So this weekend I went to another small LAN. The cool thing about this LAN was that it was located in a private office of the KICU 36 Action 6 building in San Jose. The LAN seemed to be like much of the other LAN parties with this group, arguing and bitching about what game to play, nobody having any games installed to pay, and by the time someone is done installing it, everyone else decides to play something else. I played Gerry’s Mod for HL2 most of the time, trying to first make drivable vehicles, and then a flying vehicle. Both seem to be quite difficult, but i finnished with a hovering platform that was somewhat controllable. Danman was there, sporting his hacked Dell SC420 with nice ATI video card and new Dell 24″ Widescreen LCD (1920×1200), which is really the main reason I went I think, so I could check out his new screen.

On Sunday Dan and I woke up around 12:30 after going to bed around 3am. We went to Erik’s Deli for lunch and then he took off. After he was gone I went on yet another bikeride, in the rain. Tomorrow morning at 6am I have to leave for Irvine, to meet the rest of the company that I work for, and I wouldnt be able to ride again until wednesday. I had a good ride. I did the usual ride to the top of St. Joseph’s hill and then down to the launch ramp, then down the creek trail, arriving at home just before it started to get dark. I didnt make it to bed on time, instead I went to starbucks, worked on restyling my blog. I had to stay up until after 12:01am because thats when Soutwest Airlines lets you do early check-in online. I checked in to my flight at 12:08am and I was the 11th person to check-in. Aparently everyone likes to stay up late or wake up in the middle of the night just so they can do their early check-in to get a good seat on the plane. For those of you who dont know, southwest does not have assigned seating. Depending on when you sign in, you get an A, B, or C seat. A’s get to go on the plane first, then B’s and C’s. Its worth being an A because you can sit on the isle or window right in the front of the plane, so its much easier to get off when you land.

Total mountain biking miles since last post: 70 (4 trips 15+20+20+15)
Total TV viewing angle increase since last post: 34″
Total internet speed after DSL gets installed: 10mbps/1.1mbps

I’ve managed to start riding again quite often which i really like. I had to buy another bike chain last Wednesday and had a gear cable and tube replaced, making the shifter work much better. I also purchased a headlight and crazy red seizure tail light so i can ride into the evening regardless of sunlight. I guess this is the biggest thing that’s enabled my ability to continue riding again. On Wednesday like I said, I took my bike in to the shop, and as I thought it would be a quick fix I waited for a bit, but then he wanted to do some other stuff like add the gear cable, so I decided to leave the bike, go run down the street to my spin class, and then pick up my bike at the shop before it closed at 7pm. I was a little bummed out that I didn’t get to ride that day, but I guess waiting for the bike to ride better was worth it. On Thursday I did my usual 15 mile ride from my house to the top of St. Joseph’s hill and back. On Friday I rode the same ride, but instead of turning around and going home, I continued and rode around the lake as well making my total mileage 20 for that day. On Saturday Jess was in town and I got to spend time with her, including purchasing my new TV and sailing in crazy wind at Lexington (see below). Sunday I rode the same trail up St. Joseph’s hill, went and checked out the crew regatta at Lexington with Jess and got to see her family. Then I rode up Priest Rock and came down overgrown (limekiln) trail, down the creek trail and home making for a total of 20 miles for Sunday as well. It’s now Tuesday and I rode my usual 15 mile trip again in the evening, and came back in the dark. Its quite different riding in the dark with a headlight, but its something I could get used to. It’s almost as if your riding with tunnel vision, because you can only see what the light is pointing at. It’s also hard to tell how fast you’re going, as vision is very limited.

On Saturday, with Jess, we had to go get my sailboat out of the water. The trailer has been remade and is ready to go. It was not that windy at the house so we went up prepared to just go pick up the boat, but once we arrived at the lake and saw whitecaps, we quickly decided to say and sail. All previous attempts to sail this season have kind of sucked, as the wind was irregular and not that strong compared to this Saturday. I wish I had taken my camera.

