After my car sat for the three days I was gone it needed a washing to get the sticky dust off of it. I was also nearly out of clean clothes so after washing my car it was off to the laundromat.

I managed to process a handful of photos taken while at Shasta, a bulk of which consist of Chad or I wake boarding and a few of Matt skiing (he only got in once for a short time). I'm hoping to get those up tonight.

Chris was in town last night so I went and hung out with him. Sat in the hot tub at his hotel for a bit, which was nice as my back was still quite sore.

Got home from Lake Shasta around ten o'clock last night. I had been a little sore Sunday morning from wake boarding on Saturday, but being in a truck where I couldn't move around the soreness from Sundays wake boarding really caught up with me. Today isn't much better. I'm pretty much sore shoulder to shoulder across my back.

Lot's of pictures of Skiing and wake boarding were taken. I'll be uploading a few of those sometime this week, as soon as I get a chance to look at and work on the photos.

I'm still quite wiped from the trip to, Shasta but in a good physical kind of way. As opposed to the I just couldn't sleep or stood up too late kind of way.

I usually get a new phone every year. I've had my eye on the Wing currently I have the MDA which I've quite liked so far despite a few memory management issues it has which can cause poor performance.

One of the things I'd like to get is an off camera lighting/flash kit. This would help to advance my photographic skill set and hopefully help me get better shots in nearly any situation. So far I've for the most part limited my self to shooting with available light, but I think it's time to move on and start improving and controlling light. This will also help to make me think more about the shots as I'm preparing to take them. Hopefully better people shots along the way as well.

Another geeky investment I'd like to make would be on a HD homerun from silicondust. This nifty little device would let me use my xbox or any computer to watch or record TV over the network on a variety of different Operating Systems/applications. And it is High Def so some of the shows will look extra good on a screen that can do HD, like a computer monitor.

Needless to say I can't afford all of these things all at once. So I'm left with choices to make as to what I and when I'm going to purchase the aforementioned items above. There are just as many arguments against each item as there are for them really.

Preparing to go to leave for Shasta on Friday. Tomorrow evening everything gets packed into Matt's Truck and or Boat so today is the best to get most stuff done.

I'm also attempting to prep a laptop to off load pictures too. So far I'm having to try all sorts of crazy voodoo cause the CD method wasn't working but I think I'm gonna be able to take an image of a generic setup on another machine and then transfer that using a nifty tool called partimage. Granted the method is a pain in the ass but could prove to be useful later if I were to setup a dedicated partimage server.

I don't think Nathan's router is coming back to life this time. I'm not sure what happened but nothing seems to work. Short of building a jtag connector, which I don't plan on doing, I'm at a loss of what to do to bring it back to a routing state rather than a brick.

Melanie's Buffalo WHR-G54S arrived yesterday. I managed to get it up and going with DD-WRT, then configured it to be used as a bridge. Her piece of junk d-link usb wireless dongle is no longer the weak link in her internet connection. The Buffalo is setup to get the existing wireless provided by the property management company and then connect it seamlessly to the wired ethernet ports on the Buffalo. Then it was just a matter of connecting the computer to the Buffalo via ethernet to get online.

Renewed My Flickr account today. I've had it for just about a year now (would have expired on the 24th). Can't say I've been disappointed with them. While I have complained about the stability of their site/servers a time or two they seem to have gotten better. I still think paid users should have better availability/stability and test on the free masses or paid users who opt to the test systems (perhaps for a discount).

I've been slacking pretty hard for the last couple months on photos. I plan to remedy that this weekend on my mini vacation to Lake Shasta.

Got a call from Mr. Worth today. He broke one of his routers that I helped him setup a while back. While we have recovered from such a breaking before I fear that this time it may not be possible. So far the usual and known fixes are not working.

The reset button and half duplex mode: failed.
Upload via tftp while router boots: failed miserably.
Shorting pins 15 and 16 on the flash memory: also failed.
Prayer: predictably, failed as well.
Grounding antenna to 16 on memory: failed too.

I've had hints of things maybe thinking about working. But nothing really meant it...

To bed i head.

Played Ultimate again today. I've pretty much come to the conclusion that if I am going to keep playing I'm gonna need to get some cleats. They don't really seem to speed anyone up as much as they allow for people to change directions much much quicker. When I played in Salem I could change directions as quick or quicker than most of the people playing, but here with everyone in cleats I'm finding myself stuck zigging while they've already zagged and sometimes zigged again.

It is only 2:30pm. I've been ready to go home for a few hours now. Fairly slow day here at work.

