Turns out that William Shatner is going to be leading a team in the "world's largest paintball game." My favorite quote from the article:

"I suggested to the guys running the game that I wanted to lead like a leader, right up front," he says. "And then they did the mathematics for me. There are 2,000 people minimum, hopefully more, so that means approximately 1,400 people are all trying to shoot me. Because, like a prize elk, they want my antlers on their wall. Multiply 20 or 30 paintballs a second times 1,400, and that's how many are coming my way. You know, leading at front may not be the best idea."

I couldn't possibly express in words alone how badly I'd like to sneak up behind Shatner and shoot him in the back of the neck.

Although he's like a year older than my dad. I don't know how I feel about plugging an older guy. It doesn't seem all that fair or sportsmanlike. Still, it'd be awfully nice to make him duck a lot, or maybe just wing him in the leg or something.

For the last few months, my game machine has been intermittently stable. It'll run forever as long as I don't play any games, but as soon as anything 3D starts, I have a 50/50 shot of crashing within about an hour. It always sounded like a heat issue (which I've posted about before), but my case, PCU and mainboard temps have always been good. I've looked around inside and can see anything amiss.

Well, I finally the cause of my instability. When I came into my office this morning, I was greeted by a bad smell: burning electronics. You know the odor. Hot circuit boards. In a room full of computers, that's an alarming smell to say the least. So I got the flash light and started taking covers off PCs and sniffing. I found it on the first try: my game machine.

My video card (a Leadtek 64MB Geforce2 GTS Pro -- a nice card which I like a lot) was nearly smoking and the fan was making noises like a tiny rodent was being tortured inside it. I remembered seeing a utility that Leadtek bundles with their Windows drivers which had some sort of hardware monitor, so I found it and fired that up. The core temperature of my GPU was 91 degrees and the edge temp was 60-something degrees. As in degrees Celcius. The fan had crapped out, getting slower and slower over time.

I shut down and yanked my card out to see what was what. I'd never noticed the fan slowing because it's really hard to see. The AGP card is upside down, and with my tower case on the floor, you have to rest your head on the carpet and peer into the case to see that it was slow/stopped. The tiny fan barely turned when rotated manually.

I took the bad fan off and tried to find a replacement among all my junk. I gave up after about 5 minutes; there's too many boxes to go through. This is my lunch hour as well as my video card I'm burning, so a compromise had to be struck. I remembered where an old fan/heatsink from a K6-266 was, so I took the fan off that. The screw holes didn't even come close to matching up, so I attached the fan onto the card with a complex system of zip ties. It blows air down onto the heatsink (which is all the other fan did), and I figured that since it's a bigger fan, it'll cool better even if the marriage between heatsink and fan wasn't exactly a match made in heaven.

I reinstalled the card and booted Windows. After a couple minutes of non-3D activity, the core temp was 79 degrees C and the edge temp was 54 degrees C, which was not that great of an improvement in my opinion. So the only thing I could do after that was use the Leadtek overclocking utility to underclock my card. I dropped the "Graphic Clock" to 150MHz (from 200, I think) and the "Memory Clock" to 315MHz (from 350). After a couple minutes, the temps are 73 core and 49 edge. That's looks to be about as good as I'm gonna get.

I need to get a new fan. The old and busted one is a T&T brand, model MW-410H2S which is a little 40mm, 12v fan with a three-conductor cable and the tiniest Molex connector I've ever seen. I could only find one page for it so the new hotness might be A Sunon fan since other similar 40mm fans are easy to find. I might have to do a little cutting; the old fan has no "sides" and fits snugly into a socket-ish thing on the heatsink. I'd better buy two then.

I could also get a new video card but honestly I like the one I have as long as it doesn't get hot enough to boil water.

I gave up cigarettes (finally) about a year and a half ago, on my birthday. It was a present to myself (and to Tess). But as Jake once said, you know I gave up cigarettes, but I didn't give up smoking. My friend and former co-worker Martin the Macedonian gave me a Cuban cigar not too long ago, as a thank-you for setting him up with a job lead which turned into a job. I fear it's going to be a downhill journey from here on out. That was a good goddam cigar.

I've always thought of cigars as a camping thing: they weren't that great (think wood-tipped, sitting in a tackle box for 3 years), but not that bad when you can sit around the fire and spit at will. The reason why I never really liked cigars was that I never had a good cigar, until recently. I once had a Macanudo (don't remember what kind) at Donovan's Steak House in La Jolla, but that's about it. It was very tasty, especially after a USDA Prime ribeye and a bottle of 1997 Casa Lapostolle merlot. But everything that night was tasty (ought to have been for what it cost) and the quality smoke got drowned out by the quality of everything else.

