Monday, November 14, 2005
Since they said they'd have it running by now, I went over to the mechanic that's doing the shift linkage for my crippled Manta Montage. It still needs a little adjustment, but I saw it shifting through all the gears (a big improvement). A shift gate and some minor fixes and it should be OK. The right-rear brake needs to be replaced as well (it's been completely non-functional — and noisy — since I got it).
Anyway, when that's done, it's off to have a new interior installed, then some minor bodywork and a paint job. I'm putting a Basic Stamp powered interface on it as well so there will be digital gauges showing things like G-forces, downforce on different parts of the car, regional temperatures, and so on, with a USB port for data logging. I'm also putting in front and rear cameras…
Anyway, back to server programming now…
Saturday, November 12, 2005
While in Santa Cruz I picked up a 1.6 TB NAS device (which gives me just over a terabyte of RAID-5 storage)… Problem is, my DSL modem which is also the router is insanely, insanely slow and I'm not able to pass data particularly quickly. I was going to pick up a gigabit hub but the Office Depot here doesn't carry them… Maybe not a bad thing because when I tried plugging in the router I already have (10/100 only), while it did greatly increase the speed when talking to the Buffalo TeraStation, it also killed off my internet connectivity for some reason we haven't figured out yet.
Anyway, it's pretty cool, and will be useful as I start moving some of my internal image archives over to it, but it's still going to take some fiddling to get it performing like it should.
Friday, November 11, 2005
Just finished the drive through the mountains back to La Paz. As gorgeous as Santa Cruz was, it was nice to get back as well. This time of year this part of Mexico has a really ideal climate, quite hot during the day and cooling down to long-sleeved weather at night. All it needs is a little more rain and foliage and it would be perfect… Or would that then be the California coast?
I need to get working harder on a few projects so I can open up our realestate options even more. I bumped into the owner of (I think) Lulu's in Kailua-Kona (Hawaii) on the airplane and I have to admit that if I had a few million to spend I'd be very hard pressed to decide where I'd like to buy. In the mean time, I love being in Mexico. I have a ton of work to get caught up on now (er, I mean, to tell Phil to do).
Friday, November 11, 2005
I'm in LAX right now waiting for my flight to Cabo. Big thanks to Barry for dragging out of bed to drive me to the airport at four in the morning. Anyway, time to post some quickie pictures from the trip… The Santa Cruz area is really beautiful. It's unfortunate that I couldn't stay later; there's lots more people and places I wanted to spend time with. Here's a picture of the area where Barry lives (wow), and as a point of trivia, on the left is the world's longest conveyer belt.
And here's a quick photo of the San Jose skyline at about 4
PM:
As I said, the landscape is absolutely beautiful. This is one of many little quiet coves at Bonny Doon.
Finally, a couple photos from out the window of the early morning flight from San Jose to Los Angeles… Rivers of cloud flowing between the mountains, and then a photo from above the clouds as well.
Well, I'm just going to download some of my email (and the email server's been having problems lately, I think because of
BMEvideo's rapid growth, grr…) and then get back to missing Rachel who's staying a little longer here in this particular paradise.
Wednesday, November 9, 2005
Had a nice evening and supper today with Rachel, Barry, and Jen (and then later bumped into Sean as well). It sure is nice up in the mountains here… Also got to see Lane's new magazine which features quite a few IAM members, and congratulations are definitely due. Anyway, Rachel took this picture of me at lunch and the one that is in my main gallery (on IAM, not Zentastic). I don't use a comb!
PS. I think the picture makes me look fuzzier than I am. I think…
