Eric’s Story Book

This is a test posting from my phone….

Well today April 17th its 3 months for Abby and 59 years for my dad.  I haven’t had the time to blog or anything in the last 3 months being a new dad isn’t really hard as much as it is time consuming.  She has been a great baby so far and I am sure all babies have issues but you just have to work through them.  Anyways here is a shot of Abby and GrandPa.

Abby and her Granddad

Its offical I am a dad.  My girl got here Satuarday 1-17-2009 at 7:47 AM.  Labor and Delivory went great Alicia was a champ during the whole pregnacy and was really strong at the finish line.  Things went so good in the delivory room that I in between pushing I tried to give her a high-five.  Alicia was quick to let me know that things were good but not that good…. But it was pretty funny.   We had a great time at the Kaiser Irvine/Sand Canyon Hospital the staff and facilites there were out of this world.  After Abby was delivered we made it through all of the checks and the testing with flying colors and we were out of the hospital by 11:00 the next day.  The staff said we could stay longer but it was time to get home.  So we are home now and things are going fine.  She is a calm baby right now and just descovering her new world.

And a final photo of me and my girl…

So in the last week Alicia and I have been on edge waiting for the baby to get here.  Everything is progressing great and we think she should be here soon.

While we have been waiting besides taking long walks down the beach and catching up on recorded TV shows, I started tinkering around with some side Linux projects I have been putting off.  This week I built a MythTV box for the living room and backup all of my files to a new NAS I built for the house.

But what I really want to write about tonight is I have flashed my Linksys WRT54G Wireless Router with OpenWRT. OpenWRT is a Linux distribution for embedded appliances.  The front end for OpenWRT is X-Wrt it give OpenWRT a nice web based configuration screen to work from.  You can access your router from SSH also so it really opens up your methods of managing your device.  Among the other things I like how the setup allows you to point directly to the OpenDNS servers instead of using your ISP.   I have been tired of Time Warner Cable DNS jacking invalid website request from our home network.

Here is a shot of the configuration screen.

Now once I got the whole thing loaded I advise you follow the advice from the Wiki. They tend to warn you a bunch about “bricking” your router.  I guess they know better, but as long as you are plugged directly into your router (not wireless) I think it will work out alright for you.

Now the real reason I wanted to load Linux on my router was actually not just to tinker but I wanted to tap-in to the huge list of applications that you are now able to install.  My next projects include and I hope to blog about them.  Installing and configuring OpenVPN, HTTPing, Knockd (for port knocking), libnids (network intrusion detection librarys), and logrotate.

With my upcoming time off besides spending tons of time with my new daughter my new router will be come part of many new projects.

Every site I have been on in the last couple of weeks have had top 10’s of the year.  I haven’t been doing any blogging lately I have been too busy with life and work.  Today out of the blue I got an email from an old friend summing up their year in review.  So I figured I would write about it here.  I am calling this the “Year of Baseball” because we went to some pretty far off place to watch some games.  We watched The South Bank Hawks in Japan (left photo) and watched the Cub’s beat the Philly’s in Chicago at Wrigley (right photo).

Well I start this off with Alicia keeps documented of everything we do on Picasa.   You can check our photos out here.  The biggest news of the year is Alicia is pregnant and I am going to be a dad.  The baby is supposed to be here on Jan 23rd but I am really thinking sooner than later.

You can continue reading about my year here.

(more…)

So my Panasonic HDTV PT-53WX53G went out on me in the middle of watching the Alabama game (ROLL TIDE).  When i started powering it back up the only thing would happen is my red power light would blink 3 times.

First of all let me say thank you to Chris Palmer and his blog posting on how to fix his Panasonic TV.  My TV (PT-53WX53G) was a little bit larger than his but his steps and parts are right on.   Before you start with this let me say.  This is not an easy task don’t get in over your head messing with these tiny solders.  I haven’t worked with solder in about 20 years and I fumbled through it.

I ordered 3 of the STK392-110 convergence amplifiers (Panasonic C5AA00000108 from www.electronix.com and I am glad I did.  One of them came in pretty bad shape I could send it back to them but it was only 5 bucks and it might cost me more in shipping.  Here is a shot of it.

So I took a couple of extra photos area inside the TV you will be working on.

(more…)

This weekend Alicia and I went to Pismo Beach to hangout with our friends Kevin and Stacy.  I got a little bit of 4×4ing done but didn’t push it that hard.  My last trip out my buddy Nick and I went over the dunes at 4:00 in the morning and went pretty crazy.  This was very civil compared to that.

I love Pismo Beach and would move there if job and economy permitted it.  I like to call this photo “Yo estoy con barba”

Here is Alicia and I taking a walk on the beach after a game of Bachie Ball.  I have to say 80+ degrees in November wasn’t bad weather at all for Pismo Beach.

Jumping on another: meme

In a perfect world, this is not fair, moral, or just. – Steven Schragis and Rick Frishman, 10 Clowns Don’t Make a Circus

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

This weekend I will be flying up to Rapid City, South Dakota and picking up my mother-in-laws moving truck then driving back to Huntington Beach, CA. After my flight up to South Dakota I am going to try and hit the ground running. I am going to make this map the 1st leg of my trip from Rapid City, SD to Salt Lake City, UT. It’s 11 hours long and I am thinking I should be able to do it without much trouble.

View Larger Map

I got started on my new tattoo this week my buddy Rikk Rodriguez out of Riverside, CA has been doing the work on my back.  I currently have the whole middle of my back done with a drawing from the book 1100 Design and Motifs from Historic Sources. I wanted something to set atop it. I decided to go with an octopus.

So this is what Rikk has done so far.  I will be getting more of it colored in as the days go on and will post updates then.