In the process of rebuilding all my computer stuff that was fried/killed last weekend. Luckily, I could return that expensive SSD, so I didn't spend the money for nothing. I love SSDs, they are so fast and all-around good. Could not imagine going back to "normal" drives now. Plus, it looks like the data on my NAS can be salvaged - added my old drives into the replacement unit which arrived today, and it's currently rebuilding the RAID. Well, we'll see what's coming out of that, but I'm confident! So I might only have lost a week of emails and files on the laptop drive instead of almost everything
Speaking of which, I got a brand-spanking new Dell now. Sure, it's really fast (what, quad-core CPU on a laptop?) and has all the bells and whistles you expect from a current top-of-the-line business machine - but I don't particularly like it. Never been a fan of widescreen displays - they're good for watching movies, but where's the horizontal space? And the keyboard as well as general build quality is really shitty compared with my old IBM. It's flexing and the shiny surface will scratch in no time.. Due to the keyboard layout being different from the Thinkpads I've been working with for over a decade now, I constantly keep hitting the wrong keys when typing, too. "FN" "C" opens some networking control instead of copying stuff! Argh! Can't wait to get mine back!

Feeling a bit better in general, too. Just letting things settle for awhile seems to help. Still a bit down, but nothing I can't manage.
Plus, the weather has finally caught up with the season and it's all nice, sunny and warm instead of cold, rainy and plain depressing. About time and just right in time for the outdoor concert/festival season - there's a few coming up soon I'm really looking forward to attending: Greenfield festival next weekend, and AC/DC on Tuesday!

Hey, I might just continue this for awhile. Writing things down has proven to be helpful in dealing with things, and it's not as awkward as I thought... so why not use this space for what's it was intended? (thanks for the inspiration and the guidance, you know who you are!)

And I could not resist - a lot of (pricey) geeky goodness:

No, this is not the Dallas suscon picture update. Unfortunately not. Laptop royally shit the bed today - a power surge (caused by lightning from a nbearby thunderstorm) fried the innards for good. The bad thing is that the NAS array where I have my image backup was attached to the thing at the time and is also dead, as is the brand-new 256GB SSD ($700, ouch!) I just put in there last week where all the images are on... It's gonna be a ton of work getting everything operational back again. Not looking forward to that.

Anyway, I'm going to curl up on the sofa, kill the rest of the bottle of Havana Club Añejo 15 Años I just opened (hmmm....gooood stuff) get wasted (yeah... about time!) and watch a couple Dennis Hopper movies in memoriam. In case you didn't know, he died on Friday. He was one of my all-time favorite actors who made even the trashiest B-movie worth watching with his presence.
Hey, and maybe I wake up tomorrow and all of this just turns out to be a bad dream, who knows? Yay for drunken posts, I guess I'd never have written this sober... maybe I really should blow my mind to kingdom come a bit more often, it definitely feels good now. And seeing that things seem to be pretty quiet around here nowadays (hey, ever tried to search "nose piercing" or "body suspension" on google - BME doesn't even turn up on the first page of results! :o ) privacy isn't that much of a concern any more, so, yeah, I think I can risk going a bit more personal.
Cheers, and here's to a nice Labor Day/Spring Bank Holiday!

Ever since getting home from my involuntarily extended vacation I've been so swamped with work and rather pressing family business that I never found the time to update. Sorry -  I know there's a few of you whom I have promised this to for a long time, but courtesy of said Eyjafjallajökull volcano, my flight home got delayed by almost a week and you cannot even begin to imagine the pile of work on my desk after almost four weeks of absence...
Well, today I  read what Justin had to say about how the whole Dallas roadtrip adventure started and I decided it was about time to go through my pictures and start....
I flew in to LAX on March 30, arrived there in the evening, collected the rental van that was to be my home for the duration of the trip, picked up Aurora and Justin and we took off east, heading for Dallas where we all wanted to attend the 2010 Dallas suscon. Been looking forward to this event for one year and things were finally happening!

The following is stolen from Justin's page (thanks for saving me the work! :))

Mar 30 2010
10:57pm Bastian and Aurora arrive in Long Beach, CA
11:50pm 28 Miles from Palm Springs, CA
Mar 31 2010
3:36am Stop in Phoenix, AZ for gas
6:20am We pull into a beautiful rest stop. Bastian runs around with Sabrina (the dog) I try bouldering out side of a gym for the first time. We all snap some photos then it's back on the road

8:48am Stop in a small town in New Mexico. Bastian and I discover there are no juice bars in the area, only a lot of old people.
2:43pm Entering the final hours of our drive, Bastian refers back to the driving techniques of the autobahn, pushing our rented minivan to 110mph. This is still sort of slow for him...
editor's note: 110 is not only "sort of" slow, it's freaking slow (my car goes 155, and as we don't have such stupid speed limits I'm going that regularly). Oh, and for the record: I did not get one single ticket or get pulled over once on the whole 6,500 miles I/we drove on that trip! And the being flashy-thingied in PHX so far hasn't manifested in anything either. :)


3:00pm We reach Pecos, TX
4:43pm Big Spring, TX
6:00pm Merkel, TX (200 miles from Dallas)
7:09pm Quick break to fill up the tank. Aurora makes her way from the drivers seat to the back with Sabina, then we're back on the road. 115 miles from Dallas, Bastian slows down for a construction zone and for the first time in 18 hours a car passes us
7:14pm The construction zone ends and the second lane is opened back up. "Don't mess with Texas," Bastian chuckles as he hits the gas and speeds passed the car that had passed us a couple miles prior. We have half an hour before sunset, I'll have to wait till tomorrow to see Dallas in daylight
7:30pm 80 MILES TO DALLAS!!!!!
8:21pm "So are we in Dallas yet?" "Yes, as you might have noticed, Dallas is fucking big."

Nothing much to add to that... Anyway, we took possession of "my" house which I rented for the week and conked out pretty soon.

To be continued.... SOON! (yeah, I feel guilty...)

on top until April 2 - new entries below

So it seems like I get to help out a bit with organizing the 2010 Dallas suscon, which is scheduled to happen from April 2 to April 4. As I have gotten a sweet deal on a house and apparently got everyone from and to the airport all safely last time I am now responsible for accommodations and transportation for the 2010 edition.
Well, today I got a call from the agent who was supposed to rent me a bunch of vacation homes and told me that I'd need to decide and commit NOW or everything would be snatched up by someone else who was looking to accommodate his wedding guests. So that's what I did - signed the paperwork and wired the money, and now there's space for ca. thirty people.
UPDATE: Everything's set up quite nicely - all the details are now available on the event info page over at suspension.org: http://suspension.org/2010payandstay.htm.

Please use the attached forum for discussion and questions!