I spent the better part of the weekend suffering and recovering from food poisoning.
I have yet to pinpoint the source, but it was something I must have eaten Mid Thursday (Company lunch via Panera) late Thursday (Tony's Pizzeria) or mid Friday (Team Lunch @ Sakura).
Bottom line, it wasn't fun, I didn't get any chores done, and poor Violet had to do all the work and take care of the kid nearly the entire weekend.

A bit of a recap:
I have a 2002 Buick Rendezvous. His name is "Stanley". I bought it (used) a few years ago while in Wisconsin to alleviate the problem of getting stuck in the snow. It was the cheapest all-wheel drive available except for a Subaru Brat or two, which Violet hated. Anyway, I haven't had too many mechanical problems with it (As many owners have). My major issue came back in January when the fuel gauge stopped working. After a $100.00 diagnosis from the dealer, they determined my level sensor (I think its called) was defective, and its repair would be around $500.00. Ack. At some point I hope to order the part I need, remove the fuel tank, replace the sensor, and put everything back. One day. For now, I'm ignoring it. I keep track of fuel used via the instrument panel (DIC).

What I'm really posting about:
Last week (Sunday or so) I noticed that my car didn't start the first time. The second crank was kinda weak. The third crank was fine and I went along my merry way. Odd.

The next day I went to work and sometimes I had to crank it once or twice but otherwise I was OK. Since I worked until midnight Monday evening, I was a little nervous, but it was kinda OK. Tuesday morning it got worse. I took my Simple Start™ Vehicle Battery Booster which I had plugged in the previous night "just in case". Good thing, because come midnight Tuesday evening (Yes, I worked late again). Unfortunately it didn't work at all. Stupid thing. I had used it with some success on Violet's car last year when I had the same issue, but I always had a problem getting it to work in mine. So I'm at work with a dead battery at midnight. There were about 5 cars in the lot and one guy happened to be exiting, so I asked him for a jump. He said no. Apparently his Saturn requires a jump to be performed via the wheel well or something and that he only had 10 mins to get o where he was going. Nice guy (not). Fortunately the audio guys were working late so I asked them for a jump, which I got. (Last year's fiasco taught me to put jumper cables in my car, which I always have in the trunk now). Car started no problem and I drove home.

On Wed I took Violet's car to work, leaving her vehicle-less. After I got home, I checked the battery terminals for corrosion, but they seemed OK. The belt seemed OK. So I didn't know if it was the battery or the alternator. I assume when I bought the car it still had the original battery in it, so the battery was probably going on 6-7 years old. Still, I didn't want to chance replacing the battery and the car still not work.

Thursday I took her car to work again. My vague plan was to have my car battery tested for free at a local shop. After some discussion with some co-workers though, I decided to buy a new battery on the basis that if the alternator had been bad, I wouldn't have made it home from work the previous night. The Violet and Drake and I had a nice dinner at Ruby Tuesday and then we went to Walmart to buy a new battery. $70 bucks. Ouch.

Thursday was a very bad day for Violet, baby-stress wise. Unfortunately, I had to replace my battery so I couldn't help her out at all. Most car batteries are easy to replace. 30 mins tops. Not so with my car, of course...

Whoever designed the engine layout of the Buick Rendezvous hates mechanics. As you can see in the picture, the battery is located under a large metal support bar, the fuse box, and the windshield wiper fluid tank. Stupid... Stupid... Stupid!. Unless they think only rich people buy these kinds of cars and so just goto the dealer for simple stuff like battery replacement. I don't know how much it would have cost me for them to do it, but I didn't want to find out. I'm guessing hundreds.

So anyway, Thursday evening I spent 7 pm-10 pm replacing my car battery. Yes, a 30-min-job-for-most-other-cars took 3 [frickin] hours. Not only did I have to remove the fuse box and the metal bar, but I also spent a lot of time trying to get to the screws. There's maybe an inch or two of space which made it very difficult to remove most of the screws. Also adding to the fun were bugs. Since the sun was setting, I ended up being dinner for several mosquitoes and ants and who knows what else. I ended up putting on some bug repellent (with DEET), but I'm not sure how well I applied it, nor its effectiveness at keeping the bugs away.
So I finally removed the old battery and put in the new one. Wearing leather gloves to keep from being shocked is a good idea. I highly recommend it. There might have been some way to use the metal ratchet and connect it to the bolt that connects the wire lead to the battery terminal and not have sparks flying all over the place, but I don't know what that way might be.

