I just put a set of tires on the car. My old set of Bridgestone RE-01R tires lasted a good 25k miles and were incredibly sticky, but loud and harsh towards the end. My new set are Falken Ziex RT-912 in the same size: 225/45 R17. They have significantly less road noise (they are new, which helps) and are much more compliant. I have already heard some tire squeal so they aren't as sticky. But I don't expect to keep the car for more than a couple more months.

Over the weekend, Craig and I helped setup a new VMServer using 64bit Ubuntu as the host operating system. The hardware was a Dell 2900 in Rack Mount configuration with Dual Quad-Core Intel Xeons with 16GB of RAM and 10x300gb SAS drives. We configured the system to use VMWare Server 1.07 and setup OMSA and Webmin for monitoring and management purposes.. This is the sort of thing that really excites me. Very cool idea and implementation.

Driving home from work today, I noticed some interested behavior.. The car seemed to have a tire whap over 70 mph.. I drove carefully to the nearest pull off the highway and looked to see if I had a punction like I did the other day in the Mercedes.. But no. Everything looked ok.. Now that I get the car home and up onto the jacks I see the real problem.. Wheel bearing is toast on the right front.. Massive amounts of fluid escaped onto the inside wheel well.. So I need to put the car down for some maintenance.. Ugh..

Last Saturday was a very good day. I put just over 400 miles on my Motorcycle riding with Matt and friends from Fuel Cafe.

Scott invited Craig and I out to Arcadia to the Desoto Gun Club for another Practical style event. This time it was outdoors and all steel targets to engage. Very fun, not nearly as bad as my first experience with "Screw the shooter" night.

I have been dealing with a real head scratcher at work. I am troubleshooting a complicated network topology that has intermittent connectivity problems. Basically, the perimeter network cannot get out through the border firewall. It's becoming a real problem and we have a ticket up with the firewall vendor but they aren't returning our call and providing support.

Due to some very immature and irresponsible behavior we have to scrub the trek up to the mountains this Memorial Weekend. There were too many logistical items that had to be met for Isaac's trailer to be road worthy and the rush to get a second rig together in time caused all sorts of problems. We nearly ran with a third option of just two bikes towed behind the car, but even that turned out to be more expensive than the original trip budget. What a fscking nightmare.

This is the preliminary timeline for our 3rd annual Deal's Gap Memorial day vacation.

This is the preliminary timeline for our 3rd annual Deal's Gap Memorial day vacation.

1. May 18
   Load Motorcycles onto Trailer for mock up and tie down checks
   Fuel truck, connect trailer
2. May 19

3. May 20
   After work, pack remaining gear into truck and trailer
   Begin trek out of Florida around 6:30pm driving till Midnight or half-distance.
   Sometime Around Midnight stop (Hopefully) in Valdosta, Georgia for a hotel.
4. May 21
   

Karen and I went shopping for something Italian and wound up at the Ducati dealership to test ride some hot italian bikes. My ride of choice was the Hyper Motard. A very interesting take on the whole super motard class bike.

My new 2007 Yamaha R1 outside of Fuel Cafe, ain't she just perfectly scrumptious?