my life, my thoughts, my world.

The last few days have been pretty “meh”. I certainly can’t complain much as there are many worse off then myself, so I won’t. My best friend’s baby brother Grant passed away on the 9th – if you’re the praying sort please pray for his family. I wish I could do more, but I can’t, at least not right now.

There are two new pics up in the gallery. One is the Diyala River as I’m going over it, and the other is the back of the M1114 I was behind. I took a lot more pictures, but I didn’t figure anyone wanted to see the inside of the front blast shield 50 times. Taking pictures while holding a .50 cal and scanning your sector is hard (and evidently I suck at it).

I’ve been awake for 28 hours, so I’m going to sleep now.

..the ones that tell me I need to build a race car. I’m thinking along the lines of a Formula SAE type open wheel racer. Only I won’t be having to deal with pesky regulations on air inlet sizes and the like. What I’m thinking is build the same type vehicle from scratch, but instead of using a 600cc mill, and maybe some light turbocharging – I go all out and transplant a 1000cc mill out of say a GSXR-1000, give it a healthy dose of turbo boost (intercooled of course), and roll with it. I spent enough time drooling on the FSAE cars UTA built to have a decent idea of how I want to do this.

So what’s the problem? That should be fairly clear by now: Time and Money. One day I might actually have enough of both.

Or maybe it was water this time. Either way, I’ve killed *two* laptop hard drives since I deployed. One met its death due to extreme heat, this one seems to have gone the way of the dodo when KBR cleaned our A/C. They got water all over the damn thing, and apparently it made it to the platter. I don’t know if I can even attempt to RMA it, but I will anyway, at least I didn’t have any data I really needed on it this time.

My custom 1911 is finally home! Who knows when I’ll be home to go shoot it, but at least I know it’s there waiting for me. The pistol uses the Nighthawk Custom Enforcer as the base, but I opted out the ambidexterous thumb safety, and opted for the Ed Brown Bobtail mainspring housing. The holsters are two from Tucker Gunleather, the HF1 and the Cover Up. More pics and a range report will follow when I actually get it in my hands over R&R.

That’s right, two year ago was my first day in service. It sucked, and well today kind of sucks too! Funny how that works out. The good news is I only have two more years of active duty left. That of course assumes I don’t get stop-lossed and extended for another rotation in Iraq, but at any rate, in 2 years I can at least plan to get out of the Army, and move on with my life.

It’s been a few days now, and I’m still impressed with Inphonex. I have only two gripes, and they’re with the softphone client I use. I’ve got to killall esd before I open the client, and then reconfigure the audio settings before I make any calls. I’m not too torn up about that, it happens. The other thing is how long the client registers with Inphonex for – by default 30minutes. If you close it, and 5 minutes later decide to re-open and make a call, you’re out of luck. The solution? Go into the menu, advanced settings, SIP settings, and set the re-register time from 1800s to 200-300s.

There’s a bit of delay, and sometimes it flat just doesn’t work – but that’s my ISP/location at work there. I intend to try using my softphone from anywhere I can connect on my trip back to the States. That’s all for now.