Will's B-day and the sickness
The pic to the right is at The Office in Cardiff Saturday night. We were celebrating Will's birthday.
Tracy and I have been fighting a cold for a week now. It's kind of disheartening to look at a calendar and know it's been a week. Jeeez.
Got a new radio. Trying to get back into the amateur radio hobby. I loved it when I was younger but computers and cell phones kind of squashed it. It isn't amazing anymore to be able to make a duplex phone call for free. But it is amazing to hold a tiny radio in your hand, dial a few codes and talk to someone out in the stix in Australia as if they were 15 feet away with a radio. For free. And to bounce signals off the moon to get around line of sight radio propagation limitations. There are a lot of cool things that the amateur radio license has enabled me to do in the last 10 years, figure it's time to get back into it. Maybe even learn morse code. Who knows.
Halloween came and went with not much fuss. I was all set to go to the Brotherhood party, but it was a week before halloween and neither Tracy or I had much motivation to get costumes ready by then. So our tickets became donations to the party cause. When Halloween came, I had all these aspirations of making my house scary and dressing up to give out candy...but Tracy had to work so I was home alone to hand it out. I opened the door and waited but got very few doorbell rings. Turns out that unlike when I was a kid, parents hover over the kids and don't let them go to a house that doesn't have big bright lights. And my flood lights are automatic...the kids never came close, they never came on. When I finally figured this out and flipped them manually on, it was too late. Oh well. Maybe next year. Met some of the neighbors and gave them those HUGE snickers bars that I bought from Costco. That was a hit. Watched the Charlie Brown special, that's always a treat, and makes me feel like a little kid again. I need to get all those short holiday films on DVD.
It's been cold lately and I finally figured out how to light the pilot on my heater. Man, that was cool. My first gas furnace. It's neat watching it flip on. I even took pics! And boy did that heat feel good after a week of freezing my a55 off.
Not much else has happened in the last week or so. It's been continuing to rain. I've cleaned my pool a lot, but haven't added any water in almost a month. And it's still nearly overflowing. Also haven't washed my car in a while either. D-oh. I wish it would clear up and get warm!
Eddy's B-Day
Eddy had a Birthday this Friday. Went to a gun range, got some dinner at Fidels, got accused of breaking and entering when I went to the bathroom at the 7-11, and watched motorcycle videos at Stan's afterwards. It was a good time.
The pic is cruzing in Webb's bling bling at 2:49am.
Happy B-Day Eddy!
Firefox rox
I hate to be one of those bloggers that blogs the news.
But if you haven't seen it, Firefox is raising money for an ad in the NY times. What a great idea, that is so cool! The pic at right is from work and you can see the Firefox poster that I picked up at LinuxWorld. I put it on the front entrance to our suite. Makes sense for 'web server admin' to be Firefox advocates. :) I'm just stunned at how popular Firefox became....so fast. 5 million downloads! I've been using it since the alpha days of Firebird, but I'm so happy to see that the Internet at large is picking up on it.
"Firefox is increasingly becoming the browser of choice for people fed up with spyware and other internet annoyances." Haha, no way, really? Fed up with spyware and ads? Who isn't? And yesterday, yet another CERT was released for "Multiple Vulnerabilities in Microsoft Internet Explorer". What else is new. They should just put up a big siren that goes off when there are no bugs in IE.
If you're currently using Firefox, I highly recommend you check out the Web Developer, LiveHTTPHeaders, Sage RSS and IEView extensions. They have made my life as a geek so much easier.
Rain, Rain....
Go away.
And don't come back.
...FLASH FLOOD WARNING CONTINUES UNTIL 100 PM...
What is up with this liquid falling from the sky? I pay my taxes, work my ass off to pay for the high cost of living, turn a deaf ear to the masses of liberal idiots, bring back the sun! What do I live in SoCal for anyhow? I mean, I realize it's 'winter' now, but dude, I'd rather have a foot of snow. At least the people that grew up back east know how to drive. Damn. It spits rain here and there are a dozen accidents filling up the freeways. You can't do 85 in the rain pal.
I didn't get any sleep last night because my new house has this totally sweet feature...when the wind blows hard, it spins the exhaust vents on my roof so fast that they oscillate...and set up a vibration in my house that slowly varies in frequency from one minute to the next. That's because it only oscillates and causes the vibration at very high RPM...but once it starts oscillating, it causes friction and slows down. So there are 0.5-1 sec periods of silence as it spins up to infinity, and then the oscillation/vibration slows it back down. And it's LOUD. No sleep for me!
Add to that the TJ shack my mexican neighbors are building...it's made of thin metal. That thing was slapping around all night and morning. Not a wink I tells ya!
