I spent about an hour and a half out there, and I was actually amazed at how cool it was in there. It was damp though, and there were a lot of bugs around, but I didn’t get eaten up that bad. I’m gonna take the bug repellant next time, anyway.

I came home and chilled in front of my computer, mucking about with Mumble stuff for a bit. My screen started doing this going black for a half second, like the vga cable is loose or something – I hope the damn LCD isn’t going out, I like it too much.

As far as Mumble stuff going, I started putting together a clean version of Mutter. It’s a CLI administration tool I’ve been writing as a project to learn C++, and it’s slow going… I keep falling back into the same old way of doing things, and it’s probably pretty dumb doing them that way in C.

I did manage to learn about IO manipulators tonight, which is good because now I think I can mostly ditch printf() when I’m writing C++. So far so good, it compiles without any warnings, and I think it’s reasonably stable.

My goal is to get it compiled as a static linux binary, and included in the static linux server package, so that folks who can’t get Ice bound to PHP or Python for some reason can still have a method to do trivial management of their Murmur. There are many people out there who don’t need a full-blown web interface (most of it can be done from inside the Mumble client), they just might need to reset a user’s password or something from time to time.

So far I have a method to list virtual servers, methods for viewing and setting configuration directives, and that’s about it. I at least want to get the ability to trivially edit user accounts, and possibly a method to add/delete virtual servers, and then I’ll start working on cleaning up all the bugs.

Last year we got a pretty good deal on some “pro shells”, which at the time seemed totally worth it. It seemed like they went nearly twice as high and they were much louder – but when it came time to pop the money this year, we wimped out. We got a few cheap mortars and we’ll call that a night.

Sabs woke up early this morning to start baking and cooking – she fried up some chicken last night which smelled awesome. She’s currently working on some red white & blue independence day creamsicle cake, along with matching cupcakes.

Dinner should be good, Trevor’s barbecuing hamburgers and hot dogs. My only task thus far is to go out and sevin the lawn to curb the inevitable bug problem – which I haven’t started yet.

We went inside, checked in, and a few minutes later had to take him to the weight and measurement station. It’s a bit shitty that they don’t get him naked to weigh him (so we only know to within the average weight of a baby onesie how much he weighs), but he’s definitely put on a couple inches since birth.

Next it’s into the little room, stripping him naked and onto one of those fancy massage tables they always have with the parchment paper stretched out on them. He was a real good kid during this whole process, just chilled out on my lap until a couple minutes before the doctor came in and he wanted his Mom. The checkup went fine, we got a neat little printout of a graph showing his project with the various percentiles of average babies.

Next we had a giant wait for two nurses to get done at the same time and get ready to give him his shots. They finally came in, got him all ready, and then poked him in both legs at the same time. He screamed.

He screamed so long, he ran out of steam… his mouth gaping in a mute, breathless squeal for what seemed like an eternity before he realized he needed to breathe in and start the whole process again. Another prick in one leg, some kind of live vaccine in his mouth (which apparently tasted pretty good because it calmed him down a bit) and we were done. Got him dressed again, and he slept the whole way home.

We were reluctant to give him the generic Tylenol we bought… it’s only name-brand Tylenol that’s been pulled from the shelves but all these recalls just make me nervous. For the most part he handled it great though, he was a happy baby for about 5 hours after coming home, then he had about a four hour spat where he was pretty miserable, I got him to sleep again and then the next day he was fine… happy baby again.

Even the band-aids came off just fine.

Both our trucks have the flat type 7-pin trailer sockets on them, so we thought it’d be easiest just to stick a 7-pin plug on the trailer and wire it all up. No.

It turns out it was rather confusing, because there’s two color schemes for what’s pretty well a standard wiring layout for the plugs. At least, the wires that are in use on this little bitty trailer are all in the same spot.

But when I went to connect it up to Trevor’s truck, nothing works. Turns out, his truck was wired with all the wiring the same color as mine, but the plug they put on was for another color scheme. When they wired the trailer socket up, they just put “green wire” to “green screw” and called it a day – worse still, when I tried to rewire it, the entire corroded mess disintegrated.. so we had to pick up a new socket and wire it up.

Anyway, after that time it was well into the afternoon so we headed out to pick up the wood. The little bitty trailer isn’t good for much over about a ton, and this is some really great wood that’s quite dense so needless to say we couldn’t put much in it.

I’m not really the kind of guy who sits around and thinks about how to reduce belly fat, but sometimes I’ll play with my gut and just wish it were a bit smaller or flatter. Well, it was quite a workout lifting up those big-ass, un-split logs into the back of that damn trailer… specially considering that all the greenery has grown in at the woods, and it’s like a damn rainforest in there… so it felt like a sauna.

By the time we got done with it, there wasn’t quite enough wood left out there to warrant us coming back for a third load, so we left it. I was completely wrecked at that point, so we called it a night.