This last Sunday I had a Don Capitano Churchill (from Ybor City, cigar capital of the world, apparently) that I got from a newly married bride whose reception I had attended the day before. Some relation to her had a box of them and was passing them out with much fanfare. She doesn't like cigars but felt obligated to take one, owing to their hand-carried-from-far-away-lands nature. She surreptitiously gave it to me, and I smoked it after a big dinner (steak again this time, oddly enough) with Tess's parents Sunday night. It was a very good cigar. There's something about a nice thick steak and red wine and good cigars. The Don Capitano wsn't as good as Martin's Cuban, though.

These two events, coupled with Martin's gift of a cigar sampler from his humidor have given me a taste for cigars. And not just any cigars, either. Good cigars, like the kind from a store where you have to walk into a special room to get them. I've recently tried buying some from regular (grocery/drug) stores, but they aren't at all good. No, I need a certain kind. The Cuban kind, one particular brand. Martin may as well have just given me crack. Now I not only need to go to a special store which has a special room, I need to go to a whole different country to do it.

I found a shop in Tijuana called La Casa del Tabaco which sells Ramone Allones Specially Selected Robustos. I don't know how much they cost down in TJ (I emailed them but haven't heard back yet), but they aren't cheap. I'll also be keeping an eye out for counterfeits while there. Although the shop has a good reputation, based on the searches I've done, you never know. The fake Cuban cigar trade apparently flourishes in Tijuana. Luckily, I have the band from my original Ramone Allones to use for comparitive purposes. It may seem like a lot of hassle to go through just to get a cigar until you realize that it takes over an hour to smoke one of the damn things. A box of 25 represents something of a committment.

I emailed Martin to see if he wants to trek on down to TJ this weekend. If it turns out that the cigars are $300, then I'll just order the Dominican Gustosos and call it good. In fact, I might just buy one of those anyway to see if it's the same. If it's close to the Cuban one, then I may just stick with that. They say that Dominican cigars are better than Cubans these days because all the quality left with the embargo and rise of Castro. I don't know yet if that's true.

I still want to go down to Mexico, though. Even if I don't buy any cigars, we'll have a nice day trip no matter what. I've never seen TJ, and niether has Tess. We've been meaning to go for like five years. And now, thank the maker, we may have a reason to go on a semi-regular basis! Joy!

I'm going on a camping trip the weekend after Labor Day. The cigar-around-campfire situation will be much improved.

I recently found myself with a need for project tracking software of certain and specific proportions. It's a metaproject I'm working on this time. I'm going to be doing some work for one person (honestly, one guy, that's it, and just the one thing since I'm always running out of time) and need to be able to keep track of what I did, when I did it, how long it took, and notes about it. At some interval, I need to total up the time I spent and then make some descriptive text to that effect, which I can copy and paste into email or print. Having something which automatically summarizes the above in email would be very nice indeed. Icing on the cake...

Sounds easy, eh? Easy enough that a fruitless freshmeat.net search for such a software package didn't dishearten me into not trying to build something myself at around midnight on a Friday. I really am trying not to roll my own all the time, I swear. (As proof, I even bought a book on x86 assembly programming yesterday, which virtually guarantees that I won't do anything but learn something new and obscure and partially useless for at least six months.) I just couldn't help myself this time, and there really was nothing out there that does what I want. So I had to build something myself.

Well, I got the database designed for this project task tracker. It only has five tables. It could have had 100, easy. It's the sort of project that lends itself to easy and unthinkingly instant blossoming. You might have more than one project, users that have tasks associated with more than one project, tasks that span projects, projects which span customers, estimates (not only billing) reports combining any of the aformentioned, ad infinitum. It can get really silly. I even put in some user authentication stuff, with crypto. Ultimate silliness!

So after getting the database "done" I rabbittrailed my way into a couple hundred lines of PHP code which, while nice and dandy and a good starting point, doesn't run. It has bits which, when fleshed out, will do all sorts neat of things. Assuming it gets completed. It may not. At this point, I'm happy enough entering info using plain SQL. But it feels like an interesting project, and one that I think I'd be very good at. The trouble is I'm tired now, and tomorrow I won't be bored. I'm rarely bored, so the odds of this being what occupies my next period of non-boredom is slim. I know this from personal experience.

Which leads me to a concluding thought: The art of not being bored is in finding things to do which are only just complicated and time consuming enough such that they can be completed in the time it takes for something else more interesting to come along.

I posted a comment on Slashdot which got a lot of responses, in email I mean. I said the RIAA needs to be collectively wished into the cornfield. More than a couple people mailed me asking where the cornfield thing came from. More a couple people mailed me saying where it came from. More than a couple mailed me saying they thought the same thing. I got more mail form that one comment than I did from one of my web pages being posted on the front page of Slashdot. It's weird.

