The woman is shopping on CL for random crap she'll need for after her hip surgery in February. I'm pretty sure they would charge more than $15 for this walker if she got it from the hospital.

One of our "impulse buys" at Costco was a wireless weather station for $75. I thought that was a good deal vs. what I had seen online so we gave it a go. I moved my 2m antenna mast up a bit and stuck the solar powered wireless wind sensor up there and it works pretty well. I had to go back up on the roof to reset it after I pulled the batteries out of the main control unit and it lost its pairing. Doh.

Some pictures from the roof. With winter taking all the leaves off the trees you can really see the neighbourhood behind us.

As our giftmas gift to each other we went to "The Little Hen" which is the quasi-fancy farm to table restaurant down the road. Not a bad place, a few things were under seasoned but overall it was a win, and without the hour ride into the city. :)

Also, with the HVAC repaired we can actually run the heat and we're only buring $20 bills to stay warm instead of the emergency heat and burning $100s. Pics are linked from the main page of the coils and whatnot that had to be replaced.

Just a few days ago it was 77F out, and now it's 25F out. Normally I guess you don't wear shorts in December.

Ho, ho, ho, a load of toys for the orphanage! (OK, maybe it's just me moving all the bricks they saved from the garage demo so I can reuse them to create walkways by the barn). The poor 4runner isn't sure what to make of all this hauling and towing and other tasks it's being asked to perform. It's old life mostly consisted of driving slowly on 237.

First use of all that extra carpet from the garage as well... putting some homey touches in the bunker. No more cold feet when checking on the router for me.

Right now it's 77F out. In December! The air mass must be from the gulf because it's crazy humid too. We've got all the windows open and the house has warmed up nicely, which will be good since the HVAC is still down and it's supposed to be freezing again in a few days.

You see, you have to sort your corn. The squirrels only get the best cobs with all the kernels on them, the rest get the kernels pulled off and tossed into the deer corn bin.

With the success of the GAP project, and me wanting to get more stuff put away and not just laying around in my room I went up onto the roof today and put the 2m antenna up. It was scary at first but then just aggravating trying to move the straps around the old chimney by myself. It's done though and SWR is 1.1:1. Kenny was right, the window pass through is causing problems because when I test the antenna direct it's exactly 1:1. Sigh. I also found those cheap amazon cables I got degrade the signal pretty bad even though they're only a few feet long. The 1.1 climbs to 1.2 or 1.3 with the cheap cables. Fortunately I bought a 10 pack of connectors so I could just use some leftover cable and make proper short cables that don't suck the signal out of things.

After using the hot spot a bit I've decided to take the return penalty and take it back. It works, but there is a lot of latency (200ms average vs. the 30ms on the DSL) and some packet loss which makes it annoying to use. Good idea, but just not quite there yet for full time use.

My parents sent me a picture of their giftmas tree. That's pretty funny:

They're headed to Yuma AZ next week and then Palm Springs at some point to ride out the colder weather. Snowbirds.

Daylight pictures of the antenna. It's very hard to see from the house even if you know what you're looking for so the woman will be very happy about that. I hope I've left enough slack in those guy ropes. The trees move a lot, but hopefully not too much only 6' off the ground vs. the swaying we see at 50' off the ground.

Update on class:

Last night after some punching drills (against bags) he mixed it up a bit. Half the class had bags, the other half faced the wall with their eyes closed. The bag holders then wandered around and randomly "pushed" people with the bags, that was your signal to figure out where they were and land 4-6 punches into the bag. After you punch you go back to waiting for the next "attack". After a few minutes of that he did the same thing but with the lights out and the music cranked up so even after you got to open your eyes you were having to deal with tons of sensory input or lack there of, and half a dozen people moving around in the same space as you. Basically a slowed down bar fight. Crazy, but it's so much easier to focus on attacking then moving and scanning when stuff is actually happening around you. The only down side is that both my hands are bruised, even with the gloves on enough energy must have leaked back through to end up causing trouble. What I'm kinda surprised about though is that my chest isn't hurting more. I was partnered up with a guy that's 1' taller than me and outweighs me by at least 75 pounds for some kicking and he kept blowing me off the mat with his kicks. It's hard to "stay strong" when you're airborne.