Next Friday will be different. Next Friday I'm going to be at or in route to lake Shasta for some camping, boating, and perhaps skiing or wake boarding if I'm feeling brave, it has been like two years since I've done wake boarding and well I've never skied. It's only one day off but it will be a nice mini vacation.

the bluetooth tools in linux are very difficult to us. I again find my self struggling to get them to do what I need them to do. I've read about a million websites all telling me what to do. Then when I do what they say it doesn't work. Granted I can't follow any of the sites to the T as I'm working with a system that nobody seems to have documented how to do what I'm struggling with. Which doesn't give me a lot of confidence as I've pretty much wasted a whole evening to not make any progress. If I had made some progress I'd be alright with it. But none was made.

I'll have to see what else I can dream up for the gumstix if i can't make some sort of progress.

I've pulled my gumstix computer out of the closet to play with. I've had a few ideas for what to do with it. The first challenge was getting it to read a compact flash card. Which lead to the challenge of getting a machine setup to compile for it. Once I got the revision of the software /packaging system for it and got the image installed all was well.

Now I've got much more figuring of things out to do. Automount? Directory indexes with the httpd daemon? Uploading with scp or ftp? Network bridging? So on and so forth.

This morning before heading into work I booted up the computer I suspected to have the code I was looking for yesterday. If this computer didn't have it I may have been SOL. But I found what I needed and made a copy...

While I have the computer hooked up I'm gonna see about setting it up to do something more useful...

I had the idea to make one of the existing scripts I use more flexible and useful to myself and Chris. I've got a bit of code someplace that has what I need. Usually I'm fairly responsible about this kind of thing and stick it all in one location. I apparently missed a couple of files, as I've got other scripts and code that were from the same project as the missing code. So I've got to see if I can track that info down sometime this week...

Remember kids, backup and backup, and backup the backup. And try to keep all your toys organized and put away when your done with them.

Finished Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom today. Also by Cory Doctorow, who wrote the book I read on Friday (Eastern Standard Tribe). Another good read and also quick enough for me and my slow reading skills to complete in a day.

I've read as much in the past three days as I have in the last couple of years. I have also read more fiction in the past three days than I've read in the past four years. Both thanks to Mr Doctorow.

So I finally found a pickup game of Ultimate Frisbee to play in yesterday. It was wet, it was cold, I was the only one with no cleats, It was awesome. It was my first game since I moved to Eugene, nearly 4 years ago now. But I managed to do alright scored a couple goals and ran my self stupid and today sore all over, back, sides, legs, shoulders, and even my left wrist some how. I plan going to pickup games every chance I get.

Cleats were a bit of a new idea to me. As when I played in Salem with a motley band of friends and strangers we'd often go barefoot or just with our tennis shoes. But the guys here are a bit more serious and many play in a league, and were talking some ultimate frisbee speak that I didn't quite yet know. If I do keep playing I may need to buy my self some cleats.

Melanie apartment comes with free wireless internet. It's always been kind of flaky for her. But I'm pretty sure it wasn't/isn't the provided wifi but with the junky little wireless USB adapter that she has. It currently comes on and allows access to the internet for no more than a minute or two, which isn't enough to do much other than see the search results because by the time you click the page for the result you want to see the connection has been lost and the page won't load. It's quite infuriating.

So a plan has been formed. The plan involves dd-wrt and a compatible router which will be a Buffalo WHR-G54S. Setup in a bridging configuration. This will allow total bypass of the USB wireless adapter and allow use of the existing on board, and what is sure to be more reliable, ethernet connection on the computer, leaving all the wireless stuff to the Buffalo and dd-wrt. I'm looking forward to voiding the Buffalo's warranty and configuring it with dd-wrt.

Nathan and I got his gaming systems networked with pretty much the same configuration with a couple of Linksys WRT54 units with the oh so awesome dd-wrt firmware.

Just finished Eastern Standard Tribe good read. My kind of thing and read. I managed to read it in one day which I like because it wasn't a huge time commitment which is something that turns me off a bit when it comes to lots of books. It doesn't help that I am a painfully slow reader which I blame mostly on not reading much as a kid. Granted I pretty much read all day at work, various web pages, emails, product documentation, etc etc most of the time I'm just extracting the important bits of information and storing them away someplace in my head.

I may take a read of some of Cory Doctorow's works/stuff. I already read boingboing of which he is a co-author/blogger of.

I managed to get hold of the dealer manual for my new alarm, thank you interwebs. The dealer manual actually covers all the programing options and install directions that are not included in the owners manual for some reason.

Now that I have the manual I've got the alarm setup to roll my windows up when I lock arm/lock the car with the remote. Its also been set it up so it no longer locks the door when the key is turned to on, a feature that I find really annoying. While it may keep strangers from getting in the car with you at a stop light it also makes it more (but not much) work to let passengers out or in, also a stranger has never tried to get into my car at a stop light.