Anyway, the cornfield thing is from a short story called "It's A GoodLife" by Jerome Bixby. It was in the Twilight Zone TV show, a short story, a paperback, and the Twilight Zone movie.

I wish people into the cornfield all day. It never really happens, but if you squinch up your eyes and make tiny grunting noises while you think it in front of them, then they do go away temporarily. I recommend it.

My uncle John sent me this link to 9x18mm ammo gel tests. When on long road trips, I've taken to toting around a PA 63 Makarov due to its compact size, reliability, and inexpensiveness. (If I have to get something siezed, I'd rather it not be my Sprinfield Armory P9 or my Thompson/Auto Ordinance 1911A1. Those go to either my grandkids or a case on a wall somewhere.) I was never sure about what ammo to use, though. I'm using FMJ surplus. It didn't do too well form the looks of those tests.

See, I want something that will stop in a 2x4/drywall combo after going through an arm or a leg or a neck or something thin. That might sound sick but you have to think about these sorts of things. If someone comes into my house late at night and doesn't knock, I have to protect my family. Protect means securing all weapons against misuse, but it also means no collateral damage. It's dark, there's a guy throwing a cinder block through your front window, they have knives, they're coming up the stairs, and won't leave when told to. You have to either throw down or be a victim. That's no choice at all, except that it might be (in my mind) if I thought my .357 hand cannon might go through an interloper's chest and through a wall and into my wife. I'd hesistate, and that isn't good.

Anyway, we (thankfully) live in probably the best neighborhood we could live in for our area and the possibility of the sanctity of our home being violated is nearly infinitesimal. Still, I should be sure. Best to order a box of Hornaday or Barnaul and be done with it. Or just carry the Mak when on the road and have the 1911A1 available when at home. Or both at home, even. The more the merrier, I say. I'm ten times better with a .45 than a Mak anyway. It's a little big for Tess to shoot, though. Here's a plan: give the Mak to Tess and then get a lefty .45 for me to go with my righty. Full-on John Woo might be the way to go. And I get 14 rounds. Me, in my undies, plowing down the staircase blazing away with both hands like Bruce Willis would deter any nighttime burglar. Hell, me in my underwear would probably scare them enough, no guns needed.

Yeah, I need a pair of stainless .45s: one right-handed, one left. That's the solution.

I work at a university. I normally go to lunch with my boss. It's a good time to get out and talk about non-work things, or sometimes even work things we shouldn't talk about. When we head out together, I don't usually pay too much attention to my surroundings since we're talking to each other. He was occupied and so I went alone yesterday. In the 20 minutes it took me to walk to the student union, wait in line and order, and walk back, I heard (in conversation, not just students doing homework or anything) American English, Spanish, Italian, French, German, Russian, some form of Chinese, some kind of Filipino, and Australian English.

The American I heard all over -- nothing new here. Spanish, same deal, except the older gent and young woman speaking it looked like they were from Spain, not Mexico like you'd expect in Southern California. It was like dad and daughter from Barcelona were seeing the school.

The Italian I heard was from two very well-dressed middle aged ladies. They reminded me of the kind of people you'd see in Vegas. One had on a cream-colored blouse that reminded me of something my mom would wear. It had sparkly stuff on it up at the left shoulder area and she had on some large jewelry.

The French came mostly from a young woman in an elevator. She had on a geek t-shirt, and was talking with a young man who, I guessed, was not a native speaker.

The German was in the lobby of my building. A group of three young men (and one woman who said nothing) were standing around talking. Even though I speak a little German, I didn't catch anything recognizable. I was a little far away. Oddly, I pegged them as Germans by how they looked before I heard them talk. Young Germans have a certain look about them that you can spot from up to three miles away (and that's without a track suit). I came out of the elevator and they were across the lobby, and I remember thinking to myself "Heh heh... those guys look like they're trying to be Germans..." and then I heard them.

The Russian was from a very old woman and a slightly younger woman and man. They looked "professor-ish". They were in front of me at Subway. They spoke English with almost no accent whatsoever. I remember being impressed.

The Chinese and Filipino both came from two separate groups of young girls carrying books. At least I think the one set were Chinese. I'm no expert at Asian languages, but they looked to be Chinese (as much as any Westerner can guess at such a thing) and it sounded like they were speaking in a language I'd heard before as being Chinese. They were getting salsa at Rubios when I heard them. They didn't giggle at all and were very somber. I don't know why it struck me that they didn't giggle, it just did. Usually when you see a group of young Asian women, they are pretty happy. The Filipinas were walking out the door to the student union at the same time I was. They headed into the bookstore and I only heard a little bit of their conversation. They mixed English into their conversation.

