New floors - Day 1
Rima and I have been busying ourselves for the last few weeks packing up stuff in the house, removing ugly wallpaper, and painting rooms and baseboards in preparation to have our grimy wall-to-wall carpeting replaced with some new bamboo flooring. All the work is finally starting to pay off! Our flooring guys started today, and they're kicking ass. The living room is completely finished, and our office just needs baseboards.
We've got a lot more moving around to do, but I'm feeling less bitter about it now that I'm seeing results. This is almost fun.
Posted at 08:57PM Jul 10, 2008 by raydoo in General | Comments[1]
Pour out a 40 oz. Healing Potion for a Fallen Homie
Posted at 03:32PM Mar 05, 2008 by raydoo in Games | Comments[1]
Vacation in the Frozen Section
I was bumped to 4 weeks/year vacation after my 10th anniversary with Intel last year, but didn't manage to use my last week last year. I decided to allocate the time to snowboarding. I grabbed a season pass at Kirkwood in anticipation during an earlier day trip. I took most of last week off, and took a cheap room at a South Lake Tahoe casino for two nights to enable a three-day boarding-binge. The conditions at Kirkwood were really amazing all three days.
Day 1 (Wed): After dropping Hazel off at school, I headed up to Kirkwood. I had to rig my Beetle with snow chains for the trip (my first time ever using chains). 12-18" of snow had just dumped overnight, but it was a pretty clear day. There was powder everywhere, and very few people on the slopes -- no lines at the lifts at all. Here's a camera-phone shot from the top of the Cornice Express lift - it doesn't capture the scale very well, but you can make out some of the lift towers to get a sense of it:
Day 2: I used the Kirkwood shuttle to get from my hotel to the slopes (only $5!), which was super convenient since fresh snow was dumping all day, and driving would have sucked. Excepting some scary landings on the bigger lifts (50mph+ wind gusts on the ridges, and snow making poor visibility), the weather caused no problems, and was continuously refreshing the slopes. I was up there all day, and since I wasn't driving, was able to take frequent Irish Coffee breaks to stay warm and loose.
Day 3: The storm cleared up over night, but I needed to chain up again to get to the resort. It was a little busier on the slopes, but still no lines. It was only partly cloudy and snowed very little, but there was still fresh powder all over from the previous night. My legs tired out pretty quickly this day as they were in need of some rest, but I was able to cut some very long lines in fresh snow on the back side of the resort before I relegated myself to easier runs.
This may very well be the first time I've taken a leisure trip alone since I married 15 years ago. It was a little lonely, but it was refreshing, too. I think I'm getting better at handling myself on the snowboard, especially at finding lines off the big trails and staying on top of the board in soft powder. I was very glad to get home to see Rima, Hazel, and Cassie, and my legs are enjoying the day off.
Posted at 12:08PM Feb 02, 2008 by raydoo in General | Comments[0]
Rock Band, Pedal / Short Time
Dammit. I've fallen off my blogging again. Getting 'Rock Band' for the Xbox 360 earlier this month hasn't helped me find time for blogging, that's for sure! The game doth rock! Unfortunately, the manufacturer spent a few too few pennies on the bass pedal:
The warranty process appears to be pretty efficient. I was able to request a new pedal on-line in the middle of the night, and it appears a replacement will be sent via UPS 2-day on Monday along with a box to use for returning the snapped pedal.
Posted at 09:52AM Jan 27, 2008 by raydoo in Games | Comments[0]
XTr33/N 5p@m
Load average of 15-18. 0% idle CPU. 5 instances of spamd humping
along at full clip, most of that time doing Bayes scoring. Internal mail pipelines timeout, and crash
spamassassin - releasing tons of crap for delivery to mailboxes on my
server in bursts before a watchdog to restarts it. Sometimes the
defenses go down for hours if something gets really confused in the
load. SPAM defenses have been soaking my server non-stop for 15+ hours
since a reboot last night (due to tangled up mail processes, of course).
Posted at 11:38AM Dec 19, 2007 by raydoo in Software | Comments[0]
Late to the party - Civilization IV
I know this is old news, but as they say, it's new to me. I had been eying Civilzation IV for a year. Sometimes, I'd pick it up at Game Stop, then put it back down before checking out. Well the last time I was in the local Game Stop, I left with the Civ 4 Gold Edition. If you're one of the several people who've told me how cool this game is, I'm here to say, "You were right!".
Ho-lee-crap! As someone who loved Risk and Axis and Allies growing up, this thing is the culmination of strategy game dreams. It manages to simulate so many factors that would be impossible to model in a board game - not just troops and their movement, but it overlays culture, politics, terrain, territory, food, natural resources, production, trade, developing research capabilities, buildings, technology trading, diverse victory conditions... BAHHHH! Somehow it's still amazing to watch the games unfold.
I would totally get fat sitting around playing this game, except I forget to eat while I play. I guess that's a ringing endorsement!
If you're curious, you can scan this insanely long FAQ.
Posted at 12:24AM Sep 29, 2007 by raydoo in Games | Comments[0]
Pushing my autotech envelope
After pulling off my EGR valve, I realized I'd disconnected most everything I would need to disconnect to swap in the Schrick VSR manifold I'd bought the other year to be the cherry-on-top of the big valve head. So I went ahead and yanked the stock manifold.
I'm waiting on a few parts... EGR valve, correct throttle body adapter (I ended up with one for newer cars w/o EGR. Doh!), a missing vacuum solenoid, and some gaskets. While I wait, I checked the fit of the new manifold and verified all the connections were still lining up. Yummy!
Posted at 01:11PM Jul 27, 2007 by raydoo in Cars | Comments[0]
Smog inspection actually *helps* VW owner?
My Corrado got pegged for a 'Test Only' Smog inspection this year. The tech came back to give me that bad news that my car failed on the EGR functional test. The EGR valve is barely flowing even at max vacuum. I think this might explain the hot running condition I've had trouble diagnosing.[Read More]
Posted at 12:42PM Jul 04, 2007 by raydoo in Cars | Comments[0]