·:[ NotANerd ]:·
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Not only was it a bummer month, it rained the whole time too. November was the wettest month ever recorded in the NW. And then after Thanksgiving it snowed .. that was fun, since most of the city stayed barren and all of the outlying areas were snowed in. Needless to say we didn’t get much further on the waterscape. Hopefully in the next couple of weeks we’ll get the liner sprayed and then the deck/spa work can commence.

Thanksgiving itself went pretty well, actually got the living room cleaned up enough to entertain the whole family .. although they spent all their time in the family room taking turns in Elena’s massage chair.

Oh, and as a birthday exercise I tried to order a Wii online for my nephew Max. Turns out that he did go stand in line and got one, so the one that arrived we donated to Ronald McDonald House. I still have to find an extra controller and some games so that when they setup their “Teen Room” more than one person can play. During the early morning shopping I also ended up on a back order list for another Wii .. that one actually shipped out to me today so I may just have to keep this one and see if I can exercise with it a bit

I did get some other shopping done though, now there is a new HD Tivo + digital cable (we may be hooked on “On Demand” especially for Dexter) and a Pioneer Elite VSX-84 receiver. Now I have plenty of inputs to switch between, and to relieve Elena of the hidden remote nightmare I went and got a Logitech Harmony 720 universal remote. Now its just one button and everything starts correctly. All that remains is the $$ for the Pioneer Elite 50″ 1080p plasma monitor and I won’t have to leave home.

December is turning out to be pretty wet and windy too, nothing but mud puddles in the back and the decrepit old arbor fell over. I need to put up a bunch more hooks for the birdfeeders since they appear to be starving out there.

Lastly Cricket is starting to take on the traits of Cracker .. especially the broom attacks, we may rename her Crackit, and now Gilbert has started to figure out he can fly, even with his anti-feather-picking-collar on. Its only a matter of time before he starts dive bombing everyone.

Gee, this was almost long enough to pass for a Christmas letter .. we may have to think about that since we’ve no time for cards this year.

I forgot how much I liked cool weather .. especially the fog, its still pretty mild and hopefully when the hardscape work starts in a couple of weeks it won’t rain too hard. Now that the weather is cooler, the furnace has started kicking in, I’ll have to check and see if the efficiency is really as good as advertised since we didn’t have good numbers from last winter.

This is now indoor sports season, my bball league has started as has Dave’s advanced vball class .. its always good to get training in, although my body’s still going to be sore for a while.

On the tech side, still no webcams, we did get a new printer (hp color laserjet 2605dtn), we mounted up a scarecrow to deter animals (its a motion detecting sprinkler system) and I finally got a new phone (nokia 6131). I racked all of my AV gear in a new entertainment cabinet but I still need to find/buy an HDMI AV receiver .. then I can think about the new plasma screen. The interim LCD TV turns out to have an HD tuner in it and I’ve recently discovered that the local broadcast HD stations are unscrambled, as are discovery and most of the PBS stations … just more temptation/examples to get HD signals and a larger screen.. but at least I don’t have to get that Tivo HD Series 3 yet. I didn’t think that HD sports would be worth the money but I might be changing my mind soon

We’ve had some power outtages lately so the server’s been a bit unstable .. I think everything is all sorted out now but we’ll have to see.

The house still feels a bit empty, my wife says she still hears Fila’s tags clinking occasionally, maybe he’s busy chasing off all the other ghosts. I had him cremated but still have to bury his ashes (probably at the other house by Cameo)

We’ve also been having some estimates done for the back hardscape (deck, spa, water feature) so work may commence soon. The only thing we really booked is a new set of gutters (LeafGuard) since we have way too many pine needles falling on the house and there’s no way I’m climbing 2 stories to clean the gutters out. We may also end up with a rather deep koi pond since we saw my spa guy’s setup (www.elite-spas.com). He (and the deck guy) had done my previous setup so we’re looking forward to seeing the design. It’ll be a multi-phase thing since we want to figure out how to put a swim-spa in by the side of the garage eventually.

I still haven’t bought my plasma .. its finally out but very pricy (Pioneer Elite 50″ 1080p monitor) and I’ll need a new AV receiver. I think I’ll be waiting to see how much the deck/spa costs .. in the meantime I bought a smaller (26″) LCD screen at Costco to tide us over .. couldn’t stand the tiny 15″ screen any longer.

Max (the nephew) will be in town for the next week or so and we’ll be taking him all over for the touristy things, I might have to even get the webcams up again so his parents can watch him

If you’re reading this then you’ve noticed that my server is back up .. hopefully for a while.. but the DSL is sorta slow so they’re gonna work on the line a bit .. in any case the drive to Seattle/Bellevue is complete with no incidents .. even the birds were ok with the 2 day trip.

