Rode this morning -WOOT

The things I pick up around the internet, LOL, I have never said woot. But it was a nice little ride this morning, just a little dog stress. Dad volunteered to get feed today so I was able to relax a bit afterwards instead of hustling to get the errand done and get to work.

And I must pat myself on the back for finding the typo in the password protected archived file to fetch some data. I do NOT understand why M does not put the password into a file to make sure she doesn't get typos when she archives. The archive perl script makes you type a password twice but I know I can repeat a typo 2 or 3 times. Oh well I cant enjoy any snark because dummy me has had a long habit of always using the backup io machine to push data for post processing. Only the backup io machine does not collect data from one of the big download centers. Surprisingly this has not bitten me until the last few days of my oct and my nov post processing. BUT I did not catch that I was missing data back at the end of December when I was doing the processing. Only just now when I thought I would launch processing for December.

And can I quietly fix my mistake and still start Dec processing over the weekend. Oh heck no. The software 'guru' dinked around sometime and broke things on the post processing batch CPU. So time to see if I broke the ground based stuff. I hope not, I want to go home soon.

I THINK I want to ride a lot this summer ....

But I have not been getting my big butt in gear and riding. Have been letting the weather/footing and darned dogs push out riding. I have taken the dogs for a run every day but wednesday and did at least get an ok walk myself today but I need to ride, and I need to be more focused at work. Okay whine over.

Folks who watched thought the Republicans made some good points at Barry's Health care summit. I wonder how much video editing etc the MarxSpewMedia will apply to spin it as the Dems care about people and the R's only care about money. Always it is left unsaid that those poor hurting people's kids and grandkids will be screwed if the Dem's keep spending money they haven't even extorted from other people yet.

Anyone want a free overly friendly dog?

I was about ready to shoot dad's dog on saturday morning. He ran off to play with the neighbors dog in the 15 minutes I was getting grain ready for the horses. Then when I grabbed my car keys and went looking for him he and the neighbors dog he ran over to visit were running around and the neighbor kids couldn't call their dog. Arrghhhh. I put a leadrope on Ole and ran him on leash through the window 1/2 a mile and then made him drag the leash and took him about 3 miles. At least he was then content to sleep on the couch the rest of the day. So yesterday I took him and Mia for a run before I grained the horses and I've been putting the lead rope on him when I feed. Today I took the dogs for a run, and while I was walking along thinking, I realized Mia had already turned for home. Between the two of them they are REALLY turning me into a cat person.

I didn't ride all weekend. We got about 4 inches of fluffy snow. Snow was fluffy because it was pretty cold out. I did however get to fix fence yesterday. I don't blame the horses for this though; just the crappy fencing. On MY property corners are going to be H-braced. Stupid slant posts with a bitty ground stop do not hold up long term. My temporary fix is even more half a$$ed as I just pounded in a steel T-post to take the place of post that had been tugged out of post hole. The post doesn't look like its damaged at all, its like it just popped out. Probably the post was not set as deep as it should have been as well as not being a good H brace. I'll have to talk dad into drilling that hole over and drilling another one so I can H brace it --when the weather is warmer. In the meantime its is 'only' a dividing fence. Actually I am thinking that I may try to hire someone to fix up that pasture fence. I really don't want to mess with it.

Well at least I rode a little bit yesterday

The zinc was working and the thursday morning forecast did predict at least the snow through today + highs only in 30's for the weekend so I figured I better get out there. Now it is sounding like there is another snow system moving in so I'm really not likely to want to try to ride. I am going to have to start upping distance on my weekday morning rides soon. March in CO is usually even more iffy for counting on weather allowing a good ride on the weekend.

HooBoy --Llano Estacado ride is Jun 5-6

Thats the Amarillo Tx ride entry I won in the raffle. I thought it was a september ride. I'm going to have to be serious with training this spring to get ready for it. Good incentive I guess, I need to be well into a training pgm for the Shamrock ride 4 weeks later if I want to ride all 3 days this year. Good thing I got curious now, I would have been howling if I had waited till late july to check when it was to make plans.