After our most excellent sail, Jess and I went to Best Buy so I could purchase my new TV. After wandering around, and seeing what the sales guy knew, I choose my TV and she helped me with the discount. Sort of an early birthday present :) I got a Sony Wega 34″ Widescreen Tube TV. It didn’t have one of my requirements of DVI in, but it does have HDMI. I also found an HDMI to DVI cable to take care of this issue. At first we didn’t thing the TV would fit in my car, but after a tape measure, and a little cleanup, the TV fit face down in the back of my Jetta Wagon just barely. Getting it home was easy, though I couldn’t see out the back of my car at all. It was removing the box from the car and carrying it to my room that was difficult. My brother helped me out with this, but it seemed as if we could only go about 10-20 feet at a time without taking a break. It was not so much the weight either, it was the pain inflicted from the little ‘handles’ they had, and kicking your shins on the bottom of the box limiting foot movements completely. We ended up getting it into my parent’s bedroom, and from there it was easy to just slide it along the carpet. Lifting it out of the box was quite difficult and then hoping my desk would be strong enough to hold a 196lb TV all the time. All worked out well, though I should have gotten a few more cables. I didn’t realize the DVD player I had was a progressive scan player, and now I need Component cables to hook it up to view in high quality. Getting the HTPC working wasn’t as easy as it should have been. Finding a working good resolution for the TV was quite challenging. I’ve now got it setup in 1080i mode, where viewing and reading the screen as far as usability goes is near impossible, but Media Center 2005 and any played video looks awesome at the crazy high resolution. If I want to use the system as a system, I need to change the resolution to a 720p mode, which is much more readable. I need to figure out an easy way to switch to a set of predefined resolutions within windows.

In addition to having a great weekend, buying a TV finally, and having a great sail, I also ordered myself some fast DSL at the end of last week. I purchased myself some 6.0mbps / 768kbps DSL from Speakeasy for 105/month. I can’t wait for it to come in as I really miss having 6mbps like I did when I lived in San Luis Obispo. Now I just need to find a Linux firewall that will support the type of routing I want to do. Two internet connections + IPSec tunneling + wireless zone are what I require.

Last week was crazy for me. I spent too much time working and not enough time resting. By the time Friday night came around, I had worked 55 hours for the week, its sure a good thing I get paid overtime. With 55 hours in mind for the week, I’m sure you can relate to my laziness this weekend. I did get lots of things done though that I’ve been wanting to get done for quite some time though. At the end of last week, my dell server arrived, just in time too, because now MP doesn’t post. For those of you who dont know, MP is the name of my older server, which is a Dual Processors AMD system in a 2u case. I simply moved the 4 x 80 GB raid 5 drives from MP to the new dell, and everything works great. Now I just need to get some new RAM for that system.

In other news, I completely rearranged my bedroom again. I gave the conference table to my mom, in exchange for the corner desk set that used to be in my room. I now have a lot more room in here and don’t really know what to do about it. While I was cleaning my room, I came across some old CD’s from high school that I cleaned and restored to my system. When I was in High School, I was on the Tech Crew and did all the sound for any kind of event that took place. I also took on doing the Senior Slide Show for the class of 2001 and 2000 while I was there. The CD’s I found were of those slide shows, which were shown to the school during the Senior Talent show during those years. The CD from lghs class of 2000 didnt work very well, and im still working on restoring it. The plastic on the top of the CD is intact, but the bottom is all scratched up, so there is still hope for it. As for the LGHS Class of 2001 Senior Slide Show, it can be found here. Man those pictures bring back some memories. I wonder what lots of these people are up to, and after setting up this gallery I started thinking about how much I miss doing audio for live concerts. It was very stressful at times, but it was such a rush at times and always sent chills through me.

On Saturday night I went with Danman to a small LAN at Eger’s house with Matt and Adam. It was fun to get back to playing Battlefield 1942 with Desert Combat, but initially I didn’t bring my desktop, and my laptop sucked at playing it, so I drove from Eger’s house in Redwood City back to Los Gatos to get my desktop and LCD, then drove back to Redwood city again, then when we were done, I had a little bit to drink, and Danman drove my car back to LG again to sleep. Buy the time the weekend was over I put 588 miles on my car for the week. Luckily most of which i get $0.405 per mile for because of work.

