Sacto was easy, the weather was good (not too hot nor windy) and traffic was light. Got back to work at 4pm to some mild drama but can't bring myself to care too much. :)

I thought on Sunday that something was wrong with the Suzuki because it was stumbling when I was riding it around the driveway but it was just being cold blooded. I ran it up to temp today after work and it was fine. Whew, thought I screwed something up with the maintenance.

Tomorrow I've got to go to Sacramento to let the bean counters into the DR site to do a physical inventory. They don't like our physical inventory enough I guess. I'll lounge in Alameda and leave from there cutting some time off the ride.

Still having some strange ARP issues with pong and the home network. I've made some hacks, we'll see if they're the right answer.

Company BBQ was yesterday and it wasn't as painful as in last years, mostly because I had a woman along. However, if I hadn't had a woman along, maybe I could have scored with Melissa (the last hot SAP chick). She got divorced last year and didn't bring anyone to the party. She was just sitting around most the day drinking herself into oblivion. Yep, drunk desperate lonely chicks, who wouldn't want that? :)

I figured out the problem with pong 'dropping off the wireless'. Turns out it's not pong, but the win2k laptop that's having issues. When it goes into suspend mode it deletes all it's arp entries and when it comes back up it won't re-arp anything on the wireless net other than the router. I've tried it with pong and with the other windows box upstairs (also on wireless). It will not re-establish arp after a suspend for either OS. I just made a .bat file that adds static arp entries in for everything and will click on it when I un-suspend the laptop. Not a big deal I suppose. I tried having pong constantly banging away broadcasting it's arp data out but the laptop won't pick it up. The win98 box doesn't have these problems at all, it happily gets arp data for any host it doesn't know. Then again, I don't suspend the win98 box ever, it gets a full power cycle each time. Interesting bug. This workaround is better than my other which was to VPN into work (from the laptop) and then ssh back into pong. Seems sorta lame to go to Santa Clara and back to talk to a host in another room in the house. That was easier than hooking a monitor back up to pong every time I wanted to try something.

I also picked up the worlds smallest UPS, a little 350VA unit from APC. I took the 1500VA unit that was powering the alarm clock and will use it on pong in the attic and use the 350VA unit on the alarm clock. I don't think I need several days of backup runtime on my clock. Yea, I know it has a 9v battery in the clock but that won't power the display nor make the alarm go off, it just keeps the time. Not as useful.

Kristen went to the NASCAR race up at Sears Point with her friend Heather this morning so I've got the day to myself. I'm going riding in a few minutes with Jason and some of the other guys from work (going to Alice's for breakfast) and then I'll come home and continue my quest for a clean, junk and paper free house. Dad is bored and may come by.... maybe he'll get the truck and we can take this furniture I'm ditching to good will.

The strange ass neighbor that never says hi is in his garage. He had a white M3 (same body style as mine) before but now he's got a dark silver M5 in the garage with paper license places. Looks like he upgraded. That M5 sure fills the garage up, he's got too much junk in there. Of course I think everyone has too much junk in their garage.

Pong is now upstairs, but not behaving well. It sorta drops off the net with respect to the laptop every time I suspend/resume the laptop. I then have to VPN into work and then ssh back into pong. I think it's the statefull firewall crap the Cisco VPN client has in it.

Kristen is pretty upset about something today and I can't figure out what. I'm not in the mood for stupid girl games, I'm just going to ignore her. Kinda hard since she's here. I'm not looking forward to the company BBQ tomorrow. :(

I've got the DWL-520 wireless card in now. It's the E-rev that requires a firmware download each time you want to use it, but that process seems like it's a known quantity. I'll try it now from work and see what happens. Hope I don't blow up my PC while working on it remotely. I hate that.

Crap, this DWL-520 isn't even a 520. It's some POS based on a broadcom chip that's not even remotely supported by anything but shitty windows. Dammit. Teach me to trust the box to actually contain the right card.

Dennis told me to just quit screwing with all this and get a wireless bridge... um, OK. I looked it up. It's exactly what I need! Looks like my issues are solved with one quick trip to Fry's. I'll give it a whirl tonight.

Quick trip, yea, but not a quick install. There were only 2 bridges left in the whole store, both open box. I took a risk. The one I got had everything but the antenna. No problem, I have an ass load of antennas from all these other useless cards. I got it working with minimal fuss with winders, of course, using DHCP and everything. For linux it would work but not with DHCP. Um, OK, so I changed the DHCP range to be 1 higher and just setup pong to have a static which solved that problem. Next I tried beating the crap out of the interface and it would cause it to hang. lots of "wait_for_cmd_timeout done!" errors. Switching to the Intel eepro driver helped there. Oh, and this bridge only talks 10mbit on the Ethernet side, yet 11mbit on the wireless side. Go figure, it's still faster than my 1.5 mbit cable modem and the 0.35 mbit upload speed they allow so it's fine. Next stop, bed. Tomorrow I'll move pong into the attic once it's proved itself to not roll over and die.