So Sabriena went ahead and started looking online, but apparently our local Pizza hut doesn’t do online orders… so we’ll have to drive out there and wait anyway. We went for a walk earlier, and we’ve been extending our walks so it’s not like a pizza here and there will make us explode… it’s kind of a waste of time searching for safe weight loss pills if you’re chugging down pizzas every day, but that’s not us.

The HTC Incredible looks to have almost everything I want – it just lacks a decent physical keyboard, but from what I’ve read… I think I can live without that.

It looks kinda like the Nexus One bred with a Hero, before stroking itself up with maxoderm and leaving my little WinMo phone crying in the corner of a prison cell. Everything I’ve read about this phone says it’s snappy, fluid, and runs great – battery life kinda sucks but hey, it can’t be any worse than my i760… and if it charges via USB I could plug it into my PC while I’m at it and I’d be ahead (Samsung’s older USB cables won’t charge via USB unless you buy an aftermarket one).

It’s still sorely lacking a Quicken app, but I’ve been reading up on Android development and I might just be able to make something that works. Watch this space!

But cheap auto insurance isn’t the only advantage, we’re also slowly getting our credit sorted out too.

After it didn’t perform so great, he commissioned me to build a new enclosure, which can be seen to the left. Sitting directly behind the single bench seat in the tiny cab of an F-150, this thing would shake your teeth out – not bad for a sealed enclosure!

Fast forward about 9 months or so, and he wound up getting a much better job and trading the F-150 in for a 1998 S-10 Blazer. The factory stereo was “acceptable”, so all the stereo equipment lay in his room unused until yesterday. Our initial plan was to use a speaker level to line level converter to steal RCA outputs from the factory head unit. I thought it’d make a really good Hungry Hacker article, so I took photos and documented everything.

I’d spent about two days doing research beforehand, so I thought I knew everything going in… apparently my research wasn’t quite good enough, because it turns out despite what it says on the box about “adding a subwoofer to a factory stereo system” the line level convertor (Scosche FAI-3A, for what it’s worth) wouldn’t exactly do what we wanted. No, as near as I can tell, it’s only any use for adding an aftermarket head unit to a vehicle with the “monsoon” style audio – where each speaker had it’s own mini amp and the “speaker” wires from the head unit carried line-level audio.

The reason being that the FAI-3A, when placed between the head unit and the speakers, reduces the speaker output to line-level as well. The signal still comes out, just really quiet. Aside from the above scenario I can’t really see what use it is for adding a sub to a factory audio system.

So we wound up tearing the factory head unit out, I busted out the soldering iron and we put the Xplod head unit in. A quick trip out to Bluffton to pick up an enclosure for the head-unit and we were putting things back together in short order.

The other trivial mistake I made was reversing the “battery” and “accessory” wires – I’m not entirely sure how I did that, but his head unit won’t hold memory for more than a few seconds of ignition-off… I’ll probably wind up fixing that on Thursday – hopefully this mistake doesn’t drain his battery, because he doesn’t have roadside assistance, he gets off work at about midnight and we have to be up for a doctors appointment at 6 tomorrow.

On Thursday the subwoofer should go in as well, assuming we can find a suitable place in the incredibly cramped firewall to safely run some 2ga cable through. Anyone who’s ever done a clean installation of a subwoofer in a second generation S-10 is welcome to email me with their ideas!

We got the office all sorted out, it’s got nice carpet and our computers are all hooked back up again. We had some real issues with cabling somehow, so I had to re-run a bunch of cat5 anew, and I ran the TV cable at the same time. We’ve got an HD converter box, and it was nice to sit around and watch the TV again, even if nothing’s on. We don’t miss the ads for phone chat lines, weight loss supplements and those god-damned bump-its, but hey… it’s free!

Our Linksys WRT54g died, so I spent a couple of days fixing up an old FreeBSD machine to act as a router… finally it seems like it’s working about how I want it to.

So now it’s time to turn the attention to the bedroom… Duncan’s crib is still full of his clothes, I need to finish Duck’s filter while I have the time. We still have a few things we need to pick up (mostly little stuff, nothing terribly important) and I have to go put the car seat in the car yet.

The clock’s ticking too, we’re full term now and he could come any day now.

Verizon keep bugging me about re-upping – apparently the idea of us not being on contract is terrifying to them – but honestly they don’t really have a phone I’d be interested in. Sure, they have the Droid – but it’s not quite as nice in many ways as the Nexus One.

My chief complaint with Android is that there still isn’t a Quicken-syncable app for it yet. There’s a few notable entries in the personal budget software category, but nothing that really seems to work well. Since we started using Quicken, we’ve not overdrawn once – so I’d say it’s paid for itself many times over.

Guess I’m stuck on WinMo for a while longer.