The plumber guy was just here this morning, or more accurately the "waterproofing" guy. He thinks a 2' French drain along the front of the house will solve the water issue. We'll see what his quote is, somewhat afraid. It's probably $35 worth of gravel, $100 worth of pipe, and $4000 worth of labor or something crazy. We shall see when he finalise the quote. I know I could do this myself, and depending on what they're going to ask to do it I may just spend my holiday shutdown days digging and slinging gravel.

One oddly positive thing that could come out of this is a trench I could put a conduit and some cable in. When they trench under the walkway and all that I could run a 1" conduit along side the drain pipe and that would let me run Ethernet out toward the pond. Might be cool to have a PoE camera sitting out directly on the pond behind the bushes.

My new LCP was delivered yesterday. This is the "custom" version with the better sights and the goofy red trigger. It's hard to say if it's really better (the trigger) than the old one, I personally didn't have a problem with the old one but the new one is crisper. That could be because it's brand new though and my old one has 400 rounds through it which is plenty to set a cheap 380 to rattling.

The new sights though are way, way, way better. After just a few rounds of dryfire with the new gun switching back to the old one is a huge minus. It's not a target gun or anything of course and the original sights are fine for it's intended role, but the larger ones are still nice if you want to shoot it slow and accurately (for a pocket 380 again, not a target gun). Overall I'm happy I picked up one of the last ones and will have it as a spare/backup when my primary one craps out. I paid $195 for this one on close out, and now people are asking $350 for them because they're gone. Let's just say I'm happy at $195, and would be very unhappy at $350.

Also gun related, I got one of the Tactical Solutions 22 conversions for the Glock 19, and this one is threaded. I had an old Ciener conversion for my Gen 2 G23 but it didn't work well and wasn't threaded. This one does work (amazing what 20 years of progress gets you) and is compatible with the suppressor. Fun times in the backyard ahead.

Totally unrelated, the cameras are coming in handy once again. I'm working in the basement and waiting for the stove guy to show up. This way I can keep and eye on the driveway and deck from down here so I can't miss him.

Ha, someone else was capturing video too and they sent them to me. A little editing down and now I have clips of the same stages I have dad's clips for.

Also on the video front today I decided to try to film myself doing some bag work. I've never seen myself so I don't know how balanced I am and all that. Using the front camera on the phone worked because I could set it on the window ledge at the gym and aim it at the bag. Not the most exciting video but again, I've never seen myself do anything so it's eye opening to me.

Forgot to post pictures of thanksgiving dinner.

Shot the backup gun match today, came in 4th out of 49 shooters. Dad did pretty well himself, came in at 40th or so. Not bad for someone who has never shot a match. I captured some video:

I got the clever idea to use one of the dead cameras as an IR illuminator over the barn door. The Ethernet is dead, but the IR still comes on. That's some sort of win. As you can see in this picture the working camera IR lights up the middle of the paddock, and the dead cam over the door lights up right in front of the goat barn. I need to aim it a little better but I think it's going to work. Now if I only hadn't thrown out those other 'dead' cameras!

I'm always amazed at the dramatic change in the driveway when I blow all the pine needles off, but I always forget those before/after pictures. Fortunately today I remembered that the cameras are always rolling...

My parents went to a "hallowthanksmas eve" party with their car club. You could come in costume from Halloween, Thanksgiving, giftmas or New Years. Frightening.

Moved a few cameras around today. Took the $32 wide angle one and put it in the run to replace the existing narrow cam, and moved the goat cam over to the other side of their barn. That way the woman can see them on the bench or at the feeder. She can't see under the bench as much with this angle of course, but it's a trade-off and since they're sleeping on top of the bench more now this makes sense. Until it doesn't and I have to move it again.

Two goats and an old goat.

Yep, you can see them all sleeping with the new camera angle. That smudge on the left side must be on the lens itself, or the lens cover. I had to flip the image back to right side up and the smudge followed the housing orientation. Probably should check that out tomorrow and see what it is.

I just used Apple Pay... at a Starbucks. Hipster achievement unlocked? Or maybe I need to snapchat it or something to get the achievement. I do suspect people are placing orders online though, they seem to walk in and get their beverage immediately.

For the record, Sean kicked my ass again at the match last night. A full 5 seconds, but I had a really bad run on stage 1 and there was no way I could catch up, and sure enough I didn't. Close though.

Busy day today, I'm at Starbucks for an early morning meeting with SECU, then Goldberg and I are going to Stock/BMC, then I have to go to FAI. I was bored last week, and for some reason this short week I'm super busy. No middle ground.

Match tonight, and the G34 kept getting hung up on my flashlight when in the holster. Scratched up the nose of the gun a little. Merf.

I've got several thousand rounds through the gun and the only cleaning it gets is a quick brush out, removal of the powder residue and then some oil on the rails. I probably should actually clean the barrel for real at some point and try to get all the residue out of the frame. Cheap Russian ammo is dirty.

Digging around on some old CDs I found a 2nd picture of me on the bike in Bangalore. I thought the one on the right was the only photo (taken with a cell phone... my how far we've come) but it looks like there was another. Clearly not a phone photo, it's way too high res. My image script pulls all the metadata out of the photos so I can't know which camera took it. I should pull the original back up and see what's in there.

Mom got one of those fancy chair lifts so she can get up to her craft room without two people having to help her up the stairs. They drill right into the tops of the steps so they're all going to have to be repaired or replaced, but as she points out... she'll be dead when that happens and won't care about the steps.