Gonna try the windows up thing for a while. I may turn it back off if I decide I want to leave just a little open and the override function/dealy proves to be too much of a pain.

My camera is on loan for a few days to a friend of mine who needs it for an upcoming event. The door to the house was forced open with a crow bar around 1pm and her cameras were stolen and some other things as well.

I was surprised to hear such a thing happening in that area, as it is isn't exactly in the city. But I suppose places with neighbors that are far apart could be just as good a target as anyplace else if not better in some cases because of the extra privacy.

Even though I go several days at a time with out using my camera, it will be a bit strange to be with out it for a few days. Just not having it available and ready to go is a bit strange... But it is more needed elsewhere right now...

After discussing a few things with Chris last night and his concerns of leaving a computer on while he is out of town and it over heating and failing or having drives fail, because of the AC being off due to him being gone. I told him I could write a script to monitor the temperature of the machine and shut it down if it needed to be. Also that I could have do some graphing of the temperature of the machine using lm-sensors and MRTG.

So today I got to geek out a bit and setup MRTG with temperature monitoring on a server, I actually grabbed and modified a perl script from this how to for configuring exactly what I was doing. I also wrote another script to gracefully shutdown the server if the temperature of the specified thermistor gets above a preset limit. Ya lots of main boards could just cut the power or sound an alarm but what if nobody is there to hear the alarm? Not to mention cutting the power and making the system do a non graceful shutdown can cause other problems.

I've been working on person pictures. I've got a whole lot of learning to do. I need to learn to light better and how to use a flash properly, considering an off camera flash for assistance with lighting. I also need to get far better at manipulation of the photos during post processing. My last attempt could have had a couple of really decent shots if I knew more about these things...

I wish I could say I wasn't disappointed, but I am. It's been trial and mostly error so far not. Not that the situation is hopeless or anything as depressing as that. I'm glad to be learning and trying some new stuff and pushing my self a bit out of my own comfort zone of photographing the inanimate.

The plan? The plan I do have at this point is to practice more portrait/people type shots, which I should have started years ago. Also to read sites like strobist to learn about lighting and many other photo blog/magazine type places to learn about tricks for post processing the shots with potential that just aren't quite there.

New alarm is getting installed today. Spent just more than a month with an alarm that did very very little. It locked the doors when I was done with the car and clicked when I got into my car as it was attempting to do it's job as an alarm but couldn't because I had disconnected the siren. So by the end of the day I should have a functioning alarm again.

Didn't make it to the brewfest. Carl's allergies acted up then Nitemayr realized he couldn't bring the wife and kid to the brewfest so I ended up meeting Nitmayr, his wife and kid at a restaurant then headed back to their place and played some Forza 2 and watching some myth busters.

Sasquatch Brew Fest is going on today. Gonna check it out this evening with nitemayr and Carl. Ten bucks for admission gets you a glass and two beer pours. Not bad considering two good beers at a restaurant will cost you ten bucks.

Yay for beer.

Chris returns from his cross country journey this weekend. Gone nearly a month. First was Hawaii for a couple weeks then a ten day road trip with Catherine to Maryland. So he has passed though all the US time zones in less than 30days. I was going to go on the road trip but Cat changed how she was gonna move, instead of a moving truck and a car she used a moving service and a car, which saved her a bunch of money. Her car, a Mustang and it was pretty much full and three grown people in a Mustang for the better part of two weeks doesn't sound like many peoples idea of a good time. I also hadn't asked for the time off by the time she had made her choice on using movers and Chris had so he went.

Since Chris turned off a computer that serves up all kinds of stuff while he was gone for fear of it overheating and just being unattended for a long stretch of time. This has proved to be a bit annoying to me as of course when I can't access it is when I need to get something from it. But it will be back online soon enough.

I've been contemplating revisiting/reworking an abandoned project that I had worked on last year. I had originally abandoned the project mostly because of the difficulty and cost associated with a specific very necessary component of the project.

If I do decide to work on this it will be from scratch despite having already having some of the components and completed some of the core work/research on it the first time around. The starting from scratch on the project isn't to save on costs, but to go with a platform better suited for the project.

The previous platform was a gumstix computer, which would be like using a back ho to dispose of a dead goldfish when the toilet or a small garden spade would have done just fine. The new platform will be based on a microcontroller which would be a better fit.

My car alarm has been delayed. The guy who I want to do the install was out today due to an injury. Which sucks for him and me, but more for him. So I rescheduled for Monday. Hopefully he is feeling better by Monday.