The Franco-Taiwanese Alliance

Alice and I failed twice to go to the corn maze this weekend.  Sucktastic!  We’re going to try again on Thursday night, and hope that there are no crowds (and no inclement weather).

Luckily, it was a productive weekend in other aspects.  We got some errands done, I fixed the Camaro’s electrical problem (I think), and I got some paint thinner to try and fix the faucet in our backyard.  The faucet doesn’t seem to want to be fixed, but ah well.  It’s covered in paint from when the apartment complex got painted over with sprayers, so my shiny hose that I bought can’t thread tightly onto the faucet.  Sucktastic again!

It was a good weekend for video games, too.  I got a bit of Final Fantasy Tactics in, carved through Portal (I’m addicted to the ending credit song, by the way), and played some Team Fortress 2 with Ryan.  TF2 is good fun… anybody want to join us in playing online?  James?

We also watched Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, as well as last week’s Heroes episode, which catches us up.  This presents the problem, of course, that now we have to wait for a new episode to air every week  Sucktastic the third!  KHAAAAAAAAN!

I have corn muffins.  That will be all.

Alice and I went to the gym today.  I did:

• 3 x 12 x 35lbs dumbbell press
• 3 x 10 x 25lbs dumbbell curl
• (2 x 10) + (1 x 4) dumbbell lift (what are these actually called?)
• 1 x 10 x 40lbs shrugs
• 3 x 10 x 20lbs leg extensions
• 2 x 20 decline situps
• 1 x 10 x 25lbs weighted decline situps

and then I ran half a mile.  Not too bad, if I do say so myself.

Wyotech has continued its trend of being boring, but informative.  We’re currently learning about practical electrical testing and diagnosis with breadboards and DMMs and the like.  I’ve always been afraid of electricity, since I never really understood it, so this is really good for me.

Riding April around for the past couple of days has felt completely awesome.

I’m horny.

Neither April nor Faye are fixed yet.  It’s been back to the boring classroom for the past couple of days at school.  And even with something like 2/3 of my day dedicated to “doing something”, I’m still restless for something real to do.  I itch.  I’m not exactly sure what it is I’m itching for.

On the upside, I’m on expensive meds at the moment that might cure two slight health problems I’ve had for about a year… I’m on proton pump inhibitor to reduce gastric acid production, which hopefully will stop my chronic heartburn and allow the flappy thing in my throat to heal, thus making it so that I don’t feel like something’s stuck in my throat for hours after every meal.  I’m also on some strong-as-hell anti-fungal foot lotion, to try and get rid of a mystery skin-peeling thing that’s afflicted only my left foot.  Also, Alice has garnered me some gym-buddies!  So between those two facts, perhaps my health can improve.  Not that it’s bad or anything.

This sucks… there are a bunch of games out now (Orange Box, Crysis, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, World in Conflict, Final Fantasy Tactics: The War of the Lion, Odin Sphere (though that one’s not that recent), etc.) or that are coming out in the near future (Disgaea: Afternoon of Darkness, Hellgate: London, the Neverwinter Nights 2 expansion, Guitar Hero 3, Rock Band, etc.) that I really want to play.  This is, of course, in addition to unfinished games I already have, and older games I want to acquire and play.  But even if I could afford all of these, I really shouldn’t… and even if I did, I don’t really have time to play them much.  I’m already sleepy as hell from stretching myself too thin every day.  5-6 hours of sleep isn’t catastrophically low, but it leaves me lethargic for the entire day, pretty much every day.  But if I sleep more, then I wouldn’t have time after Wyotech to cook, clean, hang out with Alice (sexually), watch Star Trek: The Next Generation and Heroes, play a bit of video games, and generally have a life.

Speaking of Wyotech, though, our second day of shop time today went pretty nicely.  I added a GM 5.7L V8 (not an LS1… LT1?  My partners thought it came out of a truck) and a 13B rotary to the list of engines I’ve cracked open and reassembled, although the 13B struggled mightily against the “reassembled” half of that process.  I thought those things were supposed to be simple!

The status of my own vehicles, of course, continues to fluctuate.  Faye has been having issues… a fluctuating idle that I thought was intake-related.  This morning, however, she completely died upon attempted startup, with all lights and gauges vanishing into the darkness.  She started up after a couple more tries, again with the wobbly idle, so now I think it’s a loose electrical connection somewhere.  Because THAT won’t be hard to track down.  In good news, however, Mister Awesome Man Dirty Dan has apparently successfully fixed April… if this is truly the case, then I can start riding the shit out of her all over the place.  Yay!

