This is why chicks at RPG games are funky. Yea, she's playing a druid but does she really need a menagerie of stuffed foxes to watch over the game?

Saturday was the big day, I had to play golf with Ed (ie customer at Marvell) at Eagle Ridge, which is not exactly an easy course to play. Lots of water, lots of sand, lots of freakin' houses everywhere, long, long narrow fairways, etc. Since I still can't control the ball well the idea of having to hit long and precise is scary. Look at this sample tee box view, ditch/trees to the right, trees/grass to the left, and a big water filled ditch 250 or so yards out there. Any mistakes costs you a ball and worse. Half the time it was like we were playing from sand trap to sand trap. Fortunately I survived and even managed to hit a few good (ie playable) shots in there. Not exactly a fun day, but good enough.

Today I've been taking down stuff in the garage (posters, license plates, etc), basically getting ready to seriously pack up if we have to sell. By the time we would let anyone come in for a showing I plan to have almost everything I own packed away and hidden as best as I can. Everything I do is un-PC, scary or offensive so it's gotta be out of sight. I should have taken some before pictures, because it looks to barren afterward.

On the walk home from Starbucks the woman saw some kids doing an egg hunt and she managed to find an egg they left behind. No, I wouldn't let her keep it.

Right now she's 2 hours into making fresh biscuits for dinner tonight. Yum!

On a con-call, very boring. Snap manager for share point, woo.

Yesterday's crazy dinner was a success. The bread was a little too dense but tasted OK. Gotta tweak the feeding of the starter next time. We ended up eating the darker loaf and saving the one we made in the dutch oven for tonight.

Doesn't look like much, but everything on the plate was hand made (pasta, bread, sauce, salad dressing). I wasn't happy with the texture of the sauce, when you do the final blend at the end it chopped up the meat so fine that you lost the texture of it. Maybe I should try to blend the tomato base first, say 1/2 the way though cooking and then add the meat? You don't want it at the end because you'll lose the time for it to took together and integrate the flavors. Or something like that.

Busy weekend, and it's not over yet. Saturday I went to Fry's after the driving range and picked up some LED strip lights. I wanted to replace my dome lights in the 4runner with LEDs like Kenny did but the place that makes the drop-in replacements doesn't list them for my old truck so I had to get creative. The strip lights are 24 white LEDs on a really flexible sealed strip. I just curled them around inside the hollow left when I pulled the factory bulb and held them in with the dome light cover. Since the LEDs don't get freaky hot like the old bulb I shouldn't have trouble with their outer casing touching the plastic. I ran the setup for a while on the radio power supply giving it a full 13.2v and it never even got warm.

Testing last night showed them to be super bright, but because they're directional the back seat it like an operating room and the front seats are in shadows. I'm going to take it back apart and angle some of the LEDs forward so they aim into the front. It's still better than the stock bulb even as it sits now but it can be better.

After chores we went up to visit some of the woman's friends and have dinner. It was an OK time, but it's hard to hang out with all of the retiring cops listening to how they're working on their "retirement jobs" now that they're all drawing 100%+ of their original pay without having to go to work.

This morning I got up first thing to make the jerky I had marinating from yesterday, and it finished up a little while ago and it's the best batch in a while. I used the mixer to combine the meat and spices rather than doing it by hand. I think that makes a difference on how uniform it gets spread around. My parents are coming for dinner tonight so the woman is making sourdough bread (from the starter we got at class last weekend) which should be ready tonight at 6pm after she started it yesterday morning. I'm going to make pasta around 3pm, and we'll be starting the sauce here in about 10 minutes. The pasta, sauce and bread will all have been made from scratch; let's hope it's worth all this labor!

Also between the second and final rotation of the drying jerky and the second phase of resting for the dough I made the woman help me flush the brakes on the 4runner. Fluid was looking a little funky and it's been on my to-do list for a while. I keep thinking the day is already gone but we've done so much today (store and auto parts run, breakfast at Noah's, jerky, bread, brakes, pressing all my clothes for next week, laundry). I might run to wally world to get some new socks too while I'm thinking about it.

