After a bit we hear a loud crash from the kids bathroom, so in the usual “I have two kids been through it all” mode I waited a few moments to listen for screaming, crying, etc before getting off my ass…and after a few moments of silence its determined something not so good happened. As I’m getting up, I hear the bathroom door open and Keira come out crying. As a parent you learn quickly what every type of cry your kids have can mean just from hearing it without even seeing them. I immediately took this cry as a “oh shit I’m so dead” more than “I cracked my skull open and I’m bleeding”.

As I come around the corner, Keira is standing just outside the door crying and looking quite worried and I turn to look into the bathroom, here’s what I see.

Shower curtain rod is half way in the bathtub and half way out on the floor, shower curtain is laying on the floor, there’s water everywhere and the toilet water sounds like its running (you know the tank constantly filling) and the lid to the tank is half off.

I turn to her and I say “what happened?”. She so afraid of what happened she won’t talk to me and just keeps crying. So I take another approach. “are you okay, are you hurt?” and through her tears she says she bonked her head and it hurts. So I check her out and she seems okay, no blood, no big bump yet. “What happened?”….nothing but more tears. I immediately change my approach, “sweetie, you aren’t in trouble, it looks like an accident and I won’t get mad, but you need to tell me what happened.”

As she continues to sob and think about talking, I wander into the room to see where the water is from…I’m assuming the toilet since its running but not sure how. I suddenly realize that the entire side of the toilet tank has a huge crack down it and water is pouring from it onto the floor, so the tank continues to fill at a rate about equal to the water coming out of the crack. I reach down and smack the standard builder special shitty valve they always install, so that it shuts the incoming water off. I then grab two towels from under the sink and drop them on the water pile on the floor so it doesn’t run into the wall or subfloor.

By this time she’s decided to tell me what happened. Now being a four year old there’s some non truths. Not really lies as they haven’t really figured out that art yet, but more they remember things then recite them to you in usually a not so accurate order. After some thought and a series of patient calm questions, here’s what I pieced together.

Keira heads into the bathroom with all intentions to wash her hands as were her previous parental instructions. After washing and drying her hands, she begins the usual, while I’m here I’m going to play around in the bathroom because hey there’s water here and water is fun. I can only imagine during this time it involved, sitting on the counter, feet in the sink, standing on the toilet, messing around in the tub. At some point her fascination with the bathroom turned to the shower curtain rod…which to a four year old looks like a solid bar mounted to the wall and exactly like a monkey bar found on the preschool play ground. Holy crap, how much fun and excitment can that be, right here in my own bathroom. Proceeding to climb on the toilet bowl, then on to the tank (hence the lid being half off) she reaches up grabs the bar and begins swinging back and forth…wooohooo! I mean come on, thats serious fun.

Well not being a solid bar bolted to the wall of course the rod immediately flys out of its positon with 45 pound 4 year old still swinging to her hearts content. Considering the tank lid of the toilet was half way off, probably from her feet pushing off, I’m assuming the curtain rod (and not her head) came straight down on the edge of the tank cracking it and she landed either in the tub or on the floor, hitting her head somewhere along the way.

Now the image of all this to me is quite funny as I’m putting all this together and I can’t help but laugh at the thought process of a 4 year old in causing this entire commotion.

So needless to say we checked her for concussions and then had a conversation about how not safe shower curtain rods are and they aren’t for swinging from.

Her punishment was helping me replace the toilet, which was on my list of things to do anyway, since it was the original crappy builders special constant clog toilet. Here’s some pictures of our project we did the other weekend, she was big help!

I did however get a new audio deck for the Explorer ordered, its suppose to show up today. Maybe I’ll get some good pictures of the installation I hope to do this weekend. Although its suppose to be hot as hell saturday/sunday so I might be inside in the AC. This rig is cool, it has a DVD player in it as well as a microSD card reader. Since it supports DiVX and XViD formats I can stuff a bunch of kids movies on to the microSD so when we are stopped/stranded somewhere for long periods they can watch a movie on it. It does support multiple displays but since my kids puke when they watch movies in the car, that ain’t happening anytime soon. I also ordered the HD Radio add-on (why not) and it came with the iPod adapters. So i’ll probably pick up a big ass NANO and just leave it in the car after filling it to the top with music. Anyway, I’ll do a write up on all that when I get it installed and more about my choice.

