For all the uses I've put that BBQ black paint to over the years, today was the first time I think I've actually used it on a BBQ. I wanted to grill some fish but don't want the house to stink so I resurrected this old grill we found and will put it back into service. It cleaned up pretty well I think, at least good enough for me to burn some fish on.

Took my drug test for my Biogen badge. Not sure what the next step is but I've done the background check, peed in the cup and filled out the legal paperwork.

Went with mom to Duke on Wednesday for her CT scan and cancer check-up. They found 3 spots of cancer but they haven't grown much if any since the last Stanford scan they have so the doctor said he wants to just wait 6 weeks and do another one. If things have gotten worse then they can discuss treatment.

Duke is a really nice hospital, but the floors are a little oddball. Scanning is on level 0, the doctors are on 00. Did they dig out the lower levels after the building was built??

Since the parents are here and dad is such a huge fan of turkey for some reason we did a full spread of stuff for the holiday. Honestly though it's just not worth the day of prep and the day of cooking. If you really want a turkey dinner, they sell them at the store. I checked, they're there.

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I just realised that the picture we took with all the food is incomplete. The first courses are missing (carrot and squash soup, apple salad, and something else I've already forgotten).

With nothing to do the woman setup the tree and forced me to help. I put up 4 ornaments and called it done; she can do the other zillion.

We had poachers in the neighbourhood and they killed the big buck and who knows what else, but now that the game warden chased them off we went back into the area they were at and removed their trail markers and looked for anything they left behind. We didn't find anything but we had fun riding around in the neighbours side by side. Standing in the bed zipping down the road I felt like I was just a bandanna and an AK away from experiencing a true technical.

Turkey consumed, etc, but before that I got the logs from the pond cut up. Dad helped which made it go a lot faster, and the rotted/needs to be burnt scrap is piled by the pong whereas the good wood is now in the 4th and 4.5th stacks in the woodshed. We even moved all the long and need to be cut up smaller limbs into the shed and stood them on end so they'll at least be out of the rain.

Finals for the dining competition were last night, and the woman got us tickets. The dude that runs it says that the event sold out in 67 seconds after the tickets came available. Guess there are some foodies around.

The secret ingredients were apple butter, caviar and champagne, all locally sourced of course. The champagne was kinda a dumb ingredient because they used it in everything but you can't taste it so judging on how well they used it was hard. Does hiding it count?

We knew that one of the chefs was going to lose as soon as dish #4 came out. It wasn't bad per se, it was just so pedestrian that in a competition like this it's going to lose you enough points to make you lose overall and that's exactly what happened. One nice side effect of the apple butter was that they couldn't use chocolate very well for dessert so neither chef tried. I really liked the non-chocolate based desserts for a change.

Our table had the "NC beer guy" there, the owners of one of the breweries whose beers were showcased for the dinner, some air headed (yet obviously hot) food blogger and her man, and this really oddball couple that had been to almost 20 of the dinners. The guy was retired IBM, the wife was some social worker and apparently they like nothing more than travelling around going to this competitions. They just did not seem like foodies, especially since they wouldn't eat half of what was served. If you're that picky, going to things where the chefs have to be creative and do oddball stuff is probably not a good use of funds.

Course #2 was the best, hands down. Even the woman liked it after being upset at the thought of eating one of her pets.

So far today I've debugged the electric fan on dad's jeep (relay is shot, sometimes it works and sometimes it just does nothing when you feed it +12v), fixed the boat cover and moved the boat out of the way, and.... well and I guess that's it. Not sure where the morning went but there ya go. Dad decided to order a new control unit/relay assembly rather than have me hack in a random automotive relay from the parts store. I can do stuff like that because if it fails I know how to bypass it, but not so much with him.

The woman did take some pics of me working in the yard last week:

The customer visit in Charlotte was a good use of time. After the meeting they said that we went from being "just another vendor to use as leverage to get EMC's price down" to "a legitimate contender with features that we could use". They wanted a presentation on the basics of the storage, the GUI, etc and said "we just want that guy to present", pointing to me. Apparently they've reached their fill of sales guys and just want a nerd to talk to them. That means I'm headed back to Charlotte tomorrow to do the live demo. I also have to pick up some gear from the office there and bring it back to be shipped out so I'm driving the 4runner.

The electric fan in the Jeep is having issues and it overheated so I had to go rescue my parents from the Harris Teeter parking lot. Towing the Jeep is hard, I think it actually weighs more than the 4runner.

Feels so late, getting dark out at 4:30pm is nuts. Of course it's also trying to rain so it's darker than usual, but still. Stupid daylight savings time; it's dark when I get up and dark when I get off work.

The parents arrived yesterday and while they've been out looking at houses I put the winch on the Jeep to good use and pulled those big logs out of the pond. Once they're dried a bit I'll chop them up and burn them off (they're way to big to burn easily by themselves). I also built a 3rd wood rack in the woodshed and stacked up the last of the cut and split wood. I'll have to build a 4th rack to finish things off at some point because there is still at least a full racks worth of wood piled up outside the shed awaiting the splitting maul.

We got a burn done today, got rid of the last of the sticks and rotted wood the woman collected up, and while putting away the shovels and axe I broke out the drill and some wood screws and fixed the barn door. I guess it technically wasn't "broken" but the doors did not contact each other when they closed so it left a 1.5" gap. I put a piece of trim board behind that gap so it looks a little more finished and you can't see inside. Probably unnecessary but now that there is like $5k worth of power tools out there (all my stuff plus dad's wood chipper, power washer, chainsaws, etc) it might keep the neighbour kids from seeing in and thinking they should try to steal stuff. Not that the neighbour kids are old enough to have to steal to support their drug habit yet but it's possible they have friends.

All that winching, cutting, burning and building and I didn't take a single picture. Huh. Well here are some, my new Carhartt jacket I got for working outside (which is now covered in mud and ash from the day's work) and a stealth shot of me trying to capture a picture of the hot chick in front of me on the jetway in ATL for Vareck. Didn't really work out, you can't see the amazing thigh gap from this angle.

Flight back from ATL was easy, although I didn't get dinner. I think the woman was upset because I used my powers of flirtation to get some fries off the random chick next to me who brought a bunch of food on the plane. If you can't use your powers for evil, what's the point of having them?

I think everything went well yesterday at the client site. There was about 75 min of nonsense and 10 or so minutes of 'hard dialog'. The rep and his boss were both very happy with what I said; I had no real role in the meeting but I ended up speaking up a bunch toward the end. After they (coworkers) asked why I waited until the end to 'act like a rock star' and whatnot and the truth is that the customer wasn't ready to hear the real truth until they had some nonsense spoon fed to them for a while. If you just open up and start an honest dialog it will fail if you don't first do all the political crap. It's just how I've found the world to work in non-nerd circles. Why say something in 5 minutes when you can say it in 90? with power point?

Today I'm in a "big data workshop", learning a bit about hadoop. It's kinda cool, just wish I could figure out a use case for it. Hopefully the examples and labs will be good.

First labs were good, and lunch was amazing. OK maybe it was just because I didn't have dinner last night or breakfast this morning and I was a little hungry....

I still find it hard to stay awake/alert in these classes. The material is interesting but my ability to focus on one subject for a day at a time is really limited. Sorta used to the firefighting of lots of customer engagements. Maybe this is why so many people claim to have whatever that "can't pay attention" thing is. Maybe people just aren't meant to try to focus on complex new tasks/topics for hours on end? I'm trying to use this typing to re-focus. Or at least stop doing that almost-fall-asleep-and-jerk-awake thing like in college.

Went to the range tonight after class, tried out the new G26. It's pretty sweet. I can't shoot it for crap but that's just a matter of practising with the wonky Glock trigger and grip angle nonsense.

When I was doing double taps and mag changes (actual double taps, not controlled pairs which is different) the RO came over and I figured he was going to get on my case or something. Instead he said that I looked like I was wasting my time and that I should come to the pistol competition on Monday night so I could do what I was doing with more interesting targets and more movement. Huh. Maybe I should try to join a league and shoot once a month? Would be more interesting than faking it on the square range.

The woman said that we had some money building up in the joint account. She wasn't kidding. Lower taxes, lower mortgage, lower utilities, lower gas, lower insurance, and no actual vacation this year yet still putting money in at the CA rate has had an impact.

RDU headed to ATL for the day. Fun times at a big meeting in which I don't have a speaking part. My slides were cut out entirely so I'm just there as "backup". Sigh. Would rather not have to spend my whole day flying around just to do nothing.

Oh lovely, we're in Atlanta at 10am but the meeting isn't until 4:00pm! WTF? 6 hours early? I realise you want some prep time but that's kinda nuts, and it means that we're going to be rushed on the way out. Lotta sitting around in the Netapp office in Atlanta watching the all-hands meeting for us.

Got this in email yesterday, they're supposed to be sending a fancy printed version I can frame. Ooh... ahh...

Last night I managed to get over go FG&G and pick up a Glock 26. Now, I know... or I think, I swore off using Glocks a long time ago and just kept my G23 because it was my first CCW gun all those years ago. However, I've decided to give it another try obviously. The G26 was the "right" choice because it can use the larger mags of the G19 and G17 with little "grip sleeves" that make the extra mag sticking out just part of the grip just like on the XDs. They had 1 xgrip at FG&G so I grabbed it and put it on a G19 mag and sure enough it makes the whole grip of the G26 just like the G19. So, I can carry with the flush fit 10 rnd mag, or in the winter when I've got a jacket or sweatshirt on I can carry with the 15 rnd mag. Best of both worlds.

The other thing I did which was a larger leap of faith is that I picked up a crossbreed holster for it and proceeded to cut it up. I've thought there is a little too much material in the holster because it's a semi-generic sized back piece that has to fit 40+ different pistols and it has a lot of material to keep the gun from touching the wearer. I'm fine with the gun actually touching my skin and would rather have less bulk and less printing over a little bit of comfort. The woman thought I was nuts taking a knife to a brand new holster but I'm pretty happy with the results. Good retention, good comfort, good concealment and minimal bulk. I did 100 or so draws out of it and it seems "right". Time will tell, once I get the pistol actually fired and known to work I can carry it and see how my home hacked setup works over time.

Those 100 draw strokes started me down the path of learning the Glock grip angle again. It's not the same as the 1911 or XDs or XDm or any other pistol that's supposed to appeal to 1911 converts, but it's not that hard to train up on the new angle. The G26 is already starting to feel normal whereas my XDs is feeling kinda funky. You can train yourself to use anything.

The rotation is now, based on what I'm wearing: LCP pocket carry, PM9 belly band, G26 IWB. If I find myself wanting to carry more than a G26, I probably need to not be going wherever that is.

That didn't work out very well. After chores today we went to a new barn so the woman could check out a potential horse. While the owner was riding it showing her how it moved, the horse freaked out and dumped the rider. Doh. She wasn't badly hurt but I'm glad it was the owner that went over the handlebars and not Kristen. That pony is no bueno, she'll have to keep looking.

More cans arrived this week and I've loaded them up. I've got 2 cans left and all that's not in cans now is the 4 cases of 308 factory match stuff that I'm going to leave along and most of the shotgun shells. They stack pretty well and in uniform cardboard so I'll leave them alone. The factory 308 stuff is really inefficiently packed, you only get like 12 boxes to a can so I would need 9 cans just for that. That's a big much.

A little before and after leaf blower action.

Doing some ammo horse trading and I ended up with ~150 124gr NATO spec 9mm rounds. It should work fine, it's just like +P and would be harder to reload due to the crimped primer pocket. I kinda don't want to shoot it because it's +P and don't want to trade it lest somehow it gets back that I'm trading with people who are somehow trading with people skimming .gov ammo. Looks like yet another thing to toss into the stash and ignore for another 20 years.

First things first, the woman dressed as Gordon from the Spring commercials for Halloween (in PHX with her family, not here). So maybe she did a good job of it, but who the hell is going to know who "Gordon" is? I figured no one but she said that kids were dressing up as "Jake from State Farm" so maybe commercials do go into pop culture like that. If so, I would imagine that more than one chick out there dressed as Flo.

Last week was the start of a long journey. I went to Vegas for a work conference and we went out a few days early so the woman and I could eat at a few places and she could then go visit her family in PHX. Being cheap bastards we ended up staying at the Excalibur which was the cheapest place we could find on the strip. Even the Flamingo was more, which is scary but maybe now that it's next to that fancy new place it's got aspirations of being great itself?

The woman gambled a little and came up $55 ahead for the trip, which is really impressive when you're playing penny slots. I thinks she lost most of that at another indian casino with her parents, but I stole $5 from her winnings so she couldn't totally lose everything.

The first restaurant was China Poblano, a Mexican/Chinese place. Um, yea. It was very good but I still think the pairings were just a little oddball. I tried the duck tongue tacos, the woman would not.

The second restaurant we want to was Bouchon. It's an oldie but a goodie and since both meals together cost what we would have spent at Craft Steak (even if we could have gotten in!) it was a relative bargain. By going early (we were still on east coast time and starving by 5:30pm like we're old or something) we had the entire restaurant to ourselves basically. The patio was deserted and we ate alone almost the whole time. Kinda cool really.

After the duck tongue taco adventure I decided I was going to try snails (it is a French restaurant after all) but instead I tried the skate. I gotta say it was a good choice, the flavor was excellent and the texture was not "fishy" so Kristen would try it a little. The waiter suggested I try pairing it with a beer instead of wine and that also turned out to be a good call.

I wanted just a normal breakfast on Sunday and it turned out that House of Blues serves normal American breakfasts reasonably priced so we gave it a try. What was cool is that their menu is made by this guy:

Now obviously he doesn't cook there but at least it's something with his name on it so we can say we've tried his food... well sorta. Any moron can make bacon and eggs, even me.

Vegas is taking it up a notch, now they're offering IVs if you overdo it. That's nutty.

Leaving Las Vegas came in a different form though. Dad came by in a moving van to pick me up and we drove back to NC. Very slowly. Took almost 3.5 days just from Vegas and we did it in 3.5 days from his place last time. The 4runner might have slowed down up hills but the van couldn't even maintain 70 on the flat. It was large enough that actual truck stops made more sense for fuel so that was kinda cool hanging out with the big rigs. One oddball thing was that the DEF tank was on the passenger's side and every truck stop had the DEF pump on the drivers side, so we had to mostly just buy bottles of DEF to top it off as we went until I finally pulled into a mostly empty truck stop backwards to get it topped off.

Then of course we had to unload the truck into a storage unit, while I was nice and sick with a sinus issue and fever. Now that sucked.