Thursday I took clients to the NCAA thingy at the HP Pavilion. I got a pretzel and malt, and some of the cheer leaders were hot so it wasn't a bad time. The first game was good (close, action until the end) but the second was pretty much a slaughter and fortunately everyone wanted to leave before it was over. I personally found the mascot for Syracuse pretty amusing... A large orange sphere wearing a hat.

We got another notice from PG&E saying we were using 25% less energy than last year, but still 8% more than comparable households. I think that's bogus since we're the only 2 occupant unit in the whole complex. What's interesting though is the "average usage" graph they provided that shows an average day last month.. It makes sense that usage goes up around 6am, that's when we get up and then drops off after as we're gone shortly afterward. The upward trend during the day is odd since the HVAC is off for the most part and nothing new is turned on while we're not home. The only thing I can think of is that the house warms up with the day and the fridge and wine fridge have to work harder to maintain temp. Or the rodent turns on the TV and cranks up the heat during the day then shuts it down when we get home.

Monday I ended up in Foster City for a meeting and figured I should make the most of driving half way to SF and go all the way up and have dinner with the woman. She wanted to take me to one of the "SF usuals" thinking I should eat at all of them before we move. I've been to the lounge at Lulu before during an event at Moscone but never eaten there. Meal was pretty good, and the wine choices we had were also worth the price of admission.

That meeting was with Sycomp and their building has a really cool elevator. You select your floor before you get in the elevator and then it routes you to the most optimal car. Eric looked up the manufacturer and apparently they have a published algorithm that tells you how they compute the optimal path taking into account accel/decel times, car position, waiting people, etc.

Yesterday while the woman was up visiting Heather, I spent the day learning how to move drives around between windows boxes. You can in fact pull a drive out of a system and move it to a new one and have it work, but only if you run "sysprep" on it first to put it back to first-install mode. It makes you select the language and punch in the activation key (which in my case requires me to call it into MSFT now every time I reinstall) but otherwise it preserves all your apps and accounts and everything. Very handy. I made a copy of my disk to do all the experimentation with and then when it was perfected I made one final backup and did the switch. Now instead of the old single core PC left over from nvidia (which they didn't want back because it was old when I left in '06), I have an old dual-core left over from Skyrider. It's the shuttle I lent to Don a long time ago and other than it only holding 2gb of RAM it works well enough. My windows experience score is only 3.4 due to the on-board crappy graphics but my CPU ranking is much higher. Hopefully windows makes good use of the extra core now too since I've always got the APRS software running in the background.

I also rearranged the radio room, moving most the radio gear into the closet (don't need to have physical access to most of it for the APRS and packet stuff) along with the shuttle, power supply, etc. This gives me a bunch more room on the workbench for the Arduino projects, whatever they may be beyond blinking LEDs.

I got the truck washed, and I think it's going to rain on Wednesday.

Today we went to a bread making class at the farm up in the hills above Los Gatos. We got to make rolls in class because they only take 3.5 hours with all off the resting/rising. The instructor demoed making sourdough and brioche, and passed out samples she made today (starting at 4am). We took some starter home, perhaps we'll make sourdough at some point. One of the best ways to make it is with a dutch oven and we've got one of those.

Not sure why these guys are hanging out behind work, but they are. Lotta them.

Had to go pick up a loaner system from Ericsson yesterday, and haul some boxes of old replacement disks from the office over to the cage in 15, I suddenly feel like I'm a real tech now with junk in the car:

Last night we went to the annual client conference for Bernstein at the Four Seasons in PA. It was actually a good event, they kept the topics interesting and the BS level down but the fact level high. I really enjoyed it, and the food and wine afterward were excellent as well. We asked the head dude "if I was going to read one publication, which should it be?". He recommended the Economist, said if you can get through the dry data you can really learn something. I've checked it out on-line, not too bad. Can't tell what their bias is yet but it's gotta be subtle (or it's right in line with my thinking so I don't notice). I can't believe they don't have one though, that's not going to drive sales.

