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.

Yesterday I went to work as usual, plugged in my laptop, and then proceeded to visit a few clients without it. Little did I know that my power adapter was not working, so instead of just sitting there, my laptop battery was gettin lower and lower. When I finally returned after lunch, my battery was at 3% and the system started to shut down just as I was about to start doing something. I tinkered with the power supply a bit and could get the light to come on just for brief moments, just to have it go out again. I called my leet dell number (1-888-569-3355) and someone answered with no phone tree asking for my service tag so I could be routed to the right department. They transfered me to whatever department handles the Inspiron’s and I got to speak to some lady that didnt speak english as her first language :( Her accent wasnt too bad, but she talked real slow which was a little annoying. After I finnished setting up the RMA, I asked to be transfered to the spare parts devision, and I ordered two additional power adapters. The company I work for paid for one of them and I paid for the other, since I need to have one at the office.

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.

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.