I hate being sick, hate it hate it hate it. I've been trying to ignore it and do normal stuff but it's not working. I had to leave the match on Saturday after 2 stages, I was just too unwell to continue standing around doing anything. Hate it.

The sickness started on Friday. I took the day off and went squirrel hunting. I didn't really expect to find anything, and I in fact did not see a single squirrel, but I got out into the field and walked around and made a show of it. The season is over as of today, so I did at least make it out once. Whew.

I did get to see them loading up some heavy equipment (they were logging in the game lands area) and found a deer stand up in a random tree while out walking. It wasn't that cold out and I had the proper gear on so not sure why it got me sick but I was clearly feverish after I got home in the afternoon.

The people that bought our Milpitas place emailed us with some questions, and they shared pictures of what they had done to the place since we left. They pulled up our carpet and put down laminate, and totally redid the kitchen. The woman thinks the kitchen is too small to be that dark, and it might be, but I still think they did a good job of it.

Friday afternoon I went and got the first load of dirt for the garden box, and then Saturday morning I went for a second load. There was a lot of moisture in the dirt and the truck was struggling with the weight of even a single yard in the bed. It's got plenty of power to haul it around, but the springs were really sagging. Guess that's why they make 2500 HDs. I don't have a picture of the full box yet, but it's full now.

Sunday dad came over and we worked on the barn remodel materials list, and then went to the gun show. He wanted a big flashlight but couldn't find anything better than the streamlight I got off Amazon. I could have told him that, none of the Chinese junk they sell at the gun show is going to be better than an actual surefire or streamlight.

Sneaky came down for the show though, and came to the house after for lunch and to check out the birds. He's suitably impressed, even though our "farm" is about 1/20th the size of his.

Somewhere in all this time I migrated the security PC from a 250gb SSD to a 500gb SSD in preparation for a windows 10 upgrade. I wanted to have a clone to test with in case things go wrong I can just re-image off the original 250gb SSD.

Still hunching and doing the "tactical turtle". I forget under stress.

When you're not actually shooting at the match you help out by pasting targets, running the scoring tablet, etc. My unofficial job, yet the one I do every time, is sweep up the brass. Most the other squads just leave the brass laying around everywhere and people have to be careful not to get dumped on their ass slipping on brass. I sweep up after every shooter so everyone gets the same stage without all the underfoot obstacles. As part of sweeping I see all the ammo people drop, usually the last round they kick out when clearing at the end of the stage. I've been picking them up and tossing them in my bag and as of yesterday I'm 1 round short of a whole box of found ammo. Lots of different bullet styles, weights and seating depths but you can see the local guy who makes the blue coated bullets has a following.

Back in the 90s they tried to market those coated bullets too. They're just lead with a nylon covering to keep the lead dust down, so you get cheaper bullets than copper jacketing but without the health risks of airborne lead. It was a good idea but the media saw them and declared them "teflon coated cop killers" and they were pulled. Stupid media.

Ellen made up a bunch of chicken lunch boxes last week and that inspired me to make up some of my own. I didn't have a bunch of chicken to grill up but we did have some hamburger and sauce so I got some pasta to go with it and made up a big batch. I'll freeze these guys and they should reheat well. I left the pasta a little more al dente than usual but I'm hoping when it gets reheated it won't get so soft like usual.

Dad cut up the down limbs they had in their yard from the last storm and I hauled it over and added it to my storm woodpile. All the wood on that particular stack is from that same ice storm.

Part of the garden box project is getting water to the box, so I ran the piping under the deck and into the basement where Jamie (our neighbour who is also a full time handyman) is going to hook it into our water supply while cleaning up some of the scary plumbing the original owners did under there. I put the pipe at a slight downward angle so that in the winter I can turn off the supply inside the house and open the valve outside and let it drain. No frozen pipes that way.

On the box itself, I ended up putting on the bird netting... and then ripping it all off again and pulling out all the staples. The material was just too flimsy, it kept ripping just under it's own weight so I know if any critter actually just touched it that it would fall away. I put some supports down the center of the boxes and will get some 1/2" poultry wire and use that. Should be sufficient.

