Saturday, more coop work. Got the roof on, the baseboards run around the bottom, some additional supports in for things we'll be adding inside, the first of the ground wire in and the first bit of panelling up. We also got the rest of the wire so we can start on that as soon as we're ready. The woman painted up most everything we have in place, but I don't have a picture of that on my phone.

Sunday was spent not working on the coop, and in fact not working on much of anything. The woman went to the barn, I went to the range with Chris (the boat guy) and got some dope on my 308 with the can on it. Oddly adding the can makes it shoot .5 mil higher than without. No idea how adding a huge weight at the end of the barrel makes the shots go UP, but it does. It's very consistent too, once we got the .5 mil correction I just used all my existing dope and it worked out to 550 yards which is all we could get at that day. It's so nice with the can on there, getting rid of all the noise makes shooting a lot more enjoyable.

I want to think we did something else, but I can't think what. Uh, laundry? Cut my hair. Nothing exciting.

League alternate night went well last night. I didn't beat Sean but I was close, so that's good. I screwed up 2 targets but otherwise everything else the entire night was clean. My hits are far better, now I just need to work on speed.

Stuck in an all day customer briefing today, and my preso and demo (that I've been working on for over a week) got bumped to the end. What fun, I go last after everyone is ready to go home. Maybe most people will be gone by then so if I screw up it won't matter as much.

Picture I forgot to post. The woman trying to befriend a white turkey at the poultry farm while doing research on chickens.

Still winning the sportsball bracket, and the woman is still flirting with the last spot. It's gotta change at some point, my later picks were all pretty random with little regard for the teams actual skill. I think. Or maybe that's just how it all works out.

Another pic from Lane of the progress in the old neighbourhood. Trees gone in the last set, buildings gone here. Based on what I've seen them do here in getting model houses built I can imagine they'll have something done in 3 months and I'm guessing there is already a waiting list to buy whatever they end up building.

Sunday was spent on the coop project again. I started in early by myself while dad was doing other errands and then around 10am he showed up and we started making serious progress. I got the outer two ceiling joists in myself along with trimming the 4x4s before he showed up, but it's really slow working both ends of a beam by yourself.

A week without an update? Guess not much as been going on other than work and classes. Today I had my private shooting lesson and a few hours and 500 rounds later I think we've got some progress. The instructor corrected a few minor things I was doing and gave me some drills to work on at home, but the "most left" problem continues. He shot my G17 and it went left for him a little, as did my G26. Maybe that whole "glocks shoot left" thing isn't just BS and these really do need to have the sights adjusted to shoot straight? By the end of the day my full speed groups were pretty awesome though, if just a touch left. He said there was no way I could be so consistently off... unless something was wrong with my eyes. Lasik screwing me over?

After class I came home and we went to see the local chicken farmer dude who the woman is convinced is crazy (her professional opinion). Worse than that, he didn't have the kind of chickens she wanted so we'll have to look elsewhere.

We had my parents and the neighbours over for pizza tonight as a thank you for all the work on the coop so far. Tomorrow we'll put up the roof and set the floor joists.

Oh wait, I did just think of something interesting. Went to a going away social hour for our DM who left to go work at a reseller. Guess that's not interesting but it was outside the normal routine.

Ah, and another thing just popped into my head. I've finished rebuilding dad's old laptop into the security system PC in place of the NUC. The NUC is cool, but it just doesn't have the CPU to deal with so many video streams as inefficiently as BI processes them. I pulled out the virus filled SATA disk and replaced it with a 256gb SSD, added a bluetooth adaptor so I can run the remote keyboard and rodent, and put another 4gb SO-DIMM in there to kick the memory up to 8gb. With only 4 it was actually paging quite a bit so the $32 investment in that extra RAM really helps. I've got about $150 in parts in this thing now, but the results are worth it. CPU is generally lower and it doesn't choke when you get multiple HD cameras triggered at the same time.

I was trying to figure out why there are all the cams showing "no signal" 7 times but I forgot that I had the network disconnected after I rebooted with the extra RAM in there. Not sure why it shows only 3gb used, it was steady state at 3.8gb before the upgrade.

I picked a March madness bracket just to taunt the woman (who takes this way too seriously). In her group of NASCAR friends I'm currently in the #1 spot. Odd there is another Kelly in there, what are the odds?

The woman planted the plants we got yesterday so now the deer have something new to chew on. Not sure why she's trying, but I guess it keeps her happy.

