Finished the memorial box and put mom in the ground, so technically today was her funeral. It was just dad, myself and Kristen. No photos were taken, and no words were said. I don't think any were necessary.

I've since put some wire around the bushes so the deer don't eat them. I'll take the covers off for the party thing next month. Also moved the weather station to on top of the roof and blew all the pine needles off there while I was up there.

The woman found this guy over by where I was going to build the generator shed. Wonder what killed the possum? OD on cat food?

Actually driving back from the NRA show right now, pretty fried from all the sensory overload. Wish I had remembered to turn on the pedometer function in the phone or watch, we walked for 8 hours yesterday and covered some serious ground. Friday was busy, but today was a mad house. We got to the show just a little before it opened and the crowd was already large outside the expo hall:

Fortunately for me, I found several of the TV celebrities that the woman loves to hate. Rob Pincus, Mike Seeklander and Julie Golob. The woman doesn't hate Julie as much because she has chickens too. I had Julie make the autograph out to Kristen and she wrote "to a fellow chicken mamma". :)

There were protests around noon yesterday when Trump was speaking but they were almost a mile away, not very useful (if protests are ever useful). Will be interesting to see what the MSM take on it was, if they'll report it was a handful of people or really play it up.

Did really well at the match the other night, except for the fact that I had a tail most of the night....

One more day and then I get a few off for the NRA show. Wee.

My aunt had a bunch of tomato sprouts with her in the car on the trip down; she didn't want them to die while she was away. There was one extra in a large pot so she gave it to me to make room in the car for other crap (she took mom's cat so there was a lot of extra stuff to take back). It's doing well on the window sill, and as soon as the stem darkens then I'll know it's time to plant it outside.

Quick range trip today. First up was to test out the AR with the new tube and spring setup. Worked pretty well. Those cheap steel mags do not like the steel case ammo, lots of binding and whatnot if you try to load them all the way up. Downloading to 29 rounds seems to make them happy to feed. I did some slow fire and some mag dumps and the rifle cycled fine. Got really hot after the mag dumps, not a lot of metal in that thin barrel.

The really important news is that in pistol class on Thursday we finally seem to have figured out how to cure my flinch. By applying a lot more pressure ('crushing grip' pressure) with my left hand I'm able to control the gun and not try to push it back into position as it fires. Makes a huge, huge difference. I went from not hitting stuff at 25 yards to actually hitting stuff well and fast. Exciting. Today after testing the AR I made a bunch of runs at the plate rack and as long as I kept my eyes on the sights and not the steel, I did pretty well. This is the best I've ever done with a Glock, ever. I feel like I've gone up a level or something.

Hey, one positive of 10.11 on my old MBP at home... the sleep function works now. That's nice.

Started on the memorial box today. Looks like rain tomorrow so we can't stain it until later and the dirt will have to sit in the back of the truck until next weekend. It's only half a yard, shouldn't hurt it any.

I let the work MBP upgrade to 10.12, and so far I've got everything working again that I thought would break and did (WebEx, USB monitor, menu meters) and working on fixing things I didn't think would break, like terminal settings.

I tried the "unlock with apple watch" thing, what a waste of time. I move the mouse, then sit there for 10-15 seconds while the thing figures out to unlock. Or, I just type my password in 2 seconds. I guess I'll stick with the old school / working method. So much for "innovation".

Also, my Amazon USB ethernet widget on the monitor at home needed a driver update with 10.12. Good thing wifi still works.

Picked up some Trijicon HDs for the 22 conversion, now it's just like all my other glocks (almost the G19 and G41 still wear factory night sights).

The free router from Dawson is now in service. Let's hope the lightning stays away for a while.

Nothing but class around these parts. Wines by the glass, in the gas station.

Got tired of having to use a physical cable and a glitchy EoP adaptor on the Macbook with the dead wifi radio, so I got this unit. I had to upgrade to 10.11 (the last OS this early 2008 can run) to get the thing to work but it does so I guess I should be happy. Only downside is I'm sure this MBP is going to be slower now, no way they cut bloat with a major release.

I had to do the upgrade at dad's house, the 6GB download would have taken me a week at home.

One of the woman's friends is a photographer and he was able to quickly Photoshop Kristen out of this selfie with mom for use on her "prayer card" (the little card they give out at funerals with the person's picture and stats on it... I thought "trading card" would be more appropriate but history dictates otherwise).

Getting fancy with the cameras now. I wanted a view where we could see the base of the back of the barn and coop because the goats have taken to sleeping there in the sun in the afternoons. I ran a 60' conduit out from the coop and made this little bird house looking thing to hold the camera on the fence and protect the wiring from the elements. I think it turned out great, just needs paint on the vertical pipes to help them blend in to everything.

That first picture is me not having the right types of clamps to hold things together while the glue dried. I wanted to use glue as much as possible to keep the wood from splitting. I don't have small screws, everything gets built with 1.25" sheet rock screws or 2.5" deck screws.

Decker is getting tricky about getting the low hanging leaves on the trees.

Time of death, 5:05pm.

The Apple Watch can't deal with a recently deceased person. We couldn't feel a pulse so I tried using the watch to do it. It just bounced around between 58 and 198 BPM. Not sure what it was reading but who really knows what happens to the body in those moments of death?

At the parents house talking to the hospice nurse. This is not a fun conversation.