For mom's birthday we made her dinner. I tried two new recipes, a celery soup that everyone seemed to love but I wasn't all that thrilled with... and the real winner of the day a lemon pound cake. I made it totally from scratch, including zesting actual lemons. Fancy, and it was awesome tasting.

I now know why the Starbucks lemon loaf is 410 calories per slice. Pound cake is mostly creamed butter, sugar and buttermilk with some token lemon zest and juice in there. The frosting is nothing but confectioners sugar and lemon juice. I'm sure the Starbucks version has some bonus chemicals in there too.

Before all the cooking I made some progress on the garden box. I moved the legs of the first frame out to the corners and used a crap ton of wood glue in addition to the screws, and then built the second one which went a lot faster. Now I can attach the netting and it's ready for dirt.

Dad brought the sawzall over tonight as well so in the morning I can shave off 1/4" of the 'tabs' that center the frames on the box. The wood has warped just a tiny amount and it's enough to make it hard to get the frames on/off the lower box but with a little shaving action they'll be perfect.

I'm at the same Starbucks as two weeks ago and that same SAT prep chick is here. Students are different though. Must be that time of year.

I had to go to Red Hat today for a migration talk, I wasn't sure why the SE on the account wanted me there until we actually got there, and then it made sense. Those IT guys should be happy their user base is so interested in helping. The engineers were actually interested in tweaking their workflows to take advantage of the new stuff the storage offers because they thought it would make things better. WTF? What user wants to change things to make them better? They want to keep everything the same but have it work better, everyone knows that. Anyway, I helped mediate some of the meeting and clarified what their options were so that everyone agreed to what end they were working which really helped keep things on track.

Prior we went to a restaurant downtown and I got the butternut squash ravioli. Not bad, and the shrimp on it weren't as odd as I thought they might be.

The night vision version of the new camera:

Got the new garden cam up, and this one has a better image and wider field of view, so that's a win. What's not a win is that the interface is a total POS. If you set it with a static IP it works just fine... until you power cycle it. Then it locks up solid and won't respond on it's static any more or DHCP so you have to do a full factory reset and start over. Leaving it at DHCP works, so I've done that and just static DHCP it off the router. That's lame as shit, but it works. Sigh. This camera wasn't even that cheap, it should work!

I may move it over to the original post I had it on before, just depends on how the night vision looks from this spot. It may interfere with the deck cam which is just out of frame to the upper left.

This camera also came with a 60' cable which I ended up running along side the cable I originally ran, thinking that all my woes with the network were a result of a bad cable. Now I have two cables out there, might actually put my long range wireless widget out under the deck since the cable is there now and remove the EoP link to the barn as it's quite slow.

I replaced the EoP adaptor with the long range wifi as planned, and the bandwidth is literally 10x what it was before. From 24mbit to 240mbit, and I'm now pushing some data, and latency is fluctuating between 2-9ms. That's not horrible all things considered.

Keeping the food theme going, Ellen sent this photo of dinner that she made on Monday. Kid is getting good with her presentation.

Match was run last night in spite of the chilly temps. It got warmer as the night went on though, it was up to 35F when we finished at 9pm. Today the chilly temps are gone, and the snow/ice has been replaced with some rain this morning moving to sun for the rest of the week. Great for working. :(

We did a pop-up dinner last night, and the woman did a write up for our parents so I'll just copy that here...

The menu was all local sourced vegetarian and he only does "concept" meals - so always a theme...theme tonight was not Valentines day...it was Research Triangle Park. The dinner was on a bridge connecting two office buildings that are being "re-envisioned" for the "new" RTP which will include live and work space, parks, arts etc. The first three dishes were important to RTP past, the next three were initiatives RTP is pursuing and the final three dishes are future architecture of RTP.

So in order of the pictures (and the dishes...)

The menu....

"Barcode" - is phyllo dough stuck into ginger & ground chick peas and roasted pumpkin seeds with honey spreads. Meant to look like the bar code from above. Barcodes were apparently invented in RTP!

