I have to remember to tape over this light in the car. For some reason there is an LED that shines right onto the console at night, but all the stuff on there is already back-lit so the extra front lighting is just washing things out and throwing up unnecessary glare. Strange.

Just got off what can only be called a support call. Our support guys couldn't help a customer with a Mac/NFS problem and I got asked to step in and help. To be honest, the support guys got it 90% right, but what they couldn't do it explain it to the customer in a way they could understand and implement. Unfortunately that's a big part of it; doesn't matter how "right" you are if you can't get that into the customer's head in a way they can use it.

The woman found this in Food & Wine (I think). We went to the restaurant in question in Asheboro.

After all the chores this weekend I sat down and pulled out all my electronics junk and got the current meter prototype created. The sensor has a 3.5mm stereo plug as it's output but I didn't have any surface mount or other 3.5mm sockets.... oh wait, crap, now I just realised where I do have one. Great, 16 hours late. :) Anyway, I whacked the connector off there and soldered on some leads I can use on the prototyping board. I guess I can put the 3.5mm back on there when I'm ready to solder the whole thing together and put it in a box. I was at least smart enough to save the connector with sufficient wire on it to reuse, but likely I'll want to find a different connector all together.

I wired up the temp/humidity sensor too since it's easy and I needed a refresher on how the board worked. I had left it in some wonky state with a half functional LCD and a light sensitive back light level but clearly it had been taken partially apart to fit back in the box. Trying to read those resistor color bands was hard with my eyes, I'm may see 20/25 at distance but close up like that it's hard to see those little colors clearly. Fortunately my meter has no such problem so I could test them all and put them back into the appropriate baggies.

The clean office, now back to being a disaster area.

Snuck off to the range for a bit on Friday night to test the Kimber and the LCP post paint job. Both work just fine, and if anything the Kimber actually feels a little better now. A few thousands worth of paint on the rails makes up for the metal worn away from all the years of use. I couldn't get a spot at the normal pistol lanes so I had to use the 50m mixed use lanes and they won't let you shoot closer than 10m. Not normally a problem, but I was concerned about the LCP's accuracy at that range. Fears unfounded though, you can see the .380 holes mixed in the .45 holes on the target. It's not a target gun but it's good enough at 10m.

The work this weekend was cleaning up the wood scrap left over from the barn rebuild. I sorted all the leftover wood we pulled off the old barn and either stacked it for reuse or cut it into 2-3' sections for easy burning. I cut off the bad parts of the longer boards and kept as much as possible since that wood is crazy hard and not something you can get anymore. With all the scrap sorted and nails pulled, we then burnt it in the burn pile out front. Of course, the burn pile needed maintenance too with the ducks and geese having used it for their egg hatching and all the weeds that had grown in the good ash soil, etc.

Of course, around 11am on Sunday when I had the burn going really well it decided to rain. We got half an inch of rain in about an hour and it almost put the fire out, but later I was able to come back and finish the burn job.

I also managed to get the entire side of the 'feed storage' part of the barn off as a unit. The woman wants me to replace that with the siding we're using everywhere else, and I'll reuse the nice wood slat section as the floor in the feed area. That is, when I can get someone to help me move it. The woman is too weak to pick it up and carry half of it.

My laptop is burning up, fans running at 6500 rpm, temps up, couldn't figure out what was going on since I'm not doing anything but email.... ah, runaway java process on my windows VM. Nothing was actually using java, it was just cranking away doing something. What shit, can't believe people still use that stuff. I guess it's running on windows though and they don't expect it to be any good? Haven't we passed that era now? Win7 is not that bad... but maybe Win8 has brought it back?

I didn't take a picture of the actual meal, but I did get a shot of the specials board a the fish restaurant on Saturday. It was pretty good, but was lacking in horn.

CA has been sending me threatening letters for a while now about my fast trak transponder (which I paid for up front so fuck off) and today they changed their tune and just gave me a refund on my unused account balance. Totally, totally unexpected!

The non-drone Amazon delivery showed up, the generator is here. Now if I can just get an electrician to show up and wire it in..

I was just about to send email to Dennis to tell him his site has been down for a while and when I went back to verify the error code I was getting... the site came back up. Interesting timing.

The weekend here was mostly a bust from a getting-stuff-done perspective. With the in-laws still here most of the time is spent complaining about the weather, eating, complaining about the weather, eating... oh wait, I said that already? Yea, there is a lot of that. Hopefully I can get some stuff done next weekend after they're gone beyond just cleaning up my office (which I did, and really helped clarify what I want to do with the space now that I can see it vs. just a big pile of crap).

Saturday I rode out to Ashville to drop off the Kimber and the LCP to get them cerakoted. The dude said it would take a week which was fine, but then he calls me Sunday afternoon and says they're ready. Woo! I ended up driving back out there to pick them up and the results are amazing. The LCP didn't look that bad, but now it's green and won't rust. The Kimber did look a little beaten and now it looks brand new. The guy does some amazing work.

Sunday afternoon everyone went out to go fishing in the pond. The woman's mom caught a fish that swallowed the hook and it was bleeding, so we knew it was just going to die if they threw it back. I took the little guy into the kitchen and cleaned it and after diner I cooked it up before we put the cast iron skillet away. He's a tiny little guy, obviously you wouldn't normally keep a fish that small but the rules are if you kill it you have to eat it. What's funky is it's the best fish I've cooked to date. Flavor was good, it was nice and flaky and it was not dried out. Now if I only had 10 of them we could make a meal out of it.