I'm so thankful McCain lost in 2008

Even as Obumble/Reid/Pelosi but especially Obumble do more damage to the west and find new ways to ignore the constitution and seek to trap more people in a cycle of government dependency I pause and think: God was right, I was wrong. Yes I think a McCain administration would not have been so idiotic in foreign policy, would not have mirandized the Nigerian knicker bomber etc etc. And he wouldn't have appointed Sotamayor to the supreme court.

But I don't think McC would have vetoed the porkulus, its possible that Reid and Pelosi would have crafted a 25% health care takeover bill and I doubt McC would have vetoed that. He was(possibly still is) an AGW believer so I'm sure he would have signed a carbon taxing bill if Reid/Pelosi had focused on that which they might have done --Obumble wanted HCR even though he of course didn't lift a finger to craft it. He doesn't know how to do such a thing, he's coasted his whole life after all.

But anyway we would still have had a lot of bad legislation passed or in the pipeline and people who inform themselves only by watching an alphabet news show and maybe a bit of newspaper reading would be associating the crap with McC and the republican party. The tea party movement might still have happened but would there be the widespread anti-incumbency fever that will help some smaller government candidates actually get elected? I think not, the couch potato citizen would just be cursing McC and the GOP and would probably be swinging more towards the 'opposition party' even though congress writes the bills and establishes the national budget.

But my prayers were answered 'NO.' 52% of the voters (or should I say 22% since a scary big percentage want to try full socialism here) did not recognize BHO before the election and his heart was not turned to be less anti-western, anti capitalist, anti-constitution of the U.S. And this bitter medicine may save our relatively young country, but old republic. They say republics or dynasties historically have about a 200 year lifetime. Perhaps longer lifespans have shifted us to last 234 years but the U.S. was sliding towards the end, and may still slide into failure but the public has been given the gift of seeing the big lie that is progressivism/socialism and has a chance to turn back to the ideals that have historically made our country the desired destination for entrepreneurs from around the world.

Nooooo I don't want to get a cold or flu bug

But I have two early symptoms. Mild throat irritation, and itchy watery eyes after modest amounts of reading. Sure hope zinc and 'hot stuff' will do their thing and reduce severity and duration. Watch me get a knockdown flu bug that puts me back on the 'get the darned flu shot' path for another few years. Oh well whatever will be will be.

In other fun news I had to increase the window for my clock solutions today. Results from the sat-tues. showed 5-6 orbits that failed because they were looking for a 6.5-7 hr span of clock solutions and I was only generating 6 hour windows. So now I may find myself adding another layer (yay that means another point of possible failure /sarcasm) to the process and making 2-3 hour solutions and combing them to cover 8-10 hours (or possibly combining solutions as needed to span each satellite dump period; LOL I am so bad for writing stuff in here that only I have the background information to understand. Oh well I'm not pretending to be a blog general consumption, just too lazy/contrary to close the blog off from the public.

End of the 3-day weekend.

Hmmm, what was I going to journal again? Feel so sleepy. I'm popping zinc again because I woke with a sore throat, and even though it mostly went away after my tea I still kind of felt like that starting to get a cold feeling. I haven't taken any on an empty stomach and not feeling any tummy rebellion so hopefully I can give the germs heavy metal poisoning and stay healthy. I think I'll take the hot stuff tonight also. I am feeling a bit stuffy now. I drank the last of my Grand Mariner after flavoring a batch of fudge. I must have put in more last batch because I couldn't taste it. Oh well chocolate is supposed to be the main flavor, not being able to taste the mariner is not a problem, I just still have not remembered to buy vanilla and figured I would add a little something extra. So one batch got a tablespoon+ of Mariner, and one batch got 1.5 tablespoons of rum. I still have to buy a bunch of stuff to fill the large size box. Maybe I'll stop at a Safeway and get some jerky. Target doesn't have much for jerky and I have not sent any jerky and not much roasted nuts to my newest soldier. I've been attempting home-made goodies and I think the fudge is passable but I can probably gear up for more protein and salty snacks.

