Yesterday I came home from work and wanted to go to the gym to do my spin class, but I had nothing clean to wear, so I decided to run on the treadmill at home instead. I ran 3.6 miles in 45 mins which isn’t that impressive since I walked at least a 3rd of it. But I did manage to run my 3rd mile at 7-8mph the whole way, which is like just under an 8 minute mile, and now I’m just dead. Apparently running uses different muscles than mountain biking, who’da thought? lol. This little running bit that i did would have been impossible if i hadn’t been riding my bike, I’m discovering that I’m actually in decent shape for the first time in like 6 years. :)

So Friday I took the day off work since I’ve been so busy. It was nice to have the time off, but I still had to answer my phone and help out clients if they needed it. Friday was also Payday, and it was my first paycheck with my raise, but what do ya know… my raise didn’t show up on the direct deposit. Luckily my boss rules and they were able to cut me an advance for my next paycheck which was the difference that I was supposed to get paid on this paycheck. It was finally time to go to the bike shop with intent to buy. After visiting many bike shops over the past few months, I decided that Summit Bicycles was the best place to buy because they offer free service and a lifetime warranty for any bike you buy from them. They are a Trek dealer so thats the type of bike I ended up getting. There were two bikes I was choosing from, and the main differences were that the nicer one had lockable shocks, and it had ball barrings instead of bushings on the rear shocks joints. The price tag was about $400 more, but it will be worth it in the long run to have a bike that will last longer, and the lockable shocks help out a lot while climbing up the hill, since you want to put your energy into climbing up the hill instead of making the shocks compress. It also had hydraulic disc breaks instead of mechanical ones. When all was said and done, I walked out of there empty handed, because they didn’t have what I purchased in stock, they had to order it. Next weekend I should be riding on my new bike, a Trek Fuel EX7 seen below. I cant wait. In the mean time, they are letting me use one of their rental bikes, since I couldn’t walk out of there with the bike I have purchased.

So yea, Its about time to give up on AIM completely I think, and unfortunately that now includes ICQ as well. I’ve decided that its a pain in the ass to have everyone incorperate the same type of encryption into their aim clients, and i dont want to give up my aim pirvacy rights, so instead im just not going to use it. Read this quote from slashdot.

“AOL has posted new terms of service for AIM, that include the right for AOL to use anything and everything you send through AIM in any way they see fit, without informing you. A sample passage: ‘…by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy.”

Instead you can reach me using MSN or Yahoo messanger
MSN: tomh@lglan.net
Yahoo: tomhlglan

UPDATE: Pics are Here

so for the most part I had a great weekend. I guess it seemed to start on thursday night, because I went driving with LGJeff. We went up highway 9 and came down woodside road. Once we got to the top of highway 9 the road was super foggy, and it wasnt so fun as it was hard to see. We stopped at the big lookout point down skyline, because we noticed that they had changed something about it. The sidewalk and railway and curb were completely gone. It was possible to just drive down the hill, which was a little freaky. After a short pee-break for Jeff we got back on the road and headed down the hill. I then went over to his house and we watched that night’s O.C. from his TiVo.

The next morning, my alarm didnt weak me up. Luckly my dad came to check up on me around 8:20am and woke me up. I didnt actually get to work until 9:05 when I’m supposed to be there at 8:30am. I completely missed a tech meeting confrence call since I was late, but I made up for the time with lots of billable hours for the company for the rest of the day. I ended up going to Pleasant Hill, and spending most of the day there. I must say that friday was one of the first times I had planned out a set of tasks to complete an objective for a customer’s computer problem, and nothing went wrong. In fact, everything was perfect. Im not saying I mess up a lot, rather when replacing a broken IDE disk with a ultra 320 scsi raid controller and a pair of 36gb scsi disks in a mirror configuration, stuff usually will go wrong. Instead, I installed the scsi equipment, installed the software for it on the os, still running on the IDE disk. Booted to a Ghost floppy with scsi support, and copied disk-to-disk from the IDE to the Scsi raid. Presto bingo! everything worked perfect. I unplugged the broken IDE disk and there was no headache or any issues of any kind, it just worked. Anyways, it was about 7:30 on fiday night by the time I got home, and I didnt really want to do anything. I did go however and check out Brian’s new apartment in Mountain View.

