My temporary book reader. All the annoying spam about account activation and missing sim cards and random Samsung shit apps trying to do stuff is going to make me dump this thing at some point but for now it's free and working so I'll live with it. Too bad you can't run clean android on it, but I'm guessing that's why people in the know are buying old Nexus tables at a premium.

Some progress after work on the deck today, even one of the tricky corners is done. The remaining ones are going to be worse.... oy. What have I done with this design?

Time to quit working when all the screw guns are dead.

My anxiety dreams are at least different this time. After 2 nights of the usual old boring stuff, last night's dreams were new and unique. For the first one, I was doing a table read for a Star Wars movie and I was playing Yoda. I couldn't figure out how they numbered the pages and kept screwing up. Eventually I found out they blackballed me from Hollywood and put "incompetent fan boy" in my file. Hollywood keeps files?

Then I ended up in some restaurant and... I can't remember why I was freaking out there.

At some point I was trying to get home on BART, and the usual anxiety stuff was there just in a different form. Couldn't figure out which train to use, couldn't figure out the ticket machine, couldn't find my luggage, couldn't run to catch a train, etc, etc. Same sorts of anxiety as the usual "can't find the classroom / didn't study for the test" dreams of the last few nights, but at least some new themes.

I also had a dream about vising mom, she was sick and trying to hide it. Then I was trying to figure out why I haven't actually visited mom in a while, then I remembered she was dead. Strange.

Curling night was fun. I scored our teams only point on my first throw. After that, nothing but suckage by everyone. We lost, 2 to 1. They were using the "stick" so they could throw standing up and walking instead of doing the proper curling pose thing. Lame.

The Russians were not there, but the Canadians were on TV:

Worked on the deck, as usual it seems. Got the first step done and the rest of the main surface with the exception of the last board. It's going to have some pretty thin cuts in it and there is no way I'll get it over there and in intact without someone helping me. I know it will snap at the cutout by the power line feed if I try it without an assistant.

Made up a batch of roadkill jerky. This meat is really different than the usual venison that sneaky gives me. He said it's because this was a young doe vs. the old bucks he actually hunts. It's true, no one typically hunts the yearling girls.

I was going to make some coffee cake too per the woman's request but between making the jerky, the flatbread dough and working on the deck I was running out of time so she jumped on it. Came up pretty good!

My streamlight light and switch showed up and I got it mounted. I've been playing with the light position a bit, but the switch is right where I think it should be.

Now the woman is making chicken cordon bleu (sorta). Using up leftover chicken, cheese, ham and some pastry dough she grabbed on sale at the store today.

I made a batch of the Lebanese Mountain Bread stuff, basically a really thin flatbread. I had the wrong kind of yeast (yet again) and don't think I kneeded it long enough but it mostly worked. We made kebabs to go with them and it was a pretty tasty meal.

Michael came over and flattened the poop area; basically where the woman throws all the chicken and goat poop, shavings, etc. It has turned into some really nice soil, that's probably a hundred bucks worth of topsoil / garden soil right there he's pushing under.

We also expanded the area a bit, took out some small sickly trees and this one annoying branch that was always in the way. Some real redneck logging going on right there.

Before going to the range we had to take a trailer of hay over to Jason's. Sean had borrowed it for a Halloween hay ride and was done with it. Jason's barn is amazingly clean, like the cleanest barn I've seen in NC yet.

I tried to capture some of the fall colors in the back. Hard to photograph but this gives you some idea of the variety of leaves everywhere.

Playing around with the pi2 vs the pi3 vs my linux VM for image processing. Running the same thumbnail generation on all 3, it's 22 seconds on the pi2, 2.75 seconds on the pi3 and 2.23 seconds on the VM accessing the file over NFS from the pi2. Hard to beat the number crunching ability of the i7 it seems.

Keltec sent me the repair kit for the stock "nut" coming loose on my Sub2k....

I wanted a really tiny 45 degree foregrip for the sub2k and by total dumb luck found the perfect thing at Ed's in Vass today on the way to Pinehurst. It's small, made of pieces you can reconfigure, and was only $15! Made by Magpul even.

Tried making the bread again, this time doing the yeast correctly. So I guess the yeast was right, but I didn't shape it enough like a loaf before baking so it turned into a weird shape and ended up with a raw center. I'm sure the 3rd time will be the charm.

