The woman wanted me to rebuild the step in the goat barn, Decker is too fat / uncoordinated now that he can't get up on the bench, he can't get his whole body on the first step to be able to go up the next. So, with some help from the building inspector I used some scrap to make it 2.5x the size.
But they still couldn't figure it out, they would just try to climb up into the wall instead of from the left up onto the step. Sigh, so version 2:
Working with this VM right now I can tell it's significantly faster. Thumbnail generation is twice as fast, and just the editor itself is snappy. Page loads and image transfers are also noticably faster. Imagine if I had used the fast laptop??? Best save that for the lab though, it's more important to run a bunch of VMs on that vs. just running 2-3 infrastucture VMs really fast.
Worked on building the locking storage on the van. Got all of the materials except something to cover the plywood with. It's sanded wood, looks nice, but is still just plywood. Carpet might work but it would look wierd on the door. Contact paper?
Lugnut apparently thinks the new step is is personal sleeping platform...
Completed the cabinet... then realized I forgot to buy an actual lock for it. Ah well, easy enough to solve. I've got the doors open in the garage letting the paint dry. It's dry to the touch but still smell wet and the van stinks.
So... yea. Yesterday Tim calls and says "hey, this pawn shop has 2 SU16s". I say "no, they can't have two of them".... but then he sends some pictures. Sure enough, they have two SU16Bs in stock. In Garner. WTF? The 'expensive' one marked at $579 has 3 mags, box, papers and has some "punisher" stickers on it. Dumb. The 'cheap' one has 1 mag and no box and is marked $479. So $100 for a box and two more shitty 10 round mags?
Time starts dealing with the guy on my behalf for the cheap one, and gets the guy to $368, but then they close. I go down today and check the place out and see that the cheap one is kinda crusty, has what looks like some rust on it and actually has spider webs inside the handguard. Wow, it's had an unhappy life sitting in this pawn shop for over a year.
The expensive one looks cleaner, but has some mods done to it. None are agregious or unfixable except someone has taken a grinder wheel to the back of the front sight block and crudly rounded the corners off. Wha? Why would you do that?? They've also drilled a hole in the hand guard and added a sling swivel. THat's not as horrible as the sight damage but still shows some bubba gunsmithing.
I offer the guy $325 for the 'rusty' one... and he accepts. Damn. Guess I left some money on the table there when he didn't even counter. So I drop some bills and do paperwork and am on my way. At home, I take it all apart, clean the crap out of it, use the silicon cloth to get the 'rust' off (which apparently it wasn't since it all came off) lube everything, then take all the screws out of the stock and stick them in a box to paint with BBQ black.
Nicely cleaned Sean and Jason said I should put the Vortex on it, and since I have it in QD rings at the moment I dropped it on there for a photo opp. The rings are too high to comfortably use, but it still looks good.
As it sits now though I put the Sig red dot on there using the low mount. You can't use the rear sight this way so I took it off but if the optic fails I can use the outer ring and the front post as a makeshift iron setup. Hopefully the dot and front post line up when it's zeroed at 25.
Working on my docker class today, and it's complicated trying to get the firewall to work correctly. It says it's configured, but the config file is missing some ports and even adding them in it won't do the swarm connections. Turn off the firewall and everything works. Pretty typical, security is always broken.
Got the flir imager today and fired it up briefly. The battery was mostly dead so I only played with it for a sec and grabbed some sample images from around the house. Going to be eye opening....
Lugnut manages to crash while trying to ride the feed tub. What a dumb goat.
Woke up to this mess this morning:
Curling last night. I kept telling the woman there is no kissing in curling, but she wouldn't listen.
At what point do they just start delivering pallets?
Dad bought this when I first went to OSU and put it in a box somewhere, then dumped it off here when he was moving. I was going to toss it but putting it here annoys the woman so that's what I'll do.
Cleaning the safe yesterday and I found a watch box that dad left after he moved. Or maybe 'left' is a bit much, it was jammed up behind the sliding drawer in the back on top of the boxes of stripped lowers. Anyway, inside it had one of the fake Tags I brought back from Hong Kong, two watches from my grandfather (his EDC junker and his retirement gold watch from United Pump) and an Omega Seamaster that my dad says belonged to uncle Elly. Cool.
I posted it to the forum asking for an ID and the watch guys on there say it's a mid-60s Seamaster 500. It needs some work, but it's totally rebuildable cosmetically and it's still working mechanically. I kinda want to get it serviced and wear it, It's about as Mad Men as you can get.
I wonder if I can switch my windows system from teh NUC to the fancy laptop and move the lab stuff to the nuc? The fancy laptop is an i7, the nuc is only and i5... but would any games I have run faster on the fancy laptop? My guess is 'yes'.... and the lab runs fast enough even on lower power hardware.
Folding stock showed up for the SU16, and it does cut the weight down. Under 5 pounds with the optic, not bad at all.
The woman said this stuff is all the rage, it's showing up in all of the foodie mags. From what I can tell, it's semi-spicy mayo.
