AC went out on the van, and some quick parts from Autozone and I was able to recharge it enough to verify it's not the compressor being dead... it's just out of refrigerant. Called the dealership to ask what they did to fix it, and they said "nothing", they just filled it with refrigerant because they "couldn't find a leak". Ugh. So basically they didn't bother really trying and just patched it to get it out the door.

The valve for the high pressure side of the system is right up on top of everything under the hood, super easy to get at. The low pressure side you need to add to is conveniently located behind the wheel well on the passenger's side. WTF Ford, you could do better than that if you wanted to. Take a lesson from Toyota!

When this batch of refrigerant leaks out I'll add in the stuff with the UV dye and then track down the leak. Here's hoping it's just a o-ring.

Something was wrong with Biscuit this morning and the other birds pecked the crap out of her. She's still alive, but I've already dug the grave...

We now have 150A switched power available. Next, to run it somewhere...

Dad is cleaning out his desk and whatnot in preparation for moving and he found a bunch of stuff mom had kept about me. ASVAB report, 2nd and 3rd grade report cards, etc. Apparently I had aptitude to do anything I wanted in the military:

But... my spelling was atrocious right from the 3rd grade on. Seems legit.

Some religious creds, my baptismal certificate, and somewhere there was a card talking about my first communion.

Here is just some of the haul from dad. I got a really good battery charger to replace the one that blew up, some good hand trowels from mom's gardening supplies (mine was a POS that I found in the barn, and it kept bending every time it hit a rock), a leatherman which I was going to order a spare of for my range bag, paint brushes, brooms, power tools I don't yet know how to use, etc. He cleaned the spare generator, and filled it with ethanol free gas. Would have preferred he just left it empty, even small ones like that are too heavy to flip over and empty easily by yourself.

Pro tip for the conference: steal extra beverages at each break. They have beverages at the breaks, but at the lunch/dinners they only have water and tea. If you want a soda, bring it with you.

Random crap from Converge in Vegas. I'm trying to participate in the dumb stuff to ward off the brain damage from the non-optional dumb stuff.

Made it to the gym this morning, pretty easy with staying on east coast time. Getting up at 5am is really sleeping in until 8am. Anyway, gym was busy but I got a machine to do some cardio, then did some shadow boxing and other crap, then went and ran some stairs in the conference center. Not a lot of people out at that time.

Spent the equivalent of a half case of cheap 556 on dinner last night, but it was worth it (I think). Got out by myself, had some real food, and got away from the conference center. The strip wasn't crazy crowded so I was able to walk there and back again reasonably easy (for Vegas).

Today I have a work call at 7am, then the general session starts at 9am (vs. 7:45am or 8am starts they've been doing, I guess they know everyone will be hung over from the mandatory fun last night?) and then off to the airport at 11am. I think I'll wait to check out until right at the last minute, I can come back to the room and change. I've got a room way closer than the regular block of rooms so it's easy for me to get to from the conference. Not sure how I got the upgrade, but it's nice.

Sitting in my little corner of the airport waiting for my flight. Other than sitting on concrete it's a nice spot. Power right here, a big display kiosk blocking people from tripping on me or seeing the laptop screen, and with no chairs nearby it keeps the dregs from being too close.

One last thing from the conference, they had the speaker notes displaying on a large screen in the back of the room. Pretty sure they're only supposed to show up on the smaller screens up front facing the stage. Takes the magic out of the 'spontaneous talk' when you can see it's so staged. I mean, no one thinks it isn't, but putting it up on screen really kills the illusion.

Power in! Those big connectors did not work with the crimp tool at all. It juts ignored my sledgehammering. The proper method apparently it's to solder them in using a torch. Next door neighbour had one (I couldn't find mine) so some heat later and we have solid connectors.

The rail on top of the sub2k was not flat, there was a peak in the middle so nothing could actually latch on solidly. The internet says the fix is to sand the rail flat.... so I did that. Can't find the sanding block but some scrap wood and staples and we're in business.

Got it to the range and it holds zero. Got to where I could hit the 100 yard steel easily, and the 200 with a lot of luck. Did some mag dumps to rattle it around, and it still stayed zeroed at 100. So now I'm ready for the steel challenge at basically no cost (since I already had the dot, rifle and sand paper).

Snap Pea dinner tonight, and I gotta say this one was actually worth it. They've been slipping but now that Rachel is back it's returned to it's former glory. Hard to tell from these photos, but the best dish was the squash blossom. Jacob actually made 'squash seed butter' (like peanut butter) out of the seeds to use in the filling.

I ordered a UV light so I can see the UV dye in the van AC system. So far I've not been able to find the leak, but I can see the dye on the injector and the hose so I'm going to guess it really did go in there.

That looks like a smoking gun to me. The switch itself seems to be $15-30 online. I'm just wondering if I can be that lucky.

