He's not that cute from what I can tell, there must be more to it. Maybe it's that damn French accent.

Sunday was more pedestrian. I went to the driving range again (have finally figured out what I was doing wrong and now I want to grove in what's right) and then we went grocery shopping, the woman watched the race, I took down the shelves in the guest room (after she finished packing up her nascar cars) and then we did a bit of cleaning after stocking up on cleaning supplies at OSH. I had some idea how gross the blinds had gotten but it really became apparent when we had them down and cleaned them. They look so much better now. Not sure how we'll clean the fancy cloth ones though.

With the rest of my Sunday after our walk I spent some time working on my controller project. I got the temp/humidity sensor working but that was trivial. Next I broke out the new small soldering iron I got last year... or maybe 2 years ago when I got the new huge one to work on wiring for the Jeep and Suzuki. Anyway, I assembled the "maker's shield" that came with my kit as a warm up then soldered the header pins on the LCD display.

With that LCD sitting there I decided it was time to get fancy and wanted the temp data to be displayed on the LCD instead of just out the serial port on the board. The only trick was the potentiometer which doesn't actually mount on the breadboard. I had a little 3 female port header that I had cut off a fan and hadn't thrown out yet and with some bending the pot leads fit in the header. I tinned the wires on the scrap so they would insert into the board and it ended up working well enough to continue. I have proper female-male leads on order already, probably be here this week and I can rewire it.

More tweaks to the thumbnail script. Now it not only does the metadata strip, auto rotation, sizing, permission fixes and pops out the HTML code to embed in the page, it now understands groupings. Before I had it popping out a single HTML block of all the images and a second of every image on it's own line. I would then modify that output to fix the logical layout I wanted. Instead now I can separate the images on the command line and it makes the blocks for me. The changes took about 5 minutes to implement (with testing and documentation) so it's a huge win. Should have done it years ago.

Friday I took the day off to go visit mom and see how she's recovering. If you don't look at her she seems normal, all her mental faculties are there and she sounds normal. If you look at her she's lost 35 pounds, skin is all ashen and dry, eyes sunken, basically what you would expect someone being pumped full of poison to look like. It took her 5 days to recover somewhat from the chemo treatment, so she'll hopefully be more "normal" by the time the next one happens. I can't imagine what's going to be the cumulative result of months of this.

While there we installed the pan/tilt/zoom camera that I got off Amazon. Mom really wanted a trail camera as it turns out (to take pictures of the animals sneaking around eating her plants) but this at least let's her look around outside areas she can't see from inside the house. The only hassle of setting this up was getting into the attic over the garage and laying out over a board suspended above the drywall ceiling to reach the cable entry point and plug the power in. Doesn't look scary in the light of the flash but it was creepy in the dark with just the flashlight. Hot up there too, the roof is insulated so the 8' airspace up there is scorching hot.

Huge backup on 880 on Sunday, all for this retard that smacked into the wall on the left side of the freeway and ended up on the right side.

Saturday we went to Rok Bistro with Scott and Lina and after went to the comedy club. Usually the "middle" guy of the lineup at the club tends to be the best (beating out the headliner for some reason) but this time we had 4 comics and they were all good. My face hurt from laughing so much, and that's about what you want from a good club experience.

Sunday we went wine tasting with Vered, the crazy Israeli chick that took me to Jerusalem when I was there. We didn't want to take her to the usual large wineries so we went to El Sol, a little place out in Livermore. We planned to see how she liked it and then pick a second one based on that (larger, smaller, etc) but we ended up spending all our time at El Sol. Their basic tasting was 9 wines and 2 barrel tastings which was cool because I've never done that before. One of the benifits of the little guys is they're way more open to letting you see things and try the extras.

After that winery we went to Underdog Wine Bar for some snacks and whatnot. About half way through the meal I realized that it was exactly what we had done in Jerusalem: wine, cheese, crackers and conversation on the patio. Difference here was that instead of looking out over the old city and hearing the Muslim prayers, we overlooked a vineyard and a field where some kids were playing soccer. Surreal in a way.

The melting of my knife continues, I've got more gaffers tape over the hard edges and everything that touches the inside of my pants. I don't care if it digs into my leg, but I do care if it starts to wear on my dress pants. Pants don't heal or get clauses, they just wear out.

I'm thinking about changing the whole way I do this journal entries. Instead of a file per month, I might have the alias create a new file every day, then on the web page have selections like "last 7 days" "last 30 days" etc and just have scripts aggregate the individual entries together into pages. Not really a major change for the reading, but it adds some scripting into the mix and I need to work on that (staying current with fixing things with scripts).

I generally hate April fools day, but do enjoy how google tweaks maps for it. Last year's was better, but this years treasure map was fun too: