Ellen sent us this picture of her being a yuppie at a wine tasting event over the weekend. I miss those.

This is funky. I'm on a WebEx (which isn't that odd obviously) but it's for a gun related thing. Rob Pincus is doing a webinar and an Q&A session and I'm connected. It's like doing a work thing, but they're talking about guns instead of storage. I've submitted some questions, we'll see if they're ignored like they are in work webinars.

Holy crap, Rob answered my questions!

Screw guns are awesome. Some scrap wood from the coop, a few screws and bam... you have yourself a shelf hanging from the floor joists underneath the living room. The camera server is now directly under the TV with an HDMI cable running up through the conduit where the Ethernet was. Now it's feeding the TV but the woman can't complain that she can hear the fan run. It's also a lot harder for a smash and grab thief to notice the easy to steal laptop when it's under the floor instead of behind the monster TV.

It's hard to see in the bad picture but I also put some scrap siding between the joists to keep the insulation from falling onto the laptop. It's going to be dusty enough down there without having crap fall from above.

1/4" wire installed on the lower half of the run, should do the trick I hope. It was pretty easy to install, just used 1/2" staples and the staple gun and it works well enough. I did borrow dad's heavy wire cutters to do all the cutting but it was taking forever so I busted out the dremel. Way easier, even if I did burn through 5 little cutting disks. That 20 pack was a good investment.

After working on the coop I went and installed this bullet trap over on the side of the pond. The woman was worried I would get lead in the water so this should alleviate that fear since all the lead gets caught in the bottom of the box. Unfortunately it makes a bit of noise when the bullets hit the trap, but having it mostly buried helps some. I don't think anyone is really going to notice though.

Apparently your linkedin accounts don't go away when you're dead. I guess they have no way of knowing, but it's going to be interesting as more connected people start to die off.... or maybe it's already interesting but I only now know of someone who uses 'social media' that's now dead.

This 2013 vintage of Bogle Essential Red isn't too bad. Not sure it's as good as the 2012 but we can't get that now 'cause Costco only has the 2013. All the best wine is from Costco for $8/bottle. :) I do miss CA wines though, and sometimes the winery visits and whatnot. Previous life I guess.

Leak testing the chicken watering cans. The article said that they ended up using O-rings on all of them, but that teflon tape might work just as well. I had the tape so I'll try that first.

While out for lunch and to get some 1/4" wire to keep the racoons from reaching into the coop (which they apparently do, they get the chickens attention by wiggling their fingers inside the wire and then when the chickens come to check it out they reach in and grab them and kill them) we stopped by FG&G. I didn't end up getting a G19, but did look at every suppressor ready .22 they had. I liked the look of the Walther P22 but didn't like how it felt in the hand. Same with the Ruger, except for the 22/45 but it was pretty racy looking with a funky blue aluminium barrel that looked like it was designed to press pasta out of. The full size M&P .22 was really too bulky for a .22, but the M&P compact was perfect. The woman liked it (as if she'll ever shoot it) and they had just gotten in two that had the adaptors with them instead of as a separately orderable item. Seemed like I should just get it, so I did. Impulsive in a way, but if I don't buy when I get the urge I tend not to and then end up complaining later.

Have never owned an S&W semi auto before, should be interesting. First sound test in the yard was very quiet, although the woman says it's "way too loud". It's about like the air soft, the slide makes noise but that's about it.

Didn't leak, so I finished the rest.

I need to re-do all of my picture indexes, it's just a total mess the way it is now with things scattered in tables and other pages and whatnot. Perhaps just a link to a big list like Dennis' site, that seems to work and is easy to search.

I made root beer on Monday and tried some today (after letting it ferment in the hall bathroom tub in case it exploded). It actually worked! It tastes like root beer and has the right amount of carbonation. Not sure it's worth the time/effort/cost but it's kinda fun to try, and the end product does not contain high fructose corn syrup.

OK, forget re-doing my image listing. It's already in somewhat of a pattern and changing 15 years worth of entries is just not worth it. I should try to script it if I want to re-do everything and that's not happening tonight. Instead I just reverted to the old pattern for everything and put them back on one page linked off the home. Searching still works just fine that way, and in fact is easier than what I had before with it broken up. Or so I'm telling myself.

One of the guys at work was celebrating his 15 year anniversary at Netapp so the boss took us out for chicken wings and beer. For some reason the took photos and I got my hands on one after. Bunch of sales droids... and me. :)

Yesterday I had to run up to Glen Allen in VA to pick up some gear at the Allscripts data center up there. Pretty boring 3 hour drive, followed by some bad Chinese food I picked up for the crew working there and then a boring drive back down. I did actually turn on the radio and let it beacon away on the trip, mostly to see if it still works. I'm really not doing much with the radios these days which is weird considering how much more I can do here.

I will be taking some comp time to make up for working on a Saturday. I'm not in IT anymore, I don't work 24x7 for free.

The best part of the day is that that the new owner of the boat came and hauled it away. I get to park the truck back in the carport now instead of the barn. That's good news for me because there are less snakes in the car port.

I've had Dawson's AR tool bag for a few weeks now trying to get my old AR put back together again. I got this cheap quad rail hand guard for it so I could mount a flashlight and with some bad advice of "cut the d-ring off" I proceeded to do just that. Once I got the d-ring off the hand guard fit, but it was totally crooked and there was no way to make it straight. Of course I couldn't put the stock guard back on because the d-ring was gone so I had to pull the barrel and replace it. Super annoying. Even with all the right tools it was a pain in the ass, but it's finally done and I have the stock guard reinstalled and a little rail adaptor bolted to it. Good enough. The last thing I needed was a replacement gas tube roll pin because the factory one as bent to shit coming out. Fortunately FG&G had one so I could finish today. $2.14 is about the cheapest I've ever gotten out of FG&G.

Today I moved the power over Ethernet endpoint to as close to the power panel as possible as to minimise the distance to reach the barn. With the adaptor here I'm getting 5-6ms latency almost all the time. With it in the attic I was getting 500ms, and in the laundry room I was getting anywhere from 5ms to 140ms depending on what was in use (running the washer killed the connection for the most part). I just checked it now and I'm seeing 4ms to 50ms... sigh, it's just never consistent. It will be great to replace that setup with an actual wire some day.

I pulled one of the easy to access camera cables out of the attic and replaced it with a store bought 75' cable. That let me re-use the good easy to run and easy to put ends on cable to wire up the coop. No more EoP out there, it's all cat5e between the barns and the coop now so the only EoP run is from the main barn into the house.

I also built a little weather stripping thing for the nesting boxes to prevent water from running in between the siding and the lid, but I may have to re-caulk it again. That caulk is "water clean up before dry" and it's pouring right now. I don't think it's had enough time to set.

Just got back from the "pop up" dinner which ended up being held at a nursery. Go figure. Menu is here, the pics of the food is linked from the main page. Good eats!

The bushes around the house are going nuts with flowers. You can see where the deer ate everything down below their head height and everything above that is full of leaves and flowers. The woman was slightly worried that the deer would kill the plants entirely but those bushes have been there for 20 years, it's not the first year they've been snacked on by deer.

Magpul is making G17 mags and I managed to snag some of the first batch Midway had. They're $15 vs. $25 for the factory mags but they're not as "nice". The finish isn't as good, you don't get the load indicating holes in the back and they don't use the standard base plates. If I was a super high volume competitor then the price savings would be worth it, but it's not clear that the saving are worth it on a small scale. I also picked up one of the 33 rnd mags just for fun, because they're so ridiculous.

The woman said she saw a huge snake running away from her when she was hauling paint to the back yard and sure enough, the snake shows up on the security video. Scary!

Mounted up one of the extra vices behind the press in the loading room. Now I can work on the AR as I have something to mount the action block into.

The coop is done, or mostly done. We still need to build the feeders but that shouldn't take much, and I need to run Ethernet over from the goat barn. I ran out of cable so instead of buying more I'm going to get another pre-built 75' cable cheap and run that in place of one of the runs of wire in the attic. I'll reuse that rather than buying another spool of cable and ending up with 900' of unused wire.

Last night we went to the woman's horse trainer's kids birthday. The kid is 1 so there wasn't a lot of activity there, mostly just adults standing around chatting. Older country neighbourhood so lots of old country folk, not a lot going on out there.

Second day of being home sick. Sucks, but I'm feeling better and getting some small work done so I guess it's all good in the end?

March madness is over, and I came in 2nd in the bracket thing. Woman came in 6th, which is why I guess she's not taunting me. :)

Coop, nothing but coop. So much work! The good news, is it should be done next weekend. The bad news is I have to make another home depot run for electrical supplies.

Saturday before coop work I went to the gunsmith to have him remove the muzzle brake from the .17 (don't need that now that I have the direct thread rimfire can) and try to swap the brake on the 300BLK. He couldn't get it off, the factory must have really torqued that crap down. Might have to send it in to them to get it removed.