Look who is back at the blogging thing.
That's right, it's me!
I haven't had much to say lately, and apparently Twitter and other social media have satisfied my creative outlet needs.
So here's what's new:
- I'm studying for the Amateur Extra exam for Ham Radio operation, the highest level you can get.
- I just installed a Kenwood TM-V71A radio in my car and love it!
- House repairs! I've had great cause to curse the builder of my home lately, as he NEVER sealed any of the windows. No caulk. At all. I've had some leaking lately, and since he failed to use outdoor grade trim some of it is rotting off. There was also never any drip edging to divert water from seeping in to the window and inside. Hell, I'm probably leaking heat out through the windows in the winter! So I have a contractor to make it all right. Then another guy to put real gutters on the house, not plastic ones over the doorways.
- I'm still looking for someone to run a new gas line for me. I'd like to have the option to put a gas stove/cooktop in the kitchen at some future date.
- I've got steel plates now for my flour mill so I can grind oat groats and corn into meal.
And that's everything, in a nutshell.
Tomorrow, April 26th, is They Might Be Giants Awareness Day. Tell your friends!
This afternoon a challenge was issued to write a story that ends with a line provided ahead of time. The first one was "It was the loveliest shade of pink they'd ever seen." The following is my contribution. Yes, I'm mentally 13 sometimes:
A Trip to Remember
For Heather and Shannon, every summer vacation started out with a road trip to their grandparents' farm outside Terre Haute, Indiana. It was bad enough leaving their friends and California behind, but the long and boring drive pent up in the back seat of a car with a dodgy air conditioner was driving them crazy.
If asked later, neither Heather nor her sister could remember who started the get-the-driver-to-honk game, but they both knew who ended it. As they frantically competed to get a vanload of college students to honk at them by waving their arms and blowing kisses, finally they got what they both wanted.
Mr. and Mrs. Connors noticed the lack of noise from the back seat moments before their attention turned to the green van honking its horn as it slowly passed them. A chubby college student with his pants pulled down was pressing his cheeks up against the window as his buddies cheered him on. Mrs. Connors harrumphed while her husband chuckled and nodded his head. The sound of contagious giggling came from the back seat.
It was the loveliest shade of pink they'd ever seen.
We're off tomorrow at 0-dark-30 to Atlanta to attend InvaderCON. Expect a few weird pictures/posts later.
I just saw a car get pulled over for running the light at Kathleen and Ramsey (turning West from the Northbound side). I see this happen at the same intersection nearly every day. The bozos just keep following cars through the intersection despite the red light. Well today justice was served. There was an unmarked police cruiser just ahead of me and three cars back from the light. Just as I was throwing my hands up in disgust he sped after the turkey with his lights on. I only hope he actually got a ticket, because he really deserved it.
If you have ever had to download anything from Cisco you may appreciate this:
I recently acquired a copy of the entire series of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. on the cheap ($16 + shipping). It aired during the time I was serving in Taiwan (1993-1994) so I never had the chance to see it on the air. Last night I watched the entire first disk and was up to after midnight—that's late for a middle-class working stiff like me. But it was fun. My wife says her favorite character is Pete, but I haven't seen enough to make a decision.
I remember the first time I heard about the show was from Bruce's "autobiography": Make Love the Bruce Campbell Way
What struck me as funny was when he mentioned doing appearances and how he would get lines of little kids dressed in cowboy outfits next to adults made up like monsters from the Evil Dead movies.
I actually met Bruce Campbell and shook his hand in Seattle while he was on the book tour for the previously mentioned book.
As usual, you'll probably hear something more from me on this, but I can't promise when. Hey, I'm still not done watching MST3K!
I was looking for my snow brush/window scraper the other day, as we just had our first snow stick, but I couldn't find it anywhere. I searched my car and the garage, but it was gone. When I asked my wife if she'd seen it, she said "You said last year that it was stupid, broken, and then you threw it away and said you'd get a new one next year."
My response was "Yeah that sounds like me, I guess I'll go buy another one."
I still don't remember ranting about it, though.
I drove home from Portland today with several hundred pounds of loot. About as much as my car would carry. On our first day there we managed to hit all the big places we wanted to visit: Bob's Red Mill, Powell's City of Books, and IKEA. We stocked up on grains from Bob's, 50 pounds of flour, 25 pound bags of Scottish oatmeal, coconut granola, cream of wheat, and 10 grain cereal. We also picked up a dozen or so of the small 1 pound bags of things like black currants, coconut flour, wheat gluten, potato flour, sea salt, muesli, etc.
From Powell's we bought a couple of shopping bags full of books. We mostly buy used, so it's not as expensive as it sounds. IKEA provided two new DVD shelves (we are running out of room on our existing ones), and a few random parts I can hack together to make a good shower rack to hold shampoo, soap, etc. We also picked up a table for Lorien's uncle.
Aside from that, we bought some dry egg noodles at Costco (they stopped carrying them at our Costco in Cd'A!), some chocolate from Bernard Callebaut Chocolates (very tasty), and a couple of bags of assorted goodies from Trader Joe's. We also found some of our favorite Finnish licorice treats we didn't think we'd see outside of Finland at the World Market store near my mom's (score!) along with a couple of 4-packs of root beer I've never seen before.
All in all, it was a fun trip. I just wish it wasn't such a long drive…
Okay, let's see. Build a squirt gun from a sprinkler valve, PVC, and a couple of 9v batteries. That was fun.
I started learning the Dvorak layout. It's something I've been meaning to do for a long time. I'm using Master Key and am very happy with it. If you need a typing tutor program, check it out. It runs on Windows or on a Mac.
My liver is fine. Probably because I'm a teetotaler.
I'm working on deploying a Cisco 881W wireless router at home to test some VPN and routing ideas from work. When it's up, I'll have the biggest wireless router on the block, and the ability to launch multiple SSIDs and name them things like MakeTheBarkingStop and ShutYourStupidDogsUp. No reason, really.
Dear Apple,
YOU SUCK. My office's brand new $3200 Mac Pro has to have a specific keyboard because you didn't put an eject button for the DVD drive on the machine! You, sirs, are complete asses.
Plus, your top-of-the-line machines don't work with KVMs. I don't know how business-people use your hardware…
Tomorrow Carbon Leaf plays in Moscow, Idaho. I've had tickets since the day I found out a couple of weeks ago. I'm very excited to see them live again!
This morning I went to the office early to make sure the new website rollover went smoothly. I got there just after 7am to find the phones down because our T1 PRI was offline. Fortunately, most of the right steps had already been taken to resolve the problem and I just had to make a few phone calls. Well, after the heat from that died down, the website switch was green-lit. It took me about 12 seconds to change the Apache config.
Most everything else was solving small problems. A week or so ago I wrote a PHP script to handle importing data from an online database to an internal server, but due to the complicated nature of the data, it was difficult to test. I took a long time to set up an environment to test against, and even then it still wasn't really conclusive. But it looked good, so I deployed it and it runs fine. The only thing that worries me is that it worked without any bugs at all. It always makes me nervous when something just works, it makes me wonder what nasty bug I haven't found. Anyway, I had to fix an issue, and the entire fix was implemented by adding the number '6' to the file at a certain spot. One-byte change. It's great to crank something like that out once in a while, but I'd rather have something I know had bugs and was fixed…
This shirt is awesome: Mind of a Ninja
I started watching The Day of the Triffids last night (the 1981 BBC TV version). I get the feeling this is another one of those "the book is way better" stories, but it definitely has its good points. It's creepy in an apocalyptic sort of way. It's only a miniseries, so I'll be done soon. I'll let you know how it goes.