Getting ready to head to Idaho Falls later this month for a week. Kids are excited, it will be Keira’s first time flying so that should be an adventure. Ethan has gone the last couple years and they are both excited to go back to Bear World, LOL. How can feeding real bears donuts not just be the highlight of a little kids day!

I think this year I’m taking the good camera and lenses with me, its more work but hopefully I’ll have more time to take a lot more pictures. Guess it depends on what i end up trying to carry on to the plane…hrrmmmm

Upon recommendation from my friend Alan Grainger I ordered up a iPod control system from DICE Electronics. These devices allow you to control your Ipod via the CD changer connections on your built in BMW audio system. Other vehicles as well, but I can only speak for the BMW system. Its relatively in expensive and quite easy to install (at least if you just want to dump it in the trunk).

Initially I just plugged the Dice and the Ipod into the trunk CD changer location and left it all there. Since the 2002 BMW doesn’t have a NAV unit it doesn’t really have a big nice display on the dashboard. While the Ipod is controllable via the changer controlls already built in to the audio system its a bit clunky. Awesome that it works at all though! So for a month or so I’ve just left the Ipod in the trunk and use it that way.

However, this weekend I decided i wanted the IPod up with me in the front of the car for faster navigation and control. This requires some work to re-route the Dice wiring up to the center console

I highly recommend the Dice, it works really well and plugs straight into the existing car wiring systems. This is a great way to get Ipod capabilities into cars that were built before the IPod, hell even before the iMac! The ability of the dice to use older existing cd changer control systems to control the Ipod is pretty ingenious.

So anyway I took lots of pictures and documented all the steps, so those of you who chose to do the same thing, will have a little bit of a resource and can see what I did. Obviously your mileage will vary with your year and model of BMW, but I’ve found in general most Beemers are the same at some basic level.

Here’s all the photos with descriptions of the steps taken.

So here I am 8 months later posting about it…sorry to all of you who have been bugging me for so long for some pictures and data

… welcome to the Caribbean love … so the story goes

The plan was to find a relatively private island get away somewhere warm and tropical, but not including the usual worries of tainted water, mosquitos and general un-fun potential mayhem. Petit St. Vincent Resort in the Grenadines proved to be the ideal spot for what we wanted.

If you’ve never been and are looking for a nice quite get away with no phones, TV’s or electronics in general, this is definitely the place for all inclusive without the crowds. I’d be happy to sit down with you and go over details if you really want to go there.

We spent a couple days in LA on the way down hanging out with my best friend Zac Fink and his family which was a wonderful time. We had to break the travel up in order to time it correctly. The logistics took me awhile to get down before booking. Here’s how it had to work timing wise:

• Portland to LA (Alaska Air 2.5hrs)
• LA to Miami (America Air 6hrs)
• Miami to Barbados (America Air, limited flight times 6hrs)
• Barbados to Union Island (Mini local airline w/ limited flight times 1hr)
• Union Island to Petit St. Vincent (Boat ride happens once a day 25min)

One thing I did learn is that I will never fly American Airlines again. Those are some of the most uncomfortable plans I’ve ever been in. They bought the cheapest boeing packing in the most seats possible…especially for two 6+ hour flights.

While I was there I wrote notes every evening as if I was blogging but with no internet connectivity I could never upload them. I’ve gone back through these notes and loaded them back into my blog dated on their original dates in November 2009 as if if they were posted live. You can read those on the links below.

All in all the trip was a wonderful time, the staff there is amazing and the weather was perfect. We were there during the “off-season” so the cooler weather (and by cooler i mean 80′s instead of 90′s) was perfect for us and since its the “off-season” it wasn’t overly busy or expensive. I’d be happy to share expenses/costs with you if you are interested.

Some things to note from my daily blog entries now that we are well past that time frame:

1. My kindle never did show up from amazon
2. I’m still editing together all my video

Links about this trip:

• Photo Gallery
• Video Gallery (still editing)
• Daily Blog Entries (read from bottom to top, then to page 1 bottom to top)
• Petit St. Vincent Resort
• Google Map

In summary, this was a wonderful time all around and I highly recommend this resort. Would I go again? Yes, if I had no where else I wanted to go. There’s too many other wonderful places to try that unless we lived near the island I probably won’t venture back, but on to new places. If we lived within a few hours of this place via airplane, I would go once a year!