BTW, this new OWA for outlook actually looks pretty good.

Kristen came down yesterday and stayed at my place, a rare mid-week treat. It feels very odd to have her in my place. I'm all cool with being at her place but it seems odd for her to be around mine being all domestic. Probably just a lack of familiarity.

I got my nifty jpg rotating script done so I can fix my web pages when there are 'sideways' photos in them. It's not 100% automatic but it's still kinda slick.

I'm still fighting with wireless under linux. I'm getting closer though. The big fight is that card manufacturers change their damn hardware all the time and don't change the name of the cards nor the models and rarely it seems even the revision numbers. They release winders drivers for each one, but even those don't mix with various cards. The SMC card I've got doesn't work, but I've got another one at work that might. You have to download firmware into the card each time (they don't have storage on the card anymore to save money I'm guessing) which is a pain but seems to be catching on as a manufacturing process.

I threw some misc pics up in the main area: taking the Suzuki apart, some mods dad made to the road (again) and that savings bond I found.

Back at work and people have started to notice the hearing aids. They seem to work pretty well though which is nice. I've lost about 15% of my vacation relaxation which is way less than usual. Normally I'm unhappy and burnt out the first day back. I'm trying a few new coping strategies this time, we'll see how it works out. Dating a therapist is handy. :)

We have a dumb ass 3 hour meeting starting in 15 minutes. Our quarterly (or there abouts) ops meeting. Listening to Ed drone on about nothing for a long time is kinda a bummer, but at least I can hear what his mumbling ass is talking about with my fancy new ears.

Good thing I don't make money as a motorcycle mechanic. It took me a total of about 8 hours of tinkering to finish all my projects on the Suzuki, and I still need to wash it. I wanted to check the valves which is a major deal time wise. I've never done it before so it took me a bit to figure out all the steps and get the right tools. I had to have a feeler gauge that went to .002" which is some paper thin metal. Mine is very coarse and only goes down to about .02" which is fine for spark plugs and stuff but not for valves. All of them are at .005" so I'm guessing that's where they set them last service. That's either in or slightly loose depending on which set of specs you look at. The factory manual I got is really complicated and has different stats for different model years, CA vs. no CA bikes, etc. I have a "T" model, variant x-23 based on the carb they used. There are 8, yes 8, different carb variations for that bike for that year. WTF? I know they change stuff but come on. What's worse is they're all the 'same' by the model, they're Mukuni SS33.. The stock main jet could be a 127.5, 130, 132 or 135 for various carb variants, that's a big difference. Mine had a 130 which was one size larger for that aftermarket pipe. I went down to the stock 127.5 since it's got the stock pipe and you can really tell a difference now that it's no longer running rich. I also had to replace the plug, it was gapped wrong and somewhat fouled out due to running rich. The complete list of stuff is: change oil and filter, check valves, replace plug, re-jet carburetor, lubricate cables, check brake pads, check & lube chain, replace all fuel lines (they're all custom due to that aftermarket tank to I had to make a new 5-piece line myself, fun). I've only got 600 miles on the bike in 2 years, you just don't rack 'em up riding around in the dirt. Now that dad sold his KTM I'll just be leaving the Suzuki at the cabin as a runabout. Not worth selling it really, it's fun a paid for. Now that I know the valves are right it's good for another 4000 miles according to the manual. That's the service interval. I should flush the brakes out at some point but the pads will be worn soon so I'll do it then (I have the replacement pads already too, handy).

I'm getting used to the hearing aids. I still think I look dorky although some people haven't noticed until I pointed them out so perhaps I'm being too sensitive. I've noticed that I can understand South Park now, and that my keyboard is sorta noisy, the birds outside are more numerous than I previously knew about, toilet paper makes noise, etc. It's strange all the things that I thought were mostly silent turn out to be quite noisy when you've got full range of hearing. I've also got to turn down the treble on all my radios, suddenly things aren't so bass heavy as they once were.

With Don's help (he stopped by on his way home from that binary XML standards meeting) and $43 I got the 'misc pins and crap' for my 50 cal project ordered up. He's going to loan me a stock and grip until mine is ready so I can at least put the thing together and maybe, just maybe test fire it. Na, I've only got 14 or so rounds for it. We need to get a reloading setup for it in the works or buy some more ammo (probably the right thing to do...?)

Back from Kauai. Pictures are uploading. Only ~230 photos this time, but hopefully they're more interesting than usual. :)

We lost power here about an hour ago, I wondered why I thought I heard the UPS cycle upstairs.

