One of the woman's new outdoor pets snooping around this morning. The woman got a 40 pound bag of feed corn yesterday to spread around for the critters. They won't get skinny with her around.

Beautiful day in the neighbourhood down here. I ran into town this morning to get an oil change, drop off the dry cleaning and get some food. Pretty full after dinner last night with Liz (Brian bailed on us at the last minute) but still in the mood for Chick-fil-A today. :)

The woman is at her new office today getting the sofa delivered. They also got her sign on the building. Now she's official:

Wonder what this guy has on his kitchen table? If I see him outside I'm going to go bug him.

The woman sent me some pictures of the work they did inside the office today. Looking like she's open for business again.

Dammit FOBs, do you not know how an ice maker works? When you put your grubby paws in the machine to take the last ice cubes, do not lift that little bar up. See, right there on the machine it says "left bar to shut off ice maker". When you shut off the ice maker, it stops making ice for anyone who comes after you. I realise you're happy to steal the last of the magic cold to cool your tea down (vs. just using a mix of hot and cold water that the water dispenser puts out), but you don't have to screw it up for the rest of us. Dumbasses.

Last night I woke up 3 times, which isn't too bad compared to normal. What was cool about the night though is I was having a non-disturbing non-crazy non-anxiety dream and every time I woke up and went back to sleep it seemed to continue. Usually only the stupid anxiety dreams follow me all night.

There are no mini-vans and no hybrids on the road at 6am from Morgan Hill. You would think that people with a long commute would like hybrids but it's just a steady stream of pickups, work vans and beat to shit camrys/accords. Perhaps the economics work that buying a used ubiquitous Japaneses sedan and driving it into the ground is cheaper than getting something that gets 50mpg.

The woman emailed me a bunch today to tell me she was at the local farmer's market and it looked pretty good. The first pic made me thing of the Victoria's Market in Australia in a small way. Anyway, a few minutes later she emails saying she got her first pet. Turns out it's just a sheet metal 3D goat. Um, yea. She also sent me this years picture of her posing with pumpkins (a bit of a tradition if you look back at prior years).

Down 9 pounds as of today. I'm feeling weak and sick most of the time now, so that is not a good sign. I tried to eat a larger lunch today (chicken kebabs, rice and pitas) but my body is not happy about it. I'm going to try to work out tomorrow just a little and see if my back can take it. I have to get back to normal!

I finished reading "Of Dice and Men: The Story of D&D and the people who play it" by David M. Ewalt. He's a writer at Forbes which is why I thought it was strange he mentioned this book he wrote about gamers but after the preview on Amazon I had to get it. I read it pretty much straight through, even installed the kindle app on my mac so I could read it during a particularly boring phone meeting. I was pretty interesting reading about the history of the game and the crazy ass people who wrote it, and I had no idea I was so close to the beginning of the whole thing. I was playing in '79 I think, or '80 when I was 9-10 years old. Let see I was in the 4th grade or 5th so yea, right around there. Anyway the game really got going in the mid-70s and the core 3 books of AD&D came out finally in August of '79. I had original printings of each (non-orange binding) so I must have been right there at that start basically. That's amazing to me, I had no idea it was a new thing to the world vs. just a new thing to our social group. Star Frontiers, which we played a lot of as well, came out in '82. Gamma World we played the 2nd edition when it came out in '83 but I still have an original '79 1st edition rule book which I seem to remember using a lot. So yea, we were in on the ground floor and didn't even know it.

So many of the books/games don't have pictures on wikipedia so I thought maybe I should take pictures of my editions and add them. I looked in the edit history (thinking I would email them to whoever did all the editing) but then I saw some douche was going through deleting all the images because they violate "fair use" in some countries. What's the point of a universal encyclopedia that can't include pictures of things? Especially old out of print things from history? Worthless.

So yea, 5:15am is the official time everyone goes to work from the trailer park. About that time half a dozen F250 super duty diesels fire up and they try to stealthily make their way out to the main road. I gave up sleeping at that point and just got up and on my way.

