This year, at least, they're allowing us to broaden our range by setting up a site to sell things through: http://www.foryourschool.us/store/brochures.php?sID=rsc7977

The fund raiser ends October 1st.

After I got onto the road, things settled down a bit. The Vista Cruise Control is now officially my new favorite accessory. It's actually a throttle lock rather than a true cruise control like most cars have. There's no feedback mechanism so your speed changes when you hit hills but it was perfect for the straightaways between San Diego & Phoenix and Las Vegas and San Diego. I can't imagine how much worse my hands would be aching if I didn't have the cruise control.

Riding through the desert, I expected the weather to be blazing hot but it was fairly moderate. I had put on an extra long sleeve shirt as well as my jacket's inner liner to deal with the early morning cold. It didn't really heat up enough for me to take off either while I was on the road. When I stopped at Superstition H-D in Apache Junction, I took the shirt off so i didn't cook while I was off the bike. And it was cooling down enough that I put the shirt back on when I stopped in Henderson. I left the sweat pants and the shorts on under the leathers the entire time and I never felt overheated.

Leaving Las Vegas (I like the song & still haven't seen the movie), the sun started setting and I immediately regretted not having any auxiliary lighting. The lights on the Ulysses are okay for "in-city" riding, even as spread out as SD is, but they totally suck for open highway riding. I was concerned that I was going to have to slow way down in order to make it home safely. Fortunately, there was plenty of traffic heading towards SD and I was able to get a couple of cars to play lead blocker for me. They were moving at a pretty good clip so I just jumped into their slipstream and followed them all the way until the 15/215 split. I tried to stay far enough back so that my headlight wasn't blinding but close enough to still take advantage of their headlights.

Every time I stopped for gas, I did a bit of stretching to keep the legs loose. Except for the obligatory Taco Bell stop and a couple of extended rest stops to scarf down a Snickers and some beef jerky, I didn't spend more than 10 min off the freeway when getting gas. I also need a charger for my Sansa. The battery charge ran out about 2 hours out from SD. If I didn't have it on when I did the early morning paperwork run or while I was eating, it might have lasted the entire trip.

I've been physically exhausted all day. I was fine when I rolled in last night. I walked into my place at midnight. I was good until about 2:30a and then that last Rockstar must've worn off. I just felt completely drained and I couldn't keep my eyes open. I felt the same way when I woke up this morning. I finally rolled out of bed around noon and could barely muster enough energy to fix lunch. I didn't expect to feel this drained after the ride. I think part of it problem is that ate next to nothing yesterday. I was plenty hydrated but never really felt a need to eat until Kingman. And that seems to be playing havoc on my system. The other part is the wind. The wind was blowing down from the north so the ride from Phoenix to Las Vegas really sucked. I think the additional pressure caused the pen in my breast pocket to implode because it was toast by time I got to Henderson.

All in all, I think it was good experience. I made good time and with some adjustments, I think I'm ready for the next step, 1500/36.

After discovering that our fields had been partially co-opted by some flag football tournament, we played a modified schedule on Saturday with games to 11. We lucked out and got the perfect schedule: 2 games, a bye & 2 games. We had some minor troubles in the first game against Nils, Billings & Lane's team (brown) but we managed to get a win 11-8. The second and third games went about the same.

The final game of the day was one for the history books. I don't know if it was the collective overconfidence from being on a winning streak or the knowledge that we were playing a team that had yet to win but we came out soft the first half. Once we were down 0-3, people started taking this a bit more seriously. We tried to buckled down and make better plays but to no avail. There were several times that we were in the red zone but just tried too hard to punch it in and wound throwing the disc away. We were down 0-6 at half-time. After half-time, everyone was fired up. We finally scored on the first point of the second half but they turned around and scored as well. Then we went on a 5-0 run to bring the score to 6-7. We had a chance to even things up but we couldn't quite get there on the next point. The score was 6-8 and then 7-10. Then we went on another 3 point run to tie things up at 10-10! We were hoping to ride the momentum to win the universe point but it turns out that we had to win by two. But it didn't matter, we couldn't hold on and we lost 10-12. In that second half, we showed our potential so we were still pretty psyched up for the next day of games.

After that epic battle, the rest of the tournament was a mere footnote. :-P We started the day with a first round bye. We got to watch Brown & Kiwi (Slap & Aaron's team) battle it out. Kiwi managed to get the edge right before being hardcapped. We came out and played a fairly decent game. We had a slight lead when hardcap was called on us. Then we played Ross' team (Military). They were tough. We had to fight and scrape for each point. Towards the end of the game, we drew a crowd of hecklers so it was mildly entertaining to watch the crowd turn on whomever called a foul or violation. We managed to squeak by Military and made our way to the championship game. Again, it was more of the same. We had some close calls and were trailing at one point. Then we rallied and managed to get ahead 12-10. Then they tied it up and visions of Summer league started to haunt me. We finally pulled ahead and won 15-13.