Wyotech is pretty fun, I suppose.  We just got into the shop today after a week of boring-as-hell classroom time, in which I have to put up with about 40 trouble-making numbskulls and about 10 decent people… such is the demographic of my classmates.  It’s okay, though… I get to hear fun stories from the instructors about various experiences they’ve had working on cars, and today I got to rip apart and reassemble a 4G64.

Heavenly Sword is fairly fun, and really pretty (even if Alice can’t tell the difference between God of War II on an SDTV and Heavenly Sword in 720p on a 42″ plasma).  It’s frustrating at times, though, but that’s mostly just my general frustration with action games in general.  They aren’t very intuitive to me, and I get frustrated at things that I don’t pick up very easily right away.  The other part of my frustration with it is the shooting segments, where you shoot things from a first-person view, and then “aftertouch” them to their targets.  That frustration went away, though, as soon as I switched off the motion sensor control of aftertouch.  Good job, Sony, your little gimmick is more annoying than it is fun. 

I feel the urge for RPGs of any sort.  I hear Neverwinter Nights 2’s expansion is coming out relatively soon, and fixes a lot of the UI issues that made me stop playing the original game about half an hour in.  I’ll probably give that a shot….  Also, Final Fantasy Tactics for the PSP is out.  I loved the original game, and this remake supposedly has lots of added bits that make it even better.  Who doesn’t love SRPGs?  Not me.

I just had a pretty decent game of Supreme Commander with Ryan… us against two Supreme AI.  We got creamed in short order the first time, but got our revenge the second time, with the assistance of T1 bomber-rushing on one of the two AI to take him out of the running early.  The rest of the game amounted to us stalling the other AI with suicidal base attacks while teching up, taking his infrastructure apart with T3 artillery, and striking targets of opportunity with T3 strategic bombers and T3 gunships.  We may suck (especially me) compared to serious SupCom players, but it’s fun for us!  I managed not to let my base stagnate this time around… usually I start forgetting to build upon reaching T3… I’ll set a bunch of things with long build times going, and then I’ll forget all about my base and run around like a maniac with a small group of units, get them killed, get my base attacked, and sit back until I die or Ryan saves me.

The Transformers trailer… wow.  It looks like it’ll be a fun action movie (as expected of Michael Bay), with no substance whatsoever.  And forget about adhering to the source material… Megatron isn’t a gun, and you can’t even tell what any of them are supposed to be when they’re in humanoid form.  Half the fun of the old Transformers was that you had a robot with distinctly recognizable car (or whatever) parts as arms and legs.   Bumblebee as a new Camaro, though, I can live with that.  And Megan Fox… I’d like to have a relationship all over her face.

The Alvin Maker books (Orson Scott Card) are pretty good, as expected of Card.  I’m going into the fifth book (Heartfire) soon.  My favorite character so far has been the judge who presided over Alvin’s trial… pity he didn’t get a bigger part.  Judicial pwnage ftw!

It looks like we’re not having that comment contest, since nobody seems interested.

Oh, and I’m now officially enrolled at Wyotech, in their chassis and powertrain program.  I start in October.  Nine months of eating and breathing cars, and doing terrible things to make them go faster.  You can bet Faye won’t come out of it stock.

…was bloody awesome!  Pics tomorrow.

I was feeling weak and shaky at the bank about twenty minutes ago, Faye’s springs suddenly started creaking significantly where they were silent before, and Helen just bluescreened and rebooted herself… what’s going on today?

So I went on a group ride with the crew from 530riders.com on Saturday. It was a fun ride, lasting about 4 hours with a few rest stops… but unfortunately, the end of the ride saw me lowsiding the Ninja on Russell, coming back in to Davis. I followed the person in front of me too closely and didn’t notice them reduce speed drastically in the first part of a 40mph sweeping left turn. I hit the brakes to avoid tagging his back tire, went off the pavement, and lost traction. The bike slid out from under me, and we both skidded about 30 feet on grass and dirt to end up in a ditch.

Damage to me: one bruised elbow.

Damage to gear: armor is a bit green, burrs everywhere, helmet is iffy and being replaced.

Damage to Ninja: right handlebar insert snapped, right footpeg/rearset snapped, right front turn signal popped off, left front turn signal housing/lens broken, sidestand bent, and the all-important Vacaville Motorsports license plate frame snapped. Light scratches to the plastics.

Lesson: DON’T TAILGATE! Also, for in-turn panic braking, straighten out, brake hard, resume turn - don’t try to brake and turn simultaneously.

Here’s a link to the group ride thread… the last three pages or so have commentary on the ride, as well as pictures. Here’s a link to my Flickr photoset of pictures I took on the ride… nothing too exciting there, though.

I just got a voicemail from the dealership in San Jose that Rosette has been sitting at for five months.  They FIXED HER!

Two weeks after I bit the bullet on the Ninja.  It figures, don’t it?