Rachel (the dessert girl) called the woman and asked if we wanted to come to the popup dinner last night. We hadn't gotten tickets because I sorta didn't want to go, and the woman was having horse problems on the Friday they went up for sale so she didn't try to get them. Anyway, we decided to go and it turned out pretty good. There were 175 people on the waiting list, and we got skipped ahead. Guess it's good to be friends with the dessert girl.

The dinner was at a fancy cutlery shop. Nothing retail, it's like a restaurant supply for high end restaurants, casinos, etc. The theme was them giving him 12 plates and him trying to make dishes that look good on those plates. Maybe they'll use them in their advertising? Anyway, most everything was fantastic, there was one dish I would not eat because it was made with a blue cheese sauce and I hate blue cheese. I tried to eat it, but it just tasted like rotting feet / shitty cheese. No thanks.

Currently using my windows laptop, my MBP said it needs to do a new baseline backup and it was just not running very fast over wifi (with the USB2 wifi widget). I put it downstairs and plugged it into the network and it still says it's going to take 5 hours to backup 150GB. Guess it's all about the time capsule being the bottleneck.

Look, bullet art. Was loading some magazines and just thought this looked interesting. Normally I don't load out of boxes, I've got rounds loose in an ammo can so they can't be arranged neatly like this by just flipping the trays over.

I also did some reorganising, and throwing out of packaging. I had at least 20 Glock mags in retail packaging which wastes space, so I opened them all and arranged them in a bin in the safe. I also processed some 556 ammo I've had sitting around, getting it broken down into cans and labeled. To save even more space, I loaded ammo into mags! Rather than having a bunch of AR mags in a box and a bunch of ammo in another, I now just have 21 loaded mags. A standard load out for an infantry dude is 210 rounds (7 mags, presumably 1 in the rifle and 6 on their carrier) so I've got 3 people's worth of ammo ready to go.

The other big thing was getting the deck work done. I've got to do the flashing, final fitment of the boards, caulk and trim but as for the rest of the surface and steps it's done. Next weekend I'll get those bits done and then start working on the handrail. I got the materials almost right, I have 4-5 10' boards left but those are for the handrail so as far as the long pieces I was right on. Good thing I tossed an extra 5 16' boards on there "just in case". I used every one of them. No major errors either, even the boards I mis-cut I ended up using elsewhere.

Went to the range with Sean and Jason, mostly to be social but also because Jason bought a new toy:

It's not a real MP40, but a modern semi-auto clone. Or sorta clone, or knock off? I dunno, it looks very similar but it's not really. It's got a modern barrel but then has a cast zinc cover over it that makes it look like the front of a real MP40. It's also classified as a pistol so they can get away with the short barrel and not have it be an SBR. The reviews of it were horrible, but he got lucky and got one that works. It ran cheapie Russian steel ammo just fine. Maybe that's why the reviewer had such a hard time, not running crappy ammo.

Mostly just working and the woman is sick. Not too much to report. I did do a quick Docker class at work yesterday, and have it installed on the new pi system and want to try to containerise my web server.

Ah, this crap again. Got hit by a big rock yesterday on my way back from from the gun show and stopped at Autozone to get the repair kit right away. Last time I did this on the Jeep it sorta worked, maybe I'm better at it now.

At the gun show I got another holster, this time I got the actual Urban Carry instead of the cheap knock-off (now that I know I really like the concept and will use it it's time to get quality). The leather is much nicer, going to take a while to break it in. I also picked up a stripped lower from tsconver for $60 OTD, that's a good deal. You can get them cheaper on-line sorta, but once you stick on shipping and FFL fees, it's around $65. Supposedly this is a good brand, they make their own vs. having Anderson do it and slapping their name on it.

I picked up the router from dad, did some practice work with it and then finished up the last deck boards. I'm very happy with how it turned out, you can't even see the area I routed the notch in the board to get it to fit under the existing deck trim. I don't think I could have done it better.

I then put the router back in the router table and knocked the edges down on those counter top scraps from Tim. They're not the best, I think the old router bit was getting dull and it splintered the hard wood in a few spots, but they'll work well enough for us. Got the first coat of oil on them, probably have a do a few coats before they're usable. We've gone through almost a whole gallon of the oil for the top in the house, glad we get it from the horse supply section for $5/gal instead of the scented version you get for counter tops that's $14 for a 8oz bottle. Yuppies get ripped off. :)

8500 rounds later I can no longer say "my Glock doesn't malfunction". Russian rounds are just a little long and they drag on the front of the magazine sometimes and if you're not shooting fast and banging the gun around they won't "pop" up into position right and it causes a mis-feed like this (happened today at the range):

Usually cleaning the mags clears it up. Probably should do that more often.

