Leaderboard

Fired up the smoker today while working on the deck. The ribs came out great (there were 4 sets like this is total) and the deck isn't looking too shabby. Still have the other half of the railing to do but now that we've got it figure out it should go pretty quickly.

Vietnamese food with Doug and Erica!

We had Vietnamese food for my next oldest brother's 60th birthday tonight. Thanh Long / Crustaceans ftmfw!!!1!

Yes, will be coming. It's a super high quality board so will definitely be showing that off. The unit that went to Massdrop had a prototype inside

Pumpkin Spice Frosted Mini Wheats -- it's actually really subtle, they erred on the side of less pumpkin spice.

No skateboarding involved.

Huevos Jeffero with last nights over the top hot (4 Habaneros, 6 cayenne, 6 Jalapeños from the garden) chili. Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

I was certain your placemats would be carbon fiber.

Have no fear, garlic is well represented tonight — in the pesto and the beans.

* Heckler's voice, meeker * How about just a little bit of garlic butter for the bread?

Saw Tom's 3rd to last show at the Hollywood Bowl last Thurs, been listening to nothing but his music since. They were great live, not a single filler song for the 2+ hours and they could have played another hour worth of singles. They did a 12 min version of 'Good to Be King' that was incredible. RIP Tom Petty.

Vince, John is a meticulous graphic artist and builder. Below is a Carbon designed and built by John, sitting on top of a KGSSHV off board designed and by John and assembled by me. The knobs are stainless steel on the Carbon and titanium on the KGSSHV...

Finally finished casing my Carbon. Apologize for the quality of the photos, the lighting condition isn't ideal. I went a different route - have the amp and PSU in separate chassis and set up the PSU as an "universal" PSU which I plan to use for the Carbon, the KGSSHV, the Blue Hawaii and, in the hopefully near future, the Grounded Grid. I used two off-the-shelf Antek transformers. The secondaries for the HV and filament are on the same 300VA transformer. The toggle switch acts as my manual HV delay and switches the HV secondaries which also have thermistors in series. The 7-pin connector houses the +/- 400VDC, +/- 18VDC and Bias supply. The 4-pin connector houses two sets of 6.3vac filament supply, each set has a 0.15R/5W resistor in series to lower the filament supply to around 6vac to help preserve the EL34 tube life. The amp chassis is a Mini Dissipante 3U and the PSU is a Galaxy 3U. Both with all aluminum panels.

Kind of a long story, and a sad one at that. I'm at home in Illinois this weekend, and attended the homecoming football game and after game tailgating party last night, including our first ever BruinsJam, which I helped to organize. Big stage, lots of great talent, and nearly everyone who performed was a graduate of the school, from the classes of '64 straight through to '15. It's not my reunion year (I was in the Class of '80), but I've been going every year of late, and really enjoying the opportunity to catch up with people from the surrounding classes. It's a small Catholic high school (about 100 students per class) on a 1,000 acre campus with a monastery, apple orchard, an amazing art barn, lots of farm land, and deep woods leading down to a river. I'm on the steering committee for a $20 million capital campaign project, and we use the homecoming weekend as an opportunity to connect with some of our key donor targets on a social level. One such highly successful person was Bill Prokup, from the Class of '82 (see pic of him and I from last night), who was a great guy and someone who (oddly enough) always seemed to look up to me. He went to Illinois State as an accounting major, and overlapped with my time there just long enough to enroll in the intermediate accounting course that I was teaching. I had done my bachelor's in 3 years and my master's in a year and a half, and then joined the faculty on a full time basis for just one semester. So it would have been my 5th year out of high school and Bill's junior year in college. So we've always had that connection, in kind of a big brother, little brother type of way. He was an A student at ISU, and went on to become a CPA and eventually left public accounting and started his own company in a totally unrelated business, which he was always quite humble about... but somehow, out of thousands of graduates, managed to land himself on the list of our top 75 most capable donors. While I wasn't, last night, directly talking with him about the capital campaign, he did bring it up to let me know that he was very much supportive and that we could count on him to be a part of it. Then I opened Facebook this afternoon and learned that he died of a massive heart attack at around midnight. Attached is a pic of he and I taken at about 9pm, and he seemed perfectly fine. He was a great guy. A humble man with a gentle spirit. I'm shocked, and will really miss him, and feel gutted for his wife and kids. As Warren Zevon would say, "enjoy every sandwich."