OK that's a badly formed paragraph with 3 topics in it. I find that I do that when writing in this journal vs. writing in real life.

Two pi projects in the works. First I'm moving the filesystem off the SD card and USB memory stick and putting it onto a spinning drive. Normally that would be a step backwards but due to the 24x7 nature of my pi project all that writing to the flash is eventually going to kill it. I would rather burn a little more power and not have to worry about log files and other stuff killing the flash over time.

The second project is to get around the slow DSL. I broke down and got one of the AT&T hot spots and a data plan. Now I don't want all the stupid traffic wasting my expensive bandwidth (things like iPhoto and system updates, windows patches, etc) so instead of making it the default route I'm putting the wifi card back into the pi and will only let it talk o the hot spot. Then I'll change all the hosts to not use the proxy (disable system wide proxy on the macs/phones) and only let the browsers pick up the proxy config. That way all the interactive web browsing goes over the fast link but bulk file transfers and other goes over the slower but unmetered DSL. We'll give this a try and see how much data we actually end up using. When the 6-month promo on the DSL runs out it may be cheaper (I'm hoping!) to just put all that money into buying more GB on the hot spot and completely dropping the DSL. I didn't do a contract on the hot spot so I can change my usage at any time.

I didn't end up buying a drive for the pi though, I took the small backup drive I bought for work and am using that and took one of the huge 3.5" disks my parents sent with the other stuff I had to leave behind when I flew out and am using that at work. I have free space and power at work, might as well use them.

Came home early today and spent some quality time getting the GAP put together. The light was fading fast as we got it into place but it's up and I got it guyed to 3 trees. The dude at GAP said four is their recommendation but I had 3 nicely spaced trees so that's what I went with. They're tied off 6' up the trees to the deer won't run into them which is important since they come from that direction a lot. I didn't have time to bury the cable or radials so I just threw the radials out on the ground, ran the cable out to it and fired up the tester to see what I had built. SWR was 1.7 or less on all the bands I tried (80m, 40m, 20m and 2m) which bodes well for how it's going to do out there. I'm hoping to tighten that up a bit, perhaps actually measuring out the radials will help and/or there might be some tweaking that can be done on the antenna itself. Still, even if that's where it ends up that's good enough to run without the tuner and it's the best antenna I've ever had.

At 32' tall it's actually taller than I thought just looking up into the trees. Had I got the 160m capable version at 42' I think it would actually be dangerously close to the lower branches on the pine trees. The 160m capable ones are also not tuned as well for 20m and don't do 2m at all, and although Kenny says I shouldn't use the big vertical for 2m I will likely try it anyway. I'm going to put up my real 2m on the old chimney this weekend but that will be for the APRS radio, I'll still want 2m capability on my IC7k to check into the local nets without having to reconfig my APRS radio (because disconnecting wires is a pain and I already have 2 radios... well 3 actually but whatever).

Dennis' family photo images are large enough they trigger the web gateways "download and scan for you" page. Annoying, but it reminded me to turn my proxy back on.

A few weeks ago the woman said she saw a squirrel using some sort of white thing to file his teeth down. When we went to the log he was on she couldn't find the thing, but then yesterday when we were checking out the woodshed (which is NOT structurally sound) we found this bone fragment with a ton of little teeth marks on it. Looks like we found her squirrel dental tool.

Saturday I spent my required 8 hours in a CCW training class to get the cert I need to file my application (today if all goes well). The material is all state mandated so there isn't a lot of variability there but the instructor actually tried to make the class interesting. He's a retired cop so he threw in lots of real world stuff he had seen, and we had a lawyer in class as well who put out some legal real life as well. NC is a whole lot more friendly to the good guys than CA is, that's for sure. Bad guys that break in to your house here can't then turn around and sue you when they hurt themselves (or you hurt them). Nice how common sense prevails outside the golden state.

