We went and met Scott for lunch, as we haven't seen him for ages. Of course, he partially ignored my instructions and ended up miles away, but it all worked out in the end. We have different views on some of the political stuff, but it was interesting to talk about it - basically our views aren't that far apart, but the only way you can vote is one extreme or the other. For instance, neither of us think they should ban gay marriage, per proposition 8, but the trouble is that there's a lot of baggage - apparently since the state Supreme Court decreed that not allowing gay marriage was discriminatory, his kids are being taught about gay marriage at school. Even though there's no actual subject that encompasses it, and they don't teach heterosexual marriage. This means he can't remove his kids from this class, like he could if they were teaching sex education. So, from a parent's point of view, the only way to stop teachers rattling on about homosexual sex to their kids is to change the California constitution to ban gay marriage. That's like having a bolt to install, and only having a hammer to install it - rather than stopping teachers from teaching stuff that parents don't think their kids should learn, they're trying to ban gay marriage. This, we decided, is the crux of the problem with the politican system here in the US. There's no common sense, you either have one wildassed extreme, or the other. For the record, I don't think gays should be banned from marrying, as that's discrimination. But I also don't think that schools at this level should be in the business of teaching anything that isn't actually fact based either. That means they can teach history, science, maths and languages, but not religion, morals or ethics. We had a similar view on most of the propositions - our views are generally similar, but because of the levers we perceive, we'd choose different extremes to represent. I'm so looking forward to this election cycle being over and done with, so I can stop caring about all this crap again.

In the evening, Gwen called from the SPCA to say that Victoria's pumpkin had won the competition at the Sutter Hospital - now she'll have to decide if they want donuts or pizza as the prize :o)

As I couldn't do anything interesting, I went and picked up some paint and started painting the hallway.
Tilly ran into the bedroom and hid, as usually when there's paint about, she's in trouble for chewing or breaking something, so that made things a lot easier. I was upset to find that what I thought was a paint pad (marvellous invention) was actually a foam painting thing (bloody useless). So, I used a small edger and painted a good deal of the hall. Tilly came out to investigate, didn't get yelled at instantly so leant on a wet wall, wagged her tail against another and proceeded to lick a third. I've managed to get the worst of the paint off her. Idiot.

After that, I ran through the house again to pick up all my junk and throw it in the van and head to the airfield to meet Jack. He was late showing up, so I pulled the Rans out and went for a play. Mounting the solid state camera lower, by the gear leg, worked better, but it's still picking up some vibration, and overexposing when it can see too much sky. After an hour or so screwing around by the casino, I headed back to see Jack had just arrived and started opening up the hangar. I parked out of the way, so he could get his Drifter out for some taxi tests.

After watching him taxi around a little, and talking about how I taxi my taildragger, I went out to do a couple more circuits, as Jack's trying to figure out how to fly his plane, and wanted to see me take off and land. The circuit was busy, and I ended up going around on my first touch-and-go as there were 2 much faster aircraft behind me on finals. We were all on the radio, so it wasn't such a big deal - I'm used to this sort of thing. I then did a touch-and-go, and a full stop landing on my next circuit, as it was getting a bit too busy for my liking.
I taxied back, and couldn't get around the back of the first row of hangars because there were some morons unloading an SUV right in the middle of the taxiway. I had to push the plane back and go down the second row. All of this bothered Jack far more than it bothered me - I'm used to people at Lincoln often not being the sharpest tools in the box.

We eventually put everything away, and I scurried home to feed Tilly and pick up a computer that Vince is going to hand to Mike tomorrow, then went out to meet everybody for dinner. I called Vic, and she showed up with Jen and Gwen straight from work.
Vince thought I was giving him a laptop, so he showed up on his BMW with a backpack, so after dinner I took the box over to his place, and got to see his new toy hauler by torchlight. It's pretty cool, and when he's done everything he wants to it, it should be pretty self-sufficient.

Your Email have won you this sum of £1,000,000.00GBP(One Million pounds) in cash credited to file
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Tilly's obviously feeling a lot better - she started the morning crying that she couldn't get off the bed (so I lifted her off - I'm too soft on that animal), but was soon trotting around the house just fine. Still, I'm not going to take her for a walk until tomorrow at the earliest.