The big issue with the RV is heat management. Because it's a large poorly insulated fibreglass box for the most part it gets hot during the day and cold at night. I'm not running the AC or heat so last night when I went to bed it was 82F in there and this morning it was 60F. I brought out the extra blankets so I'm nice and toasty warm in bed, but then have to pop up and start dealing with the cold. Only going to get worse as the weeks go on.

Officially down 8 pounds now, I really need to get this back problem behind me so I can get back to working out. I don't want to lose that much weight.

New neighbours just rolled in. Quite a strange bunch. A strange looking woman on an old BMW GS bike, a small child, two 20-something looking dbags (probably the parents of the child) and at least one other person that I've not got a good look at yet because they're staying inside. Grandpa maybe? They're in a small RV so I can't imagine they're staying long with so many people in there. RV doesn't have a front plate and the BMW bike has... whoa, an actual German plate:

Interesting. Also has the Belgium sticker on the side bag, but that's not as telling as the plate with the big D on it. Bike shipped over from Germany and a rental RV for a vacation? No, actually it looks like there is a temporary registration in the front window of the RV too. I may have to take a look around later and see what I can see from the outside.

New neighbours also have a small baby along with the 2' tall child, and the RV has no plates at all. They're also not speaking English nor German, so what do they speak in Belgium? Dutch? Yes, says google because they're not using French either. Not that I know any French but I kinda know how it sounds. Ah, plus I can see a magazine on their picnic table and it's clearly got way too many umlauts and stuff on it. Bork Bork.

RV land wifi is pretty dodgy. Works fine one minute, drops out the next. Never lose connection with the towers but packets just don't flow for crap. Tower 4 is the worse, tower 1 has a weaker signal but works more often.

My plan to go to work at 6am and come home at 7:30pm only sorta works. Coming home last night I still ran into dead stopped traffic on 101. Damn the traffic here sucks.

Woke up to rain this morning and it took me a while to figure out what was going on. Sounds of pounding and water? Some pump going nuts? Water heater exploding? Tanks over-flowing? No, just water against the hull.

On the way back from Morgan Hill I saw this "dealership" so this morning on the way back from breakfast I made it a point to stop and take some pictures. It's not abandoned though, if you look in the 2nd pic you can see a large healthy dog came to check me out by the fence so clearly someone is in there or living there or something. Creepy. Posting the pic on twitter let me use some of those filters, the "1972" filter makes the pic look pretty cool given the subject material.

Putting a scarf on a goat doesn't hide it's evilness! Nice try zoo people! Mostly just took this to text to the woman and tell her it's where I was going for the day to make her jealous. She called my bluff though, she knows my back is still too screwed up to sit or stand for very long and I really wouldn't go to a petting zoo.

Ever tried to work on giving a presentation laying down? It's harder than you think.

I would like to have something cool to write about but it's just not the case. With my back so screwed up and my life spent at work trying to avoid traffic (leave the RV at 6am, return at 8pm) there just isn't anything going on. I did weigh myself this morning and I've lost 6 pounds so that's something, but I do fear it's just lost muscle since I'm not working out. I'm also not eating dinner so that might be part of it too.

People at work were asking about the RV so I found the brochure on the Winnebago site. I'm living in the "Adventurer 32H" with the optional "ultra leather" u-shaped dinette.

Saturday I blew my back out completely. Had to go to urgent care and get a couple types of meds to try to make it so I can walk again. Being gimpy sucks, I'm going to be unable to do very much for a few weeks I bet. These drugs aren't even all that good.

The worst part about the back problem is I had to pay $300 to move my flight back a day. I couldn't even sit up without pain so trying to fly would be damn near impossible. I made it back yesterday and today I'm worse off for it.

My parents had stayed in the RV for a night while I was gone, mom was in town for some tests. She left me this gift:

Yea, a bobbing head chicken. That's mom all right. She also left some muffins in the freezer (which defrost OK if you just leave them on the counter the night before) but no other major food so I went to Target to get a second clothes rod (need 2, one for clean clothes and one for clothes that need steaming) and found this in their food section. Looks like I'm not the only one who calls it that:

Funny picture of the server and wireless stack at the new house. It's not ideal but it's the fastest thing I could setup with the limited resources I could find. I'll do it right when the move is done and I can put some shelving up on the other side of that wall.