Anyway my American Spirit AR15 decided that it was going to have all kinds of problems that day, including consistent jamming (which its never done before). We finally got it all cleared and people started pumping rounds through it. After 4 or 5 35 round clips it jammed again…only this time in a really bad way.

It actually had a live round jammed into it that had somehow managed to wedge itself above the bolt inside the reciever. Unfortunately i didn’t get a picture of the live round jammed in, only what was left after bullet extraction. I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor had anybody else even the military guys.

One of the cousins who’s a great weapons handler decided he’d take it away from the group and see if he could pop the bullet out of the casing to get the powder out since the round was live it was extremely dangerous to transport. After monkeying around with it, it didn’t explode on him and he got the bullet out of the casing.

Last weekend I stripped the thing down, the upper receiver is pretty hammered, so I’m going to have to replace it. I think I’ll replace the bolt as well. Talking to a couple of different AR experts I know (military guys who handles these a lot) the general consensus is the early jams (which were caused by a primer from a casing falling into the gun somehow) must have caused issues or wore out the extractor on the bolt and when the round loaded it didn’t line up right and due to the extractor being weak the casing was able to ride up and over the top of the extractor. Very odd, but that seems to be the most logical chain of events. i don’t think we’ll ever know.

Here’s the pictures of the tear down and damage. I’ll take some more when i get the new parts and re-assemble it. I’m just glad the thing didn’t explode on somebody! Its been rock solid for 10 years.

1. Make my life and my familys life better
2. Coolness factor
3. Save me money on a recurring basis (its all about the LRO)

Cool stuff has been around for 10+ years, however most of it was ludicrously expensive, hard to obtain and install. Over the last year or two lots of things are becoming more affordable to me and the coolness factor is sky-rocketing.

Previously I wrote up the ever so cool addition to my house of a Tankless Water heater. Ya it still rocks, and I still highly recommend one. The trouble with being on the bleeding edge of this type of technology I often pay the price of “having it first, but later models are better”. The current Tankless heaters are probably 10-15% more efficient and are much bigger gph wise. Mine has certainly never been an issue, but I had it early on and first so the coolness factor is high but you often tend to not get the best features.

Whilst there has been several things like this I’m all over, the one for today is the newest edition to my primary residence which is a in-house power monitoring system. I previously had a little $130 unit (Efergy E2 monitor) that connected to the “mains” in the breaker panel and gave you entire house usage and tracked your power bill to some extent. It was a wireless unit that went to a remote box you could carry around and see how much your wattage changed as you turned things on and off. It would also dock to a PC via USB and download data for graphing and tracking…it was nifty…but it just wasn’t enough.

For years I’ve looked for systems that would monitor all circuits in the house and use a web based interface. I hate all applications that lock me to a single computer, i want access via the web to my data anywhere I am. A few people had home brewed them, which I debated doing but I just wasn’t gung ho enough, eventhough #2 coolness factor was through the roof on those.

Finally a company released a device that meets most of my requirements. Again being the early adopter I’m sure in another 12 months there will be 3 or 4 of these companies with even cooler units…but hey i’ve met #1,#2 and #3 and the coolness factor is obviously high.

So with that said here is a link to the review I did of the eMonitor Energy Monitor Service that I recently installed in my primary home. It will include links to photos of installation and web interface screen shots.

I was extremely excited for this show, as I already attested to and why, in my previous post back in April. Well it finally arrived.

The opening act, I forget their name, was a band out of Seattle. Its not that they were bad, but they had so much going on, on stage, it just sounded a lot like a huge wall of noise. I liked the style of music they were attempting but at least in that venue at that time, they didn’t quite seem to pull it off. Cello, Violin, Accordian, Keyboard, Percussion, Drums, two guitars. Seemed like a lot. But they did a good job of making everyone want Toad to come out all the more!

I will say that the Crystal Ballroom most CERTAINLY leaves a lot to be desired from an acoustical sound point. Its definitly one of those venues you roll into as a sound guy and realize your evening is not going to be an easy one. While the room is very cool and a very fun place for a show, the acoustics in that room would challenge even the most experienced. I’m going to ice this cake with the fact that the sound system in that room is not very well designed, I think a lot of work could be done to increase the show experience in there. It was interesting to watch the front of house guy struggle with that room and PA most of the night. I use to do this for a living, so I could feel his pain but he handled it well.