And in case you missed it, he's also performing weekly at Club 3121.

Edit:If you haven't seen it, take a look at the Superbowl commerical at 3121.com.

So, we went into the playoffs feeling pretty good. The quarterfinals game was against the 2nd place team, Orange (9-2), whom we beat fairly handily at our first meeting. The game was very close this time. We barely squeaked passed them with a 15-14 win on a hard cap due to the lights going out. (As a funny side note, the last place team that was trying to go for their first and only win managed to tie up their game at 15-15 and the lights went out right after the next pull.)

One week later...we play the semi-finals game. The tournament was in the middle of the afternoon as opposed to at night when most of our games were. We struggled at first but then beat the Yellow team fairly handily. We wound up playing Orange again in the championship game. Someone (captain!) thought it would be a good idea to play on the field that we lost to Brown on and almost lost to Orange on rather than the field that we played almost every other game on and won! I'm not superstitiuos but why ruin a good thing?

The game didn't start well. We went down 0-2 and then went up 3-2. We traded points for awhile and finally pulled ahead and took half 8-6. After half-time, we managed to jump out to a sizeable lead. At one point, we were up 11-8. Eventually, we got to 14-11 and everyone thought that the game was over. Sadly, it was not. We had several goalline opportunities to finish it and we couldn't punch it through. Eventually, they played well and we didn't and we lost 14-16. Like losing any championship game, the loss is heartbreaking...but it's only Summer League (yes, that's how I cried myself to sleep that night. :-P ) . We had fun and apparently, put on a good show. While not playing well enough to win, Samadi & I did play well enough to help Pause win the Fantasy Ultimate pool.

We have a lot of "young blood" on our team, which helps as a large portion of our game was "huck 'n run". I didn't feel the need to go deep as it was well covered. It let me play decoy and draw my man into the backfield and out of the way as they generally had one of their fastest guys covering me. I did catch a few hucks for scores, had a couple key defensive plays in the first game and managed to keep catching the disc out of bounds in damn near the same spot in the front corner of the endzone. All in all, it was a fun set of games and I managed to play surprisingly well considering that I forgot to pack my mesh shorts this morning and was playing in jean shorts. I managed to soak the jean shorts in sweat. Is it bad when you can wring sweat out of your t-shirt after playing? (I think I might've asked this before).

On a more serious note, Ana Hammond passed away while playing on Saturday. Our prayers go out for her and her family.

We played 5 games on Saturday. Some of us thought that we were only playing 4 games so we didn't pace ourselves correctly. We won our first 4 games including a game against the "stacked" team who also claimed to be Pistachio. ***That started our run of taking the names of the teams that we beat in the game or in the spirit games that we did in lieu of a cheer. I think originally we were Sanguine but we quickly renamed that to Hell's Bells, in honor of our captain, Mike Bell. I wasn't sure what to expect for our first couple of games, but the team played well together and we quickly learned how to make the best of each other's assets. In our 3rd game, we played Nilla's team. That was a hard fought game, especially with Nilla just whipping out throws and breaking marks like nobody's business. In our fourth game, we played Alice's team who also had a lot of great players. I think we barely managed to squeeze by them. By the 5th game, we were worn out so when Tickle-me-Leslie's team, Petron, came at us, we practically fell apart. We definitely weren't playing at the level we were earlier. So, we lost that game by more than a couple of points. 4-1 aint too shabby though. After the game, we had a "party" at the local sports bar. Unfortunately, it wasn't a private event and the bar was already packed with locals watching the NCAA games but, they had burgers & beer so it wasn't too bad.

On Sunday, we started pool play. The games were seemingly a bit tougher. The partying the night before might have something to do with it. For the most part, we made the games harder on ourselves. Our opponents were tougher but they weren't really forcing us to make bad throws, we just kept dropping the disc and they'd take advantage of that turnover. Despite that, we did manage to win 3 games to make it into the semi-finals. Then we played the lime green team that everyone wanted to lose. After the game started, it became clear why they were so despised. They just had bad spirit all around. They would make controversial calls and then debate them until the other side gave in, even when it was clear to everyone on the side-lines that they were wrong. Maybe I'm just bitter because one of their bogus calls robbed us of a point when I made an awesome catch despite being practically boxed out by their player. But because he called foul, even though the entire sideline says that he was wrong, the disc went back. (In retrospect, I should have argued it but on the field, I prefer to play than debate and there are definitely people who can & will take advantage of that. ) So we lost that game. Alice's team made it to the championship game but unfortunately, they fell into the same lime green trap that the rest of us did.

