We went to dinner last night with Dad and his woman for "my birthday". I picked Taipei 101, which was interesting. The food was fine as expected, but the chicken dish they picked had some sort of curry spice to it. It was just odd to be eating Chinese food and then get a bite of clearly Indian food. I had the last of it for lunch today, and it was still strange.

I built a door frame thing really quick today just to get the new fence closed up. I was thinking that we should have set a 4x4 in some concrete and then I could hang an actual wire door up, but with just the fence posts there it's too much weight. So, that door thing is just sitting there wired to the fence being supported by the ground. The scrap I used for the top and bottom is pressure treated so no worries there, it just looks ugly.

Continuing with my peanut butter experimentation, I had a PB&J sandwich. Never had one before, and they're not too bad. The crunchy peanut butter adds some nice texture to the sandwich. I'll be eating this again for sure.

Today was getting the garden in. I replanted the last of the berries, pulled up all the weeds, tilled in some chicken/goat poop compost and then got to planting. I put the onions I started inside in, and I swear they won't survive. They're just too fragile looking. Honestly I don't expect to get any onions out of this batch at all, they just seem too delicate for me to grow. Time will tell. Kristen had one regular white onion on the counter that sprouted and I planted that just for fun.

The potatoes are interesting. I dug the trench as they say and started them at the bottom. As the shoots grow you keep filing dirt back in until the flowers appear on the top. The new ones grow in-between the original potato at the bottom and the flowers at the top. I'm concerned that if it rains a lot the trench will just flood and everything will rot. Supposed to rain a lot on Wednesday so we'll see what happens and if I end up with a muddy trench full of rotting potato plants.

Thai rolled ice cream as a dessert for my birthday. Odd. Tasty, but odd and no way close to being worth what they're charging for the experience.

Three (or more?) years later, I have the parts to make a hose feed from the big water tub. Dad gave me 200' of old hose so I can run it all the way from the tank on the "high ground" down to the raspberry garden. Hoping gravity does it's thing, otherwise I need to raise the tank up on another set of blocks.

Driving cargo vans, I feel like a choice is close to being made.

Well that didn't take long. Dammit Decker, leave the water tank alone!

Also, I bought a van! Woo! After 12-15 years of saying "I want a van" the woman said "just shut up and buy a van" so here we are:

It's a 2013 Transit Connect XLT Premium Wagon... so it's the same as every other version except it's got a back seat in it and some extra plastic panels in the back covering the bare metal walls. It's also got those extra rear windows. Personally I like the look of the pure cargo version, but those extra windows pop open (manually) so when you're sleeping in the back you can open some vents. That's a huge win, sleeping in the 4Runner without a way to manually control venting was a major drawback.

To fix the look of the windows, I'm going to see about getting them 100 0nted white. They can wrap vehicles with crazy patterns, so doing a solid white over those rear windows will give me the look I want and the venting. Best of both worlds!

The van was not ready when I went to go see it, it was on the dealer web site but without pictures or anything. It hadn't finished going through service, it hadn't been to detail yet, basically it was not ready to sell. So that said, I don't have it right now. They have to fix up a few more things, detail it, etc and then they're going to deliver it tome when it's ready. Never had a vehicle delivered before, but since that's what dad does on the side it's apparently not that uncommon of a thing for the big dealerships.

This is the first thing I want to build for the van. I won't make it out of such fancy plywood because I want to cover it with some industrial carpeting. It won't fold open like this, and may be a bit higher, the idea is just to give me a platform to put my garment bag on and stick my bags under like the cargo cover in the RAV4. Oddly the van has indentations in the plastic where it looks like a cover would go, but no part has ever been sold by Ford. Perhaps it's a Europe only option?

We now have water in the back garden.

Screwing around with plastidip. It worked OK on the badge I tested on:

Not so well on the handle though. There is a trick to the coating, they say 1 light pass to start then 4-5 medium passes. Trying to figure out what "medium" means is the trick. The first coats were too heavy, but I got it right later on. Unfortunately the first drips were still in there. The bubbles go away, the drips do not. It does peal off just fine which is why they say not to bother masking much, you just peal it off everything you don't want it on when it's dry. For practice I revered it, left it on the body and took it off the handle (it all had to come off anyway). Kinda funky with it reversed.

Saturday was the rescheduled carbine class, and it was a great learning experience. I didn't take any real photos though, other than part of the mile or longer drive down this dirt road to get to the range. It's a private facility, only used for classes, and it's really nicely done. Lots of steel, lots of places for paper, barricades and whatnot, a 'classroom' hut that's covered and a long row of tents with tables to lay out gear for 15 or more students.