So let’s remove the crappy acoustics and weak PA and look through at the performance. It was wonderful. The entire band was excited to be there, they performed well and put on a great show. The crowd was exteremely responsive and stomped and hollered for the 4 song encore they eventually did. They played for about an hour and 15 minutes then came out for another 20 minutes on encore. I was okay with that considering they played all the stuff I wanted to hear and the tickets were only $25.

I would absolutely go see them again, maybe not if they were in the Crystal Ballroom. It would be really nice to see these guys at this point in their career in a nice hall like the Schnizter, or better yet at an outside venue.

Thanks for coming to Portland Toad, you guys are as good as you’ve ever been and I enjoyed seeing you again!

On Michelle and my’s 10 yr anniversary I was driving into work, spacing off about things to come and went through a light a bit late, honestly I don’t even remember seeing what color it was, but based on traffic it must have just changed red, and a lady turning at the intersection, oddly enough hit me on the front drivers side of the vehicle.

Now granted that car is a BMW but neither of us were moving very fast and I slid sideways to the curb and she spun around 180 degrees, but the damage to the car exceeded $6,200.00. I was quite blown away by that, I knew it’d be expensive…but. The other vehicle hit the front wheel just right and push it and all the connecting hardware and goods straight up inside the engine compartment…yum.

I keep full coverage on all my cars. Its not that much more on vehicles you own that aren’t brand new, and I can afford it right now, so why not….well it paid off this time. Progressive is quite awesome and was fast, efficient and literally had me a payment within two days. I was at fault obviously, but because of the full coverage it didn’t matter. So they paid me out the value of the car plus some other minor things with a nice fat check around $5,500…wow that was a suprise. I’ve dealt with Progressive twice, both times they have been awesome. Also because I’m a 4+ year progressive customer, they have a clause to prevent any accident size from raising my rates regardless of fault…we’ll see if they hold to that.

Alright long story short, eventhough I didn’t tell all the gory details, the wife and I decided we should replace it, eventhough its a third vehicle and not necessary for us to survive on a daily basis. But we liked having a car (we have an SUV and a truck) and something fun to drive when we go out or travel without the kids. So we went on-line shopping.

We got lucky and found a broker in Portland (313 Motors) which is run by a guy and his son as a side business, who had a couple cars in inventory, but mostly finds cars for people off auctions. These guys have been amazing, honest and gone out of their way to make everything all good for us.

He had a 2002 330ci and a 2002 530i. We drove both on a sunday afternoon. The 330ci was cool but wasn’t what we were really looking for because is a VERY small car on the inside. Even smaller than our 328i from 1996. The 530i was perfect. I’ve always wanted a 5-series. And being a 2002 it had a lot of great features, the bigger engine and lots of upgrades. This one has the 235HP 3.0l engine…yum.

The coolest part is, that the 530i had the sports package in it. Which means it has all the features the M5 has, except for the engine. So it has the sports seats, M5 mats and steering wheel and feature sets. It also had the cold weather package in it. Most excellent. Minus a couple small details the car was perfect and was right around 100k in miles, so not bad for the low asking price of $9500! Minus what the insurance company paid me for the 328i I really scored on this one.

Its been a joy to drive, and its is amazingly fast, combined with comfortable on long drives.

Maybe one of this times I’ll do a full write up on the car and review it.

Okay so bring on the commitment. You commit to reading, I’ll get back to posting. Maybe some tech stuff like i use to do, guess I better buy some new toys to review. Like my new Yahama super quiet portable generator…ya, saweeet. Or how about my replacement car 2002 BMW 530i, guess i could review that thing. So much to talk about. Or even my new Android HTC EVO phone that I love so much i sleep with it.

Well I went through WordPress updated the latest patches and patched plugins, cleaned up so old kruft and a few hacks I’d done that were slowing things down…even tossed out some more modern random pictures (which show up on the side bar at the bottom).

First things last, TTWS 48 hours away. Wednesday night, Crystal Ballroom McMenamins, Portland Oregon. Toad live, first time i’ll have seen them in…um…15 years? ya sounds right. They should be amazing. Maybe i’ll take some video with my phone if i can get it in.

Mmmmm Toad.

Nice to see one follower back! Thanks Mr. Xinu, and I do follow you on social media sites and your blogs…I’m such a hypocrite