Minor Win thread - Life is good!

Got home last night and SWMBO's friend and her son were over at our place, and clearly something's went wrong.

A little backstory, SWMBO's friend is a single mom and her kid doesn't really have much in the way of a positive male figure in his life, so he tends to pal around with me when he comes over and we talk cars and video games. Naturally, he's glued to the Xbox when they stop over and plays the games he doesn't have at home.

Anyway, the kid's got this hangdog expression and explains that he broke my Xbone and he'll pay me back or lend me his Xbox until mine's fixed or whatever. I tell him that I really appreciate him taking responsibility, but sometimes things just break and you're the unlucky one who's at the helm at the time. The kid is clearly relieved, and the girlfriend and I insist that everything's OK and wish them good night.

I start to set up the old Xbox 360 for Heather's Netflix/Amazon Prime TV addictions when I notice the Xbone's power brick is off. Between the gf's cleaning spree and our dogs tearing around the house, I guess the power cable was worked just loose enough to disconnect it. Heather texts her friend and advises nothing's actually broken, the kid can rest easy, and we don't have to cough up money to fix the console. (Although, I secretly was already making plans to replace it with a 2TB Xbone S. )

My first Saturday off in a looooong time. And I have no chores to do. Just read my book and play with the hot rods.

I lost 10lb in the past couple weeks! The only real dietary change I made was eating beef jerky instead of sugary starchy snacks in the morning, which oddly enough was also cheaper since finding a source of 10oz bags for $13, and not eating soup with my sandwiches at lunch.

It's nice when you get what you want and save money at the same time Now I am only 10lb off of my "normal". Interestingly enough, since switching to beef jerky as a munching food, I feel less hungry through the day, too, which is why I cut down on what I eat at lunch.

I'm sure there's some protein/carb balance explanation, but I didn't really even cut out carbs or sugars, just toned it down a bit.

Sitting on a balcony in St. Lucia while typing this. My Wife and I may have found our new favourite resort.

The weather is perfect. I grilled brats for dinner. Now I am sitting on the porch sipping scotch.

First real day of work on the 2017 challenge car, and it was seriously fun and productive. And we scored free wheels and scraping metal!!!

Spent too much money this weekend but on the way to a local craft festival we hit a yard sale and scored a $450 massage table for a whopping 40 bucks.

Today we moved the oldest teenager into the basement bedroom and I'm setting up the table in her old room. Yay!!

Not my win but on behalf of a friend. She just won her 4th National Championship jacket out at the thing happening in Lincoln Nebraska. 4th! That's just ridiculous. In the third different car and class no less.

I have walls in my house again, even in places that have been open Wall cavities for the last several years. New plaster has never looked so good.

Beat an F type. In raw and pax Times.

To be fair, EVERYBODY beat the f type, which I think makes the win even better.

Pretty sure I out raw timed a procharged vette too.

Tight courses are awesome.

Bought a 2.5 car garage, and it even came with a house!

My parents are giving us a ton of their furniture--which is awesome, since it is all high quality and most of it is from my grandmother on my moms side and my great-grandparents on my dads side.

While organizing my toolbench in the basement, I found a propane torch down there! So I used it to make parmesan encrusted steak last night. Wife was impressed

RevRico wrote: Beat an F type. In raw and pax Times. To be fair, EVERYBODY beat the f type, which I think makes the win even better. Pretty sure I out raw timed a procharged vette too. Tight courses are awesome.

I raw-timed a 502-powered CAM Chevelle with Pro Touring chassis parts and Corvette brakes and big tires with my "STS+" C/SP Miata this weekend. Felt good.

Went to get some school supplies for my son, Target had them on final clearance. $.07 composition books and $.01 folders for the win. We should be set for awhile and his school will be getting a few as well.

