Not Necessarily Interesting News

Last night we were watching TV and heard a bang and then the lights went out. The living room was lit up by a flash of blue light. I knew what it was instantly. Someone hit a power pole somewhere in the neighborhood.
Sure enough, a couple of kids were drag racing down the street behind our house and one lost control and went off the road and through a power pole. Sadly, he was completely uninjured. So, even though he totalled his car, he’ll still be convinced that he’s invincible behind the wheel.
This happens on a regular basis around here. People see the wide roads and think the 30MPH speed limit doesn’t apply to them. This was the second at that particular spot in the road and I lost count of how many have happened near my house. Just a couple months ago a biker was killed when he lost control of his bike a block up the street and went through a fence. A week after that I had a drunk driver wind up in my front yard.
I don’t know what to do to get them to slow down but the county sure doesn’t seem to care. Occasionally they’ll have a deputy work the street for a day but it doesn’t help.
*sigh*

The wife and kid left on a cruise to Mexico with my parents yesterday morning. They left on about 15 hours notice. My parents are frequent ‘cruisers’ and got a call from the cruise line looking to fill a boat leaving Galveston in the morning. I guess they had a lot of cancellations and such because of Hurricane Rita passing so close to Galveston. I think it cost a grand total of about $350 for both my wife and kid to do the cruise. Not a bad deal.

I have a busy week ahead of me anyways so it wasn’t bad timing. I had a Land Rover club meeting last night. I’ve got tickets to the local premiere of Serenity with some friends at which a couple of the stars will appear and do a Q&A. Those are the big tickets in town this week selling for over $100/each on eBay. This weekend I’ve got a British Car Show so I’ve got to get the Defender detailed for that. Detailing the Defender consists of washing down the outside, cleaning the windshield, and hosing out the inside. Looks like I’ve convinced a few other folks in the club to show up too. I hope there’s a better showing than the 3 Landies of last year.

Last night, after my meeting, it did feel funny to come home to an empty house. Too quiet. It does give me a chance to watch the movies I want on our big screen at a volume level that I prefer. I watched one of my favorties, Saving Private Ryan, last night and had pictures shaking on the walls during battle scenes. 🙂

Generators and chainsaws. Those are the sounds of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. Everywhere you go you are never away from the hum of a generator or the buzzing of a chainsaw.

I had heard about a guy through my Land Rover Club that had been making aid trips into the rural areas of the Gulf Coast. Places where the Red Cross and FEMA hadn’t shown up or had left before things were totally self-sufficient. I got in touch with him and volunteered my truck and time over the weekend. He was grateful and asked me to organize things in Austin to bring out with me. I posted pleas for goods to take with me and my wife did the same in her homeschooling groups. My friend Chris also posted a request for donations on the Defender website he runs. We received over $1600 in monetary donations and almost 1/2 a trailer load of goods. On Thursday before I was to leave we went to Costco and got over $1100 in supplies, finishing off filling the trailer. We kept the rest of the money in reserve in case we found a need that needed immediate cash while there.

(Read on …)

Tonite we’re headed to Costco to gear up for my relief trip to Louisiana and Mississippi. We’ve taken in over $1,700 in monetary donations along with a sizable amount of goods. We’re absolutely floored by the amount of money people have given. People have given and given because of this disaster and when we made the plea it was tough to find supporters, then all of a sudden, BAM!, everyone rallied and are making this a great trip. I’ve had offers to pay for my gas, (turned down, that’s my contribution), offers of equipment, goods, bibles, and more. It’s been amazing.

Thanks to everyone who has pitched in. Words can’t express my thanks.

I’ll leave first thing tomorrow and will report when I get back. I seriously doubt I’ll have connectivity on the road.

Well, I’m getting closer to getting everything back. It’s going to take days if not weeks to recover everything. I run a RAID-5 SCSI array on my webserver. The array consists of 4 primary disks + one hot spare. Well, what happened was a cascade of crap that caused the loss/misplacement of a bunch of data in the array.
Timeline:
– A spammer decides that he’s going to use one of my email addresses as a fake return email. Ok, it’s happened before.
– The resulting torrent of spam gives my server fits but is no problem. It handles it in stride.
– Road Runner sees a shitload of connects to port 25 from my server trying to send back bounce notifications and cuts me off about 2AM.
– Sometime in here I have a disk go bad in the array.
– I wake up and can’t get online.
– My server is now unreachable for some reason. My only choice, and a bad one at that, was to hard power the machine.
– Upon coming online the RAID array decides it doesn’t want to play nice and trashes its journal file. fsck recovers most stuff but tosses it in lost+found instead of its previous spot.
– My backup drive for all this was useless. For unknown reasons it will not mount on any of my machines.
– I get to now spend hours/days/weeks going through lost+found moving files to their correct places.

Kill me now…

Yesterday I went to a offroad park about 2 hours from here, Katemcy Rocks. I was goin to meet a couple of people from the San Antonio chapter of the Texas Rovers. My father and son also came along. I showed up about 1/2 hour before the others so I got the truck aired down and ready to head out. I did get to play on the ramp a bit before they showed up as seen in the pic.

