Melanie missed her 5k at the Eugene Marathon as came down with something that pretty much floored her all day Sunday and kept her up a fair part of Saturday night.

I was looking through a running magazine and came across an ad for the Cascade Run Off the ad in the magazine said there were Belly Dancers, Elvis and other surprises along the course. They have a 3 mile course which is a 5k and a 15k being 9.3 miles. I'm considering signing myself up for the Run Off and seeing if I can get a few more people to do it with me, like Melanie, Chris, and Jana. Maybe more.

If I do sign up I'd be half tempted to do the 15k. But I'd like to have a friend in the 15k with me so if we do end up with a small party of people doing the the Run Off that I'm not the only one holding up the show or transport back to wherever it is we would be going post run... I have a hunch that no one will really want to do the 15k with me so I may end up just doing the 5k...

Friday night was chris' birthday party. We started by going to Salvador Molly's for dinner and drinks. We debated on where to go from there Go carts or Big Al's.

We went to Big Al's for bowling and more drinks. I'm not so good at bowling, even though I did have a miraculous spare after missing all the pins with a 15 pound ball I grabbed an 8 pound ball and heaved the best I could at the pins and nailed them all, minding I can't get any of my fingers into the 8 pound ball. After I had given up the bowling and played some video games for a while it was time to head back to Chris' place for more party and drinks, though no more drinks for me as by this point I was the drunkest I'd ever been. Even though some people thought I was too sober because when Jon's girlfriend Emily tossed a condom full of water at me I caught it with out issue and my movement and speech were still just fine.

While back at Chris' place I decided I should go get my bags out of my car. I checked my pockets for my car keys, not there. Checked my jacket, not there. Checked the couch, not there. Checked Jana's car, still not there. Maybe at Salvador Molly's or Big Al's?

Woke up around 6am and went down stairs with a head ache and talked to Cat who crashed on the couch for a bit, well the best I could as I had managed to destroy my voice from the very loud and busy establishments we had visited the night before. I got some water and went back to bed for another hour or two. Later to get up and vomit the very liquidly contents of my stomach up. I had been hoping that I would boot because I was really not feeling well. Cat took off soon after this before anyone else was up.

Later in the Chris took it on him self to call Big Al's and Salvador Molly's to check for my keys. Still no keys. Planning to go to Eugene started then Chris' mom who was coming up from Salem volunteered to go to Eugene, get them and bring them up with her. This seemed like a better idea and it would have wrecked Jana and his Mom's plan of dinner that evening.

The lot of us (Jon, Chris, Jana, Emily) spent most of the day laying around being lazy, or in my case hungover and kinda crummy feeling. By the time Chris' parents arrived with the spare keys I was ready for a shower and change of clothes, which of course I couldn't do without my bag from my trunk... So once I had my keys I opened the car up then the hood and disconnected the siren for the alarm as I have no fob for it now. Proceeded to take a quick shower and change while more and more of Chris' family arrived to go out to dinner.

Jon and Emily took me back to Chris' place early from the dinner so I could start the trek home as Melanie had a 5k run Sunday morning, and I had promised to get her there. I get to Melanie's place two hours and two minutes after I left Chris' place. Later to find out she wasn't feeling well, sore throat and had vomited as well, so no run for her. I picked up some throat spray and drops for her before I headed back to my place to unpack, post this and pet my Murray cat.

All and all it was a pretty good weekend.

I got a call from Catherine today about Chris' birthday party tomorrow. After the call I noticed my phone indicated it was on T-mobile's EDGE network. Which previously didn't cover the area even just a few weeks ago. Now it appears to be somewhat live. While this isn't terribly exciting to many but it does mean faster internet on my phone.

Black cars are almost four times more likely to be involved in an accident than silver cars, which are the safest, according to research from New Zealand that analyzed 1,000 accident reports.

Thats because black cars go faster.

I've had nothing the last few weeks or months to really say or put here... I've been light on photos for the past few months as well... It's not that I don't have things going on.

My weekends for the next few weeks are fairly busy with Birthday Parties, Graduations, 5K run to photograph and other things that may pop up for doing or attending.