I ended up having an argument with DirecTV about the billing - they said the new satellite tuners wouldn't cost any more, which is true, but then they upgraded the TV package without any authorisation from me. They've sorted this out (when I said "fine, cancel my account and come and pick your equipment up - it'll be on the driveway, and trash day is Wednesday") and are giving us $10 a month off the bill to get me to calm down after dealing with idiot after idiot until the customer service manager finally stepped in. It's interesting, I'm never in the best of moods having jumped through the hoops of the automatic telephone system there to talk to a real person, but it seems that half of the time the subsequent people I talk to can never do anything and end up winding me up even more. A couple of times I've had to say "fine, cancel it" before I get the service I want, and that includes a warranty claim on a broken tuner.

We watched the rather processional (is that a word? It is now...) MotoGP race from Valencia. It's interesting how settled down everybody was now that there's little chance of positions changing in the championship. Most of the racing was for 9th place. Still, the season's over now.

In the evening, I torched what'll probably be the last meat of the year in the back garden, as the clocks change next weekend, meaning it'll be dark by 17:30. We ended up watching a movie, and having an early night.

I swept up the garage, then went to the airfield. On the way there, I passed this, but it was all under control by then. I pulled the Rans out through the now functional doors. Mum and Dad had got me a little solid state camera so I strapped that on, and went out for about seventy five minutes. When I got home, I looked at the footage, and sadly half of the screen is taken up with the back of my seat. The seat is black, meaning the rest of the frame is generally over exposed. It seems to have coped OK with the vibration, so maybe next time I'll mount it further forward, or try again to get it strapped on my helmet.

In Virtual PC, I ran into a problem with Fedora 9, but the fix seems fairly simple. I've also installed CentOS, so I think it's now running more open source software than proprietary software.

In the afternoon, the guy came from DirecTV to install the new DVRs. We now have a honking huge new satellite dish (this is why they couldn't just ship me the DVRs) hanging off the side of the house, and black boxes instead of the silver DirecTiVos. I spent some time setting up the channels in the generally OK, but sometimes infuriating interface, and we'll see how we get on with them. The good news is that he left the DirecTiVos, so I can swap back if I really want to, sell them or give one to Fred who has DirecTV, but not the HD stuff. He also doesn't have an ATSC aerial yet, but now it's cooling down, maybe he'll get up in the roof and do that.

I'm a PC, and I'm a human being. Not a human doing (anything, because I'm waiting for a virus scan), not a human thinking (because I'd think XP was faster), but a human being (paid to be in this advert).

Cynic, moi?

Anyways, I've started to get the hang of it. I quite like the sidebar gadgets, even if they are generally useless, and Virtual PC works if you ignore the "your operating system isn't supported" error - so I now have Fedora 7 running under Vista :o)

Even more money:

REF NO: MSW/56B-672GH/ES
REF NO: MSW/56B-672GH/ES
BATCH NO: 4583JL/WIN/IDS
LUCKY SECRET CODE No: 01974

UNIVERSAL NETWORKS INTERNATIONAL LOTTERY FOR WORLD INTERNET USERS, PROMOTION OF 2008,

FROM DESK OF {UNIVERSAL NETWORKS AWARD EMAIL LOTTERY}

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Mr. Greg Woodman.

The SPCA are in some sort of competition to paint a pumpkin for Halloween, so Vic stayed up half the night painting a pumpkin. Tilly and I had the good sense to go to bed.

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Co-inkidinkily, John from the solar company came over today to look at the roof with a view to adding a couple of more panels - I have 500W capacity free on the inverter, and with all the rebates having reset at the beginning of the year, it might make sense to get new panels before Roseville goes to a monthly performance based rebate rather than a lump sum paid up front.

One of my test PCs bit the big one, so I pestered the manager for a replacement, and finally got an approval to buy a new machine. Better start shopping in earnest then.

I took the panels out of the oven, and scrubbed them until I was bored, then put them back in. It's a lot better than it was, so now I just need to get the ladder in to brain the smoke alarm if it goes off, and I can put it on auto-clean again.