I finally finished about 10pm and everything started and worked as it should. My gauges seemed ok, the radio worked.. nothing was shorted out. I drove the car to work Friday and everything seemed ok, except for 1 weird thing. Apparently I needed to re-calibrate my car's compass. To do so, I had to drive in a circle. Weird, but it worked and now I know what direction I'm traveling again. A least until the Earth's magnetic poles flip again...

After trying to gather enough people to have some friendly foam weapon combat sparring, I've decided to instead attend the local Darkon practice sessions. People actually show up to those. The family and I went Sunady, though Violet and Drake just watched as I got my ass handed to me more often than not. I'm slightly out of shape and a tiny bit rusty it appears. I did well enough for my first time though, and I was fighting opponents who have been doing this for over a decade. Besides being out of shape and out of practice, the weapons they use are slightly different (more painful, I actually got 2 bruises) and their techniques are much more agressive (light taps are discouraged). Most of the time I was fighting agaisnt experts with spears or huge body shields.
I had to borrow their weapons since mine weren't compatible with their system. My usual techniques of sword and dagger didn't help me too much agasinst these kinds of adversaries. The majority of time was quick friendly bouts with me and one guy (who happened to be the King of the country(aka group) whose practice I was attending versus two other guys. I lost a lot, but once I got rid of the dagger and switched to sword+axe or a sword+ shield, we won the vast majority of the time.
I liked it overall. we were on a rocky trail and my feet hurt due to my poor choice of shoes. I need to get some better shoes... these light slip ons ones don't work well for long walks or for sparring. Another bonus is that they practice every 2 weeks and then on off weeks they usually have a actual game. I'm not too keen on the actual game events per se(I'm not sure I care for their ruleset and game mechanics), but I think I'll attend a few more practices at least. That's what I was looking for anyway.

Signs that you shouldn't be a programmer or are a bad or mediocre programmer.
Fortunately, none of this applied to me. I guess I'm better than mediocre then. Hurray!

Once you figure it out, take the quiz: Serial Killer or Programming Language Inventor?

Well, I re-skinned my Blog (A "skin" is the look, structure, and formatting of something. It doesn't change the content of stuff like the posts or dates or links; instead, it affects the actual placement, font, color, size, etc of how that content is displayed). It turned out to be a major overhaul. On a whim 2 days ago I did a search for "Blogger Templates" and lo and behold, there's hundreds of templates out there that work with Blog Spot (which is also called Blogger.. If there's a difference, I dunno what it is.)

So I decided to re-structure my blog so I can have 2 columns (aka sidebars) of links instead of just the one. My intention is to be able to list my current stuff in one column and my all-time favorites in another column. It took 2 days (Mainly because I was distracted with Violet's and Drake's blogs... more on that later), but I am fairly happy with the results.

In the middle of doing this, Violet noticed my new blog's look (skin) and started looking for one for her own blog. Since updating our blogs over the 4th of July weekend seemed to be the thing to do, I also FINALLY updated Drake's Blog (mostly motivated by the awesome new skin I found for it). Drake's blog took me a good part of yesterday morning.

By the time I was done, Violet had found one that suited her tastes. I ended up spending most of yesterday afternoon and evening editing the XML figuring out how it was all setup and worked. I ended up making her a new, customized header image because she didn't like the one that came with her "Hobbit" themed template. I also made it wider and edited the template images to make everything fit. I think the results turned out well.

The process reminded me of what I do at work, actually. A lot of the work I do concerns the UI (User Interface) of the game, especially this late in the development cycle (I'm mostly fixing bugs and applying polish... most of my C++ code has already been written). I'll edit the XML and reload the UI, just like I was editing the blog XML and reloading the blog sites. I'll routinely add some code or change some numbers to see what changes, just like I do at work. That way I can learn how the system works and then its easy to figure out how to add, edit, or adjust things to suit my purposes. I'm certainly not saying it's the same.. it isn't(For one, our blogs don't use LUA). I'm just saying that overall, I've noticed that there were peculiar similarities.