I need to get something planned for the summer. A backpacking trip or something thats more than a weekend. I have more than 160 hours of paid time off stored up to use, and two floating holidays too. The reason for so much is I haven't had anything great or good to do with the time off nor do I have the money to afford to go someplace cool or fun right now. Perhaps next year I will have enough set aside for a half decent trip.

Went and caught Hot Fuzz last night with nitemayr and Karl from work. Good movie. Funny. Quite graphic at times and they are sneaky about the graphic bloodiness. Good movie. Worth seeing.

The weather was less than good. So Chris and I opted to skip the rally, so we went and played laser tag at laser port instead. I was suprised to find my self sore from laser tag but I was moving around I ways that I only do while playing laser tag. So I suppose it isn't really that suprising.

Then Sunday I dropped by my Dad's place in Salem and did the birthday dinner and cake thing there for my Dad's bday.

Possibly going to a rafting deal in early May.

Going to Vancouver today after work. Gonna go to the Rally tomorrow and Sunday then stop in Salem to visit my dad and wish him a happy birthday on Sunday. I'm hoping to get some decent photos this weekend. If not it should still be a good time.

Also I was stuck behind that stupid thunder brid again today. Again the hit the breaks on the on ramp and could have easily caused another accident. So if you see a Thunderbird with license plate ZPD 503 just in front of the retard and you should be ok.

One of my fog lights fell out of my car this morning. I need a new front bumper/spoiler/bumpercover whatever you want to call it for my car, a new fog lights oh and brackets for the fog lights. Not to mention someone to do the work... Maybe I'll see about getting insurance to pay for it as I have full coverage and I'm pretty sure my deductible of $500 is less than what it would cost to pay for out of pocket.

Slept for crap last night. Once I finally did get to sleep I had some crazy ass dreams. Near as I can remember I was picking fights with guys much bigger than me and winning fairly constantly. One had picked me up and started to swing me around but I moved or something in such a way that brought him down with me another I used pressure points or leverage on to win. Later on one of my friends told me that someone I had encountered had to go to a doctor or hospital from complications of the the melee.

Spent most of today cleaning up. Really just putting stuff away and finding new places to put other things. I still have a few things to put away and find new homes for. I also cleaned up a bit in the closet as bunch of stuff found a new home or actually belonged in there anyways, and more stuff will find it's way into the closet as time passes I'm sure.

I also washed, waxed, and vacuumed my car.

recently I reported that I lost one of my 2 gig thumb drives. I checked all the usual spots for such things. Double checked other and the other day it struck me that it could be in my car, but I still never checked. I was vacuuming my car out when I spotted it between the driver's seat and the center console.

Yay.

Today I went took Melanie to lunch at Fina Taqueria which has pretty decent food. Then I proceeded to make my car payment, I now owe right around $2,300. Then I watched a documentary from Channel 4 about evangelical Christians while doing laundry. Then I took a few photos and here I am blogging about my boring day and looking for photos that are worth putting up to the flickr.

Mostly because I've got nothing today.

Monday: Discovered server was broken.

Tuesday: Saw Grind House with a couple friends from work. Death Proof is the better of the two films. Then when I got home I stayed up to reinstall an OS on a server.

Wednesday: Reconfigured the software on the server and wrote a backup script.

Thursday: Went out with a couple friends from work and Melanie.

Friday: Worked. Still not sure what I'm gonna do this evening. I'm kinda tired, but the weather is decent and I could go take some pictures...

Weekend... No plans yet. But next weekend is the Rally in Portland with Nathan and a buncha other dudes and Chris... Then the next weekend is Chris' birthday party and a 5k for Melanie which I will be attending.

I spent a fair amount of time Tuesday night and yesterday rebuilding the server with the drive problem. I also made a script to down and backup and restart the virtual machines so I can save my self some hassle later on. I also added another 512MB of ram to give that box 2.5 gigs of ram.

I've also though about usurping some resources on other boxes I have access for additional functionality and redundancy.

So I was going to change out one the backup power supply that keeps my servers going when power goes out. So I powered down both my servers and swapped stuff out. My primary server came up just fine. The vmware server not so fine. Seems a drive decided to fail. I spent some time diagnosing and verifying that I had found the right drive to pull.