So, this morning I was feeling pretty out of it. Last night's shooting class didn't go very well, this morning's MMA class didn't go very well... I don't think I'm over doing it I think I'm just mentally fried. The woman has suicidal clients so I can't talk to her, mom is dying so I pretty much can't bring up anything there. Basically I have no one to turn to for some grief.

Went for a walk in Crowder District Park before hitting the grocery store. It's not a big park, it's like 33 acres, but we hadn't been before and it was easy to get to. There was a nice swinging bench setup by the pond which was a good place to relax, but as the woman pointed out, it's pretty much like sitting in the front yard. :)

With my backup pi dead, I was going to try to SMB mount a share off the windows security system and dump my backups there but SMB can't handle symlinks and other unix-like stuff. So.... I just mounted another VMDK on the virtual linux box I use to run the thumbnail generation off of and sync to that now. Another layer, but speed isn't an issue in this case.

I moved the test camera into the coop and it works pretty well there. It's getting an unfair boost here though, it's getting light off the other coop cam mounted in the corner (which is why there are shadows that aren't being caused by the LEDs on the camera in question.

Spent a lot of time trying to debug the fans on the fireplace, and the best I can tell is that the thermal switch is bad which is preventing them from coming on. I bypassed the switch on the front forcing them to "always on HIGH" but that didn't do the trick. The wiring is pretty simple, there isn't much left unless somehow both motors are bad and I'm not buying that.

Went to An on Friday with a customer, and got real Pho. Yea, it's not technically a Vietnamese place but they still do awesome Pho as it turns out. Put some sushi on the side, because it's an "Asian Fusion" restaurant. :) The only thing that gives it away as not being in CA... the presence of all those forks on the table. At least they have forks and chopsticks out.

Shot a match today down at H2O fowl farms. It was IDPA, so it's got all those silly IDPA rules but it was still very fun. They have berms on 3 sides of each range so they don't just have to shoot in 1 direction. One stage they had us in a minivan and we had to shoot out the passenger side window, then the drivers side, then get out and shoot toward the front, and then move around the back and hit 3 more targets out on the passenger side. That's a lot of angles.

First fire in the new insert...

Work is now filtering out both my home site (self signed SSL cert) and the wife's work site (saying it's a parked domain which is bogus). They're getting a little over zealous on the 'security'. Guess I should figure out how to do an SSL cert somehow. Maybe godaddy gives you a free one with the domain?

I added another AP to the house back in the office (hard wired back to the main net) so now my phone enjoys coverage when it's charging on my nightstand. I used to charge it elsewhere where it had coverage but now I want it in the same place as the watch, tablet, etc. All the junk can be setup to charge in one spot, and now that spot has better wifi coverage.

I also got around to changing all the SSIDs to be the same. The long range wifi can lock onto an AP by name and MAC so it's bridging to the correct AP even with the same names. That's handy, because often the phones would get stuck on the barn wifi and not flip back to the house AP when you came in but there would not be enough signal to actually do anything.

So far with the new wifi setup I've had to reinstall the chromecast widget even though it's SSID nor password changed, and it also looks like my lightning damaged wifi only backup pi is confused. Best go reset that.

I bit the bullet and did a full factory refresh / reinstall of my Nexus tablet. It was that or throw it out. Trying to load a book in the kindle app was literally taking 5-10 minutes. The reset seems to have worked. I reinstalled my two book reader apps, the camera app and my cpu/network monitoring and that's it. It's plenty zippy now.

The people who bought the 13 acres down the street are starting to build, the plans/permit box is installed. We opened it up to see what they're doing...

The owner and builder are the same, so my guess is a builder is going to stick a McMansion on there then flip it. The story of the family that "wanted to live in the woods but doesn't like trees" was pretty thin when we first heard it anyway. You can see by the diagram why the neighbourhood behind us didn't take that land, most of it is unbuildable due to floodplain issues. The house is on one of the only buildable spots, but there is plenty of room for a barn if someone wanted one, and you could put the paddocks in the flood area, a fence can get wet every 20 years.

Giant inflatable bunny exhibit at the NC art museum. Uh... yea.

Got a load of tailings from the mulch/rock place and spread it in the goat barn and coop, then pressure washed out the truck. I'm suddenly very tired.

Friday the woman's horse went lame, and it was serious enough they called the vet out with the portable x-ray machine to check things out. That can't be cheap. If the horse can't be fixed up then the lease automatically gets cancelled. At least she's not stuck paying lease payments on a horse that can't be ridden.

Back from fight night. It was straight kickboxing, so no grappling and whatnot but it was still educational. We got general admission cheap seats, but you could sit anywhere so we picked the first row. Seemed pretty "ring side" to me, but the actual expensive ringside seats were on the opposite side of the ring and featured a roped off area with table service. Oh.

My boss is enamoured with these S&W 622 pistols that went out of production in the 80s or something. He's bought 2 of them now and wanted me to test one with the suppressor since his is still stuck in BATFE paperwork hell. The pistol works fine, but the sights are way, way off. At my usual 12 yards it was hitting at least 6" high and left, maybe 8". After I saw the first 3 holes show up in the backstop board and not the target I aimed at the low/right corner of the plate and was grouping on the upper left. That's just nuts, but the can probably throws the zero off. It does on my M&P, but not that much.

I need to clear some space off my hosting server, I'm at 990n the disk and I don't want to pay to add storage.

Damn cat beating up "our" cat and stealing her/his/it's food. The woman won't let me just take it out for real, but she has let me chase it around with the airsoft gun....