With the class moved to Saturday Sean nor Jason could attend, so the instructor is going to do another one on May 6th. I'll go to that one too, just need to order some ammo. :)

The screen installers are coming tomorrow to go the gazebo so I wanted to power wash down everything and get the pollen off before the screens went over it. Once I did that, I blasted off the RAV4, Kristen's car and the gutters on that side of the house. Once you've got the washer setup and running it's hard not to hit everything you can to maximize the results.

The woman's parents have been here for 10 days so far, they leave tomorrow. I think. It really messes with everything having all these extra people around. They just sit around and eat for the most part, and it's always too hot/too cold/too early/too late to go do anything. I don't think they've gone anywhere other than a restaurant or Steinmart the entire time they've been here.

Needless to say, it's kept me from being able to do very much because if I want to do anything the whining starts about how.... well it's never clear exactly what the whining is about because they don't do anything so what am I missing out on? Sitting around watching shitty TV?

Pulled the rubber floor out (it was crazy slippery and not what I want on the floor) and the seat belts. They're still in this picture, but right after I pulled them. I left all the panels open on the one side so I can run the wring for the backup camera and whatnot. I don't have any wire loom left, going to have to make a trip to the auto parts store. Always forgetting something.

A bit of outsourcing and the porch is finished. And by finished I mean it's screened in. There is still painting left to do and the woman is not going to do it since it requires the ladder so I imagine I'll be doing it next weekend. Getting closer to being done with this though.

Yesterday I spent time running wire to the back of the van. I've got the camera wires run back there, as well as 2 sets of power leads just in case. Never know what I'll want to run off the main power, and whatever it is it will be easier if the wire is already run. No reason to take those plastic panels off more than absolutely necessary.

Security drawer is in. You can flip the bracket and mount it on the drivers side, but between the pedals, wheel and your own legs it's damn hard to get at the actual drawer. It's easy to reach over and open it and get at it under the passenger's seat, the van is not that wide.

Home Depot run to get materials, and with dad stopping by I still managed to get the floor done. Took two tries to get the holes drilled to line up with the seat bracket but they're pretty good now. Rather than re-drilling near the mistakes I just flipped the board end for end and tried again. No one will ever know there are two extra wonky holes drilled in the plywood.

It turned out pretty good, tomorrow I'll make the top and see if I can finish this up so I can transfer my gear out of the RAV4 and be officially moved into the van. Wee.

On the work side, I moved off my mac onto this crappy windows system. I've got all my docs moved over, email is working, chrome is setup, etc. I need to get some sort of VMware player to run my linux VM so I can run chrome there via the ssh tunnel without the IT snooping extension that exists on the windows side.

Another chore down... with some help from the tractor. Got that concrete slab moved over back to the barn. At some point I'll prepare the area in front of the water spout and drag the slab into place. Someday.

Phase 1 complete. Well phase 1a? I gotta do the radio still.

Phase 1b will be some removable panels to hide what's under the floor. I have carpet and plywood left, so it should be easy to do any time I want without a home depot run.

Finished moving my linux VM over to the new laptop, I think I'm ready to go to work tomorrow and enter the 100orporate controlled Windows 10 experience. So far, it's nothing but suck.

My first day of driving the van for work. Made it to the work parking lot and everything. Adventure!

I've got my new Windows 10 laptop setup and switched over to it completely now. Or at least until I figure out what I've missed and have to go grab from the Mac. That test stuff I did at home before the switch really helped, getting the virtual desktops setup best I could, building a tiny linux VM to act as my proxy host, getting iMessage setup on an old mac so I could VNC to it via ssh, etc, etc really are making the transition less painful. What's not painful is the speed of everything, this laptop is just freakin' slow compared to the 3 year old Macbook Pro. I thought it was an i7, but I think it's just an i5.

Yea, it's an i5, had to go look it up. Just getting this screen grab I had to figure out how to do screen grabs, then what app to paste it in to save it. Paint is still an app, my old windows 3.1 knowledge still holds!

Now that I said that, when I went to open the .jpg file again on the PC it said there was no app and I should go download something. "Paint 3D" is in the MSFT store for free, grabbed that. Seems like paint, but way more pictographs. Guess no one can read anymore.

Flipping between powershell on the local box to pscp things, to an xterm in a VM that's logged into home, lots of unfamiliar tools/key combos/etc. Awkward but functional so far.

Huh, ubuntu running as a program under windows 10. Not quite a VM, but it gets me rsync and whatnot so I can setup my backups again (for the web site). Interesting.

