I leave in 6 hours. I'm packed, but it doesn't look like a whole lot of stuff. Guess not having any "fancy" clothes helps out a lot. Here goes nothing.

Dude? Dude! The Kimber broke! Part of the slide stop lever sheared off and now the magazines can't lift the slide lock into place when empty. Freaky. Not even 10,000 rounds through it (close though). I knew I shouldn't have cleaned it. At the range they had some Wilson replacements but they were the 'extended mag release' type which I didn't really like. I'll have to find a regular one somewhere. I wonder if they're close to milspec? I dunno, but I checked the web site and you can order a slide stop on-line. Must be a common failure. They don't sell barrels which is too bad. I wonder when mine will be officially 'shot out'?

Tonight was my last German class and Sunday at 7am I fly out. I'm starting to get a little scared and a little excited. I'm looking forward to the trip, but not the long ass flights. I've started playing with the loaner phone that I got for the trip (GSM or whatever, it works in Europe). It's so high tech compared to my phone. It's color, has 'themes', 57 background images, like 10 games, can take a camera adapter, etc. Probably lasts a long time on one charge too.

I got through the Veritas web cast OK! Woohoo! There were 4 people on the panel and 57 or so people in the 'audience' and I gave a 25 minute talk on our Veritas net backup solution. It was pretty cool. They made up the slides for me based on my information but I had to sorta skip around a little as there was too much bogus marketing fluff on there. Afterwords they (Veritas) were all happy with my performance and I got a few questions and whatnot from the audience. There was no camera on me, it was basically a shared power point type application with a meeting tool wrapped around it (that showed the status of the audience and relayed questions and whatnot) and then I had to call in for the audio portion. It went off very smoothly, the people at the web conference company seem to have their stuff down.

And my Linux box has eaten yet another video card, this one is already starting to flicker and die. Maybe I should stop pulling them out of Jack's junk bin and just get a real (modern even) card and upgrade my drivers? That sounds like a hassle.

Only 6 days to go before departure. I'm starting to slack at work already!

I went to Fry's with dad tonight and helped him pick up some more memory for his camera. He only had a 64mb card so I had him get a 512mb card which should last him for the whole trip. I contemplated getting a Powershot 400 but didn't... the Nikon still works just fine. I looked at some old pictures to see if I could tell a difference in the image quality and the answer is not really. There might be some degradation in the quality but it could just be me looking for excuses too. Instead I just picked up another battery and a 256mb card (they only had one of the cheap 512mb cards and I didn't want to pay 2x for the 'good' one). I now have 3x 256mb, 1x 128mb, 1x 64mb, 1x 32mb cards. I would say that is enough. After Fry's we repacked the riding gear into this huge suitcase mom bought from the goodwill place (it looks brand new to me). It all fit so he's going to take it on as checked luggage instead of shipping it. It was too expensive to ship there and back again and I was worried that it would vanish once it got there.

Our marketing VP got himself a new toy today... he hired a new executive secretary. Damn, she is one fine looking woman. Kenny would say she's no Verbanic or anything but still, she's fun to look at. She was dressed in this suit/skirt thing that was both professional and sexy as hell at the same time. Takes class to pull that look off. And of course speaking of bimbos, here is another random picture from the web. Lisa Ryder who plays in Andromeda.

I'm just now noticing a pattern in the women I'm picking off the web. All short haired blonds. Hmm... must be a theme for 2003? Or maybe it's just what's popular now and since I'm just picking stuff I see on Saturday TV I end up with lots of the same stuff. Hmm... another conspiracy? :)

Oh, and if you're bored, check out Hotel Holzleiten which is where we'll be staying for the tour. Sorta different that I imagined.

Made it back alive from Jo's birthday, managed to get to bed at 3am. She really wanted to go out to eat at 2:30am but there was no way I was going to make it. I'm not like those kids, I can't stay up so late anymore. I woke up at 6,7,9,10am today too which sucked. I couldn't force myself to sleep enough. I'm going to crash early tonight.

I still need to get to Walmart and get some disposable t-shirts for the trip.