I never did ride Razz this weekend. The breeze was cold yesterday so I wimped out on any riding and today I rode Shade in the paddock and my legs felt too tired to try riding Razz as well. Possibly I'll try to ride him tomorrow. If I want to build up riding muscles I've got to keep at it. Hopefully I wont get sick and the 4 day work week will go by smooth and quickly. I did get my rings sewn on my barefoot saddle yesterday and rode in it today. Feels like it still needs a tweak, but I'll ride more miles in it, the only thing I could tweak w/o major production is the thickness of my cantle padding. I'd make it thinner than what I have right now, but it more felt like the saddle was a bit downhill than that the seat was too short. So maybe I need a bit more wither padding under the saddle or maybe I just need to get used to it. I think I'll try to hang my picture. That project has been stalled for over 2 weeks as well.

Made out like a bandit at the MRER convention

I bought $44 raffle tickets and got 3 ride entries (traded one in AZ for some Dynamite pro-biotics and E/Se supplements for the horses) + a pair of half chaps and fly sheet. And a nice polar fleece lined wind breaker for Shade and I being 4th FW pair.

One of the entries I kept is for a very local ride I intended to enter anyway and one is for a Sep. ride in the TX panhandle, that I have thought of attending before but never got ducks in a row to do it. The free entry is a great excuse to go for it. I do like to explore a new ride or 2 during the season as well as enjoying a few favorite rides.

It did snow early this morning but we barely got an inch and the sun is shining so I will probably ride Razz a bit and play at my Equitation this afternoon. I need to see if I can find rings and sew some on my barefoot saddle, that project has been sitting ignored in the porch for too long.

gripe gripe gripe

Need to head to bed soon. Feel cranky rather than sleepy though. Stupid facebook changed their pages. Now they are showing me stuff my friends posted on their friends' pages. Umm, if it was already a mutual friend situation I'd have the friend in my list. I don't want to eavesdrop on other peoples interactions. Ick. Maybe I'll have to go to full FB from FB lite to customize. Great I hated getting all the stupid farmville type requests. I liked quick updates and the like button for being polite when I dont have anything intelligent to say in response to a post. If they added a sympathy button it would be even better.

Wasted too much time at work today but my new software mod is running and working for the orbit group stuff. Took mom's car to be serviced. Got my walking in which is good. But man I miss my prius I wrecked in 2008 after driving hers today. I chose to get a several years old econo box saturn SL rather than making car payments and paying extra for collision coverage for a replacement commuting vehicle --and I got the nice F350 this summer. But dang mom's prius felt so much smoother, and more powerful than my neglected little SL, made me miss mine.

Made it through hump day ...

Or pretty much. I'll head home within 15 minutes. I survived my talk today. 6 whole slides included cover. But it was good to shake up my routine a bit. Tomorrow I think I will hay the horses and then slowly enjoy a mug of coffee while web surfing. Tuesday I had a health fair blood sample taken, so had to skip breakfast and just stuck to tea for morning beverage. I like cream in my coffee. Even just tea on an empty stomach had me feeling like I was ready to retch driving in, as well as feeling light-headed. Then I ate too much at lunch because I was still hungry even after having a bagel at 10:15 for my late breakfast.

Today I had to leave by 7:30 am. Yeah eye roll, I know that is not early by general standards but I like to leave around 10:30-11:30 am and work through the evening, anti-social hermit that I am. I set my alarm and got up before 5:30 so I had time for coffee, waiting for it to get light out before I fed the horses their hay. I was even browsing the net with my coffee but its nicer when there is morning news to read instead of catching bits missed the day before.

I probably won't get on a horse until sunday, unless it feels really nice tomorrow or friday. Saturday is the regional endurance convention. I hope I feel more in the groove than I have the last 2 years. They have good speakers and maybe I'll connect with some folks to plan some spring 'riding dates' Meeting and riding with someone away from home usually gets me motivated to get more serious with riding and Shade enjoys it too.