"AstroTurf" - charred broccoli, broccoli rabe, mustard greens and soft boiled egg perhaps a nod to a golf ball on AstroTurf! another RTP invention....

"IBM" - one of the first companies to open in RTP. Chef interpreted the name to be "Infused, Baked, Mashed" to make a carrot infused oil which he used to soak rye bread and then pay fry crisp for the croutons, blended carrot soup with coconut milk and charred carrots on top. This was very good.

"Arts & Culture" - because RTP bringing more arts, music and creative spaces into RTP - this was cooked lettuce which was a different take on how usually served with "cultured" buttermilk as dressing which made it taste a lot like cheese topped with heirloom "cow peas" - a nod to different beans available at speciality growers like Anson Mills.

"Crossing Paths" - because RTP creating live work spaces for collaboration - best dish of the night pasta with ground pecans and collards. He simmered the pecans in just a little buttermilk and since nuts are fat soluble, it made an amazing but simple sauce. Delish!

"US2020" - the name of the initiative to bring underprivileged kids to RTP - amazing cow milk cheese - creamy like brie but not bitter. with an apple miso butter and this great crisp - made from sourdough starter spread very thin and baked. We are going to try to make this crisp! The tie in to the initiative is that these kinds of cheeses are rarely done in small local farms because it is a 3 year investment before you get any product as the milk sits and becomes cheese, so investing in the future.

"Skyscraper" - pavlova cookies (meringue) piled high with a spiced caramel and walnut chocolate sauce.

"Amphitheatre" - beet puree surrounding a chocolate brownie on top of a chocolate pudding infused with smoke topped with salty beet chips. A savoury chocolate dessert that was very good.

"Boardwalk" - not pictured was single wrapped green tea taffy on a marble slab - a good bite to finish the meal!

Everything was very good and portions generous....chef said he almost always does heavy vegetarian pop up meals because he only uses local food so the meat costs increase prices a lot, he tries to keep tickets under $100. Said winter is a challenge for creating dishes with so few ingredients available on the farms. We will definitely go again!

More pictures of the plating, "kitchen" and other random stuff is over in the image gallery.

Most of today has been inside, with the minor ice we're having it's just been too cold to go outside and work on the garden box. Waste of a holiday. :(

I ran out of screws while building the garden box yesterday so I picked some up at Home Depot before we went to games night. As an aside, I came in 2nd in "cards against humanity". Anyway, I picked up my 2.5" screws and this morning went out to finish up the first of the removable covers. it's 17F outside, so... yea, that's a bad idea. My work gloves are not all that warm, and my ski gloves would not survive if I tried to wear them while working and they're too clumsy to run the tools with. So, we'll have to just stop for the weekend and resume next weekend.

I managed to get a 2nd case of those cheap golden bullets that I liked so much. I put 2000 of them in a can, and have ~700 of them stashed in my "to shoot" pile. Gotta love those 1350 round cases!

The new camera is on it's way back to amazon. It kept crashing and was generally flaky as all get out so it's going back. Rather than get another of these, I spent a little more to get a 2megapixel cam. The 1.3 looked good enough, but the 2 had a little wider field of view which is needed in this application. They had some crazy wide angle cams but they were 2x the cost of what I thought was reasonable for a garden watching cam.

We had a marketing event at work, and I had customers sign up so I spent my lunchtime listening to a presentation I had heard dozens of times before. The good news though was it was at Ruth Chris steakhouse so the food wasn't so bad. No pictures of the food, but it's pretty easy to envision steak house fare (ie slabs of meat with weak sides).

I've been telling people how "bad is not a feeling" because the woman says that all the time, and about the "wheel of feelings" that she uses to get people to more precisely describe their feelings. The guys at work thought I was making it up so I found a copy on the interwebs.

I put the garden camera up, PoE from the basement running under the deck and up into the gazebo. The field of view isn't what I would like, you can see where the garden will go but you can't see squat around it because the camera can't be mounted far enough away. I might have to re-think the location but so far I've tried 3 and haven't found a good one.

The night vision version, complete with clock that's off an hour. DST is so freaking stupid.