Look, the first load on the new power system.... OK not really. I was going to put an LED somewhere to let me know that the solenoid had tripped and power was flowing (also as an error condition, if I turn off the van and the LED is still on, something is stuck). However, it was almost cheaper to get a 5 pack of these little LED voltmeters than it was to get the single LED. OK so the LED had a nice surface mount fixture and all that, but come on, I can come up with something to make this look less ghetto and then I get a whole gauge instead of just a light. What a bargain.

Phil pointed out the voltage is too low, but the engine isn't running in this photo, but the ignition is on and all the fans are running. Didn't want to die of CO poisoning while taking pictures in a closed garage.

Starting to physically organise all of the first wave of parts going in. The very first thing I need to do is build the battery enclosure. I don't want the battery sealed in, but also don't want it flying around in an emergency.

Unrelated to the van, I finally changed the firewall rule to allow ssh directly into the mac I'm using for iMessage. Now instead of using the new pi as the landing platform I'm just connecting directly to the mac to tunnel. Takes just 1 more step out of the process. Less latency and less moving parts and all that.

At one of our customers I've been pushing one of the admins to be more experimental in food. He would only eat steak well done, now he's down to medium rare. He wouldn't touch sushi, now he suggests it for lunch. He suggested that we try an Indian place to expand my boundaries... because he knows I'm not a fan of Indian. OK fine.

So, we went to a local somewhat hole in the wall Indian place catering clearly to the Indian community in north Cary, and I gotta say it was not all that bad. In fact some of it was downright good. I tried pretty much everything on the buffet just to see what I liked and the curry mutton was damn good. It was actually good enough than I would go on my own.

started wiring the physical circuit for the van. I think I've got it sorted out, hope to get it finished and functional this weekend.

While sitting in the EBC today I did some testing of the linux VM and generating thumbnails. Doing 1 at a time on a test run took 1.5 min. Doing 4 in parallel look... 2 minutes. 25lower running more cores? Guess IO becomes a bottleneck really quick.

Went to this weird practice / cool kids shoot with John Wilson today at 5pm at the range. There were just 5 of us, not really sure who the others were but we ran drills for a few hours. The dry practice is really, really paying off. At first I wasn't thinking it was, but now that I'm shooting away from San Lee on a timer with witnesses and pressure... I did much better than I would have expected. I ran 1 El Prez at the end, in just under 7 seconds with 1 miss. That's a record for me for sure.

Replaced the G34's recoil spring, with 11,507 rounds on it. It was time, even if it doesn't look like it. Glock says 7500 rounds I think. Old on the left, new on the right.

AC is fixed. Ford changed the connector on the replacement part but I didn't know that until the mechanic opened the sensor package and found the paperwork saying "if you haven't already replaced the connector, replace it with part XYZ". Sigh. Fortunately the dude had one of the new style connectors and wired it in, and recharged the system, and cleaned up the dye and after all that and almost 2 hours of work he charged me... $50. I lucked out on this one.

More van improvements. Build the battery holder / post that will hold the access door and got all the wiring in place. Running a fridge test now, going to see how well it does over night.

The steel challenge match today was crazy. I was expecting the usual "stand there and shoot fast" thing but Instead we got a full IDPA/USPSA style match complete with barricades, vehicles, props, shoot house and even a stage with a double Texas star like this:

I did extremely well (for me) considering that I had never run anything like this and was using the red dot on the Keltec which was also totally new to me. At the start of stage 4 the red dot lost it's zero, I had to switch back to iron sights mid-stage. I pulled the optic and ran the last stages without. I've got a theory on what happened, we'll see if I can correct it.

While I was off having fun at the match, the woman was working on the pickling homework from the Keller class. It's super trivial to do but if it works it's going to give us a lot of different flavors to add to dishes. Should make things more gourmet.

She also put the first coat of paint (tinted stain) on the upper deck and the 2nd coat of paint on the lower trim board. I think it looks better matching the house than being the contrasting white.

Elsewhere in the world, Will's kid was busy rolling his civic in a single car accident on his way back from SC. He was speeding, but the tracking stuff in his phone says his max speed was never over 65 and the corner was marked 55. I would think anyone could take a turn at only 10 over during the day, in the dry. Guess that's not always the case.

So happy she is.

The fridge ran for a day and a half and the battery was still at 12.5v, and that's with an unknown charge on it (I just pulled it out of the box and started using it). I think it's going to work out pretty well.

Switches, a delay circuit and a thermometer for the fridge on order. The thermometer seems nuts, but I really can't tell how cold it is inside, just sticking my hand in isn't calibrated and the settings on the fridge itself don't seem to mean anything that I can tell (so far). Once I've got a thermometer I can figure out what 1, 0, -1 and all the rest mean as actual temp readings. I'm guessing it's Celsius, but it doesn't feel 32F when I open the fridge.

