managing stress in a fast-paced world

I finally got WOL (wake-on-lan) working on my new home server! I picked up a Fry’s special like a year ago and have been just way too busy to build it. Also just recently there was a new bios update that allowed me to use the RAID card I had sitting around. Now I’ve got a few more TB’s of space and I can shutdown the server and bring it back up using my router to send a WOL packet. Saves energy and is good for the environment… gotta love the environment.

Sand Hill Road is currently having a power outage, the hot weather probably has something to do with it…

I guess $100 an hour for 17 hours in Vegas isn’t bad… I went to Vegas last weekend for a friends bachelor party. A group of 8 of us went, I actually got there about 2 hours before them and played blackjack until they arrived, won $200. The night was filled with limo rides and vip treatment at Sapphire, Prive, and Seamless. I guess at the peak of the night I spent like $400 in 30 minutes, but I did end up winning $400 total at the tables. I was actually hoping to win enough to pay for the flight, too bad I spent all the money I took with me and my winnings. On the bright side I didn’t touch an ATM or a credit card.

By 5:30am when it was time for me to head to the airport to go home, I had $40 left and couldn’t wait to leave. I’m too old to be partying in Vegas for 17 hours straight, by the time I go home I had $15 left and slept for the next 12 hours.

Maybe in another 10 years I’ll be up for doing something like this again.

A few weeks ago I was trying to use my Weber Q grill, it wasn’t happy… for a long time now only the front half of the rectangular burner would light. When I tried to use it, something was wrong, the grill was lukewarm and the flame was so low it would blowout sometimes.

Last night I took some simple green, couple of trash bags, a brush, a needle, a torch, a rag, and the hose to the grill. I read online somewhere that there is a safety valve on the Q and if you turn on the gas too quickly it boots into safe mode and limits the flow of propane. I opened the valve quickly and heard a “click” and the reproduced the problem. Open it slowly and it’s back to normal!

I scrubbed the outside and inside of the grill down, all the food droppings and stuff went into a bag and then a quick rinse with the hose and it was fairly clean. Next I poked all the clogged burner holes and tried to turn it all on again, no go. Eventually I used the torch and burned off all the oil and grease that had covered the burner and then poked the holes clean from the ash that remained. That did the trick, the burner lit all the way around!

Here’s where I got a little creative, I put the heat on high and a pan of water to steam clean the inside, it was pretty neat, alot more grease and grime came out the bottom and the grill was noticeably cleaner on the inside. I guess this is something I should do more often.

I don’t know what it was this morning, but it started when I pulled out from the garage, a car zoomed by the garage and scared the shit out of me, the lady driving it just looked at me as I stomped on the brakes only going like 5 mph.

Then going onto the freeway, I got cut off twice by the same BMW 335 in Los Altos, getting onto the freeway there was a long line so I went up Foothill Expressway, some jerk was blocking the right lane because he was trying to cut back into the left lane and bypass the long line for the freeway.

Immediately after getting on Foothill I got cut off by an Acura MDX, on the freeway, at Page Mill, a Jaguar refused to give me any room to merge on. A Ford Ranger truck almost changed lanes into me on 280 around Alpine Road…

I did make it safely into the office, but man what a horrible way to start the day.

I was out and about this morning in the TT, I started driving it again since the Lexus was in that accident. As I was driving around, I happened to be in a small caravan of converibles, both with their tops down, and it was below 50 degrees out. It was sunny though, so I put my top down too and man it was cold! but so much fun to drive around with a full head of hair in the wind.

I have 2 universal laptop power supplies at home, one of them is an iGo ice90, a 90-watt model. This went with my emachines laptop like 3 years ago, the cable broke, so I need a new cable and a tip if I want to use it with my new HP dv9700… of course the cable is $20 and the tip is $10.

Instead I bought a whole power supply off ebay for $30 shipped. Maybe it’s time to sell this universal one on ebay…

I got into a car accident about a week ago, it was actually really funny I thought. A woman rear ended me, I was waiting at a yield sign and she came up behind me. I think she was looking over her shoulder and saw a car coming and pretty much floored it thinking she’ll get in front of that car. Well there I was stopped waiting for that same car to pass before I merge. I was looking back and saw her coming straight at me, scary sight!

Anyways, after the accident I pull over and get out to go over and ask her “are you okay” to which she replies, “yea, but I’m really upset!” She asks me “how did you get in front of me?” To which I said, “well, I exited the freeway and you were behind me…”

So her car isn’t drivable and I suggested we swap insurance information. She asks me, “so whos fault is this?” I start to say, “well…..” and she says it’s not her fault… I tell her lets not try and assign blame right now, to which she said she thinks we should call the police. I’m more than happy to call the police at this point, I even lookup the number for her.

This is the funny part, she calls the police and an officer shows up, the first thing she asks him is “Officer, who’s at fault here?” the officer replies, “it’s your fault!”

So back to the point, I’m working with her insurance company and I went to their suggested shop, the estimator says the repairs are more than 80% of the value of the car so most likely they will just make an offer to buy my car.

I got a friendly email from American Express today, the subject was “Your 2007 Year-End Summary”.

It’s pretty neat, they summarized all the things I bought and money I spent over the year. It turns out I spend $35k on merchandise, and that accounted for 49% of my spending. It’s actually pretty freaky that I spent that much last year. Some of it must have been company expense that I “hopefully” got reimbursed for.