Saturday morning, I slept until noon. My dad and I then drove up to the lake to check things out, and see if it would be a good day for sailing. It was not that windy, but there were lots of things we needed to check out on the boat to make sure it was still in good working condition before we invited anyone to come with us sailing, so we went back home, and started cleaning up the boat to go sailing. I spent about 1.5 – 2 hours scrubbing the tree crap off the side and deck of the boat to make it at least somewhat presentable. I think to do the job right, I need to find a pressure washer, because some of the dirt just wont come out by rubbing it and spraying with the hose. After the boat was all cleaned out, we backed the car down the hill and got ready to leave. Our first issue arose when we realized the pivot wheel crank was broken, and we couldnt lift the boat onto the trailer ball of the Expedition. We ended up using the car’s jack to lift it up high enough to back the car under it. Once this was done we were set. We drove up to the lake, rigged the boat and had a great day. Nothing really went wrong, and we left the boat in the street at the end of the day in front of our house so it would be easier to sail on sunday. After the sail on saturday afternoon, I convinced Genoa to come down so I could fix her computer, and so we could go out and drink. The plan was to then go sailing on sunday too. As for the drinking part, we ended up going to safeway and hanging out at the house instead. And her computer was a mess, however it was very fast. It is a Dell Dimenssion 8300, 3.0ghz with 1gb ram and sata disks. The main problem with this system is that 6 people use it, and with that comes problems. The system hadnt had SP2 installed yet as they are on dialup, and no patches at all, windows nor norton. I plugged her system into a seperate network on my firewall so it wouldnt infect any of the other systems at my house, and started to repair it. I didnt quite finnish it by the time she had to leave on sunday evening, but it was much better than when she brought it to me.

On sunday, I woke up around 10:30 and worked on Genoa’s computer until she woke up around 11:30. We went to West Marine to buy a new pivot wheel for the trailer before loading up to go sail. All was good, we went to the lake and rigged the boat. Keep in mide too that it was just Genoa and I, my dad couldnt come. We got the boat all rigged up and it started to rain. I had a little chat with one of the rangers named Mike, and he said all was good, and that I could even use the gas engine if I needed to because of the rough weather conditions. He also said he would put in a work order to have a tree crew come out and trim the trees over the launch ramp so my mast wouldnt hit them as I back down the hill. We had a good sail. It wasnt a very long one because we got very wet and cold pretty quickly. There was another sailboat on the lake too, so aparetnly we were not the only crazies sailing in the storm. I mean c’mon, the wind is best then. Or at least I thought. The wind was not relly gusty, instead it sort of came in waves, of constant strong wind, then nothing for 15 mins or so. Our adventure really began when we started to pack up the boat to go home. We were both very cold and wet, and just wanted to get home to warm up. The sails came down and I motored into the dock area, tied down the boat and went to get the trailer. I backed down the hill, and pulled the boat onto the trailer. I was standing on the trailer where it connects to the car, and as I was cranking the boat up securly, I felt a crack. The trailer just under the winch snapped, and was barely hanging on to the car at all. This was very bad news because now I cant get the boat out of the water. I quickly pulled the trailer back up to the parking lot and came down to secure the boat to the dock. The trailer was totaled, and its a really good thing it broke on the lake, instead of the freeway. It broke in a spot where if it had been on the freeway, the boat would have disconnected completely from the car, because it broke behind the safety chain. A major accident would have resulted and would have most likely caused some major injuries. I dont really want to think about that anymore, but I cant seem to get it out of my mind. Genoa and I then sat in the car for about 20 mins with the heater on full blast while we tried to get ahold of someone from the parks service to come help us figure out what to do. Genoa called her fire capitan at the loma prieta fire station she works at, and he sent out a dispatch for someone to come help us. Mike came along eventually and helped us out. The boat had to stay on the lake. There really was no getting around that, since it would be near impossible to fix or find a new trailer on a sunday afternoon. So as a result we had to secure the boat where it was, but where it was turned out to be a very bad place. It was tied up to the main launch dock, and a few days before, as the lake filled up very rapidly, the anchor line for the dock broke, and made it such that the dock could swing around to the shore if the lake filled up at all. So Mike told us to motor the boat over to the rowing club’s dock to see if we could tie it up for the night there. As we got there, i remembered and saw that there are no cleats on the rowing club’s dock, since they have no use for them and they just get in the way. We ended up dropping anchor near the dock there, and motoring into a little cove right by their dock, and then tied up the front of the boat to some trees, as the anchor held the rear of the boat out the back. I locked up the boat, and we left it there. The ranger Mike then took us over to our car, and we locked up the trailer. Our adventure was now done for the day, and we finally were able to come home and get warm. Mike was a big help and he seemed to think it was fun, he also got to use his big bolt cutters to cut the safety chain off the trailer so it could be used elsewhere to lock up the trailer in the parking lot. After I got home and took a shower, I was just out of it. I could barely move. I think I was too cold for too long and it just really got to me. But instead of going to sleep super early at like 8:45 I stayed up till 9:45 to write this long blog post that people may not even read. I know I dont always read these uber long blog posts that others post. Anyways, I’m going to collapse now, LATE.

oh, Ill take some pictures of what happened tomorrow morning when I go to check on the boat before work. Check back soon for photos.