Tasha and I are waiting at Denver International Airport for Matt and Sarah to arrive! They should be arriving soon, we are very excited to see them again.

Hopefully this time nobody will barf hot dogs on me.

On Friday night, we met Paul and Kara at the Waterloo for dinner and a Meniskus show.  The website said they went on at 8, but we found out shortly thereafter that they actually went on at 9:45.  After we ate, the girls went for a walk and Paul and I stayed behind and talked shop over some beers and before we knew it the band was on.

It was a good set tonight, they played a few songs that they rarely play live.  It drew a few really laughable dancers to the small dance area, specifically a guy in a green and white striped polo shirt that didn’t move his hips or shoulders at all and instead turned side-to-side with his hands in front of his chest like it was a stick up.

We had a few good laughs and then it was time to turn in for the night.

I woke up at the crack of noon today, cleaned the house in preparation for Matt and Sarah, and then it was D&D time.  Tomorrow is going to be spent grocery shopping, and hopefully getting the coats of lacquer on my ukulele.  Matt and Sarah won’t get in until around 8 pm.  Fun stuff!

At work, I had to do battle with a particularly annoying set of bugs.  These were the type of bugs where everything looked like it was working properly and just wasn’t functioning correctly.  After beating my head against the table all day, getting frustrated and fed up, having some Chick-fil-A, I eventually had an “a-ha!” moment and was able to solve the problem.

Since the “a-ha!” came at 2 pm, I was busting my butt to get the code done, tested, and checked in prior to being out of the office until Thursday of next week but I got it done.  I even did more testing than I normally would have done, because I don’t want to get called on my time off.

This was one of those moments where I only knew the fix because I had done this work before in the past, so it was a really nice feeling of accomplishment coupled with pride that I actually was the right person for this particular job.

So now it’s vacation time!!  Matt and Sarah show up on Sunday and I am definitely looking forward to it!

Sensei Hartman’s been reminding me gently that I need to train more.  He’s right.  I completely acknowledge that I’ve been sporadic at best lately, in both my gym workouts and my karate workouts.  I have been doing some karate at home and occasionally with Paul B but that’s a sorry excuse for making it to the dojo.

Between late nights at work and social obligations (there’s a lot to do out here!), it is becoming increasingly hard to get consistent with my training again.  I’ve got a few more things on the schedule that are going to conflict (namely, The Dukes staying with us next week) but after that I’m going to get back to the dojo as often as possible.  When I can’t get to the dojo, I’m going to be sure to hit either the gym or train with Paul B in the evenings.

I don’t seem to have trouble getting Tuesday nights free for training, but Friday nights are difficult.  I might have to consider doing my own Breakfast Club on Saturdays.  That’d have to be either at a park or in my yard, since we share dojo space with a dance studio which is regularly busy on the weekends.

I know I have to do better.

It’s hard to call tonight’s effort a day of work, but I did complete a few more steps today.  I sanded the edges of the neck flush with the fretboard, fitted the bridge, and prepped everything for putting the lacquer on.

Now I have a problem.  I need a dust-free area to apply the finish, however the lacquer is highly flammable and toxic so I have to do it in a ventilated area.  I thought about my basement, but with the water heater and furnace pilot that’s not a good idea around flammable whatnots.  Plus the rabbits would probably die.

That leaves my garage, which is a dust/hair/debris factory.  That’s a problem for wet lacquer.  So I think I’m going to need to construct a makeshift spray booth so I can apply the finish and not worry about dirt and dust settling on it.  Plus I can use it for other projects!  Maybe a trip to Lowe’s is in order…

Last night I went down to feed the rabbits and I noticed that Joe was standing funny.  I picked him up to find a giant poop-ball on his hindquarters, it was at least raquetball sized and smelled terrible.  So I got to spend the better part of an hour liberating his butt-region from the crap-demon.

Needless to say, he was enflamed and in need of the vet today so Tasha took him right over.  They said we didn’t do a bad job of removing it all, and suggested a change in diet and gave him some topical cream to sooth his chapped behind.  So tonight we ended up at the pet store to get new supplies for the rabbits.

We have to change them to a primary diet of Timothy hay, which they went MENTAL for when I put it in their cage.  I think they’re going to be happy with this new arrangement.