I change the drive out and expect to bootup to rebuild the data on the drive... No the controller won't read all the drives now. The drive not on the raid array won't initialize properly. Tries then stops, tries then stops. I spend more time removing drives from the chain and observing the behaviors. I eventually got all the drives seen and read and initializing by the controller. I attempted to boot up but now the system doesn't seem to want to boot from the OS drive at all. So this morning I left the array to be rebuilt and hopefully I'll be pull the virtual machines out and load a fresh OS....

Let this be a lesson to anyone planning to work with older scsi hardware. Always make a sarafice to the scsi gods no matter what the task involving a computer with scsi drives.

I just opened a new savings account. It's been years and years since I had one. Up until fairly recently I was pretty consistently overdrawing my checking account. The last couple of months I've manged make it from paycheck to paycheck without needing to utilize my overdraft protection. So I figured it would be a good time to start putting some money aside for perhaps a rainy day or very large purchase or a down payment...

I seem to have misplaced one of my thumb drives. It doesn't seem to appear to be in any of my pockets. I'm hoping that it turns up at work. If it doesn't I don't think I have anything terribly sensitive stored on it.

Melanie is doing the Eugene 5k which is part of the Eugene Marathon. nitemayr and I are planning on taking a few photos of the event. It had previously occurred to me to attend or show up to evens like the Eugene Marathon simply for the opportunity to get some decent photos of people doing what people do...

The weekend before the 5k/Marathon I'll be at the Rally with Chris, Nathan, Sean, Jake, and maybe more. So April is looking to be a promising month for Photos.

So Nathan and I were stuck be hind a driver I've been stuck behind in the past, hell I've even mentioned the driver before.

This time it Nathan directly behind Oregon Plate ZPD 503, then me behind Nathan. I saw the plates on a bend and knew what to expect from the time I had been stuck directly behind this highly under qualified driver. What did I expect you may ask. Well she did exactly the same thing to Nathan as she had done to me last month. Slammed on her breaks while merging on to I5. If one checks out the map of the on ramp one will notice it's not really that long compared to oh say the south bound ramp just a few hundred meters away. But it doesn't make it ok to just lock the breaks up because you can't immediatly merge with traffic, sure let off the gas, or put the gas to the floor but do not come to a halt on an on ramp. Unless traffic is stopped on the freeway or it is a metered on ramp (which there are none of which Eugene) there is no reason to halt on an on ramp...

I think the driver of the Thunderbird with License plate ZPD 503 would be more qualified and comfortable in one of these Cozy Coupes.

I've mentioned before my job duties were changing. Latest development is it appears as if cohorts and I will no longer be on call. Which to me is really nothing as I've only been called maybe five times in my year in the position. This will be a pain for some people as work pays for and owns the cellphone they use. So this will be changing. I never bothered to have work pay for my phone cause well I never used it enough for work stuff.

I picked up a Solio at REI yesterday for right around $45 after my member dividend and %20 discount coupon. So I paid a bit less than half what what it should have been.

I stuck it in the windshield of my car to charge while I'm at work. Not sure if it's positioned well enough to soak up much sun but thats alright. A better place for it charge can be found later. Or I could just park someplace a little further out from from the building.

I'm looking for decent car charger for my camera batteries so that I can charge those with the Solio while out camping or away from power...

I recently had another geeky idea for an indevor. This one far more expensive than most others so far. This one would cost someplace around $960 a year for a single person. But if I could get another person it would be $480 a year or about $40 a month. Or if I could find three people for a total of 4, willing to part with $20 a month I could get a server co-located someplace in Portland and provide each person with a sub-domain and a virtual machine and some storage space and maybe some other services yet to be determined I could make it happen.

The basic idea is just to get a server co-located in a data center and have it there. Providing various proxy and storage services with higher availability and download/upload rates for those who participate. I'm gonna run the idea by Chris see what he thinks.

Went to the Eugene Brewery last night with some coworkers and a former coworker. After the Eugene Brewery we were heading to nitemayr's place. I unlocked my car, it unlocked just fine but the lights didn't come on. I flipped the switch for the dome lights like a hundred times, no light. So I checked the fuses once I got home. I think I blew the dome light fuse when I reinstalled my sub as I did make a couple sparks while doing that...

1:08pm: Replaced the fuse. All is well again. Also ordered new wipers, a new super bright bulb for the trunk and one of those sprayers for windshield.