Put the new stereo in the van last night. I hadn't planned on doing all of it, just wanted to run the wires up to the overhead bin and run the mic wire down, but once I got to working it just sorta happened. It would have taken about 2 hours less if Crutchfield had done the full wiring harness thing like I paid them for. They half wired the steering wheel controls in, so I still had to tap into the factory harness. Very ghetto, not happy about that. It's working, but I'm going to get some extra crimp widgets from Sean and re-do the part I had to rig up. I would be done, except I dropped half of one of the only 2 crimp adaptors I had somewhere and wasted 20+ min searching for it. Delay after delay.

The interface is a little sluggish as expected on such a low end unit, but the EQ stuff is pretty complicated so I was able to program in a good guess as to what my hearing aids do. Probably makes everything sound like crap to anyone else listening but it's pretty clear to me. It also lets you boost/reduce individual volumes so I cranked up the bluetooth volume for the phone and left everything else alone.

And not to be so one track, but I parked next to the other van in the lot at work, and you really can see how much black there is on the cargo version. I totally didn't notice the black bumpers. So yea, I'm probably not going to be able to match the look, so I'll give up on that vision.

Had to go get a bucket of dirt from the back for the garden, the potatoes are really taking off and they keep blowing out of the mounds. They're almost to the level I can let them just grow and we can see if any actual potatoes form. Farming excitement!

Got my backup disk initialised and base-lined at home, then moved to the office today. With the weird ubuntu shell on windows I can rsync from there to the windows disk just like before. I re-wrote the backup script, it was just some quick bash to ensure directories are mounted before the rsync runs. Trivial.

I opened a 2nd firewall forwarding port to push ssh directly to the new pi system instead of the old pi system, with the idea of doing VNC tunnelling through the faster (new) system instead of the old one. Good idea, right? Faster hop? Then today it sorta dawned on me, why not just connect directly to the Mac that's hosting the desktop instead of doing an intermediary hop before the Mac? Even less latency that way.

VNC really sucks though compared to RDP, it's sluggish and doesn't do cut/paste correctly. I tried using the real VNC server, but under the latest OSX it don't seem to work. If I turn off the built-in one it blocks the ports, maybe.

We went to the Irregardless Cafe last night with Divina; it's supposed to be trendy and whatnot doing a lot of gluten free and vegan stuff. We tried a bunch of things, the cornbread sucked and while my tuna steak was severely over done, it was still tasty. Had they cooked it correctly it would have been a hit.

The asparagus was not done the way Keller taught us to do it. Kinda disappointed in that.

Got the backup camera mounted up. I changed my mind, I didn't like it sitting way up on the door, it just looked dumb, so I put it behind the license plate with the other mount. I need to either adjust it down, or turn off the parking lines since it makes it look like I'm going to fly away...

I blacked out that chrome strip on the van. I'm getting better at keeping the spray even, there are no runs or blobs in there at all. Unfortunately though the masking tape tore off some of the plastic stuff so it looks crappy on part of the top edge. I don't think this stuff is going to last very long, especially when I wash/wax the thing at some point.

The potatoes are growing 2" a day I swear, or maybe the dirt it just compacting. Who knows. I put an old trim board in as a stop to keep the dirt from flowing over onto the little onion sprouts and I got another cart load from the back to keep the potatoes covered. I've got a good feeling about this, we've gotta get something out of them.

I went for a quick ride today, went over to Sheetz to get an ice cream and then just around the area a bit. If the weather holds I'll be riding up to Elkin tomorrow instead of driving.

Remounted the light to the middle of the rifle as suggested by the instructor. The light is just too big. P>

Or, you just get Amazon to send you a different light that's way smaller and you don't have to worry about the position as much. This is the 800 lumen version of the TLR-1, and it's tiny compared to the 1100 lumen XL that was on there. I'm going to trade some output for some size.

Now I just need to figure out what to do with the old light. It's too good not to use somewhere.

Yesterday I rode up to Sneaky's farm (and froze my ass off, I had the wrong gear on for the weather... it was only in the low 60s at best whereas it was mid-70s on Saturday) and helped rewire his tractor lights on the 1950s Farmall he uses for the tractor pulls. The manual was very detailed about the wiring and it was based on 1940s tech (or earlier) so it was not hard to figure out. Now he can see when he's loading the tractor onto the trailer at night after the pulls.

He's going to restore the whole thing eventually, and has a full new gauge set for the dash. When he gets the dash pulled, painted, etc I'll wire up the gauge lights on the new gauges. It should look pretty nice.