Thanksgiving dinner at dad's... with basically nothing made by dad. His friends made most of it, but we (and by we I mean Kristen mostly) made the squash soup, the jicama/carrot/apple salad and the brussels sprout... uh, salad? No idea. We also made some pumpkin ice cream that's weird, but I've had two servings already. It grows on you.

These little flashlights, regardless of maker, all have a clip that seems to stick out too far when I put in in my pocket. That little end hook catches on jackets and stuff and makes them pop out of your pocket. Annoying. Today I got the idea to bend up the clip on the one I carry casually (my EDC for work clothes is a streamlight with a much better clip) and got it to actually lay flat against my pants even when clipped on the pocket. Seems like a small thing, but it's a victory.

While at dad's I installed his left hand only safety on his AR. There is exactly one company that makes a left hand only safety. All other left handed people just install an ambidextrous safety and call it good. Dad didn't want that because the safety on the right digs into his hand somehow, so he wanted exactly this. The lever on the other side.

I've had a Samsung Tab A 7" tablet on my list on amazon for a while, was thinking it would be the right replacement for my dead Nexus 7 tablet, but I've been using mom's old S4 phone to read on and it's been "good enough". Today looking for something else on amazon I noticed that price had dropped from $130 down to $97.99. Same at Best Buy and others, so Samsung must have dropped prices for the holiday or something. I put it in the cart but it wouldn't arrive until Monday or Tuesday so I didn't bother checking out, figured I would do it later in case I needed any random little add-ons before then. Tonight I checked it and it had gone up to $99.99. Random, so I just bought it. Still 30 0.000000e+00ss than I was willing to pay just two weeks ago. Grabbed a little case for it to, one that will fold and support it sitting sideways which is how I read at night (laying on my side withe tablet propped on it's side). The phone sucks at that, even with the fancy cardboard stand I made for it. :)

Progress today includes the completion of the deck surface, the flashing and trim along the house side and the handrail. I think, with the exception of all the painting, that deck construction is complete! Now, on the gazebo framing. Sigh.

My replacement springs came in and I installed them in my regular mags. The worn out springs were a full inch shorter than a new OEM spring and 1.5" shorter than the Wolff extra-power springs. That's a lot of squished spring.

Yesterday was the pistol class up at True North. It was a long, long class, fired about 550 rounds and made a pass through the shoot house. For a warm up we shot the police qualifier, and I aced that even though I was wearing my jacket and gloves. Hadn't drawn from under a jacket in a while and never while wearing gloves, so passing was not assured. At the end of the day we did some of the SEAL qualification drills... and I ran 2 of the drills twice, and only passed 1 of the 4 runs. There are 8 drills total, but we ran out of time. In any case, I would not even come close to passing the SEAL qualification even not doing it while wearing body armor.

No pictures of me, but here is one of Sean taking a nap. Or maybe doing a ground fighting drill, but probably just napping.

The new tablet arrived today, and it's loaded with my standard apps and my the book I just started yesterday. The display has much better brightness control than my old tablet, it gets really dim without turning unreadable. That's going to be nice for reading at night.

It's that time of year again, when I have to glue ornaments back together again.

Great day outside, looks like another tomorrow. These last days of fall... why are we inside working? (taken while on my walk at lunchtime).

Dad had no milk in the house at thanksgiving so I had black coffee... and it kinda sucked but now I'm just doing that all the time now. Once you get over the bitter first taste it's, well I was going to say "not bad" but in reality it just sucks a little less. In any case, this is a good step toward figuring out which coffee is good and which is not. No hiding the bad stuff behind lots of cream and sugar. Although to be honest, I'm still putting sugar in, even if it's 1/3 less than before.

One of the 'famous' instructors I follow came up with this. Many of us like the beaver tail backstrap on the Gen4 Glock, but don't like the extra grip diameter that comes with it. His fix? Just chop it down right after the connecting pin. You get the beaver tail but not the extra width along with it. Clever, and if you don't like it you're just out the plastic piece that can be replaced for a few bucks. I had to bust out the dremel and try it and I think it turned out well.

Last year I borrowed some extended charging handles from Dawson to try out and didn't like any of them. I asked again and he gave me the same handles back, and for some reason now this one works perfectly for what I want. What didn't I like last time, or what's changed in the last year?