It's a long story.

Cop Car Back Seat.jpg

There are no seatbelts and no leg room in the back of a squad car.

[Update 2-12-2008 02:37: As Jason notes, it would probably be appropriate for me to mention that we did not, in fact, get arrested. Though it was really fun to post that from my phone 🙂 In reality, the officer was keeping us warm in his squad car while we waited for a tow truck to arrive to pull Ashley’s poor Beetle to a mechanic for a little TLC. So no crazy arrest story… sorry! Just a tiny bit of good luck in an otherwise pretty rough day, in that we happened to break down in a tiny patch of “The Middle Of Nowhere” that actually had cellular reception. [/Update]

Capitalizing on this Wisconsin Weather

On Monday, the high temperature was 44°F. On Tuesday, it was 43°F.

On Wednesday, the high was 3°F.

Fortunately, Chris had some foresight to capitalize on the warm days. So, he, Jason, Ben, Justin, and I set about getting the thermostat, heater, thermistor and associated wiring up and running for the mister nozzle we added to the fountain this year. After tracing a whole bunch of old wires up and down the fountain, we found that of 6 wires running up the fountain, only 4 still worked.

…Exactly how many we needed. 🙂

So, after the application of a little elbow grease (mostly on Chris’s part), a lot of volt metering (on all the rest of our parts), some general good engineering principles (:-P), and a little Wisconsin weather, we built this:

Maquina Icicles
Maquina Icicles

Powder Coated Maquina
Powder Coated Maquina

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Broken String Again.jpg

That’s right. One of the brand new strings I installed just last night is missing. It seems this guitar really doesn’t like the idea of tuning the G string up to an A. Bummer. Anyone have any advice on that?

Ski Trip!

Dave and I capitalized on the end of the classes coinciding with unexpected amounts of early-December snow this weekend by taking a day trip to Cascade Mountain for some skiing. We had a pretty awesome time; it was great to get to spend some time just having fun without projects, long-term assignments, or anything but a couple measly finals 😉 hanging over my head…

Cascade surprised me by how nice it was. I definitely did not expect to find that in southern Wisconsin, but I would definitely put it on par with Granite Peak in Wausau. Now, granted, it was a bit more expensive than places in northern WI and the UP that are significantly bigger, but I think that is probably due to its location: we met people from Illinois who could drive up for the day, but could probably not make it to the UP quite so accessibly 🙂

I don’t think I made it skiing at all last winter, so I was a little rusty, but it went pretty good for the most part. During the chairlift rides I was trying to find an example to teach Dave the meaning of yard sale, but wasn’t finding anything to my liking. So, I did what any responsible teacher would, and provided a live demonstration 🙂 I took a little jump near a chairlift post, and wound up with lots of cheering from the chair lift, and a perfect demo of the spirit of a yard sale, looking a little something like this:

Yard Sale
Photo from: familyskitrips.com, and does not actually contain me, because I was an idiot and forgot my cellphone in the morning… Sorry

A very good time, all in all, and they even had Starbucks in their lodge!

These Peppers Were Tasty

Peppers.jpg

It seems it has been a while since I posted anything here… life is moving along. Quite busily, lately. A lot more work than I really want to be doing, but nearly over. A couple assignments and a research project to go before break. Not too much to report… Set up Vista Media Center finally, after several months without a HTPC. Learning some more guitar in between other work. Jared and I are making the rounds of the local fish frys to find the best. Oh, and these peppers sauteed plus brat meat plus penne plus sauce makes a very tasty recipe that my Seattle roommate Casey made up. A nice break from mac-and-cheese and chicken-plus-miscellaneous box dishes!

Sooo Close…

1115072031.jpg

Good thing my flight out of Chicago was delayed by an hour… we got THIS close to taking off, when “air traffic control apparently has other plans” At least it looks pretty… this phone does it no justice.

That's a Lot of Storage

Let’s do some math:
Storage

That’s 180 + 160 + 160 + 500 + 160 + 500 + 500 = 2160. Roughly 2 TB. Much fun 🙂

(Granted, I’m actually going to put those 3 500GB’s in RAID 5 once this copy of Ubuntu finishes downloading, so I’m only adding about 931MB, and actually, I’m going to take the old drives out and run just on the RAID array so that my data is stored in case another drive fails, but still. It will be a lot of fun having a computer with 2TB of storage and 7 hard drives for a while :-D)

New Toys!

New Toys.jpg

I do so dearly love cabling… now we can hook Dave’s piano up to the computer for some MIDI-transcribing goodness, and when our SM57 arrives, hook that up too for some fancy recording. Now all I need is some free time!