Haven't been updating the journal much because the computer isn't in the kitchen anymore. Now that I have to go downstairs to type it's harder to just bang out quick updates at random times during the day as I walk by. I've also been away from the house a bit more than usual trying to avoid the in-laws as much as possible.

Last night was a different type of shooting class/practice thing at the local range. They focused on more CCW skills and drills and not so much of the high round count stuff you get in the classes with ex-military trainers. I really did enjoy it and liked how my Krav skills helped out. Now obviously I couldn't kick or punch anyone but when faced with the situation of holding an empty gun (fired to slide lock) and then having a enemy jump out most people just freaked at the idea and couldn't tell the instructor what they would do. I had no problem saying "punch them in the face with the gun". :) The other incident was when one of the instructors tried to hide a knife from us while we were scanning after firing. This is the only class I've ever seen them actually try to do things you should notice, they usually tell you to scan but you're never finding anything. Here she actually had something. Suddenly everyone was paying attention!

Surviving the in-laws, mostly by being gone as much as possible. Hard on a lazy Sunday though when they just sit around and talk talk talk talk talk talk talk without conveying any new information.

The little buck they've named James was in the yard today, he's got some actual antlers going this year vs. the little stubs he had last year. He was pretty skittish but I managed to get one bad picture of him.

This week has been crazy busy with work, two trips to South Carolina, lots of meetings, calls, etc. I did manage to make it to Krav both days as usual so that was cool, I don't mind being busy as long as I keep up with the gym and Krav.

Yesterday was the shooting class and I'm hoping the guys there taking pictures for the review article actually do post pictures on the forum so we can get them. I want to see how cool I look. :)

The bad part was that the combo of sweat (it was in the 90s and humid!), sunscreen and whatever caused the Kimber to rust in the 6 hours it was in the bag between the morning live fire session and putting it back in the safe. I'm going to see about getting it refinished, whatever is on there now isn't working so well anymore.

Members of the forum at the class got a t-shirt. I picked the one with the smallest logo and noting on the back, and it's the exact same green as the new cheapie shirts I got to replace my favourite that got ruined with the OC spray.

The wine fridge is working hard in the little niche up in the kitchen area so we decided to move it down to the dirt room. I feel better having it out of direct light and it shouldn't have to work so hard down there.

FG&G had some 300blk subsonic cheap so I picked up a few boxes to add to the stash. When your stash is small, it's easy to increase it by 50% in one day...

Boat training today on the Cape Fear river. The woman said I looked paralysed, I like to think I was just keeping my weight centered in the boat. After we dropped her off and I took the wheel (tiller, whatever) I tried to dump us a few times on accident.. don't use the damn tiller to try to turn when you're up on plane! Once I figured that out and learned to lean the boat instead of steering it I did OK. 15-20 min of practice and Chris (guy who's providing the boat) got out and let Kristen and I zip around so she could see what it was like at speed. She had no problems and was busy spotting turtles and deer on the sides of the river to really notice how focused I was on trying to keep us from crashing into stuff or flipping over. Damn small boat.

What did go over really well was my thank you gift. The guy isn't much of a drinker so I couldn't give him beer or wine, and I don't know anything about cigars, so I brought a little 100 pack of .22 shells. He was shocked someone would give those away as a gift, and asked if I thought I was going to buy the boat off him with the ammo. Even at today's crazy prices it's like $20, but it's the thought that counts.

Lots of fireworks going off last night for several hours. We were watching the last episode of "Inside Combat Rescue" and it made it seem like we were in the war zone with all the noise going on. Glad we don't have any pets to get freaked out by that sort of thing.

While the woman was over at the neighbours being social, I snuck into the back and built up the new wall on the barn she wanted. This area is where the shavings are going to go and she wanted a wall so they would be protected from the rain a little. There will be gates at both ends for loading and unloading but the wall itself is just a wall. I've wanted to see how those sampson ties worked at joining wood and this wall was a good trial. The ties work OK, but I probably won't use them on my radio shelf project and will go back to those external braces I used on the loading table.

Lunch the other day made me happy:

Ow. I spent the morning cutting and splitting firewood and then the neighbour came over with the tractor to move some of the large stumps out of the woodshed. No problem there, until we uncovered a yellow jacket nest. We each got stung once before I got the raid and hosed the bastards down. Stupid bees.

Got the pic that the pro photographer took up on the tail of the dragon. It's a pretty large pic, and you can really see how beat up the bike and my gear are at full resolution. If I had known there would be pictures I would have washed the bike. :)

300 blackout ammo quietly waiting on the shelf in the basement for the arrival of the SBR in 6-9 months. By then I might have the right powder to actually load some rounds too. Also, the LCP is starting to show some rust where it rides against my gut. That can't be good, the finish must be super cheap if it's worn so fast. Wonder if the stainless version would have been a smarter buy, or if it's just as junk stainless that would actually rust (I've seen it before).

For the last few days we've been on the road, first to Gatlinberg TN and then to Ashville NC. The woman drove and I rode so that while she went to the casino in Cherokee I could go ride Deals Gap. The tracker got some of the route, sorta, guess not a lot of HAM people out in the middle of I40.

All the pictures of the trip are on the main page as usual.