All of our stuff arrived this past wed .. and of course there are nothing but boxes everywhere .. so far the birds are ok, the house looks great (well, at least the parts you can see around the boxes) and of course its been raining (and snowing one day)

We can’t actually tell if the house is big enough till we put everything away .. but its a good sign that we still have room to manuver around the boxes .. I’m going to try and get the cams up next week after I get back from picking up Fila .. then its an extended CA stay to clean up and sell the townhouse …

and when you have two and relatives in a third it makes for a travelling christmas..we’ll probably drive to LA and Palm Desert and forgo the NW visit till we move in Jan/Feb

I managed to get some early remodel pictures up on my gallery, of course, as all projects its suffering from a bit of feature creep, still looks to be in reasonable shape but we’ll see once the work is done. The good thing is that my contractors are basically working like generals and are coordinating everything. The only thing we have left is to pick the new carpet. We found a few we liked but now have to look for PET (recycled) materials and low adhesive/VOC.

Oh and if you look at the new pictures in the gallery, some of the early sonics pics are horrible, wrong settings, I got better at the later games but am leaving them up anyway kinda like a historical progression.

Hopefully the server will stay up, its been solid for weeks and now its been really spotty.. I think I traced it down to a bad switch so maybe it’ll be ok under load.

On the eve of Black Friday we porked out with Elena’s sister and her boyfriend. It was a pretty large feast for four and the little feathered cannibals had a great time both with the food and the attention.

We also got to celebrate our new house as it closed yesterday, I’ve also put up a set of pictures on my gallery but they’re mostly interior shots so that Elena can verify existing colors and layouts while we plan for the new work. We’ve gotten most of the estimates in and hopefully will be starting folks next week sometime, probably when I’m up there again for the Sonics. The best news was that the popcorn ceiling was asbestos free so all of that stuff will be coming down immediately.

Oh and it seems like my system is finally stable (knock on wood) after doing an OS upgrade to the latest patch level its been running just fine for almost two weeks now. Also the plasma’s showing no sign of the video oddness after its repair so maybe, just maybe, it’ll be a repair free Christmas.

Its back, after about a weeks worth of work and a pretty pricy (non-extended warentee) repair .. it sounds like it was just
a loose wiring harness .. or so they hope. If it acts up again within 2 months they’ll just charge me parts .. but now we can see everything without straining .. don’t know what we’ll do for the first few months in Seattle since I’m leaving the plasma with the townhouse .. it will take a bit of time to plan (and pay for !!) the new family room/media center.

The server seems to be sorta stable a few glitches/bounces but nothing major yet ..

The house hasn’t closed yet and I’ve pre-scheduled about 8 appointments in one day when I’m there just for estimates hopefully the lead time and timelines work out for a Jan/Feb move north.

Despite what racial overtones that has …. its now day 2 of plasma withdrawl .. our screen is in for service since it had an odd, intermittent vertical bar showing up… since we’re moving soon I’ll probably leave it as a perk for the new owners, but till then I want it working … to try and cover the absence I bought a smallish 15″ LCD flat screen (HD ready !!).. something that could go into a spare bedroom afterwards.

I can’t believe I ever watched on anything that small before .. especially when it’s 10′ away .. I can’t even read the tivo menus…then theres the sound issue nothing like taking a couple of hours to re-wire just so we can watch both tivos and still get relatively good sound (not to mention remote based switching of inputs) I’ll have to say though, the new HD capable LCD’s are really, really sharp image wise.

On the house front, things are progressing nicely .. good thing too cuz they wanted a 20 day close (right before Thanksgiving if you can imagine that) looks like I get a smaller loan, lower payments, and hopefully money to put back into the house after we sell the place in CA, gotta love that silicon valley housing effect .. now I’m one of the CA transplants that will get egged in Seattle for raising housing rates. Work on the other hand, may be an iffy thing, for some reason remote workers aren’t very encouraged .. we’ll see if they try to turn me loose or not when I actually move.

Surprisingly my site has been up for more than a few days now .. wierd what switching NIC’s can do … hopefully it sticks.

This and many other things … I’m basically composting my life right now ..
the memorial service for Wendy was great, got to see a lot of old friends and I finally got to hear Wendy’s music (and voice) since Julie played a piece to close out the service. She was kinda shy so she never performed for me despite my proddings so that was good. The weather cooperated too, clear and sunny where we could watch the lake during the service (as if there wasn’t enough water in the place already)

Unfortunately that server gremlin is back .. so my site (and gilbert’s site) may be up and down.. and then around January down for quite a while while I move to Seattle .. yeah, during the weekend I went house hunting, the very one we initially were interested in was back on the market that weekend, it looked good so Elena and I flew back up Wed to see it before we made an offer. The offer was accepted today, now we just have to close before Thanksgiving and then plan for the (hopefully minimal) work. We’ll be needing a contractor, painters and probably someone to do gas lines and thats just to start. Then I can plan the move, get the Sunnyvale place in shape and put it on the market.

Boy its gonna be a busy holiday season.