The storms we’ve been having have really been doing a number on Lexington Reservoir. The rain continues to put about 1 foot per day into the lake, and that will continue about 3 days after the rain stops, so by next weekend, which will hopefully be sunny, the lake will be near full, and I can finally go sailing there once again. Its been so long since Ive been sailing that just the thought makes me want to go clean out the boat and get it ready. Right now its sitting in the back yard charging its batteries so we can use the electric motor on the lake. Below are some links to recent pictures of the lake along with the water level at the time.

Today I rode my bike again for the first time in about 2.5 weeks. It was very difficult at first, but after my first trip up to the top of St. Joseph’s hill, down to the lexington dock, and then back into town, I was feeling pretty good, and went up the hill again, thus completing two laps of the trail. The total distance for my ride today was about 19 miles I think, and was nowhere near as difficult as some of my other bike rides, but none the less, it was very refreshing. During the first lap, at the very top of St. Joseph’s hill, It started to rain real hard, but it passed quickly. The clouds today were very strange, in parts they looked very black, and in others, you could see the blue sky.

Sep 30, 2004	Jan 27, 2005, ~622′	Feb 22, 2005, 629′

as of March 1st they had to move the bench in the 3rd image above… water passed that point. I also cant stand where i took that picture form.

so i guess ive neglected my blogging duties for a while now, i think it may have had something to do with all the comment spam that i still need to clear out. Anyways, I guess i really never talked much about my new job, nor the fact that ive continued to ride my bike on the weekend since i cant ride durring the week any longer.

As far as my new job goes, its basically the same stuff I was doing at Cybermanor. Onsite tech support for small business up to roughly 50 employees, though most of our clients are smaller than that. Plus we wouldnt really have any clients bigger than that because those types of clients have a need for full time IT work and tend to just hire out their own staff to do that. On a day-t0-day basis, I try to be at the office by 0830 and i get to leave at 1730, with an hour for lunch. I tend to go home for lunch these days as I’m trying to save a bit of money and get out of debt. I figured out that eating out every day for lunch costs me over $200 a month, and its just not worth it. I still find that even though I know I have to get up in the morning, I’m still staying up to late at night. At work in the mornings, I’m usually filling out my timesheets on this horribly designed, time wasting, timesheet accounting web application. Since this site is very poorly designed, I’d say it takes me at least 15 mins per job longer than it should take to fill out my billable hours timesheets. The interface on this system just has too many pages and diffrent windows that pop up for entering data than it should. The page is also hosted on a saturated link at our Irvine office in Southern CA, thus making each page load very slow indeed. Other than dealing with timesheets, the job runs very smoothly. I usually have emails in the morning from the customers that are having issues which get scheduled for that day or sometime later in the week, and thats what keeps me busy. When Im not onsite, i have various things i can check up on for each client to make sure things are running smoothly from my cube at the office. When there isnt much to do, and no clients are having issues, I’ve been reading up on getting microsoft certified.

Ive been keeping up with my bikeriding on the weekends when I have time. Ive really cooled down on how aggressivly I come downhill since my little accident at the end of last year. Some things just scare me now while I’m riding that just didnt bother me before, mainly mud. Before, mud was fun, but now that the gound is very saturated and mushy, the mud isnt fun anymore. Istead of just getting the bike all muddy, and providing for a softer ride, the super muddy areas are extremely accident prone. Some mud looks fine to ride over, but then you get into it and the bike feels like its going to just fall over. Balance on a bike is achieved by steering in the correct direction with minimal movements, but in that type of mud, turning just a slight amount causes the bike to loose tracktion and fall over. In addition to being more careful, I also almost bought a new bike last weekend. Im glad that i didnt because now i have a new car. Soon enough though I’ll be buying a new bike. Im thinking about getting a Trek Liquid 25. This bike does just about everything i want it to do, but it would put me back a pretty penny around ~$2200