Sunday, September 10, 2006

Charlie's 450 ATV wheelie to crash

Charlie on his Honda 450 quad riding a nice wheelie on the flats of the Florance, Oregon sand dunes over Labor Day weekend 2006. As we start to overtake a sand rail he get's on it a little too hard and goes over the back. Further inspection found left front and right rear tires off the rim and the left front arms smashed. In the video you can see the bike turn sideways before it comes down. Charlie was fine other than taking a beating from his wife when we got him back to camp.

See it on Google Video at: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2603876273462024871&hl=en

-Lane

Thursday, August 31, 2006

Project = New Home

It's time to move. Not just move, but build a home and move. This will be a challenge because my wife claims she won't help, and I'm at work most of the time. So, where to start?

First, you go find some property. Done.
rmls.com

Second you need some house plans. Done. The plans we selected suited our needs perfectly. We wanted a home with the kitchen next to the garage, master bed on the first floor, big bonus room over the garage, and the upstairs bedrooms on the opposite side of the house from the master bedroom. A few other factors were a office, and an individual bathroom for a large bedroom upstairs (Daughters idea).
Cool House Plans

Third... I honsetly have no idea...

So this is what i'm going to do. Since I have no idea what to do next I'm going to write it down as I go. That way some other poor sole like me won't have to do it the painful way.

I actually need to wait a month or so to purchase the property so until then I don't need to worry about financing this thing. I'll get to options on that when it's time.

I'm building in an area that is being developed. Based on this I'm going to build a house this is both larger and more extravagant that I need or want. Basically because I want it to fit in, and be worth a bunch of coin when I'm done with it. To that end I'm going to look for things that will class the house up and make it more desierable to the upper crust.

As I go through this I'm going to put links and probably pictures in here. Please note that I don't own any of these things and they will be used as an example of the type of item I want. So, while I may post BrandX water faucet, I'm probably refering to the style of faucet and not BrandX.

I'll post again soon when I have some ideas on what to put in the house. A few of the first items I'll be looking for: Steam Room for the master shower. Music throughout the house. Tankless water heater (propane). Instant hot water in the bathrooms (via a pump).

That's it for now, take care!

-Lane

Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Update

So it's been a while since my last post. I'll catch you up on things.

Mythbox = Going well still. I'm starting to put the pieces together for another machine. This one will be for the new Panasonic 42" plasma I got a month ago. It's nice... TH42PX50U

MAME = Well... The wife put the beat down on me for wanting to build a cabinet. In all honesty she was right and there really is no room in our house for the thing. I did get a 25" TV and had it setup for a while on a desk. My daughter and I managed to kill quite a few bad guys together and had a lot of fun doing it.

What's next: Well, I hooked the MAME computer up to the new plasma until I can get a real MythTV box going. I'm running 3 channels of 802.11g in my house so I have 1 for work (secured and hooked to a VPN) 1 for the main MythTV box downstairs, and the last one for the windows box connected to the plasma. I've done this because I can run wires to either of those. Well, without a bunch of hastle anyway. Right now I'm both streaming video to the MAME computer and copying TV programs over. I use one channel for one connection, and 1 channel for the othehr. This way I don't have both hops on the same frequency and I get much better throughput.

Ok, that's it for the update on the in home machines. I'll update this info when I finally get the parts in for the new MythTV box.

-Lane