They were supposed to be coming out and fixing the hangar doors at the airfield, but didn't :o(

I'd decided to clean the oven, as I never got around to it after last Xmas' "set fire to the kitchen" extravaganza. I sprayed a bunch of nasty chemicals in there, and wiped a lot of the worst of it off, then set it to it's auto-clean. This set off the smoke alarms in the house, and sent Tilly off to hide under the bed, as there's obviously still a fair amount of burnt oil in there. Oh well, I guess I'll have to get my toolkit out and take as many of the panels out as possible for a proper cleaning.

The neighbour behind us had his 2 huge conifers cut down. I don't know why, but there's a lot more light at the back of the house now. Great :o( Tilly barked at them through the window once she figured out they were there. Poor little idiot.

In the evening, Vince came over for dinner, and I cooked spaghetti. I think Vince has eaten every meal I've cooked this year - he's such a good sport :o)

Last night there was another presidential debate, and today I was reading some of the commentaries. I don't get to vote here, so I can watch all of this from a safe distance. It struck me that people don't change their minds, at least, most people. So, the Republican leaning journalists say McCain won, and the Democrat leaners say Obama won. The interesting thing is that once you realise that you're not changing people's minds, what you need to do is get the people who will vote for you to get out of their La-Z Boy and go to the polling station. Hence the scare tactics - "My opponent voted for sex education in 4 year olds" indeed. At the end of the day, whoever you vote for, you get a politician.

In the evening, we watched the MotoGP race from Philip Island. It was pleasing to see the poison dwarf throw away all but a mathematical chance of second in the championship by crashing out on the first lap. I also found it funny that in the post-race news conference Stoner said his 2 crashes cost him the championship - ignoring the fact that even if he'd have won both those races, and Rossi had come second, he'd still be behind by (according to my reckoning) 47 points with 2 races (a possible 50 points) to go.

After we got home, we went out to dinner with Fred and Marsha from across the road, then headed off for an early night.

It seems that there were enough bribes handed out to pass the $700 billion bail out, so I'm looking forward Wall Street driving the price of everything from anchovies to zucchini through the roof, now we've proved that they won't get held responsible for their mindless gambling.

I got another get rich scam email - maybe that's the next growth industry, but maybe I should join 419eater.com.

I don't care, I'm rich! I received a message:

Toyota Car Promotions Department
London, United Kingdom.
CVR-nr. 25554493.

YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS HAS WON THE 2008 TOYOTA PROMOTION.

This is to inform you that have been selected for a Cash prize of 950,000,00 (nine hundred and fifty thousand pound sterling) and a brand new Toyota Prius car International programs held 2008 in London United Kingdom.

YOUR FULL NAME:
YOUR CONTACT ADDRESS:
YOUR NATIONALITY:
YOUR AGE:
YOUR SEX:
YOUR MARITAL STATUS:
YOUR TELEPHONE/MOBILE:
YOUR FAX NUMBER:
YOUR OCCUPATION:
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CONTACT YOUR CLAIMS AGENT FOR YOUR CONSOLATION PRIZE:
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Email: claimsdept_james208@yahoo.com.hk
Tel: (+44)-702-405-1884

Mr. Tedy Lee.
Lottery Promotional Manager.
TOYOTA CAR INTL. PROMOTION PROGRAM.

Talking of Toyota, it seems that they've sent out tenders for parts bids for the cool looking Toyota A-BAT concept truck that I've decided should be our next vehicle. I don't expect the production vehicle to have some of the silly stuff, like battery packs, solar dashboards or yellow seats, but if it's a hybrid with AWD and the approach angles that the concept truck has, and I haven't spent all my Toyota Car Promotions money, we're there. 2010, here we come.

I spoke to the people about the hangar at the airfield, and it seems the parts have been dispatched, so hopefully we can get the doors fixed early next week. It's just annoying that it's been a while since I've been able to get the doors open to fly. I'm tempted to talk to Ray at Freedom Field about taking one of his empty hangar spaces. Maybe I'll fly over there and see what it's like to land on dirt again :o)