My Arduino board showed up yesterday and I managed to get enough time to install the drivers and SDK, power it up and make the LED blink with the sample blink code. Woo! Now if the book I ordered shows by this weekend I can try to make something out of all the random parts included in the kit. Fry's might actually become useful again with it's one tiny section of component parts (until I just order some random mega pack from digikey).

Also, I think I figured out why the VM windows box was crashing randomly. The disk was full. Not 100%, there were a few hundred MB free but perhaps at night windows was trying to do some sort of housekeeping, downloading of patches, etc and that would push it over the edge. I've cleared off a few GB and it's stayed up for 6 days now.

A week of no updates, what, am I suddenly Kenny?

Friday night we went to the Big Dog Winery in Milpitas for a horse sanctuary charity event. Yea, a winery in Milpitas and they even grow their own grapes, it's not just a buying vintner. They mostly did reds, which was good, although they're all very light even for cabs. We ended up buying 2 bottles mostly because it was a charity thing, although the wine isn't bad it's a touch over-priced for what it is. Still, I like supporting the local guys that try and let you meet the winemakers and see the operations.

Sunday I went to the range and met Don for some informal shooting, and I did OK. I keep entertaining the idea of bedding the stock on the 17, I can't imagine it makes much difference but I kinda want to try, and if I ruin it I won't be that upset. OK, I will since it's probably irreplaceable at this moment but some day that will change. The banners probably haven't thought to go after bolt action rimfires yet.

Better pics of the woman at PHX, this time "helping" them stow the pit marker sign. Or so she says, these look a little staged.

Sunday was mostly a calm day. I actually made a quick breakfast instead of just eating cereal:

Then I went to the range with the .17 a bit. The demographic at the range is massively different now. There were only 2 fat Mexican gang bangers spraying stuff, the rest were normal guys with bolt guns (some hunting, some not so much) and chicks. There were probably 7 women there shooting. Not the normal gang banger hos but just normal looking chicks actually shooting. Very odd. Can't say it's bad though, I didn't constantly worry about getting shot from some dumbass doing stupid stuff.

The rest of the day I did housework, dorked around and watched a ton of TV catching up on all the shows I've been ignoring. I watched a huge marathon of "Lords of War" which is a reality show that appears to be a combination of "Antiques Road Show" and "Pawn Stars". Entertaining with no fake drama.

Lotta miles in the last few days. Thursday we had a sales boondoggle, the group went skiing up to Tahoe. I didn't want to ski but I did want to go and be social so Thursday I went by my parents house to check on mom (doing well) and then drove to Truckee where they were staying. On the way I went along the west coast of the lake which I've never seen before, and found a spot to pull over and get a pic of what I now know is "emerald bay":

Dinner was at some restaurant downtown which I don't remember the name of, actually I don't think I ever knew it, but it wasn't bad. The "cabin" was actually a 5 bedroom house on the south shore of Donner lake. Some sales guys have it going on.

Friday morning I left the cabin and while listening to the all hands meeting on the phone I drove to the land to run the pump and check on things. Nothing really to report up there, other than a mouse living in the pumphouse. Ran the pump, walked the perimeter, checked the creek and wished I had brought some camping gear. It was 72F+ that day and the night was going to be clear.

I forgot to turn on the tracker when I left the house but I did when I left my parents so you can see most of the route:

Today has been an odds and ends sorta day. First I installed the OEM mud flaps that were delivered on Thursday while I was out, and then I painted the tailpipe. I think the exhaust is some sort of stainless, it's not rusted at all it's just this light brown color and it stands out. A little BBQ black and that's taken care of.

I also setup my golf swing trainer. A piece of scrap carpet and some foam blocks from a shipping box at work and I can exercise golf specific muscle memory at home. I figure 50 swings a day for a month or so and then I'll try to hit a ball again and see what happens. Proper form and just hit the black mark with the tape on the trainer club and that's it. Improper form and the club whacks the foam. How hard an it be?

The Fast and the Furious is on TV but it's not the original, it's movie #3 or #4? The second one with Vin Diesel.

The woman is in PHX at the nascar races, sent a few pics of her goofing around during inspection (I think):