More HW woes .. only other nerds will appreciate:
..change cpus
..change memory
..change chassis
..change memory (again)
..rebuild 2 new drives (larger)
..restore corrupts boot drive
..tried fixit/upgrade via cdrom
..cdrom drive dies
..replace cdrom drive
..build minimal boot disk
..minimal boot disk dies during restore of master boot drive
..build 2nd minimal disk
..restore of master boot drive works

system is up .. but for how long?? I’ve basically replaced just about everything that can break, and some of it has broken twice …

If it stays stable I can start thinking about SW upgrades and then Gilbert will get his own blog …

Oh and did I mention we’ve been house hunting in Seattle?? found a promising one now just have to get an agent in the loop so Kat (our remote viewer) can go look in the house for us.

the server hangs continue .. sorry about that… I now think its either bad memory or flaky disk .. in any case when its up blog access is better for me. For instance, its now fall and GrendelSweets is now back at the Campbell farmers market so I’m posting via the free internet at Blendz (thank you !!) its right next to the Starbucks (which used to charge) and is reachable throughout the whole market.

It looks like this may be the last market I attend for a while as Gilbert decided to bite his sitter this morning and she figured it was time to quit .. we’ll have to find another one before I start the Sonics commute in November. He’s been a bit more aggressive lately and we’re not sure why.

On the home front Elena’s been scanning the real-estate listings in Seattle pretty closely .. we’re starting to see more houses that we might be interested in, so we’ve been sending Kat on prelim drive-bys … I still think it may take up to a year+ to find what we want but you never know..

No sooner than I start publishing my new gallery address widely then my server bombs out hard .. it’d been just a bit touchy in the past, but then it went belly up badly. I ended up swapping motherboards and chassis, hopefully it’ll be stable going forward.

In any case I finished organizing the europe trip and the laguna seca motogp races pictures.. I still need to comment europe but I have to find my notebook first. Next up, the large set of china pictures .. including my dad’s old village.

We had a house guest from Toronto for the week, one of Elena’s friends, she was in town scouting for her convention, but while she was here she redid our deck/garden .. maybe when I get a chance I’ll stick Cracker’s cam out there for a view.

If you’ve been getting sporadic access to either my website or the photo gallery its probably because I’ve had an ongoing hardware problem with the new server .. I think its solved now, so I can get back to catagorizing the slew of old photos I said I’d post.

Mostly they’re the big travel events, Europe in 2002 and China in 2004, all the pics are there, but without captions or organization so don’t be surprised that some of the sub-albums are empty while I’m moving things around.

I did manage to catch up on my one line movie reviews .. but you’ll have to go to the main page to see them, I’m still contemplating keeping that and having the blog separate .. most folks seem to be using the blog format for their whole site. It may make it easier to make entries but I think I have more layout freedom with plain pages.

Back to the non-nerdy stuff soon I promise … but I spent the last week rebuilding a new server .. all because PHP and MySQL ran so darn slow on the on the old one. Now I finally got it running and the old beast (Sun SPARC10 running RH linux 6.1) is on the verge of retirement .. I guess I could turn it into a honeypot to see who’d bother with that architecture but it’ll probably save me more money just to turn it off.

The new server is pretty fast, you can probably tell a bit just from the new journal .. but the main reason is that now I can show off my pictures via Gallery2 … http://www.notanerd.com/gallery2_local now you might even be able to see some pictures before falling asleep.

On the personal front, our nephew Max was here for about 10 days .. pretty uneventful, except for how much he resembles Mike Teevee from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory … that’d be the mumbler… I got to break out the new camera and try a bunch of things .. some of which were interesting but mostly candids.

Lastly Caroline was in town for a short visit, it was great to see her even if it was a short visit, I think she may have OD’d on the OSIM iMedic 50o.

I’d been holding out for years, slinging source HTML and editing my own photos… but then I got a glimpse of the new Gallery2 freeware .. and the upgrade fest began ..I did get the gallery (and php/mysql) running but its really slow (you can try the gallery link under the NotANerd links on the left but don’t say I didn’t warn you).

Since I now had php/mysql running I thought I’d take a quick look at Wordpress to see how easy/configurable this blog software really is. Much more work than I thought, but having easier remote access for updates may mean more frequent updates, but first I need to fix the performance issue .. so I’ll probably build a new machine this weekend and we’ll just see if I can get general performance up to snuff.

Since I haven’t updated since June, lots has happened, Elena went on a 2 week walking tour of England (Hadrian’s Wall), MotoGP at Laguna Seca was loud (pictures to follow when the gallery is faster) Our nephew is visiting for a bit this week .. and of course work’s been a bear. Ankle’s still sore, down to 1 sporting event a week .. but at least I’ve been riding my motorcycle fairly regularly.

Don’t expect much from my MotoGP pictures .. most of the action shot sucked badly, especially compared to my friend Tony’s, so much so that I immediately had to do some research and go off and get a Nikon D70 and a couple of lenses. Yeah, the D70 kit was way cheaper than the Canon Rebel .. but the real clincher was that my sister has a suite of lenses that I can borrow since she’s had Nikon gear for years .. now I just need to practice again with an SLR since its been ages.