Sunday the neighbour brought his tractor over and we cleared the antenna site of all the little trees and random logs and then dug a 3' hole to mount the base of my new antenna in. The backhoe isn't made for digging holes like an auger so after we got it dug we realised we needed to create some type of form to contain the concrete. We thought about scrounging wood from the barn or the old fence that has to come down, or using a bucket and packing dirt around that, but then I remembered an old bird bath base that I saw back in the paddock area. I grabbed that and it turned out to be perfect, it was 28" tall and hollow and about the correct diameter. We packed dirt around that, dumped the concrete in the hole and poof, instant antenna base. Once the concrete dries out I'll finish filling the hole and we'll be ready to go. There are 3 trees spaced 16-20' away from the hole so I'll just use those as my 3 guy points. I'm planning on putting the guy ropes about 5-6' off the ground to keep the deer from getting in them, I know if I try to guy it to the ground some stupid deer will stumble through there and pull my antenna down as it tries to find more corn.

More pictures are linked from the main page but this pretty much gives you an idea of what was going on:

There is still that one awkwardly placed holly tree but the woman got upset when we talked about knocking it down (she was fine with the little pine trees going away) so I'm going to have to deal with it unless it actually impacts the operation of the antenna. Then it gets a case of axe poisoning.

Managed to get to the sheriff's office and get my permit papers filed. The finger print chick was efficient and not friendly (probably because she spends all her time trying to fingerprint low lives) and the office chicks were efficient and downright surly. Meh. At least they were reasonably quick about taking my money and getting me out of there.

I wonder how long CA will continue to not process my "I've moved out of state" paperwork and hound me with these dumb ass renewal warnings... and now cancellations? I suspect they'll put me in collections at some point in the next few months. Good thing I kept copies of everything I sent their dumb asses so I can send it again, and again, and again.

Sharing a cube sucks when one of you is SUPER LOUD on the phone all the time. Just ordered a noise cancelling headset to try to silence his loudness. What's cool is that now that I have the soft phone on the mac I don't have to switch to the crummy headset that comes with the desk phones.

I've been sitting at a customer site for the last two days, over 16 hours of babysitting a 3rd party install and it's not over yet. The PS guy they sent isn't really good at installs or debugging or anything and it's not a product I've ever seen so I can't exactly help much. Today we're continuing the process on a WebEx.

Last night was my first krav maga class and it was good, but I'm very clearly out of shape. Well maybe that's not fair to say, I'm in shape I'm just not used to being hit so many times. Even with that big padded bag you're holding you take some energy.

The DSL line changes IP a lot even when the server doesn't reboot (and now that it's on a UPS it should be up for a good long while). My cable IP stayed the same for years. Good thing DDNS updates well.

Loki was in town this weekend so we spent a bunch of time trying to show him a good time. That's hard to do when you take a SF boy who has no interest in things outside of tech and dump him at our house. At least we found a few good restaurants so he could sample "modern southern cuisine". Yea, it exists, stop laughing. Oak Leaf was a pretty good spot the woman picked, (menu) and even their wines by the glass were good. I had the duck and they suggested medium rare... I had never had duck prepared anything but "done", no one has ever offered a choice. Turns out it's way better toward the rare end.

Walking around downtown Pittsboro wasting time though we found a used book and record shop proudly proclaiming:

In between social events, I managed to get the closet organisers installed. It all went fine until the last screw... somehow the stud I was using just vanished. I followed it up from the floor and then toward the ceiling it was just not there. I had one screw in it and then nothing. After digging around (and having a wall anchor fail giving me a huge ass hole to look through) I found that the stud was about 2" to the right. They must not have had a board long enough so they nailed two together making something that looked like a teris piece. Lame!

The wonky weather (almost 80F on Friday, down to 45F on Sunday) was annoying, as was some drizzle but it was nothing compared to what my parents had to deal with:

Another household project I got done was finding the source of the mystery smell downstairs. Turns out it was just a bunch of dust and fuzz and whatnot in the HVAC intake under the stairs down to the basement. Nothing too scary but all that stuff smelled musty and was really noticeable (to me anyway). About 45 minutes removing vents and vacuuming stuff out of there and sealing up the duct work so it can't draw air in from the secret room and it's dirt floor and it was good to go. I forgot to take a picture of the duct repair, but I had to use the novelty duct tape Liz got me because I couldn't find regular duct tape. Some day someone will find digital multicam duct tape down there. :)

We also (since Loki is a gun guy of sorts) went to one of the larger gun stores. I found a Kimber I really liked, learned how to actually buy a gun in NC, and signed up for their CCW class next weekend. Fuquay Gun & Gold is a fun store for sure. They probably had 100+ different handguns in stock, and a ton of black rifles and shotguns as well. No cowboy action stuff, not really any revolvers and not a lot of hunting rifles either. More of a tacticool shop than your local gun store. Oh, and of course no ammo.

