Work, YT, Bump, Dinner, TV
By Derek | February 28, 2020
A Decent Friday. (28th)
Regular work day for me. Very productive day. Helped quite a bit with a DC migration.
Discovered Gangnam Style (metal cover by Leo Moracchioli) and Bee Gees music over North Korean marching.
After work, Jill and our younger son and I left the house to pick up our older son and his wife, so they could join us for my birthday dinner. I had decided to eat at Salsalito’s Mexican, so we drove there.
On the way there, while parked at a stop light, the lady behind us bumped Jill’s car. We pulled into a little convenience store parking lot to exchange information. It took some doing, but we finally got her ID information. She was acting very strange, and kept insisting that she “hadn’t done anything” — like she didn’t remember hitting our car. It was a very weird situation, luckily I had captured her license plate, and a photo of her, because she ended up driving off without giving us her insurance information. Not sure what to do, we ended up calling the San Antonio Police Department non-emergency number and waiting for a cop to show up. The way she was acting, it seemed like she was uninsured. He told us that as long as she identified herself (she had provided a picture of her ID to Jill) that everything was cool, and he gave us a police report, which included her insurance info and everything.
So, that took about an hour out of our evening, but we finally made it to the restaurant, and had a good dinner.
Once we got home, we watched a few episodes of Phineas and Ferb while I exercised, then we went to bed.
Topics: Auto, Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Me, TV, Work | No Comments »
Work, Birthday, Lunch, Pokemon
By Derek | February 27, 2020
Birthday Thursday. (27th)
Regular work day for me. I didn’t end up taking today off for a couple of reasons. First, with my birthday being in the middle of the week, there was little value in taking a day off, and second, I was sick a couple of weeks ago, and already had to take almost an entire week off this early in the year.
Helped our lead engineer on my primary product with a couple of projects this week. I’ve been getting more into the engineering side of things recently on this product, due to some help being needed.
Jill and our younger son came up to work, and brought me lunch, to sit and eat with me for my birthday. That was nice!
After work, headed home, picked up our older son to take him to work, and ended up playing Pokemon Go the entire time he was at work (nearly two hours).
We were trying to battle one of the “leaders” Cliff. Man, he’s tough. You have to really understand what his monsters powers are, choose opposing monsters, that are very strong, but have the appropriate powers to defeat his monsters. It took me about 30 battles to figure it out. I finally ended up beating him with MewTwo (Confusion/PsyStrike), Metagross (Bullet Punch/Meteor Mash), and Scizor (Fury Cutter/Iron Head). Jill tried using the same monsters with the same powers to beat him, but she couldn’t do it, even after pumping up her monsters to much higher level (using up all of her monster candy for them, and using a ton of stardust). To be fair, my monsters are more powerful than hers, she would probably fare better if her monsters were stronger. Honestly, I don’t really like this part of the game, because it’s _very_ difficult, but we have “research tasks” to complete to get this done, which are like quests.
Anyways, we picked our older sone up from work, took him home, and headed home.
I exercised, then ate dinner, then I had to work on a customer’s computer before we went to bed.
We didn’t do anything for my birthday, we’ll do that another day.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Food, Games, Health, Me, Work | No Comments »
Work, Pic, Laundry
By Derek | February 26, 2020
A busy Wednesday. (26th)
Regular work day for me. As usual, starting my work week on Wednesday makes the first few hours a wash, what with having to catch up on mid-week Slack conversations, and loads of email. I generally don’t get productive until after noon. Maybe that’s just normal for a “Monday” — Wednesday is my Monday at work, after all. I don’t remember actual Mondays being that bad, but maybe they were. I always just feel so behind starting my week later than everyone else. Of course, that’s a double-edge sword, because I really enjoy having three days off in a row every week.
I forgot to post the picture I took of our banana bread oatmeal. Sorry. It was very yummy.
After work, Jill and our younger son and I took our older son to work, then immediately left for the laundromat. Jill had already spent most of the day sorting and bagging our dirty laundry. Our washer went out a couple of weeks ago, and we’ve been hand washing the essentials, but we got tired of that, and decided to visit the laundromat.
We ended up with something like 16 loads of laundry, so we spent a ridiculous amount of money washing and drying them.
We got done just in time to pick up our older son from work, dropped him off at his apartment, then headed home to sort, fold and put away our laundry.
I almost forgot to exercise, and we almost forgot to eat dinner, we were so busy.