Not related to the weather, but related to not sleeping, at 7am this morning about 100 police trainees came running by my house yelling some violent cadence at the top of their lungs. It was so loud, I thought that they were fighting in my living room. I sprang from the bed to see what was the mater, only to find myself standing in my front door, in my boxers, in front of 100 sweaty soon-to-be policemen...who I believe all looked at me and promptly committed my address to memory. Super.
Joseph met Ron Jeremy?
I don't believe it. My little brother met Ron Jeremy before I did? Now what's left for me to do? I mean, now, I have to be in a video with him or something. And that's gonna be a lot harder.
"Your gun says replica..."
"...and mine says Desert Eagle .50".
Went to the gun range tonight with Sean. Met up with Matt while I was
there too.
I got to shoot an assortment of weapons:
Para P14, CZ-52, CZ-75B, CZ-95B, Desert Eagle 44Mag, Desert Eagle 50 Cal, Ruger 10/22, Glock 9mm Open Class and a Ruger 610 Revolver.
The Desert Eagle .50 will put hair on your chest, that's for sure. I mean look at the size of the rounds! I shot it only 3 times and on the third round, my hand was bright red! I fully expected it to be like the movies where it throws you back, but it wasn't. Just had a helluva kick. Made firing the 45 easy. The CZ-52 also had quite a kick (due to the sub-machine rounds it fires) but it felt good in my hand and was pretty fun to fire. Of all the guns I shot, I liked the Para P14 and the Desert Eagle 44Mag the best. The DE weighs like 5lb so it actually absorbed the kick of the 44Mag really well...and just felt great to hold. The Glock 9mm Open Class was rad but I don't really have enough experience firing to tell the difference between a $500 model and a $2500 model.
A fun time, glad I went. /me does a google search for the H&K USP 45ACP
Volcano Cam
Live Mount St. Helens Volcano Cam
Link thanks to Wil Wheaton, a stand up guy and fellow blogger.
Speed Festival
Sunday, Karl, Eddy, Dave and I went down to Coronado for the Speed
Festival. It's like a
mini-monterey, but not nearly as far or costly. Eddy, in his new Z3
Coupe,
met up with Karl and I in the
2002
at Dave's place in OB. We grabbed some food and cash at a local deli and
hit the road. One giant bridge and 30 minutes later, we were at the
North Island Naval Base parking next to $150k cars.
A nice guy actually gave us 2 free tickets on the way in, which totally made our day! Half price! But then we found out they didn't allow outside food. What the heck is up with that? So we scarfed down the sandwiches while standing outside the gates. Karl was stopped by the metal detectors for his cans of soda but was able to slide them past security using well known Jedi Mind Trick...it works well on guards apparently.
The racing was really good! Since it was a flat course on the runway, we saw nearly the whole event and all of the action of the race, with the exception of a bit of course blocked by the other set of grandstands. It was great to watch the cars with big engines overtake in the straights but get whipped around the corners. Karl and I were disappointed when our pick, the Alfa, didn't compete in race 7, but Dave's pick, the McLaren, killed in the first few laps. But it lost it's grip, or breaking or something because it slowed so much that it was dead last, then rolled off the track and didn't finish the race. D-oh! The last race of the day, race 8, was TransAm, with giant muscle cars from the 60's and little 2 liter BMW's and Alfa's. The BMW's held their own against the cars with 3 times the displacement.
I put up my pics of the event here. It was a good time, I'll definatly go next year.
Pizza Port
Today, Arne, GeekD, Jim, Neil, Jason, Eddy, Karl and I met up for lunch
at the Pizza Port in Encinitas. I am not sure what alignment of planets
caused this, but for some reason, that place was stoked beyond belief. A
birthday party for kids = large group of MILF's. Add 3 different groups
of cute girls. And the waitress was cute. It was basicly lunch with a
ton of cute girls and us bunch of geeks. I mean, really, that was a good
end to an overly hard week.
Rode up in Eddy's new car, the Z3 Coupe. That is a tight little ride, I'm jealous.
Links of the day:
The Straight Dope: Premium vs Regular Gas
Google SMS?
Now this is rad! Make google queries from your phone with SMS. And it totally works too. I typed in 'pizza port 92126' and got back the full listing for the Pizza Port in Solana Beach, but just what I needed: The name, address and phone number. No ads, nothing. Check out the wallet size reference card. The web page is more in depth, but the short of it is that you can look up item prices, business and personal phone numbers, dictionary definitions, google search snippits, use the google calculator and get area code and zip code lookups. This rocks!
Also, today's APOD is awesome.