The pictures are up and some of them are out of order but it doesn't matter that much, they're all there. I did take one movie there of these strange plants. When you touch them, they appear to die, quickly. Will clicking on the .jpg below launch the .avi it's linked to? Did when I just tried it. And I didn't know it took movies with sound, so you get the lovely background noise of the radio that was on during the lunch at the end of the zip line tour.

Got the montero smoged, it passed with flying colors. These new smog checks are pretty complicated, they actually put the vehicles on a chassis dyno now and test under load. Impressive. Wonder what happens if you've got AWD? It was only a 2WD dyno.

Made it back from the motorcycle trip. It was about 600 miles, and we didn't get to go where we had intended. We went to the cabin, as planed, and dad got the road fixed. Unfortunately, I couldn't smog the Montero. I took it to the test station but all the stations in Amador county are "test and repair" stations and I need to go to a "test only" station. Some stupid new law, so I have to bring the Montero back here, or to Sacramento. Bastards.

That night we went to Mariposa to stay with my great aunt and uncle. We setup a pool they got so my great uncle can do some sort of physical therapy treatment at home. It's really ghetto as you can see from the pictures. This morning we got fairly lost (about 60 miles worth) so we couldn't go out the backside of Yosemite as intended. Still, we got to the park. There were some Indian tourists there who were really excited about the bikes. They all wanted to take their pictures with them. Odd.

Now I've got to finish up laundry and finish packing for Kauai tomorrow. Kristen should be here in 6 hours (midnight) from her horse trip. It's going to be a late night.

On vacation. Woohoo.

I wondered what would happen to pong if the power went out. Today apparently after noon it happened. No worries, it came back on line with no issues.

Not too bad of a day today. Down right relaxing actually. I got to the doctor and he (my hottie chick doc was out so I booked with her stand in) agrees that it's not poison oak but also has no idea what it could be. He gave me the standard fix: Triamcinolone Acetonide 0.1%.... ie some sort of magic cream. It worked pretty fast, the bumps went down and it didn't ich for several hours. A few days of this stuff and I should be good to go. Still, if it's not poison oak, what exactly did I touch that made me have this rash reaction?

Some guy on the BMW forum went for a ride on the CA coast and had a "good" camera with him. This is one of the shots he took. Looks pretty damn good compared to the same shots I've tried to take. I'm using it as my backdrop at the moment until I get something good in Kauai.

They've not called me about payment for plumping work yet. The dude said they would call and I could use a credit card over the phone. That's cool with me, but where is the call? Maybe I should call them so they don't freak and try to put me into collections or something.

I talked to dad for a bit today. He says they're going to finish up the plans and start building the house in Pioneer in September. It will be done in early spring at which point mom will move up there full time (she'll retire at that point) and they'll sell the Fremont condo (to pay off the house up there). Dad will rent a room down in Fremont and stay there three nights during the week. Two days a week he'll be working out of the office in Tracy so he can actually commute in from Pioneer. Who knows how long he'll keep it up. I'm just wondering where he'll find that "extra room to rent"? Think he's thinking my spare room? That would be a challenge. Kristen wants to know if she should buy a larger house than she planned so there is an extra room for my dad. She seems to think she'll use her doctor salary to buy some swank pad and I'll want to move in with her. Interesting.

I'm at home waiting for the plumber ($319 to fix the pipe, damn, we should be plumbers) and spotted this chick walking around taking pictures and notes on all the units. I went out and confronted her. She's a Comcast employee making sure that all cable connections have a ground wire on them. She showed me the "tracking unit" which is a palm pilot with a camera card in it and showed me what the wire looked like and where it was running. She also provided ID. Guess they're getting used to people having issue with them snooping around in the bushes. If I had been faster I would have taken a picture.

Last weekend we went up to the cabin for a BBQ with my parents. To escape from the misc family that was there Kristen and I went for a few rides on the Suzuki, went for a couple of walks, washed and waxed the Montero (it needed it, poor thing sitting up there) and generally goofed off. I read 95% of Angles & Daemons or whatever it is; written by the same dude that did the DaVinci Code. It was very much the same sort of story. He's got another book out, not sure if it's the same formula.

No corrupt images out of the PIO memory cards, so I'll have a 256 and a 512 to take to Kauai next week. I'm looking forward to being gone from work for 2 weeks. Woohoo.

7:30pm and I'm still at work. What's up with that, you would think I work for MSFT or something. I just can not get my people to work right. They're just so easily distracted these days, or discouraged. Getting people on-board with dumb ass shit that upper management wants is hard, even when I try to spin it as a good thing. I'm turning into one of those lying shit sacks that run this place. OK, that's fine, where is my big $$$ for becoming worthless and a yes man???

Lots to tell, but I'm suffering from a horrible rash thing on my arms (poison oak?) and it's uncomfortable to sit here and type so I won't. Pictures of the exploding pipe with my MacGyver (TM) fix are up as well as some misc crap from the cabin this weekend.