Last bit for now, the woman said I never have any pictures of myself so here is one she took of me and the "first fire of the season". Whatever. She can't see this journal so I'm not sure why I'm putting it up but here it is.

Doors!

Vareck is digging around in the archive again. Notice though, even in 1992 (?) we demonstrated proper trigger discipline. Kids these days don't manage half that.

Another project, my water heater blanket showed up from Amazon. Yea, it wasn't really cheaper than buying it at home depot but it was handy since I was already ordering other crap and shipping was free. I was going to put the seam in the rear where it would make it look nice but then I would have had to cut out openings for the two panels and the valve. Instead, I just put the seam in the front and let all that stuff show through. Ugly, but effective!

Nice collection of white vans in the driveway today. HVAC guy (main heat pump was low on refrigerant and had shut down... yea for home warranty), alarm team (5 of them doing the install) and the garage door guy. By the time I get home tonight I'll have a garage door I'm hoping.

Huge amount of stuff going on over the last few days, oddly almost none of it holiday related. For the holiday though we went to an early afternoon gathering at some shrink's house, she's a 40-something child free chick so she's got lots of friends and adventure stories and is generally OK to be around based on the limited amount of time I've spent at her place now. It was a pot luck thing, maybe 20-25 people? The woman brought fudge and I brought along a bottle of wine... which I think was a mistake. We think that some of the people there met in AA based on the comments made and the total lack of alcohol in the house. Maybe it's a southern thing, or maybe it's a recovering alcoholic thing. Either way, party foul on my part. Who knew? That's not in the "welcome to NC" handbook.

The majority of the weekend was spent working on the house. Hanging pictures, getting closet organisers, sorting out crap in my radio room, trying to find tools in the huge quantity of boxes, etc. The woman is happy with getting some of her art back up and making the house look more lived in:

The squirrels have figured out how to get on the bird feeder even with the anti-squirrel tippy thing on top (they were just leaping up from the ground after the woman oiled the bird feeder pole!) so I busted out some of the really good rope I got for my antenna project and hung the feeder a bit higher. They'll figure it out soon enough, the rope is too think and they'll just walk on it. I wanted to use really thin twine but it was bright orange and the woman didn't want that in the yard.

We did go to a craft show (and found nothing but some BBQ sauce), and then went to the flea market where we did find giftmas crap we were looking for (NC themed ornaments for the moms). I also found this $5 ninja sword stand which is working pretty well at holding my 1824 rifle off the mantle. It's a little low, but for $5 it will work well for a long time until I come up with something better.

I wanted more outlets in the basement so I wouldn't have to use so many extension cords for the wireless gear and the dehumidifier. I picked up outlet boxes, wire, wire staples, wire nuts, etc in preparation for tapping into some of the existing wiring but as it turned out I didn't need to. When they remodeled the basement they kept the old wiring from the panel and just attached new extensions to them to get the circuits to where they needed to go. Consequently there are half a dozen junction boxes in the secret room tying new and old together. All I had to do was figure out which circuits they were, power them off and replaced the wire nut splices with pass through outlets. Easy! I found 3 separate circuits and popped one outlet per. We now have clean wiring for the wifi, the dehumidifier and the alarm system (to be installed Wednesday).

At one point during some project I stopped to make a snack. Not drinking soda much these days, beer didn't sound good, so I came up with this. Not exactly a typical NC snack. :)

The wine is some French thing we found at the local wine store. Because most NC wines suck ass (we went tasting on Friday and found 1 that was passable) and CA wines are expensive being more rare here we figured we should try some of the cheaper imports which are mostly from Europe (vs. say Argentina).