We didn’t finish until after 1am, then off to bed.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Me, Photos, Work | No Comments »
Sleep, Customer, Regionals Invite, Martial Arts, Dog Food
By Derek | February 25, 2020
A good Tuesday. (25th)
Since I was still exhausted, Jill let me sleep late. She had to get up and take our daughter-in-law to an interview. She’s got several interviews this week, which is great.
When I woke up, I had missed a call from my customer I visited yesterday. She needed me to come back and work some more on her system. She’s preparing to migrate email providers and we’re getting her all set up for it. Spent a couple of hours working on it, but more to be done next week.
Got back home in time to meet a new family that is interested in our robotics program.
We had robotics today, and we waited until everyone was here to tell them that both the elementary and middle school teams were invited to compete at regionals, in Hutto, TX, next month. Exciting news, we had just gotten the emails earlier in the day.
So, the kids worked on their robots, and us adults planned out the next few weeks, and discussed logistics for the competition.
After robotics, we took our younger son to martial arts, and dropped him off, so that we could go pick up some dog food. The only place that sells it locally is Tractor Supply. We tried ordering it on Amazon once, and it came full of bugs. Ew.
We picked him up, and went to take our older son to work, then came home and had leftovers for dinner.
After we took our older son home from work, we came home, and I got to exercise. I hadn’t gotten to this morning. We watched some Phineas and Ferb while I exercised, then got ready for bed.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Health, Me, Robotics, Technology, TV | No Comments »
No Sleep, Customer, Carrack, Movie
By Derek | February 24, 2020
Monday. (24th)
I didn’t fall asleep at my sleep study until around 3:30am, since they were making me go to sleep without my CPAP. I’ve been on a CPAP for over 10 years now, and I just couldn’t fall asleep. Of course, the sleep study only lasted until 4:30am, so they didn’t have enough time to put me on a machine and start testing pressure. Which means I’ll have to go back for a second sleep study, as soon as my doctor evaluates the results.
Of course, since I couldn’t sleep, Jill couldn’t sleep either. We were both exhausted, and we came home and went back to sleep, around 5:30am. I had to get up around 8am to be at a customer’s office at 9:30am, which was really hard for me, as I had basically only had 3 hours of sleep.
I completed the work that could be completed for my customer in time to go eat lunch with Jill and our younger son, before his art class.
After his art class, we came home and played Star Citizen for a bit. We got to play in the Test Universe (PTU) so we got to check out the new ship, the Carrack ( https://starcitizen.tools/Carrack ). Man, that thing is so nice.
Of course, I was still exhausted so we only played for a few hours.
After that, we took our older son to work, and then watched Pitch Perfect 2 again.
Once we got our older son home from work, it was well past our time for bed.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Games, Health, Me, Movies, Photos, Star Citizen | No Comments »
Slept, Instant Pot, Bread Not Bread, Sleep Study
By Derek | February 23, 2020
A good Sunday. (23rd)
Slept in a bit, still recovering from yesterday.
Exercised, still doing that every day. Showered and headed downstairs to eat. Grabbed some cereal and started getting out the ingredients to make the Instant Pot banana bread, started around 1pm.
Jill had to help me find all the ingredients, some of them we don’t use often. Between doing some dishes, making space on the counter and gathering the ingredients, we spent over an hour just prepping to make the bread.
Got all the ingredients together and got the dough mixed. Put it in the spring form bread pan I bought specifically for this, then put it all in the Instant Pot.
Unfortunately, I forgot to cover the bread pan with foil. After 50 minutes under pressure, and at least as long waiting for the natural release, it was still not “bread”. So we covered it, and put it back in the Instant Pot for 15 minutes pressure. After 20 minutes of natural release, it still wasn’t “bread”. We poured it into a Pyrex dish and put it in the oven at 350° for another half hour.
We pulled it out, and it still wasn’t bread. At this point, we had “cooked” it for 95 minutes and it had set for nearly as long. It had the consistency of oatmeal. It was already 5:30pm, and since I had a sleep study later tonight we decided to just eat it anyway.
So we had left over pizza and some yummy banana bread-flavored oatmeal for dessert.
Jill’s niece came over to stay overnight with our younger son, she brought her kids, so they all fired up Rock Band on XBox.
We left for my sleep study just before 8pm. They had a nice comfy recliner for Jill to stay in.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Me, Recipe | No Comments »
Robotics, Nap, 80s Music Videos, Tribute
By Derek | February 22, 2020
A great Saturday. (22nd)
We attended a robotics competition today, and our middle school team got third place overall!