I swung by the old COS house on the way from Agilent. My once nice house is now the POS of the neighbourhood. The tree in the front yard is respectable now though.

I wondered why these "ice breakers" mints seem so familiar even though this is the first time I've had them. The mints are new, but the packaging is similar to how they used to package fishing weights, in the little plastic dispensers.

Surviving in NC so far. The safe delivery went well, had to pull the door frame apart but that's actually not that big of a deal it turns out and it's easy to put back (assuming you have tools, which I will later in the week). I need to arrange the shelving but otherwise the safe is done:

Back at home, my other new home is awaiting my return. Going to cost a fortune to get my car out of long term parking being gone for 11 days total. Work will pay for some of that I hope since I've got a business trip in the middle of my personal trip.

Dish network is in, and man does HD look good. Now standard def looks like crap, but I guess we're just used to it, and I think someone said that SD on an HDTV looks extra bad. Maybe it's just blowing that SD image up to fit the larger format TVs out these days?

Getting the net out to the new place is going to be a bit of a problem. No cable, no ATT u-verse, nothing but crappy DSL (and only 1.5M at that!). Looks like home broadband isn't in the cards for us country bumpkins. The satellite stuff looks interesting, but the bandwidth caps are nuts. We burnt 1gb of data on my phone just tethering for a short time. OK true outhouse went nuts and kept trying to upload the same email over and over and over again which burnt up a huge chunk of that but if one upload can kill your bandwidth for the month, I would hate to see what happens if you try to surf for a day or two. I may have to do some tricky thing like running DSL and the satellite and passing low priority traffic over the DSL and higher over the satellite but I'll have to see how hard it is to separate anymore. If everything uses port 80 or whatever to do it's updates (OS updates, the TV and dish network's BS traffic, etc) then port forwarding won't work, and trying to guess by IP/DNS would be a chore as well. More research is needed here for sure.

Move is half complete, the junk is loaded into the truck and gone. ETA is the 12th, which is a bummer as the woman will be alone that whole day. Her parents don't get there until after 8pm on the 12th.

The new digs, which I'll take more pictures of when I'm there in the daylight. Based on traffic this morning I need to leave around 6am to miss the majority of traffic on 101.

The woman is crazy and I'm enabling her. She's at the old place cleaning and her car was shipped off so she's stuck there until I get off work. I told her I would swing by with lunch and she said that the squirrels are there and they're begging for food too but she has no peanuts to give them. I doubt they're actually "begging" but whatever, I got a bag of nuts out of the vending machine before I picked up lunch. Damn squirrels cost me 75 cents but now the woman is happy that they get lunch too.

Powering down the California setup for the last time...

Moving day! The van showed up on time an they started loading all of the crapola. They didn't baulk and the 500 pounds of lead they would have to load but they were really suspicious of loaded ammo (which isn't allowed) because they said some dude tried to sneak 600 pounds of ammo into a move. Yea, that's going to get noticed.

They were pushing my bike up the ramp right as I was headed out to work.

There have been a few changes to the travel plans however. I'm now going to RTP and then I'll be flying back to DEN for a customer visit and then flying back to RTP for the weekend and then back to SJC on Monday the 16th or something. My car is going to be at SJC for 11 days, and we're paying RV rental space for all that time it's sitting there unused, but not much can be done about that. Not all of the stars are aligning exactly correctly.

The woman is getting calls from RTP nuts looking for treatment based on her name appearing on her professional web sites (CBT, etc). Her existing web page says all SF stuff so they keep asking her if she's moved away and if she can refer them to someone. The professional guy who's supposed to be redoing her site (with word press) hasn't done it in the last few weeks so I took the existing non-word press funky ass site and just hacked the HTML directly. Updated phone numbers, addresses, licenses, maps, etc. Not the major redesign she wanted with the new site but at least it won't be turning customers away with bogus info.

Last night in the house! Might be the last update I run from my pi system and sync to Kenny's house too since I've got to shut this guy down and pack it up for the trip out east.