Today I decided to finally do something handy and I started building a ukulele.  Several years ago, my Dad gave me a Grizzly ukulele kit and it has sat uncompleted for quite some time.  Recently, I have been regretting not using my workbench for anything, so this project serves a double purpose.

Getting the materials together

After a run to our local Big Lots and Walmart, I had the necessary sandpaper, tools, and lacquer to finish the project.  I got my workbench cleared off and I was off to work!

Here’s all of the materials laid out ready to go.  You can see the Grizzly Kit provides the body and neck in rough form.

Here’s the stuff needed for the first major step: sanding.  All of the main wooden parts came rough-sanded, but there was a lot of finish sanding needed.  This part was actually quite fun, one of the steps included wiping down the parts with a wet cloth to remove all the dust and raise the grain for final sanding and boy is this wood pretty!

Here are the parts after final sanding.  Not much appreciable difference, but it does look better up close.

Body/Neck Assembly

Marking the center line of the ukulele and the neck.  Measure twice, glue once!  (In my case, it was measure thrice…)

Using a 15′ strap clamp to hold the neck to the body.  It took me several tries to figure out how the strap clamp was meant to ratchet and hold the parts together, but I figured it out.  The most difficult part of this process was cleaning up the neck joint with the glue that squeezed out during this process.  About an hour with an exacto knife, sandpaper, and a wet paper towel did the trick.

The fretboard markers… the kit came with three 1/8″ fret markers, and the fretboard came with guide holes already drilled.  All that was left for me to do was to break out the drill press with an 1/8″ bit, drill out the holes a bit, and then a drop of glue made short work of this step.

Gluing the fretboard to the neck was messy, but easy.  I found these little clamps at Big Lots for $1.80 apiece and they worked great for this.  I had to use a wood shim and rubber band to hold the fretboard flush with the body in the right spot.  There’s going to be more time with an exacto knife in my future to clean up the rest of the glued joints, but this will be made significantly easier because the next step is to file down the edges of the neck flush with the fretboard.  That should get rid of most of the troublesome glue, but that’s going to be best left for another day.

So far it’s been a fun project, I’m looking forward to finishing it over the next few evenings which might stretch into next weekend.  Fun stuff!

I got an email back from Memorex support, they’re happy to send me a firmware upgrade disc that will work with my player.  So once it arrives, we should be in business!  I’m really amazed that for a combined help desk (it was Memorex, Imation, and another couple of companies) that I got first-response satisfaction and reasonable response time.  If they actually do produce a firmware disc that I can use I’ll consider this one a resounding success.

Still no luck.  I have contacted Memorex support to see if they can send me a copy of the firmware upgrade disc so I don’t have to waste all my remaining CD-R’s on it.  Hopefully they will be able to help me out there, if not I’ll likely be shipping this thing to a junkyard and buying a Blu-Ray player that is worth a damn.

Technical hurdles like this frustrate the hell out of me, especially when something SHOULD work and DOESN’T even after following the instructions.  Also enraging: script responses from technical support.  Let’s see how Memorex fares on this one.

Tonight Tasha wanted to watch a movie, so she selected her new Sherlock Holmes Blu-Ray disc.  We got through the previews, and the title menu ended up with music only and no picture, and my Memorex MVBD2510 refused to take further input.  A quick google later revealed that newer discs have new copy protection (thank you Hollywood, for protecting me against using something I bought from you) and the firmware needs updated.

No problem, I’m a smart guy, I can do this.  There was a download and instructions, so I downloaded and followed instructions which noted (ominously) that you should only use CD-R discs to burn this firmware update.  No problem, I happen to have a spindle of Memorex CD-R’s right here!

Well, so far I’ve wasted 6 of them.  Apparently this Blu-Ray player is really finicky about what format it reads and it only likes iso9660 format.  I tried Windows 7’s built-in burner, Nero, and now MagicISO to try to get the format right to no avail.  I’ve got two more options to try before I contact Memorex support, but I sure would like a company to not make an ultra-crappy product for a change.

BTW, the Internet is littered with forum posters that are having exactly the same problem as I am… interestingly the method with the most success is burning the thing with Toast software on a Mac.  I don’t have either of those sadly.  If I don’t get it with my own burning methods, I sure do hope that Memorex can send me a pre-burned disc that will work with this boat anchor of a drive they sold me.