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…

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.

Well earlier this year it was pretty uneventful, which was really good actually.  We I got a couple of fishing trips done with my buddies Mingo, Simon, and Tommy.

We also took a trip out to Pismo Beach with our friends Kevin and Stacy.  Pismo if you haven’t been there is one of the greatest spots to go and camp and just hang out with friends on the California coast.  It’s the only place you can drive your car down the beach in the state and the camping crowd there seemed very family friendly.

Me, Nick, and Alicia at Pismo Beach.

The Gang at Pismo Beach

We also took a Vegas trip as much as I can’t stand the place these days.  But our year really started picking up big time around Mother’s Day.  This was our first river trip out to Havasu with our Friends Randy, Tabi, Scoot, and Windi (all pictured).

After a couple of River Trips Alicia and I took off to Japan for our Anniversary.  I can sum it up in about two words “Great Trip”  Also if you fell like it you can check out Alicia’s Photos of our Japan Trip here.  We spent all of this trip moving from Tokyo down to Fukuako to see Alicia’s cousin Keoki and his girlfriend Ashlie.  I had never been to Japan before; besides an 8 hour layover in the Tokyo Airport on the way to Korea; and I have to say it was a great country and everyone there was overly nice to all of us.

I will have to say that visiting Hiroshima was the most sobering and eye opening experience I have ever had.  Seeing the destructive power of men in that form has changed me for life.  While there a group of school kids came to me and asked me a couple of questions for their school projects.   Actually several kids in different towns did this.  The kids from Hiroshima were some of my favorites.

Well shortly after we got back from Japan summer was in full swing her in Newport.  There was no parking to be found and the crowds were in coming in droves.  That didn’t keep us off of the sand we got a ton of beach time in this year right here at the house more than any other year we ever.  This was because… guess what??? I am going to be a dad.  At the end of May we found out we are going to be having a little girl some time this January (very soon it seems). So here is a shot of the first ultrasound of her.  You guys don’t even know how happy I am these days.

1st ultrasound

Also this year my sister Gretchan moved back home with my niece Jillian.  Jilly turned into my little buddy and was around at the house all summer long.  I really can’t wait for next summer to get her so we can have some more time together.

Jilly at the Beach

The rest of the summer at the beach went off without a hitch.  We hung out on 4th of July up in Huntington Beach at Winid’s house.  There is no place better than HB for the 4th.  I will still come out for the 4th when we move away from here.

I can go on and on about the river trips with everyone and trips to Hoover Dam but I will just set some links to them at the bottom of this page.

My buddy Gerald Wisnar takes a yearly trip back to Chicago on Labor Day every year.  I have never been there before so Alicia and I decided to head up there and catch a Cubs game and hang out with Wiz and his family.  Wiz is one guy I would trust with my life we have been buddies since the Marines and you can read more about him here.  Now I have been out to NY and to Chicago and the Windy City gets my vote.  Our Friend Big Brian (guess who he is in the photos) flew up from TX also to hang out with us.

Alright well after our trip to Chicago Alicia had a business trip out to the D.C. area.  Two of my other friends from the Marines live there.   Tim Reynolds and Jeff Spaeth I hold them in the same company as Wiz.  They are both in the story I linked to from above.  While staying at Tim’s house he lives in the same neighborhood as Mount Vernon George Washington’s home.  So Tim took us there to be tourist for a day.

Alright so the rest of the year in a nutshell we went to Pismo one more time with Kevin and Stacy.  Did I mention I love that place?  Oh one last thing I flew up to South Dakota and jumped in a rental truck and drove Alicia’s mother stuff all the way down here to her new apartment in Huntington Beach.   So I got to see all of South Dakota (in the dark), Wyoming, and Utah.

Well that sums up the year now Alicia and I are just waiting on pins and needles hoping for a healthy baby.  I end this with her 3D photo.  I think these things are creapy but Alicia wanted it and who am I to say no.

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.

These are the heat sinks that Chris talks about in his blog.  The Convergence Amplifiers are attached to the other side of them. The are screwed and soldered all the way to the board so don’t try to remove them.

These are the Convergence Amplifiers.  They are screwed into the heat sinks with two screws on the left and right side you can take these out easy with a Phillips head screwdriver.

You will need to remove 4 screws that holds the board to the TV Chassis.  These will allow you to flip the whole board over to get to the soldered back.  There are photos of this in Chris’ Blog.  I only disconnected a couple of cables enough to get the board flipped over you don’t have to remove them all.  You can then heat up the solder and wiggle loose the Convergence Amplifiers.  It took me a bit of work to do this the solders are very tiny.   Once I wiggled them out they looked like this (a little bit worst than the new one).

You can’t see it very well but Chris was also correct with saying they didn’t have but half of the back covered with heat sink grease. Its the white goo on the bottom half.

When you pull the CAs off then you will have this wide open space to connect to.  Pull both CAs off before you start connecting.

Be careful replacing the new chips like Chris said he bent one of the pins on some solder still in the hole.

When soldering on the back of the board take your time be sure you have all of your pins connected to the board.  On my 1st power up they weren’t all connected and my convergance on the screen was way off and un fixable.  I had to pull the TV apart again and touch up the solder.  When I did this I connected two pins on accident.  This caused my TV to not power up again and the red light to blink 3 times (same thing that started all of this).  I pulled it apart one more time fixed the solder and powered the TV back on one more time.  IT WORKS GREAT NOW!!!!  Thank You Chris…

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.

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.

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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.