California, figures. The $1.97 t-shirts in Texas are $4.97 here. Oh well. It was pretty easy coming up with a wardrobe, 7 shirts, all the same just different colors. A 'bonus pack' of 7 pairs of underwear and a pack of socks. I'm unpacking them from their little bags though, although neat and small I could never get them that small again so when I have to re-pack on the road it won't work. I wonder if the backpack I got is unnecessarily large now, it seems like everything would fit into my half dome pack. I also got these tiny sample packs of toothpaste and deodorant. I'll raid the first aid kit at work to get individual servings of aspirin and whatnot. Maybe I'm getting better at this? :) I'll bring all my short/pant convertible things so I can handle warm/cold weather and I'll bring my thin polypropylene stuff so if it gets extra cold I can layer. If I have room I think I'll bring some 'real' clothes in case I want to go to a more up-scale restaurant. Like one that uses plates.

I realize I'm behind the power curve for movies but I just saw "Xmen 2" tonight. I liked it. It was another of those action movies with some thinking in it and it clearly left it open for yet another sequel. Is it just me or has Patrick Stewart not actually aged in the last 15 years? He was an old guy when ST:TNG started and he looks the same today. That's just freaky. That or he's an android like Dick Clark is.

Rode to Alice's for breakfast again. It was cloudy down in the valley which broke out into blue skies and sunshine on the ridge, and then turned back into nasty fog when I got to Sky Londa. As such, there were just a few hard core bikers up there. I had the Ducati breakfast, two eggs scrambled, bacon and French toast. Yum. Speaking of food, dinner is ready. Got to go eat.

I went to REI and used my dividend check to pay for a new backpack. It's a "side loader" so it's easy to pack/unpack (not as useful for backpacking but it's not for that anyway) and the straps zip into compartments so it becomes carry-on. It also has a zip off day pack. Pretty cool. I also got a small silk neck wallet that will hold my passport and some cash. I'm not sure how well it will work but they had about 7-8 different styles so I'm guessing it's a popular item for travelers.

Tonight is Jo's party thing so I'll probably need to start getting ready and go get her dusty ass from work.

I forgot to mention my good deed from the other day. Traffic on 880 was very slow and I was lane splitting for about 5 miles when I came up on the problem. I pallet was lying in the fast lane and everyone was having to go around it. I pulled over, hopped off the bike and moved it out of the way. A bunch of people honked and waved and gave me the thumbs up. Felt good to do good. Not bad for a Lawful Evil person eh? :)

Also, the stock exhaust for my Suzuki is on it's way from the guy in NC. It's $47 with shipping.... and he didn't put in some mounting widget. He wants another $15 (shipping included) for that because I didn't explicitly say I needed it. Damn.

I hauled all the stuff from the front room down into the garage. Dad is going to come pick it up tomorrow and take some of it to the cabin and some of it to the goodwill pickup station. The whole front room is empty again. Cool. Next I'll probably ditch the dining room table and that will empty out the rest of the lower levels (other than the TV room which I actually want stuff in).

I had a bunch of depressing stuff to put in here but I'm not really in the mood to write it all down. It's not all that interesting, just a rehash of the same old crapola.

Yesterday was drive everyone's car day. Joe (our VP) lifted his new quadra-steer redneck mobile and put some tires on it ($7500 total) and Ed (who bought the exact same truck for several thousand less) wanted to see if the quadra steer still worked after the lift. It did some impressively tight u-turns. Amazing how engineering can make even stupid ideas possible. Like someone using this truck for a daily driver. After that I took local(Dennis)'s new Subaru WRX STi out for a cruise. It's the new 300 hp version of the WRX and man is it fast. I don't know if it's because I've been driving the montero so much or what but it was scary fast. I took a few crazy turns in it and got it to do a little drifting. Dennis wasn't worried at all.

I saw this in a sig file and thought it was journal worthy:

Cicely called me while I was on the way home. She's in a hotel somewhere in Baltimore at some trade show and wanted to share her current love life situation update thing with me. She met some guy at the last show, or at some mixer after she got home, or something and he apparently called her back and is really interested. She's been feeling sorta unwanted after the attention (or lack there of) from the last batch of losers she met at the bar but now that she's got an attentive guy she's feeling much better. She, like most of us, doesn't like the void. I also ran into Paige tonight while I was pushing the bike out for a ride. She's doing well, although traveling a lot. Next week she's going on vacation with Mr. What's His Name to Hawaii. She looks good, seems to have lost some weight.

