On the first day we got there i was so [...]]]> I took a trip to Duck, NC last month. The trip was great! I thought i’d update here with some video and pictures! The group consisted of friends who all play Left 4 Dead together. We were all looking forward to an epic week!

On the first day we got there i was so exicted! So i made this video I was pretty out of breath at the end of it from running around the house, lol.

Day two was pretty much chilling at the beach, I made another video to rub it in everyone back home’s face Chair made of sand, ocean waves, plenty of sun screen. All that was missing was the corona.

The rest of the week was filled with beach, video and board games, and drinking all sorts of tasty beverages. We also did some touristy stuff, like checking out some of the local shops where we ended up doing some judo on a lawn of a restaurant, haha!

I threw Sean with Koshi Guruma!

We also went to see the Currituck Beach Lighthouse, that was really cool! The stair case seemed to go on forever! Higher and higher! But once you got to the top! What a view!

At the end of the week we went out Parasailing. I’d never gone before, and boy!, was it a fun experience! It was amazing how far you could see and how calm everything was up there.

Mary and I way up high

The week went by way too fast for me! I wish i could go on vacation all the time! I can’t wait to for Otakon to meet up with many of you guys again!

The whole group in Troll shirt attire

I’d like to thank Tom and Mary for the pictures! You guys take some great shots!

What if [...]]]> A few days ago my roommate got a box of random electronic parts donated to him. Most of the stuff was junk, only good to salvage parts off of. But there were two items that we did find of interest. Two motherboards that seemed like they were still in pretty good condition.

What if we could get them up and running again?

And so our weekend project was started!

First we got an old power supply and some old RAM we had laying around and plugged everything up to see if it would even turn on. That turned out to be a bit more trouble than we initially thought we’d have. Sean searched the internet for the manual to the motherboard and we found the pins that the power button was to plug up to. One small problem, we didn’t have a power button. So while Sean got something together, we used a set of hemostats to bridge the pins and power on the pile of parts. Something was wrong though, the monitor we had hooked up to it didn’t show anything. and since we didn’t have a PC speaker, we couldn’t hear beep codes. We almost resorted to the ancient art of poke-at-it-with-a-screwdriver when i noticed a jumper in between the two RAM banks. I pulled it out and tried the power and BAM! POST! By this time Sean had gotten a power button and a light soldered together for us to use. Now we needed some sort of boot up medium, and we decided that a USB drive would be optimal. We got a 2GB drive from Walmart and loaded it up with Lubuntu.

After tweaking the BIOS settings a bit we finally were able to boot off the USB drive and get to the boot menu for the drive. On our first attempt to boot from the drive we got a kernel panic so we decided to test the RAM. That ended up being a good idea, since we discovered all of our extra DDR RAM was bad. Into the trash with that stuff! Luckily there was a second bank of RAM slots on the motherboard which supported SDRAM, an older format of RAM.

Sean pulled out the motherboard for one of his first computers, Jenny, and luckily it still had RAM in it’s banks! Thank god for hording computer parts We pulled out two of the ram sticks and tested them. They were good to go! We booted up and tada! We got a loading screen. It seemed to take forever to load, then we noticed we’d forgotten to put in the second chip of RAM, whoops :3

Now we’re in the process of updating the Ubuntu core and then we’re going to see if we can get some sort of clustering up and running. It would be neat to get a farm up and running.

There are more pictures on my flickr account

I bought my ticket for Virginia today. I’ll be visiting Virginia over Memorial Day weekend, and it will be [...]]]> i’m not really sure what happened. I used to post all the time. now it’s very intermittent. maybe it’s because i feel that i don’t have anything to write about. but now i do

I bought my ticket for Virginia today. I’ll be visiting Virginia over Memorial Day weekend, and it will be an awesome weekend.

Other than that, really nothing has been going on. I go to work, i come home, i do random things on the computer or in front of the TV, or in the yard, and then i go to sleep.

Right now i don’t think i’m in the right state of mind to keep going, as there’s some Kraken in me.

Thursday

It started on Thursday where I drove up towards the great state of Illinois. The drive wasn’t too bad, I had loud music, energy drinks, and the anticipation of getting to hang out with Michelle. The roads were another story though. [...]]]> So my weekend was a long one, a whole 4 days

Thursday

It started on Thursday where I drove up towards the great state of Illinois. The drive wasn’t too bad, I had loud music, energy drinks, and the anticipation of getting to hang out with Michelle. The roads were another story though. The areas which were under construction were everywhere. At one point we were down to one lane, and then a bus had driven off the road, which just made traffic worse! I was sitting there thinking to myself, “Great, we’re down to one lane and someone decides to total their car in the only lane left..” Needless to say I was astonished to see a passanger bus in the ditch as traffic crawled passed. I get to Chicago and learn that traffic there is always an adventure. It wasn’t even rush hour and we were bumper to bumper all the way through. I make it to Great Lakes around 3pm local time (they’re Central Time.. i didn’t know that ). I set up in my room and then went and got some Chinese food.

Friday

Friday I was up at 6am, got showered and made my way to the RTC (Recruit Training Center) Gate. There was a line going out the gate, but it was moving slowly. They came through, asked for Drivers Licenses and told us some simple rules of the training area (like no smoking, 15MPH speed limit, etc etc). I find a parking spot and head over to where you check in. After they stamped my hand I headed over to the main drill hall where I found my seat and proceeded to wait. I checked the Itinerary brochure they’d handed out just to see that it didn’t start until 0900. I checked my phone and saw that it wasn’t even 0700 yet. So i waited and waited.