I finally took the Milpitas weather off my mac's dashboard page and replaced it with Columbia, SC. That seems monumental for some reason.

I managed to root this Verizon Samsung S4, so now I can dork with the iptables stuff and perhaps do some port forwarding to let it act as a squid proxy. Next step is to get a metro PCS sim card and get it on the cell network.

When I was working on some of the port forwarding I was watching log files to see if I was getting ssh connections correct and I saw two IPs that were trying to brute force attack ssh, doing tons of login attempts for root, sysadmin, ts3server, support, service, etc. Not 10000 attacks, but any would be noticed on my system since there is only 1 actual valid login. I probably should bring up my IP blocker script again, after I get my experiments done. Would suck to lock myself out.

No comment needed.

From the lobby of the play... we should not have agreed to pose, now we're on Facebook. At least no one knows who we are.

Ah, a goat's life. Run around eating, then play, then take a nap. At least he carries his own pillow around with him (ie his fat gut).

Last night after I got home from the SC trip we went for sushi and then to see a play for my birthday. Even with my ears in I couldn't really make out much of what was being said, so we either have to go to larger plays where the actors are miced... or I just have to give up on live theatre.

Just a random photo from the SC trip. If I wasn't getting lost due to rain (and not being able to get my phone out to check directions) I was stuck in massive traffic jams. This little delay cost me about an hour, and when it finally ended there was zero reason for it to have started. No wreck, no construction, no lane closure, nothing. Guess people just got tired of driving fast.

The hot office chick that wears the white pants has taken to wearing skirts that ride up and tights with holes in them. Classy. :) I've found you can be really stealthy using the watch to trigger the camera, you just point your hip at your intended target and 'check the time' and poof, you get good stealth photos without looking the total creeper you are.

Ellen sent me this, apparently her company went public and she got to go to the NASDAQ party. That's kinda cool.

The woman is making home made pretzel bites for my birthday party!

My boss bought this 10/22 takedown from a guy in RTP and I had to carry it down on the bike (since I was headed that way anyway). Crazy storms the whole way so I knew I would have to protect it; two layers of trash bags and lots of packing tape. Made it through 5 hours of rain just fine. Should have only been 4 hours but I got lost a few times.

Today I'm at another BMW customer event, but this time I don't get to drive. I'm just here to network. Lame.

I'm a six-gun away from being Clint Eastwood!

No idea why the woman had a serape in her collection but there ya go. Now it's in the donation bag.

Visited mom last night, and she's basically bed ridden at this point. It takes a lot of effort and planning to get her up so she doesn't do it very often. Not sure how much longer she can stay at home vs. going into hospice full time. I can't tell how dad is coping, "poorly" would be my guess but he doesn't seem depressed, or is hiding it well.

Per mom's instruction I thinned the pea plants out. It was painful to pull out perfectly good plants, but you're supposed to pick out every other one or so to double the spacing of the sprouts vs. the seeds planted. Seems like a trick by the seed company to have you waste 500f your seeds. The sprout rate was like 95 0.000000e+00ven on these year past expiration seeds, so just planting them at the correct intervals and rolling the dice seems like a better plan to me. Next year I might do seedlings inside and then move them outside when the weather clears. Not that it will save me anything vs. throwing out 25 cents worth of seedlings, but it should let me start them earlier?

One of my cheapie Radio Shack meters died; the one I've had in the bike toolkit for years must have succumb to the vibration. You can't get them like this anymore, the new low end cheapie pocket meters have a manual ranging switch that just looks like it's going to fail after 5 uses so I picked up some fresh batteries for the one I use in the house and moved it to the bike. For the house, I splurged a whole $18 or so and get a larger meter. With probes that are a more usable length. It's amazing, this is the nicest meter I've ever had and it only took me my whole life to invest in a proper tool. I'm learning, let's just hope it's not too late.

The woman's parents are coming to visit again this year, and same as last year in their concerns over being cold they're missing all the flowers and will likely get here just as it gets stupidly hot and humid.

The diagnostic codes the back quack had for my back pain issue. They just look like insurance billing codes to me.

I wanted to build a little box to hold all the kindling on the porch, so I whipped this up this morning out of scrap I had been collecting.

While I was working, the woman came out and said "I need a shelf right here" in the barn. I had been keeping a nice piece of plywood in the barn so I figured this was a good use for it. The rest is more of that reclaimed stuff from last year, so it's a little rough on the inside but no one will ever see it and it fits into the theme of the feed room anyway (ie old barn).

I made it to the inside dimensions of the wall supports so that I wouldn't have to use any brackets. Unfortunately that meant there would be a 4-5" gap on the side against the outer wall, a perfect spot for things to roll off and fall in between the kick board and the outer wall, down below the raised floor and forever lost. So... I just ran the plywood over that end support and stuck a little cosmetic piece of 2x4 under those last few inches so it doesn't look so odd. Once that fresh cut of the 2x4 support fades out you won't notice the hackery.

While I was working in the barn I re-ran that ethernet cable from the left corner over to the right so I could directly feed the camera over there instead of using the EoP adaptor to get it that last 20'. The adaptors crash a few times a week, so it was becoming a problem and I have had that camera in that corner long enough to know I want it there permanently so it was time to run the wire correctly.

Also added some 4' stakes to the garden box and started running twine around the edges of the raspberry plants. They're already growing enough to need some containment / shaping and some motivation to stay away from the pea plants that are trying to grow.