Finally bit the bullet and bought a new router this evening. I've been having terrible inconsistancies gaming even though the One is plugged directly into it. Averaging 6mb/s on a hard wired connection and losing coverage throughout my house on WiFi. So after 12 years with the old, it was time to upgrade. My god, it's like the first time using cable after growing up on dial up. Maybe ComCrap isn't cheating me on speeds like I thought they were.

Xbox is now showing 60+ mb/s sustained download speed. Much much better.

Probably the second best $90 I spent all day, the best I'm hoping is the shock tower braces.

Unbending the challenge car tonight went far easier than anybody expected.

I have had some incredibly productive sessions at the skate park this week. Like past three days in a row have been great. Nailed down multiple new tricks and made serious progress each time out.

Video compilation from the past three days. To show what kind of stuff I've been working on.

The smaller, slower, sloppier stuff is actually me being extra challenging on myself. Working on doing stuff switch - with my feet oriented in the weaker direction (e.g. when I do sidestance, I skate right foot forward. So I'm doing tricks with my left foot forward.)

This morning I had to take the wife out to the Danbury Mall to get her iPhone unlocked since they're the nearest Apple Store and calling customer service was getting us nowhere. The store took our info and told us to come back in 30 minutes which is just enough time to get myself into trouble at the Lego store. They fixed the phone and her account in no time and the food court had a Chik-fil-a so we went there for lunch. Chick-fil-a doesn't open until 11 but took our order at 10:55 and said have a seat they'd be right out with it. At 11:06 they brought out our lunch, apologized for the long wait and gave me s card for a free lunch. Now I just need an excuse to go back out there.

Found the gun I was looking for. And the dealer cut his own throat without asking. Took it from 330 to 200 off the bat. I'm pleased with the deal.

Got the rest of my dads stuff moved to his new place yesterday, got his 3 wheeler running and it only took 2 new brake lines too get my rusty chevy home. Today i get too watch football and relax instead of making the 90 mile roundtrip too my dads. Im calling it a win and enjoying my day!

Wheelbearing on the Volvo munched itself a little while back and got Incredibly Loud. So, fine (teenage-girl sigh), I'll replace it.

The berkhead who bought the bearing bought a $25 POS from eBay instead of a $90 one from a reputable supplier. More on that later.

Upon starting work on the car last week, discovered that the caliper is hung up. Never noticed this before because I use the handbrake when I park, so the rear wheels can never turn any time I have the car jacked up... The right side was the other cheapo forget-the-brand junk we got from our "third tier" supplier because I needed two calipers in an emergency a while back. The left side siezed exactly a couple days beyond six months after installation. Now BOTH of my rear calipers are NAPA Eclipse. (3x the price of the crap calipers and had to wait a couple days, but not in a massive hurry this time) Then I found out that the cheapo POS bearing I bought was machined all wrong to take the ABS tone ring, but it was at least wrong in ways I could adjust with various metalworking tools.

The win: That caliper must have been bad for a long time. My fuel economy went up by about 10mpg so far. I reset the economy minder, and my drive from the Batcave to home netted 43mpg on the highway and 38 combined. Before it was maaaaybe 35 highway and 28 combined. I had thought the economy drop was due to the gummy tires I installed!

I got my recycling to the curb literally 5 seconds before the truck drove up - and it was utterly a coincidence.

I finally retired my first gen Kindle Fire and treated myself to the new cheapo 16gb Fire.

It's really nice to be able to download stuff through Prime's video service and watch it where there's no Wifi available. Should make the upcoming overtime here at work a LOT more tolerable.

I have a fun computer project I've been obsessing over for a few months now. It was going to involve building a cluster. Last benchmark suggested it would need 29 weeks of runtime on my bash script.

I suspected bash and the billions of invocations of a half dozen standard GNU tools was inefficient. I decided to try Python.

I've never used Python before. Less than an hour with it yielded 8 lines of code, and my benchmarks of a subset of the job suggest a runtime of three and a half hours.

I have room for stretch goals now.

My shooting is now good enough to pass my carry and conceal class!!!

I still need a lot more range time though.