I moved the centos VM that does the image processing over to the macbook air that I'm using for iMessage. It's slightly faster than the windows security PC and has no load on it (which is why it's probably faster).

Shot in the yard this morning, 50 yards at a reasonably quick pace at 15 yards. Only one shot out of the 6" circle, and that was high. Dry fire is really starting to pay off.

Had sushi tonight, it was not satisfying. Had some chocolate and peanut butter for dessert. It too was not satisfying. Huh.

Lots of van progress. I pulled everything back out of the electronics area and made this door, got the switches and display mounted in the door, got the hinges on, and started making additions to the control board. No actual wiring done, but that's next and I find that it helps to actually know how it's going to physically be laid out when making the runs instead of just guessing.

It would be super cool to have a single wiring hardness with some connectors on it instead of a bunch of individual runs zip tied together. Maybe that's v2.0 in the future.

Dad is in DC on a mini-vacation, checking out Trump's hotel. Kinda gaudy, but also kinda interesting.

We're totally out of 'drinking wine', all that's left is $30 and up bottles of good stuff. A quick trip to wines and more fixed that, got a variety of $7-14 bottles including another of that funny goat wine that was surprisingly good, a boggle just because, and one of the new cabs that are aged in bourbon barrels. Ellen says it does make the wine better, which is what you would expect from a millennial. :) (except I think she's too old to be a millennial).

Continuing with the alcohol theme, we decided to go to the Fainting Goat Brewery for some good beer. I do really like their triple, and as a bonus there was a German food truck there. I had schnitzel bites and a potato pancake. schnitzel was good, pancake was under cooked in the middle. It was clearly too thick. The woman got white pizza delivered from Annie's down the street. I had 2 beers though, and that was enough to make me go to sleep at 6pm and not wake up until 6am today. Oops.

The photos from the family thing are on the photographer's web site. We're not ordering any, but I did do a few screen grabs just to stash them away. The photographer made us pose like that, otherwise I wouldn't have had my hand in my pocket. Looks awkward.

The Keltec continues to be a mystery. I've squared everything up on both axis, stiffened the hand guard with some rail pieces on both sides, put lock tight on everything... and it continues to shoot like crap. I even cleaned it! Not sure what's going on or where to go from here.

Found a use for all those dumb stickers that come with everything. I was about to throw them out, then I figured I could decorate some ammo cans.

The painter has died.

Trying to stay awake in the first of many long, long boring meetings today. At least I don't have to present until this afternoon.

I actually turned on the text alerts from the well pump. Let's see how it works in production (3 months after I wrote the code).

Adulting pretty hard here. $360 to pump the 1500 gallon tank.

The guy said that we're setup with 2 tanks, the primary tank that has two chambers (one for solids, the other for liquids after the solids settle) and then there is a filter and pump that moves liquids over to the second tank and then to the leach field. Good to know. The guy showed how the pump worked and tested the alarm and everything so we're good to go. He said I should clean out that filter once a year and showed me how. Icky, but seems like solid advice.

Busy day today. First up, dad and I went to pick up the new safe. This one will be used to hold his stuff while he's moving, and then when he gets his safe situated at the new house in October then I will use this to hold random stuff that I don't use much but don't want to get rid of. Stuff like Don's SKS and P85, my clays shotgun, etc.

I got a brand new concrete bit at Home Depot and got exactly 3.5 holes drilled before it gave out. Couldn't get that 4th anchor set, the hole was only half as deep as needed. Probably good enough with only 3 anchors, but wish it was the 2 in the back and 1 in the front instead of the reverse.

The larger model was actually on sale starting today, probably could have gotten upgraded for cheap but then we couldn't have gotten it into the dirt room where it needed to go. My original idea, while not optimal from a cost per square inch of safe space, does actually let it go where I wanted it to go. That's worth something (less space apparently).

Dad had some finished but not used yet park bench materials in his garage. He never got around to fixing up the other bench they had and someone bought the metal parts but didn't want the wood. That's kinda random. I took the old bench by the pond, ripped the old stuff off, hit it with some BBQ black and with a few new bolts I now have a better looking bench. The decoration in the back of the old material pictured looks like it's in good shape but it's actually plastic. The new one is all metal and heavy as all get out.

Another project done today was the rust on the van roof. I used some steel wool to knock the rust down, then used some Rustolium bright white high gloss enamel. It pretty much matches the factory white, and considering you can't see it from the ground I'm going to call it good enough for now. We'll see how it lasts, if it starts to flake off I'll try something else.

Somewhat amusing, in my sleepy state I couldn't spell "white". It kept coming out wight. Funny.

The woman finished painting the deck today. We're going to call that project officially done.