Dad and I busted butt all day and got the coop mostly framed out. Digging all those post holes by hand with the clam shell digger sucked, but I'm sure if we had rented one of the powered augers someone would have ended up getting hurt. Next weekend, the roof.

View from the new pond camera. Happy to finally get that camera out of the office window and mounted up like it should be.

No private class today, it was rained out. Bummer. Guess it will just be a chore day.... plus installing HD camera #5. :)

Making the 4runner earn it's keep again today. Hauling the chipper around the yard and making home depot and nursery runs.

Dad got a used iMac off craigslist on Wednesday and I moved all his pictures / documents over and took his old windows laptop away. No more stupid viruses, hopefully no more browser hijacks, etc. His old laptop has an "i7" sticker on it so it's probably not bad, I'm tempted to toss that disk and replace it with an SSD and turn it into some sort of useful box. It's freaky huge, even larger than my 17" MBP, so it's a horrible portable system but could it be better than the NUC at being a video security box??? Built in UPS basically...

As part of the refinance paperwork they made us sign a thing saying that we didn't own all the previous addresses they could find. They included my parents houses back in Oregon (that they moved out of in the mid 90s), the BSDi office building in Colorado Springs, all the places I really have lived, the place Kelley moved to after she moved out of our house, etc. Having the list made me reminisce about all the places I've lived, and via the wonders of google street view and various MLS sites they're all there for the browsing. The 2nd Corvallis apartment... what a charmer. :)

It looks kinda dumpy, but that was a really nice little apartment, I remember how cool it was to be able to grill on that little patio and have a little private outdoor space to sit and eat. I also remember this place was $205/month. Probably not what it's renting for now.

I snuck away from work early yesterday and ran the power and networking cables in the new conduits out to the goat barn. We now have one less building on EoP and it's really helping the blue iris software not having to deal with as many latency filled connections. With 2 separate EoP circuits running it was resulting in 600-900ms latency all the time. Ick. Now it's just 250-300ms which is still ick, but much improved.

Busy, busy weekend but the awesome weather made up for it. Saturday was the mushroom log project which took all day vs. the 3 or so hours I thought it would take. We had to chainsaw up the trees, drill holes, tap in the spoor dowels and then seal everything with wax before stacking and eventually covering the pile. It wasn't hard, just really, really, really monotonous. The most amazing thing was my little MSR stove. We had it running for over 5 hours on a super low setting keeping the cheese wax melted. It did those 5 hours on less than an 8oz tank of fuel. That's pretty impressive, and means that next time I go out camping or something I'll be less inclined to bring the extra fuel bottle along. 1-2 days of cooking on this thing should be doable with the small tank.

If the logs work, they're supposed to grow mushroom for 5 years so the ROI on this project is pretty good... if it works.

Sunday was more manual labor. At one point there were 6 of us working on the coop area digging out bricks and concrete chunks the former owner buried, as well as digging a trench and laying conduit for power and networking out to the goat barn and the coop. Next Sunday we'll start the actual construction.

Some sample pics include some of the debris we pulled out, the first conduit going into the trench, and the final product ready for construction.

One of the helpers was actually that guy from the shooters forum who wanted to learn more about construction and off-grid projects like chicken keeping, water systems, etc. He worked for a good 5 hours digging, hauling, etc and really wants to come back next weekend for the actual construction part. Good (free) help, hard to beat.

Look what showed up today in the mail after only 4 weeks (or about 1/3 of the time allowed, unlike our county that takes beyond the legal limit just because they can get away with it):

Hey ya damn geese, get off the duck house! That's not for you.

Got email from Lane, our old neighbour in Milpitas. Looks like they're moving forward with the housing project behind us. The old Sun building (which I took my E10k training in oddly enough) which was converted into a Korean church is now going to be bulldozed and 80 houses put in it's place. Step 1, chop down all the trees. Who would want to live in a tree lined street anyway? Especially when you can have 80 houses on 10 acres, no room for stupid old trees. Consume, consume! Mass quantities!

Didn't do any work today, I actually went to the Dixie Deer Classic. Hadn't planned on going at all, but I found one of the dudes from the shooters forum was going and I wanted to hang out for a bit and be social. This whole having friends and doing stuff in real life thing is still pretty amazing. We walked the show and told stories and whatnot for a few hours but didn't really talk to vendors much.