We were there most of the day, when we came home, we were exhausted, and ended up taking about a 3 hour nap.
After we woke up, we watched about 3 hours of 80s videos on Apple Music on our Apple TV. We ended up reading up on Wikipedia about a ton of our favorite 80s bands, and discovered the Nashville Outlaws, a Motley Crue tribute album. If you like either 80s metal, or country music, give it a whirl. It’s definitely interesting.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Health, Me, Music, Robotics, Technology | No Comments »
Work, PC, Drobo, TV
By Derek | February 21, 2020
A good Friday. (21st)
My 8TB hard drive showed up super early, even before I left for work. Thanks, Amazon, for the prompt delivery, but that’s a bummer, ’cause I want to install it before I leave, but I don’t have time.
Regular work day for me. Worked on my primary product. Got a bunch of work done on the restore issue we were having.
Jill brought me lunch today, which was so nice. Yummy Teriyaki from the Japanese place across from my work.
Also, I took my younger son’s previous PC to work today for another Racker. He was given one a couple of weeks ago that was better than his, so I took his case, motherboard, processor and RAM into the office to pay it forward.
My coworker appreciated the system, she’s been wanting to put together a new gaming system. She needed to run to Altex to buy a new video card and power supply. Of course, the video card that she wanted was a bit larger than would fit comfortably in the case, so she ended up buying a new case, as well. She also made a deal with my boss to buy a spare (new) SSD drive he had laying around for the system, so I helped her get Win10 and her video drivers installed.
Once I got home, I snapped the 8TB drive into the Drobo, removing one of the 6TB drives. It says it needs ~55 hours to rebuild. It usually goes a bit quicker than the initial estimate.
I got my exercise done, I’m still doing recumbent bike every day, sometimes in the morning, which I prefer, but if we stay up too late, then I don’t get it done in the morning, and I have to do it in the evening.
Jill and our younger son and I all watched the latest episode of Star Trek Picard, ate dinner, and then just relaxed for a bit. Tomorrow is going to be a busy day, with a Robotics competition.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Friends, Health, Me, Technology, TV, Work | No Comments »
Corvette, Work, Chili, Mom
By Derek | February 20, 2020
A good Thursday. (20th)
Forgot to mention I took some pics of a really cool corvette while at Frys the other day.
Busy day at work.
We had a chili cook off, that I participated in. I didn’t win, but got some good compliments on my chili, and some good feedback, too. More jalapeños was the answer. I hadn’t put any in. There were some really, really good chilis there.
Also, my primary product was having an issue that affected a small percentage of our customer’s restores, and we worked today to understand what was happening.
Our younger son had martial arts, so Jill took him before I got home from work, then we left as soon as they got back to go take our older son to work.
Honestly, I had forgotten to call my Mom for her birthday, so I called my Dad, but my mom wasn’t home yet, he asked us to call back in a little while.
We left the house again to go pick up our older son from work, and called my mom and we all chatted a bit before she had to go, since they’re getting up early tomorrow to go on a trip.
Got home and exercised, then worked on a customer’s computer remotely.
Once done with that, time for bed.
Topics: Auto, Entertainment, Family, Food, Me, Photos, Work | No Comments »
Drobo, Work, RackerGamers, Chili
By Derek | February 19, 2020
A good Wednesday. (19th)
Ordered a new larger hard drive for the Drobo last night, really late, though. An 8TB to replace one of the 6TB drives that’s in it, from Amazon, hopefully it’ll be here Friday.
Regular work day for me. Back in the office, after last week’s flu. Still coughing just a bit, but I have cough drops, so that’s ok.
The new business cards for RackerGamers came in, and it’s pretty good timing, as we announced our official 501(c)(3) status yesterday!
Got some good work done today, a few minor edits to my documentation project, and the rest of the day spent on my primary product.
Went home and made chili for tomorrow’s work cook off, our younger son helped me get all the ingredients out, and organized to put into the chili. I walked him through all of the steps, as it really isn’t that difficult. In fact, the hardest part (for me) is cutting up the onion. Maybe next time I should just use the Ninja to shred it.
Jill had to go take our older son to work since I was watching the chili, but we went together to go pick him up before bed.
Topics: Entertainment, Family, Food, Health, Me, Photos, RackerGamers, Work | No Comments »