Two days of riding, that's a lot of seat time. Yesterday Rod and I went to Alice's for breakfast and I thought that would be it. He wanted to ride more so we went down 84 to Hwy 1, then went north.... and north and north. We followed Hwy 1 into SF, then crossed the Golden Gate bridge and up into Marin. I didn't want to go back across the bridge (serious inbound traffic) so we went east to Vijalo (sp?) and then down 80 to 880 and home. Then this morning I went for a short ride with the BMW club. They're doing a track day next weekend so this ride was short (only 100 or so miles) and local. We did some really tiny roads up in the mountains, smallest I've ever seen really. With all the redwood trees it was as close to hiking as you could get without getting off the bike. Nice.

I went to REI and looked at various backpack and luggage options and I think I'm going to go with the backpack I have but may get one of those 'currier bags' that are basically a backpack with just the one big strap. It's easier to get into without taking it off, handy for getting the camera in/out. I also looked at new cameras (on line) and like the Cannon Elph S330. I'm not sure I want to upgrade... but it is smaller and faster (the Nikon is pretty sluggish to focus and store images). I also went to Fry's and got a power converter so I can recharge batteries and my razor. Is that what Luke wanted to go into Tashi Station for? :)

Oh yea, the security mods. I'm still doing my log watch and black hole route (if you try to hit the web page and don't login successfully it will black hole route your IP) but now have a primitive tripwire installed. I did a md5sum on all the files and stuck it into a file. I can then read it back and compare the files to what I had. I can't fit the whole md5 file on a floppy so I instead checksummed the checksum file and put that on the (read only) floppy along with the checksum utilities. So now it first checks to verify the checksum file is good, then uses it to check the rest. There a dozens of ways to get around my system, but it's better than nothing. Since I also installed the real tripwire and got it running I'll eventually use it but it was fun to write some code.

I need to do laundry and pay bills yet today, as well as get some more shopping done for the trip.

I've lost some serious brain cells this afternoon. Not from some Santa Cruz hash, rather about 20 different cleaning products. I washed and waxed and babied the BMW, used the special spray crap on the windscreen and the extra special plastic/rubber stuff on the dash and misc bits. The dealer gave me this $9.38 tube of stuff "Original BMW Gummi-Pflege", it has a little sponge on the end of the tube that makes application pretty easy, and it does wonders on black plastic. We'll see how well it lasts over the next few weeks. Sure looks good.

So if that wasn't enough cells lost, I got busy with the Montero. I washed it, then used a crack repair kit to try to fix the crack and the big ding in the windscreen, then got crazy with some silicone sealant and completely sealed the wing windows. The weather stripping I put on there worked OK but it didn't last as long as I had hoped. Now the bastards are sealed! The garage sure needs to be aired out... whew.

So here is the bad news. I was scheduled to go to the movies with Elenore but I didn't want to as I was in the middle of all my projects and still had more to do tonight. I called to cancel and she really got pissed off. Like way more than I would have thought. Oh well. Now I don't have to call her back anymore, right? I hope so. I'm tired of dating. I truly am getting to be where I like being alone rather than having to chase after someone else. My parents called too and wanted me to do dinner. Dad got cranky when I didn't want to. Also, Jason called (guy from work). He's in Vegas for some bachelor party and I told him to look Lydia up. He called on Saturday afternoon and I didn't call back (busy) and then he called again at midnight. Screw that noise. Leave me alone.

So I didn't get to my shopping tonight (I've got bills that are almost due so that's more important). I wanted to go to Target and to the book store, but that's got to wait. Got the laundry done though. Now I just have to figure out how to get the silicone caulk off my hands. :(

Bills done. Another reason to love the Montero (do we need anymore really?) is the registration which I just paid. $68. That's not bad, the bike is $150 or something. Mom's car is $500/year. Ouch. The other good news is that even with the trip to Florida, the trip to Vegas, the water heater exploding and my little shopping trip to Macy's for some new shirts I still held to my spending goal for the month. That's cool. Next month will be impossible I think because of the Germany trip but we'll see. Maybe I should make quarterly goals to smooth out the odd months?

Did I mention that I have poison oak again? Don't know if I got it on the hike or off something that I hadn't washed off since the last hike.

And since I don't have any of my own pictures for this rather long update, and I know how Vareck gets without some pictures, I leave you with a bimbo shot from the net. This is from the show She Spies which I think I've seen before (I recognized it from the tv-guide listing). The blonde on the right is pretty damn hot.