Finally the ceremony began. They showed a little video and had all the recruits march in. Then things got really extravegant! They had a rifle team and band perform and there were some pretty high ranking officers that spoke. This was all much more of a production than when I graduated AIT. After they recognised some of the best recruits in certain areas (including Academics, which blew my mind.. the military rewarding smart people?! ..maybe the Army is the only one that doesn’t do that?), they released the recruits on Liberty. It took me a while to find Michelle, and then we went on a hunt to find her dad.

Once we’d all met up, we went off to find a place to eat, it was lunch time afterall We went to Olive Garden and had some good food. After that we headed to one of the local malls and killed some time while also looking at nice and shiny things. They put a curfew on the recruits so Michelle had to be back fairly early in the evening, around 1900.  After we dropped her off and made plans for the next day I got dropped off at my hotel (Mike, Michelle’s dad, had been driving us around) and I surfed the internet and watched a movie, War Games: The Dead Code. The movie was actually pretty terrible, don’t watch it. Ever.

Saturday

On Saturday we went out for breakfast at Denny’s and then went and got ourselves lost for a bit. Mike had to check out of his hotel by 11, so we got dropped off at my hotel and said our goodbye’s. The plan after that had been to take the train into Chicago and spend the day there, but we came to the realization that we had no idea how to get around Chicago once we got there, and we only would have had about 3 hours to do whatever we wanted to do down there before we’d have to head back.

So instead we went and saw the new Harry Potter, which wasn’t as bad as i was expecting. The last few had disappointed me a bit, and I wasn’t really expecting anything from this one. After the movie we got something to eat. We’d seen a Japanese place the day before and had taken an interest in trying it out. The sushi was delicious, but what really surprised me was the fried rice! It was so good!! After we’d finished our food we headed back to my hotel and watched The Hangover. Neither of us had seen it and we’d both enjoyed the movie very much!

Sunday

Sunday I picked Michelle up and we hung out for a few hours. After we’d said our goodbyes (I hate goodbyes..) I hit the road. The drive back seemed much longer than the drive up. I think it was because I was a bit meloncholy and tired. What made things worse, I’d discovered that I had hit something, like a pothole, or crap in the highway, and put a nice gouge in my rear drivers-side rim. I’m not too happy about that I must say.

Anyway, I made it home around 6pm. 6 hours on the road can really take it out of you. I talked to Sean, offered to help him mow the lawn, and then went into the garden to pick some fresh goodies. We’d picked our first Jalapenos and man were they HOT! There’s more on the way, so I’m sure i’ll be talking more about those later.

I then cracked open my new book and went to bed.

Now it’s monday, and I don’t want to be here

Let’s start back on Friday. I really didn’t do much, mainly read, nap, play video games, mow the lawn, drink beers. Speaking of the lawn.. a few days earlier we’d put down some weed killer and it seems to be working. Now [...]]]> I’m not a dad, oh no sir. But my dad is

Let’s start back on Friday. I really didn’t do much, mainly read, nap, play video games, mow the lawn, drink beers. Speaking of the lawn.. a few days earlier we’d put down some weed killer and it seems to be working. Now all that needs to be done is get the lawn feed out and get that grass back to being the dominant plant in the yard. I’m serious, half the lawn is brown with dead weeds atm!  Anyway, back to the weekend.. I got a call from Michelle! It was the first day they were allowed to use the phone, so that was pretty exciting Friday night i went out with some friends. First we went to BW3′s for dinner, which was delish and then to some bar in Louisville, The Electric Cowboy or some such. It was ‘eh’.. Not really my scene. Lots of cowboy hats and older people and yeah well you should get the picture.  I left pretty early, it was only midnight i think, and went home.

Saturday we had our weekly SoNotSoft meeting. We talked about what kind of moves we want in our game and tried really hard to come up with a lengthly list. There’s only so much you can do with a pencil i guess. After the meeting Josh came over and we played Counter-Strike, we both suck horribly and soon decided that food was more important than video games. We ended up going to Kanzai in E-town. Man i love sushi! The Thai Chilli Roll was exquisit! I was invited to go to a River Bats game with Sarah, but to be honest I didn’t feel like driving all the way back up to Louisville. So I went back home and played some video games and took a nap.

Sunday I was up early and hit Walmart first thing. I’d heard that ammunition supplies were low (besides every gun owner always saying ammo is low). It was true, there were only 4 boxes of .40 S&W left. I bought three of them. I got back to the house and got out my pistol and made sure that it was clean and not covered in rust My dad came over around 12:30 and showed me his new rifle. A sweet M1903. We headed out and got to Knob Creek Gun Range around 1.  I fired a few magazines of ammo through my pistol (Springfield XD-40) and then tried my dad’s new rifle. Man does that thing kick! After only 5 rounds my shoulder was pretty beaten up.. After i found out later because i wasn’t holding it quite right So now i have a nicely bruised shoulder. After we’d finished we went back to my place to clean our weapons and eat some food. Sean started up the grill and put burgers on. Things took too long i guess, so dad left, since he still had to go take the dogs on a walk. And then Kristina came over and kidnapped Sean for dinner. So i was there with a grill full of burgers. There’s no way i could eat them all Instead i played some Eve. We were trying to run some wormhole plexes.. we didn’t do too well. Apoll0s lost his domi and Scab lost his apoc. I got a bit frustrated and logged pretty much right after that. I went back to reading a new book (Relentless) for a few hours before i went to bed.

Now it’s back to work for a few days before the next weekend, which will be pretty busy too. Family is coming in starting on Thursday for the family reunion my dad is hosting this year. Saturday we get a tour of the Heaven Hill Distillery in Bardstown.