Outside of that blemish, I really did have fun this weekend. I'm sore pretty much all over but it's that good 'I got off my butt' kind of ache. I could really stand to sleep for a week though. I think I'm coming down with something after all of that exertion and lack of nutrition. And here's something you hear from me...well, ever.....I'm peeling.

Due to the cooling system, the Buell was described as very "cold-blooded". It needs a few minutes to warm up before it can go riding. After riding in the fall in Indiana, I'm sorta used to that. However, it doesn't seem to idle evenly and the entire front end seems to rattle while its idling. That's a bit disconcerting. We'll see how well it performs after the break-in period. I noticed during the ride that the backend felt like it was swaying a bit. I'm not sure if that's normal or due to the Armor-All-type stuff they put on the tires that was supposed to wear off after the first couple of miles. After the initial ride, I could still hear what I'm going to guess is the cooling system running after I turned off the engine. It did that for a couple of minutes. Just another quirk to get used to, I guess.

Unfortunately, I seem to be out of free time in the near future with St. Pat's Hat and DUI coming up. So it's going to be awhile before the bike graduates from gratuitous toy to essential SoCal commute vehicle.

No, no...waitaminute. It's still using the database from the old machine. WTF? I check the .class files and sure enough, there's a reference to the old machine name. No problem, I'll just pull the source from CVS, modify it to use localhost like a good applet and be done with this icky-yicky java stuff. So I pull the source, make the change, get confused by the Eclipse UI and write a Makefile to build the source using gcc-java and rebuild. Now the application errors out due to a missing sql table. After poking around a bit, I discover that IT'S NOT THE SAME CODE! (Public Service Announcement:Revision control, like a condom, is only effective if used (properly)). So after alerting the old developer and my boss, it's decided that we should try to decompile the production .class files and port those changes to the outdated CVS source.

jneves from IRC pointed me to Jode. It rocks! I so owe jneves a beer! Jode was able to decompile the class files into source and maintain all of the correct variable names rather than giving them generic names like var1, var2, etc. After that it was relatively easy, if tedious, to visually compare the functions and make the appropriate changes. Now, the changes compiled and the general functionality worked.

One feature that did not work initially was the populating of the weekly calendar. After quite a bit of time, I tracked this down to a broken implementation of GregorianCalendar. From my basic googling, that class is generally considered to be semi-broken anyway but libgcj's implementation varies from Sun's and was causing me unnecessary grief.

After all of that chaos, the next step was to add some sort of authentication mechanism to this application. Since I had less than zero interest in writing jsp code to authenticate with Active Directory, I decided to use apache's builtin auth mechanisms along with mod_jk. Given that I had earlier gotten linux to authenticate passwds via ADS using Kerberos5 & PAM, mod_krb5 was the obvious choice. Unfortunately, it seemed to require some server side tweaks that I had no clue how to make. So, I settled for mod_auth_pam. I set it up and while the page would authenticate to ADS, the webapp would not see the REMOTE_USER entry in the request info. Googling led to a lot of dead-ends involving mod_jk's tomcatAuthentication="false" option. 3+ full days of work later (including a 12-hr Saturday session) and I discovered that the problem is that the authentication tokens were not being passed down if the directives were inside a <Directory> block. They need to be inside a <Location> block.
Edit: You also need to add the following to tomcat's jk2.properties file:

request.tomcatAuthentication=false
request.registerRequests=false


Also contributing to Saturday's fun was a semi-dead cdrom in the server that I was reformatting to run FC4. The installer kept dying with a 'CRC Error --System Halted' message when trying to uncompress the initial kernel image. After 3+ hrs of trying different disk images, various memory tests and booting other Dell specific rescue disks, I decided to try a PXE boot install since we had no spare cdroms. I learned that ADS's DHCP server has a number of options, including the equivalents of ISC DHCP's filename & next-server, which are used when PXE booting. After a few more false starts, I was finally able to finish imaging that machine 10 hrs after I arrived.

I won't even go into the root canal, temporary crown and flat tire that also happened last week. I'm *this* close to calling 'doOver();'. On a far more positive note, Rozmaryn was in town and we were able to grab a beer & dinner & more beer so the week wasn't a complete wash.