Here are all the bogus charges that AMEX let through after my card was reported stolen. Good job guys.

They finally got me my "se of the quarter" award, it's been sitting on my boss' desk for a few months now. Doesn't come with a check or anything other than the award so it's really not all that exciting. The award is on the left. It went from an actual usable baseball down a crystal sphere. Still throwable, just not as practical.

Garden camera showed up and it's configured as camera #14 and ready to go outside. It's PoE but they included a power adaptor, so now I have a spare.

The woman was so excited about this earlier in the week. She got these 5 pound hams for $5. They were 4 days from expiration which is why they're so cheap, but by freezing one and cooking the other we're eating our fill of honey baked ham and saving $27 at the same time. Per ham! Crazy. Good thing we like ham.

Mom sent these home with me today, some mushrooms I fried up. We don't have a deep fryer since we don't make a lot of fried stuff so I just used a deep sauce pan and did it the old fashioned way. Very little mess, but now I have to go dump a bunch of used oil in the yard somewhere.

The reason I was at my parents today was to use dad's table saw. I'm working on a garden box project and want to make a frame to support some bird netting (and maybe some plastic to protect things from the cold if I somehow get motivated to do a winter crop), and the 2x2s at Home Depot sucked. So, I got some 10' 2x6s and cut them to 5' and then ripped 2x2s out of them. It sounds weird, but it was the most cost efficient way to get the pieces I needed. I spent a little extra to get 2x12s for the side instead of 2x8s or 2x10s and although I technically don't need the depth now it's easy to just fill it with less dirt. If someday I wanted it an extra 2-4" deeper it's not as easy to go add another 4" of planking around the top.

There are also a few bags of playground sand in there for the birds, the woman wanted to add a little more sand into their favourite bathing hole. Stupid birds. Not pictured is the hard cloth that will go on the bottom of the box to keep the moles and whatnot from burrowing in and eating whatever the hell I'm growing (which is all TBD).

Tonight's ham inspired dish... scalloped potatoes.

Trying to update the journal via ssh off my tablet from starbucks. At least if I screw it ip its only one file I have to fix. Haven't figured out how I'm going to use vi without an ESC key.

There is an escape key on the virtual pop up keyboard. Cool.

I'm at starbucks because I had to go to the dentist today and its right by the new MMA place. Rather than drive home then back again I brought my gear along and will go to class directly. Saves me mileage on the car, but I wasted $6 at starbucks Doh. There is a woman here teaching SAT prep classes. Shes had two students so far, both upper middle class white girls who are decked out in high dollar yoga outfits but from the extra weight they're both packing around I doubt they actually work out. Maybe they have the freshman 15 just a little early.

It was 74F outside, I went for a walk around the lake and work, and found this huge pile of snow on the way back. Crazy weather swings from freezing cold to nice all within 24 hours.

Modified the journal script to print out a count of how many journals it's processing for the 30 entry look-back (should be 30!) and the monthly. I had it printing out entries as it processes them but it's messy.

The NC DOT announced that they want to go with the original orange route for 540 today. The feds have to approve it and the environmentalists are already saying they're going to sue so nothing has really been decided but it looks like we're moving into the lawsuit phase of the project at least. Potentially I guess, the feds may just reverse the decision too on the 17th when they announce what they want.

The TV station called the woman up and wanted another quick interview on the decision announcement. Good thing they caught her on her day off.

It appears that the month roll-over for the new script works, but now I need to go rewrite some of it. My "go back" edit function works, but won't regenerate previous month's per-month files. I've got two ways to do it, either make an array that translates numeric month to the month name, or go back and change the static month files to use numeric months. Right now I'm using the time::piece module that spits out what I need but you can't get prior month English names out of it, that I can tell (yet).

Also, my home signed cert expired. Guess I never figured I would see 10 years of use out of a cert.

Updated the code so now it can generate previous months journals if the -g # option ends up putting us back in a previous month. Works in testing, not trying in production.

So that works, I can update previous months and it correctly generates the right pages. Next thing I should be doing is checking these pages into svn or something.