I Wish…

I wish I had employees for my open source projects. I’d be all like:
You write the horrible, proprietary, undocumented database parser and output code. I’ll write the GUI.

Yea, that would kick ass.

Busy, Busy Weekend!

This weekend was a whirlwind of fun! On Saturday Jen, Victoria, Bryan, Alex as and I (hereafter referred to “the gang”) went shooting at Lake City. Jen came into town on part of a multi leg road trip around the country and Bryan did the same so we tried to provide entertainment 🙂

Shooting was a good time. Jen spent some time learning the USP 9 and Bryan went totally insane with the USP .40. I have to admit he’s far better with it than Alex and I are with our guns, and it’s only like his second time. I’d call it beginners luck but after a few hundred rounds that doesn’t really work.

Victoria tore up the range with the AR-15. She’s a natural with it and did some great groupings at 25 meters. Near the end of the day we all took turns with the AR-15 at 75 meters and one of us (probably Victoria) put a bullet into the metal stand that holds the target. See, at Lake City every 5 meters or so there are little pipes in the ground. You take this big metal thing made from about 3/4″ round iron and you walk it down range and stick it in the pipe you want to shoot for. So anyway, someone hit this thing with the AR-15 and the hole it made is incredible. The metal looked like it had “splashed”. It was almost all the way through the iron and literally looked like someone had dropped something into molten metal. There were little bits of copper laced into the hole too. It was killer. I can’t believe no one took a picture 🙁

After shooting it was time to relax for a while and get ready for the BBQ. Instead of relaxing I hopped over to Microcenter and picked up a 15GB iPod, finally! Since I am going to the gym every day, planning a lot of flights and generally had spare money laying around I finally gave in. Because I had such a busy weekend I have barely used it, but it’s a very sweet piece of hardware.

Next up was the BBQ at Shawn’s place. This is the second of the year and just like last time Shawn put on a hell of a good time. He made some awesome ribs, and we all pigged out. I made the first public debut of my homebrew (the Irish Red) and it went over pretty well. At least, I think it did. Everyone was probably just being nice to me.

Homebrew is kind of a pain in the ass… at least at my level. I take a 12 pack over and it’s all “Don’t pour the sediment. You have to use a glass. Please save the bottles.” and so on. It’s more trouble than it’s worth. The biggest problem is the sediment. That’s just got to go. Boulevard manages to filter their beer and still partially bottle carbonate, so I need to learn how to do that. Seeing a film of nasty on the bottom of the bottle is just not appealing and I don’t really expect people to go through some ordeal just to try my beer.

James told us during the week that he was going to take his family to the Omaha Zoo this weekend since it’s supposed to be like the 5th best zoo in the country and it’s handily 2 hours away. The topic came up at the BBQ and it turned into us deciding to get up early and head there ourselves.

I bailed out of Shawn’s place pretty early because the allergies were getting to me. Shawn and Christina keep about 19,000 cats and that’s just tooooo powerful for my little Claritin-D.

So Sunday morning it was 8:30 and we’re on the road to Omaha. The trip was uneventful except that Alex’s brand new A/C which he paid $900 for stopped working half way there. He’ll tell you more about that in bitter, angry detail on tessier.com if you’d like to hear it.

The zoo was awesome. Very huge, tons of animals and well laid out. It’s mostly indoors, which is different from the Kansas City zoo. Our zoo is a “zoological garden” which means it’s basically large areas of land that are “natural” and the animals inhabit it. The dangerous ones are locked up but it features stuff like kangaroos bouncing around the paths that you can walk up and cuddle. Anyway, Omaha Zoo was very cool. The aquarium was excellent. There was a glass tunnel through the shark tank so you could see the (lots of!) sharks from all sides. Lots of teeth in those things. We spent about 5 hours wandering the zoo and by the end we (I at least) were beat. We pretty much walked right past the hoovestock and missed the zebra altogher. Oh well, another time 🙂
If you have never been to the Omaha Zoo, and it’s close by, then go check it out. It’s well worth the day and the $9.

We made it back alive, and magically the A/C worked the whole way which was a great bonus.

I spent about 2 hours running all over the city looking for a copy of the new Harry Potter book and finally found one in Olathe and now I am typing this and going to bed!

All in all, a great weekend. I was busy every waking hour and even hours I didn’t want to be awake. This is a vast improvement over being bored out of my mind.

My pictures from the zoo are here
Jen’s pictures from her trip, including the zoo and a killer picture of me firing my USP with the ejected shell still in the air are here
Alex’s pictures from Saturday are here. His pictures of the zoo are not up yet but they’ll be at tessier.com pretty soon. They are sure to be similar in subject to mine, and much, much better in quality 🙂

The Mermen Are Coming!

I just noticed from their tour page that The Mermen are coming to Kansas City on July 1st. This is just so incredibly great that I can’t stand it. This is the first time they will have come to Kansas City since I started listening. What makes it even better is that I figured if I got any chance to see them this year it would be at Burning Man, but I don’t think I am going to be able to make it this year.
Hooray!

By the way, if you have never listened to The Mermen here is a recording of an older live show for a radio station. I’ve only listened to the first 10 minutes or so but it’s great.

Shooting in Clinton

On Sunday Victoria, Alex and I drove down to Clinton, MO for some unsupervised shooting. As far as I could find with the terrible resources there are on the Internet for this kind of thing that was the closest unsupervised range to us so off we went. Unsupervised is important because our intention was to finally get a chance to shoot some melons. We hate shooting paper. Anyway, there was this huge family with gramps, maw, sis and Little John all carrying around guns so we didn’t get a chance to be irresponsible much. We did get to do a little gangsta style shooting at close range after we saw someone else do it so that was fun. Alex and Victoria took some good pictures of the whole event. I didn’t take any because I was too busy blasting the hell out of anything I saw.

I’m Going Bald

Alex has the most incredible ability to take pictures of me that make me look like I am losing all my hair. I am of course; losing my hair, but I can’t see it! This must be why people comb over that one remaining strand and go around thinking they look shit hot.