Hooray! I just preordered my Eee PC 1000 from Amazon! It is scheduled to be released on Monday and I can’t wait to get it!

Today the name of the game was clearing out the back yard planter. Whenever my yard needed cleared of sticks, errant portions of rosebushes trimmed, or the two stumps that still grow limbs need trimmed I would throw the detritus into this planter that is made of railroad ties.

I took four bundles of yard waste and four bags of small non-stick yard waste out of the planter and its surrounding area. It was hard work, but it looks respectable over there. My brother-in-law came over to help by scraping the paint off of the facing boards of our deck.

The plan for the deck is as follows: pull up the crappy decking that isn’t covered by the sun room and replace it, paint all the facing boards so they don’t look like crap. For the boards that are covered by the sun room, we will have to sand those down and either repaint or stain those depending on what we decide to do for a deck finish. I don’t know if we’ll undertake that project this weekend or not, but the plan in there nonetheless.

Now its off to a Fourth of July party! woot!

Tonight’s class was a really small one… just three white belts, a yellow belt, , , and myself. We had a very basic first class where we worked on lunge punch, front kick, downward block, and rising block.

Second class we focused on black belt katas, working leisurely through Bassai Dai and Kanku Dai. I was struggling most of the night with very sore hamstrings and legs from Tuesday’s workout, and I was feeling my back and shoulders a bit from all the digging yesterday.

It was a good laid back workout, just what I needed this week!

I got my package that I expected to be bhut jolokia peppers. Turns out the auction listing had “seeds” listed and pictures of the actual peppers. Not knowing any better, I assumed they were one in the same so I was a little disappointed by this. The guy did, however, provide a sample Trinidad bird pepper which I will feed my cousin tonight. Consider it a warm up to the main event!

Luckily, we now have optimal temperatures for seed germination, so I believe my cousin and I will be cultivating these seeds into full blown plants to produce the hot death.

In other plant-related news today, Tasha and I went to Old Heritage nursery and got a rather strange man to help us lay out our front yard landscape. He had some great ideas so as soon as I’m done with painting the shutters/trim and washing the siding we’ll be placing an order with them to make our front yard presentable.

Tonight was another of our classic battles of low vs. high for attendance. We had a bumper crop of white belts, a few red belts, and a few brown belts. Some of our visitors were from Mapleton, since they are closed for their annual cleaning this week, its always good to see people from that dojo.

The first class was a solid basics workout, focusing mainly on using the hips and the rear leg to propel the body forward into the attack. The second class was intended for all the Heian kata, but we only ended up making it through the first three.

It was a study in quality, not quantity. We went through each kata focusing on fine points, body movement and action, and fundamental motions that make each kata important. I don’t know about all of the other black belts, but I know I had several light bulb moments and several new ideas to incorporate into my daily training.

After class, Sensei Quinn, , and I hung around outside the dojo trading some thoughts about the class and then a few injury stories. I don’t know why it is, but every karate person loves hearing about the times that techniques went horribly wrong (or right, depending on who you are) and the teller of the story breaks some toes, gets some teeth knocked out, or breaks their hand unexpectedly.

Badges of honor are valuable and its always fun to tell war stories! Hopefully more good stuff soon!

I stand before you all today a man of accomplishment. I allowed myself to sleep in a bit today (around 9:30) and then I immediately launched into a whirlwind rage against my list of “To-Do’s”.

I trimmed as many of the low hanging limbs from the front Chinese Elm tree. I bundled said limbs into waste management approved bundles and placed them on my curb. I then set to the task of sanding and painting my garage door, starting by removing the CRAPPY barn door accouterments that were made out of some sort of 1970’s miracle foam. They were so wonderfully durable that a few of them crumbled in my hands, and I found that they were affixed with some sort of glue.

This glue was not doing an adequate job, and after about an hour with a palm sander I found that it was just much easer to grab the paint scraper and put some muscle behind it and the paint (with glue attached) would flake off quite readily. I figure this is because water trapped itself behind the foam doodads and made the paint bubble slightly.

About an hour at that and I had a garage door ready for painting. Dad stopped by and we ran to the hardware store to pick up some nuts (easy there ) and a lag bolt to re-attach my garage door to the wall. It seems that at some point in the past the track warped a little and it pulled away from the wall, which loosened some of the hinge nuts that held the door together and they were lost to the sands of time.