I wisely named these "wine_haul_ Two known quantities, 4 expernmentals. They are out of the goat wine so the woman picked nothing this time.
Pond data is showing my theory is correct. How to fix it? Unknown, but the theory is sound.
Match today up at True North, one of the all steel pistol matches. I, along with half the people there, shot it with PCCs. I really wanted to shoot it with the G34, but because you can't shoot steel closer than 10-12 yards at a minimum it meant all the shots were very long, and walking the stages ahead of registration I saw this nonsense:
Yea, the dumb double star, but this time with half sized plates! And they got this new spinning rack thing so of course they had to put it in the stage too. This would have just been a disaster for me so I chose to pass on the pistol. The 'bonus' plates at each stage were also 1/2 size of teh 1/2 size, so something like a 30 yard A zone hit required to knock them down. Easy with the carbine, impossible (for me) with a pistol. I came in the middle third (just at the bottom) of the PCC pack, which I suppose is good enough. Mainly because I don't practice, and also because everyone that was there was very serious about it. Lots of little buggies and $4k+ PCCs, there were esentially no bozos... except for me and my stock $500 Ruger.
Yesterday I took the day off and went up to High Point to have lunch with Sneaky. He picked some generic pub like place that actually had some intersting stuff on the menu. I didn't get it, but I thought about:
The actual reason I was in High Point was to go to Outdoor Limited and pick up some ammo. I was pretty much smoking my budget for the year compared to last year and the year prior, so I took a risk. I bought what I hope is a years worth of 9mm in one shot. If prices go up I'll look like a genous, if they go down... I buy more? Anyway, I got 10k rounds of steel case, 7k of brass that I'll use to replace steel I've got in the stash, and some 223 just because I was already buying and it was cheap with the volume discount.
The brass comes with a rebate, so I have to taek pictures of each box... assuming I can just send in one shot of all of the boxes, but if they want 140 .jpg of the same thing, I can do that too.
Compare me buying 19k rounds for myself, vs. back in 2003 when I order 12k rounds that was split between like 5 people. I bet I still have some of my share of that somewhere....
I got some Nu Finish, car polish that the internet says does well on brass when mixed in your tumbling media. It does in fact work pretty well at 1/3 the cost of actual tumbler media brass polish additive. The power of marketing and packaging I guess.
My shin got pretty busted up, even with both of us wearing shin guards. Might be time to upgrade my guards.
Nailed medium rare on the lamb rack tonight (on the grill). I'm getting better, nothing burnt, no bones chared, no flare ups, not well done, etc.
That game I've had my eye on for a year now is on sale again, and I think I'm going to grab it while it's cheap. I don't think my NUC will be fast enough to play it well, but that new fancy laptop I'm using for my 'lab' host is. I think. So what I'm doing is cloning my NUC disk and will try to boot it up on the laptop. That way if it works, I mean it is real copy of windows so I should be able to reactivate it, then I can move the lab over to the NUC. The i5 with 16gb is plenty to run some docker VMs while the i7 with 16gb should be fast enough to play the game. It all comes down to graphics really, so will the big laptop have better graphics than the NUC? Hoping so.
I grabbed 2 $20 referb hosafe cams off Amazon. one to replae a failing camera in the coop, and one as an extra. Turns out that one of these is actually much newer than the others. All the packaging, labels, stickesr, etc are exactly the same on all 4 but one actually upgraded to a new firmware with a much more modern look and feel, and it's faster and has a sharper image. Resolution is the same, but everything else is clearly better. So.... I've ordered 2 more of them, might get lucky and get more the upgraded ones. :)
Kinda surprised everything worked on the referb units. They configured correctly, the night vison works, the PoE works, etc. Usually something is busted. I burned them in for 48 hours and they work so I'll mount them outside tomorrow. Coop cam is dead, need one there and then I might upgrade one of the others. Actually, I might 'downgrade' one, I've got a good wide angle cam in a place that it's not needed, perhaps I put this in it's place and free up the better camera for elsewhere. Perhaps I shold upgrade the cam that's out on the 'birdhouse' to something higher quality since it covers so much area. Lots of time over the holiday to fiddle with cams and placement.
I think I just successfully swapped my Centos7 system to the NUC and the Windows 10 system to the Lenovo laptop! Everything seems to be working... so far.
Shuffled some cameras around today, rotated out the worst of them (one sorta dead, one just 640x480) and tiedied up a bit out in the barn. Then sat in the sun for a bit, just like the goats.
Went to the range this morning and tested some loads in the new AR and did a few drills with the G34. Had this really odd malfunction, it was a failure to eject... but there was a live round in the chamber at this point. Somehow it cycled, picked up another round, started to chamber it and then the ejected brass somehow got caught like that. So random.
I also tested the loads in the C9 in prep for the match in January, and found that the 10 round mags won't lock the slide up reliably. Apparently that's a known issue which is unfortunate. I would have just gone with the 8 round mags had I known.