Well that was anti-climatic

The sys admin turned things on when the RAID was 65% finished building and all the processing 95% just came back on its own; my big contribution was submitting one job which had failed because when crontab kicked it off it only had about 10 sites out of 60. That network gets data via LDM from a different CPU and I had stopped LDM until the sys admin redid the NFS mount to it from the LDM server. Gaa this is long.

It was good that processing started on its own because he had disabled logins on RAID server so I could not have fixed anything on it. It combines solutions that are computed separately from 4 networks and makes plots in addition to being the RAID server.

I rode Shade today. I think she is developing the muscling to travel in a rounded frame. That is YAY, thankfully she is doing this with some work in the paddock and me staying out of her way; I do not feel like I can get my lower leg on her to ask her to round when she is going faster than a walk. I am such a flabby noodle, sighhhhhh. Oh well as long as she doesn't need more than a bit of contact from my calf, and being a wee bit bored instead of excited due to being in the paddock its ok; I only need to ride well enough not to hinder her for doing endurance, its not like I was planning to hang a shingle as a dressage exerciser. I think my water is ready for the pasta. My big weekend cooking --making pasta with jarred sauce + browned sausage instead of just microwaving a frozen entree.

Oh crud -- RAID just failed at work

Crud is not the word I'm thinking but no sense being vulgar in the title. We are having RAID fun at work this week. Monday we switched back to our old raid server from a unit borrowed from the sister group. Well it was painful, NFS was off in some way only sys admins understand and it made all the processing slow because disk writes etc were taking forever. It got into a loop of too many timeouts and failed early tuesday morning -so the sys admin managed to switch NFS back to the borrowed raid remotely on his day off and processing was easy to restore.

Today the sister group had lunch out and then a meeting at the pub, and I was dinking around in an ate too much fog (I skipped beer with lunch but it didn't help much) I tardily checked on the routine processing and found the RAID failure at 3:20 pm. Its not so bad for me since I come in and work late anyway but that is horrible timing to announce a big fat problem to the sys admin who likes to come in and LEAVE early. Ugh ugh ugh.

Now I'm spinning my wheels. Stressed that I didn't catch things in better time but with no action that I can take on the immediate problem, I have to wait until the sys admin decides whether he thinks he can fix the failed RAID quickly or would prefer to switch the processing CPU's to looking at the old RAID. I hope I can get things going tonight so I can enjoy saturday. We are supposed to get some snow and a big dose of COLD air sunday-tuesday, then wednesday I'm committed to attending a workshop and have to arrive in Boulder extra early.

Redneck: how to groom a cat

The cat likes being curried but she was itchy restless today so it was fun trying to get the camera pointed and push the button while she was in one spot today.

You might be a redneck if ......

Your dog brings home his own chewies and they look like this.

I survived monday ...

But it took lots of coffee, decongestant, aleve@tm, and tylenol@tm to drive off the headache I woke with. We attempted to revert back to a RAID and server that failed last summer yesterday. I was at work 11 hours and then worked at it at home for another hour, didn't hit the sheets till nearly 1AM --hey don't laugh I am over the hill and don't stay up that late. Then when I checked it before feeding the horses this morning it had gone down around 6 am. Thankfully the sys admin was able to switch it back to the 'temporary' raid we've been using since august and all I had to do was revert back to my cron job from early yesterday when it had still been the primary server to put things to right today. But I'm coasting for a bit before tackling some plots I need to make for a talk next week.
I rode Razz and Shade on the weekend, both rides just in the paddock. Dad took the dogs for a run on saturday and I took them with car/walking on sunday. Shade's walk is getting better and she is doing a rounded trot pretty readily. I felt closer to being able to get some lower leg contact at the trot, I'm experimenting, seems like if I let my leg go a bit forward to her girth groove I can use it better at the trot. My guru gave me a link of her trotting and I noticed her lower leg was a bit more forward so I decided if I need to have a bit forward leg to be effective that is better than having my heel aligned with my hip but the leg is flopping.