Luckily, 14th Street Hardware in Pekin is OLDER than time and had plenty replacement parts on hand. $0.71 and a bit of elbow grease later, and my garage door was sound as a pound. I then turned my attention to painting the garage door, I am one coat of exterior white down and it already looks like a new door.

I plan to do another coat tomorrow morning and then re-paint the black trim when I’m complete. Tomorrow the chains come out and we’re ripping out some hedges! What will go in their place? New plants? That red cedar ground covering they use in playgrounds? A 1/4 scale statue of ? You’re just going to have to tune in tomorrow to find out, because frankly I have absolutely no clue! 🙂

My Xbox Live Vision camera arrived today! I immediately tore open the box and tried to make an MTmini out of a cardboard box and a frame. The only problem is that I didn’t have a suitably sized frame and my box was slightly oversized for the piece of paper that I had handy.

The good news: it appeared to work, the software ran, but I was getting a lot of extra blobs detected around the non-papered area around the edge of the box.

I’m going to give it another go tomorrow after I get an appropriately sized cheapo frame. I want to get my camera configured appropriately with the IR filter still attached, that way I can verify a certain level of “working” before I start tearing things apart.

I’m pretty excited, even with just these simple successes!

Tonight Tasha and I were watching “I Love the New Millenium” on VH-1, and an ad for the ASPCA came on. It was longing shots of sad little puppies and kitties that were left behind by Very Bad People.

Yes, this is bad, but they had to set the commercial to strains of Sarah McLachlan‘s song “Angel”. To top it all off, she shows up HERSELF to implore you to donate money to prevent the pain and suffering of furry little critters.

This commercial can be summed up in one word: EFFECTIVE. I’ve never abused an animal in my life, however it immediately made me feel awful for these dogs and cats that they showed, with their mangy, bandaged fur and runny (and in some cases missing) eyes.

This did not compel me to donate to this cause (yet) because I don’t appreciate being bullied by someone who has a hit on the Adult Contemporary charts, however I did take a little extra time to make sure Teddy had everything he needed.

I was catching up on my multitouch forum yesterday and decided to poke around on the Internet for components. One of the major pieces to the puzzle is the projector or LCD monitor, and thanks to some good advice from some forum-goers I decided that I would end up going the projector route.

I decided, on a whim, to see what projectors could be found on the Ebay market. Apparently, yesterday was my lucky day. I ended up winning this baby for $509.

You will see from the auction listing that this projector has a short-throw lens, which is desirable for a multitouch table. A short-throw lens means that I can get a reasonably sized image (30″ diagonal) from its minimum throw distance of 2.3 feet. The reason this projector was such a good buy is because a short-throw lens appears to up the value of the projector into the $900-$1800 price range, which means I got a steal! 🙂

A few forum members have piped up against the practice of mounting the projector facing straight up, since the heat generated by the projector would gravitate toward the lens and might run the risk of warping it. It is being recommended that I use a first surface mirror to reflect the image once into my projection surface, and that would allow me to mount the projector with the lens down, or perhaps horizontally (as nature intended).

A first surface mirror is one where the reflective surface is on the front-most layer that the light hits. Most mirrors you see are second surface mirrors that have the reflective surface behind glass, and that can cause a secondary ghosted image if the light source is bright (like, say, from a projector).

Front surface mirrors are usually pricey, but apparently you can make one using a $4 mirror from Wal-Mart and a $5 can of aircraft stripper. That sounds like fun, probably because of “aircraft stripper” in there so I’ll probably at least entertain that notion.

I arrived a bit late to Mapleton this morning and ran a few laps with . , , and Oedewaldt-san were already working on kata.

Mike and I opted to work on some basics to warm up, and then work on some of of the same body shifting drills that we did on Thursday. joined us after a bit, and we interspersed our sets of Perfect Pushups with our sparring drills. Both Mike and I dropped back down to 8-6-4-2 due to our lack of dedication on the pushup front, I was about to get through it fairly well except for the wide pushups. Those are always hard for me.

It was a good, sweaty, humid workout today. Just what the doctor ordered!