The woman got me some generic ingredients to make chili while she was gone. I used the last of the road kill deer to make it so even if she was here she wouldn't be trying it.
A little holiday cheer, for those of us growing up in the 80s when everything was mroe awesome.
Went to dad's today for dinner, and his new woman wanted to try to make cioppino because the theory is that grandma used to make this for giftmas dinner. We figured out the last time she made it was around 1984. Yea, so it's been a while. Anyway, they managed to turn this heaping portion of Whole Foods seafood:
into a very tasty cioppino. 4 stars out of 5. Oh wait, isn't this yelp?
Prior to going over there I made some good progress on cleaning up the woodpile area. Got all the small stuff stacked, got the larger stuff ready to spilt and got some crap piles that need to be hauled off and burnt (rotted things, odds and ends that won't stack, etc).
Rebate requires pictures of the front and side of the box. Lame...
Now I have to put all that back in the boxes.... or at least 3000 rounds of it. 4000 can go into the two ammo cans I have waiting.
More wood splitting and stacking today. Michael hauled off two little trailers full of junk to burn, there was more rotted stuff on top of the 'good' pile than I would have guessed. The pine needles are turning into soil basically and allowign things on top to rot. Gotta tarp the new stacks outside when I'm done with all of this.
I don't even remember how this thing works, and I never made a box for it or a real circuit instead of just the prototype board, and it's been sitting on a cardboard box exactly where I put it into "production" apparently in January of 2018 based on the logs.... so.... I made a shelf for it to sit on. Still not a real circuit, but hey, progress. Now I can ignore it and let it collect data for another year.
I went to Bombshell Brewery to get the gift of beer for Hier's wedding. Split 3 ways between teh guys at work this is pretty reasonable even for microbrew.
Some codger ran into one of the support posts at the gun club so I got a 4x4 and we fixed it. Hopefully this counts as our work day for the year, and maybe they'll even pay me back for the materials. One shortcut though was for the cross pieces the bulliten board was mounted to. One snapped off too short to easily screw onto the new post and the others had a bit of rot on the ends, not sure they would have stood up to reattachment either. So, a few scraps of 2x4 on the sides to move the mounting locations in a few inches and we're good to go. I did all 4 ends just to make it look like it was done on purpose and not as a hack. Now that I see it, perhaps we should have cut the cross pieces down. Still can do that, one pass with a skill saw at the right depth and those ends will come right off. Or we let it sit and no one will notice and/or care in forever.
With a 2nd failure to eject on the G34 we took things apart and compared everything to two other mid frame Glocks. Nothing looked different, no wear or deformation that any of us could see.
The extractor spring on Sean's G17 was slightly longer than mine, so we guessed that mine has worn down a bit and sure enough when I grabbed a new one at FG&G it shows the same length delta:
With the new one in place I fired my usual 160 rounds of practice and it worked fine. Ejection seems weaker though, doesn't throw them across the enclosure as far but maybe that's just me over thinking things. Time will tell if this solves it, but testing will be a bit compromised because I've just opened up a cast of aluminum blazer I wanted to get rid of so I won't be shooting steel for the next month or more. Always something!
The holidays are annoying, I'm gaining weight. Too much crap around and all these damn meals. Fortunatly it's only 1-2 pounds that need to go away, but still dissapointing that I don't have the willpower or forsight to keep it from happening.
So lugnut decides to try to headbutt the cat that is sleeping under the manger. The cat decides to leave and then lugnut snags a horn in the wire...
And after the panic dies down, we have a goat minus a horn with blood on his face. Good thing the woman was out of town.
But of course, it's not his fault, it's that defective manger so I'll quickly modify it to not have wire at the bottom. The real question is now though, how long with that additional board remain unpainted? I predict sometime next spring it will get some paint.
Took the van into the dealer today for it's 95k service, which was basically just an oil change and tire rotation. Mostly I just wanted them to get some eyes on it to see if anything needed attention, if dealerships are good for one thing (other than taking your money) it's finding problems. They found nothing, so I'm pretty confident that things are right. He said the 100k service is a transmission fluid change (which isn't actually true per the manual) and plugs. I've already done those so all that's actually needed at 100k would be the coolant flush, which I might have them do. Oh, and the 'fuel system treatment' snake oil they try to sucker people into for $250. Same as the Kia guys tried with the woman on her 50k service.
I did get a quick detach thingy for the key ring so the gun locker and equipment locker keys were safely in my pocket while the van was out of my sight.
The highlight of the visit was probably seeing the doughnuts in the vending machine. I didn't get any, but them being two weeks past expiration wouldn't have detured me. :)
Rainy day, so I'm working on the backup AR build. Going light weight here, just the dot, no magnifier. Using the gray furnature, have a gray foregrip on order from ebay for $21. Would have just bought it local but they don't stock the grey ones.
The neighbors felt compelled to give us gifts, and they gave me this solar powered lantern. It's pretty useless as anything other than a decoration so I'll put it on the patio and let it do it's thing.