Joe and Ed showed up and we got ready to head out. I hopped in the Defender and turned the ignition. The key turned to ‘on’ then just started spinning in circles. The truck wouldn’t turn over. Shit. Ed, who has done a lot of work on Rovers, helped me remove the ignition and we played with it for a bit to no avail. The truck wasn’t gonna start. I sent Joe and Ed on their way, I didn’t want to ruin their day too. My father and I stayed behind and played with it and discovered a way of reassembling the ignition to cause the starter to turn over the engine. The only problem was that after the engine started the starter was still engaged. We solved that by pulling the starter relay. The rest of my day went like this. To start the car, insert the starter relay. Once the truck turns over pull that and it stays running. To stop, leave in gear, step on brakes and relase clutch to stall it. At the end of the day I just had to disconnect the battery.
I also had to put up with the persistant overheating problems. It now looks like a blown head gasket. Oh boy.

When out on the trail we were navigating a particularly hairy section where you have to put your left tires over a rocks while your right tires are inches from a 30′ drop-off. Fun. After negotiating that Joe made the turn away from the edge and when climbing away from the drop-off he put a rear tire into a hole which caused the whole Disco to lean back lifting a wheel 3′ off the ground. He was teetering near going over backwards and off the cliff. My father who was taking pics with my camera jumped to the rescue and in doing so smashed my Sony digicam. Oops. There went $350. He keeps saying he’ll replace it and I insist it’s not a big deal. ‘It’s only a camera, I’m just glad you could throw weight onto Joe’s truck to keep him from falling off a cliff.’ Sadly I only got 6 pics of the day before the camera met its untimely demise. This pic is of Joe’s Disco about 30 seconds before trying to throw himself off that cliff. Ed’s RRC is right behind him and I’m behind Ed.

The damage:

• Blown head gasket
• broken speedo cable from removing dashboard
• trashed ignition
• crushed digicam

I’m going to be spending some quality time in the garage with my truck over the next couple weeks.

Two days ago I went in for a Heart Stress Test on the recommendation of my doc. Last week I was experiencing a bit of chest pain and some headaches so I went in for a check-up. After talking for a bit and going over my history and family history he decided to get me tested to be safe. Once he’d heard that I had an uncle die at 44 he got more cautious. Family history is a big indicator of possible problems.
I showed up for the test and got into some shorts to get ready for it. They had me take off my shirt and put sticky pads all over my chest and hooked me up to the machine. They took some pre-test measurements and then had me get on the treadmill.
The test itself wasn’t really that tough. The treadmill is on an incline and starts off rather slow. Every three minutes it speeds up and the incline increases. The doc had a target heart rate of around 160 for me. As the treadmill started he said ‘Don’t try to beat the machine. You won’t make it’. I reached my target rate at around the last minute or so of the third stage. He asked me how I was feeling all through the test and at this point asked if I wanted to continue. I said my heart and lungs were doing fine, the only thing that was gonna stop me was my calves. They were burning like crazy.
He stopped the test right at the start of the 4th stage(Thank God, my calves were dying but I didn’t want to stop. I guess I was trying to beat the machine. 🙂 ) and said he had everything he needed. He also said that everything looked good at that time. It takes a couple days for the full analysis so I hope to find out tomorrow how I did. I think I did fine. I felt great before, during, and after the test. Actually, I’d felt fine all weekend before the test after seeing my doc on Friday. That tells me it really seems to be work related. The not knowing what’s going to happen and how you’ll support your family eats you up inside.
Both docs said it seemed more like a stress thing than any real heart problems at this time. I also found out over the weekend that other people in my family are/were prone to the same ‘anxiety attacks’, so I’m apt to side with the docs. The longer I stay in my current position the closer I know I’m getting to being laid off. The end of the quarter is coming and the rumors are flying. As a contractor I have no job security which is what I’m trying to fix with the Iraq job.
Speaking of the Iraq position, I had the second interview yesterday and it went great. I talked with a V.P. over there for over a 1/2 hour and it sounds like a great opportunity. They do some cutting-edge work in fields that have always been interesting to me and from the job description I feel I would fit right in. They said they’d be getting back to me and schedule another phone interview then a day at the facility to do a meet-and-greet. You know it went well when the V.P. gives you his cellphone number and tells you to call anytime if you have questions. I’m keeping my fingers crossed on that one. I’d love to get into my first permanent position in over 5 years. I can see myself staying a long time with the right company and they seem to be the kind I could do it with. Yeah, a year in Iraq away from family doesn’t sound like a perfect job but I figure it’s a great way to get some experience in the field, earn some good money, and, I know this sounds hokey, to serve my country in whatever way I can.

Yesterday I received a new toy in the mail. A nice powerful green laser. It looks like any ordinary red pen laser but has a green dot instead of red. It is a bit more powerful than your $5 red laser. It also is visible in air at night as you can see in the photo of me lighting up the neighbor’s house. It can be modded to be even more powerful but I’m happy with it as-is and see no reason to do that and risk breaking it. I can light up a street sign from 1/2 mile away and dazzle myself with the reflection.

You definitely do not want to look into this laser with your remaining eye.

: Look At Little Sister from the album “Soul To Soul” by Stevie Ray Vaughan

Got a few Gmail invites here I can’t use. Drop me a line if you want one or know someone who does.

: Get Over It from the album “Hell Freezes Over” by The Eagles

Update: I’m currently out of invites. When I get more I’ll pass them out on a first come/first served basis.