The two Autralian dudes were jabbering on about quantum foam and getting pretty animated about it. I was walking behind them, as they were also headed back to the Applied Physics and Math building where I work. I got to hear more of their conversation than anyone elses (it also helped that I could actually understand it). One of them was carrying a new iBook, the other had really wiry hair.

It's cheesy, but I think it's pretty cool to be able to work in such a place.

I saw this on fark.com:

Q: What's the difference between Courtney Love and a hockey game?

A: Hockey players shower after 3 periods.

I laughed at that way more than I should have, I think. I just don't like Courtney Love all that much. Not that she's done anything to me personally, mind you. At least when you hate someone who has a song on the radio, you can always change the station. It ain't like they are your neighbor or anything...

I was in Phoenix, AZ this weekend hooking up a good friend with furniture. He just bought a house in Temecula, CA which has, not surprisingly, significantly larger overall internal dimenions than the one bedroom apartment he used to occupy. A predictable side effect of this life change is that he has excess volume which is occupied solely by normal air. He wanted non-air to fill said space and I didn't want him to have to go deeper in debt (he also has a 14-month-old baby girl and a wife who can only sporadically work) just because he has to increase air displacement in his house. Since my mother owns a retail store with 26,000 square feet of clothing and furniture, I felt that not helping him was tantamount stealing virtual milk from his baby's future. I don't know why people pay $1,500 for a sleeper sofa, I really don't. So helping him out was an easy decision, and one I was glad to make. I'm always up for helping out those who I know will appreciate it. I'm also glad my mom was kind enough to sell, at cost, furniture and housewares to a person she'd never met before, purely because I asked her to. She's a good person and has unwittingly helped out three other good people.

That wasn't the only reason I was there in PHX, though. I had to take Tess there because she is driving, with my mother and my sister-in-law, to Las Vegas for the ASD/AMD rodeo (which I'd been to several times in the past, both as an exhibitor and a normal attendee). The ASD/AMD show is the most surreal environment I've ever been in, sober or not. In fact, I'll go out on an easy limb and say that one needs no intoxicants in order to be entranced, amazed, bewildered, appalled and frightened by the ASD/AMD show. I just realized that the range of emotions I experienced when I first atteneded the show occurred in that exact order. Clearly, the show has imprinted itself into my hindbrain. I'll let Tess explain it all when she gets back.

And that wasn't the only reason I had to actually drive to PHX, though. I've been helping my mom at her new store, building various back-end computer-related parts or working a hammerdrill and a sledge hammer. More drill than server, not that I'm keeping score. What's good for the body is good for the soul. Anyway, I took two 40GB drives I had laying around (which I was going to sell on ebay, but figured mom could use) and build a RAID1 web and Samba workgroup server for the store. I was going to use the parts from an old dual Pentium II 400 machine they were using at their last store. It has nearly a gig of RAM, and would make a great fileserver. Since she also has static IPs through her corporate DSL line, the box was also going to be pressed into duty serving web pages, with Samba making it easy to store things (securely: RAID1 is mirroring) from a Windows share. I got the box working, but not with RAID. One of the drives must have fallen or something, though. It reported itself as having 7000-something cylinders, 255 heads (weird number, eh?) and an inordinately large number of sectors. I was going to figure out what exactly the reported geometry must have been (since the size was reported as a proper 40GB, just like the other one) but I'm too lazy and tired and I don't care anymore. I'm going to find a good deal on storage and try again some time soon.

Anyway, that was the last 38 hours. I've been gone and doing for 5 weekends in a row. I just want to sit. Next weekend is no plans (although I'd like to get a little paintball in; my Matrix is getting more expensive all the time, when you value it based on the number of times it gets used per year of its functional existence divided by its total cost). Tess's parents are here for a week, which will be a fun alternative to going to another city.

And now, I'm going to drink a beer and play a video game and not think or say anything for at least two hours.

Oh yeah, the title of this post relates to what I was going to write about but completely failed to mention: Tess's 2001 Honda CRV has an exceptionally smooth ride at 105 miles per hour.

Tess recently wrote about our weekend jaunt to the "Lobster Capital of Nebraska", Nebraska City, for her family reunion. I'm going to chime in about that trip, for no reason at all.

We saw (and caught) lightning bugs. They're really strange. I didn't have my glasses, so when they were winking on and off, it was hard to focus on where they were at (one wink blurry, the other sharp). It's like when you look at something reflective, and one eye catches a shine from something else in the reflection, but the other doesn't. Apparently, you can squish the lightning bugs, and the guts glow. (I suppose there's some sort of enzyme or something which causes the bioluminescent reaction, like two binary chemicals? I'm imagining the inventor of cyalume seeing lightning bugs and coming up with his product. No glow unless you mix the two chemicals. It's safe to say that squishing the little beetles is a way to have them involuntarily mix their chemicals.) No glowbugs were harmed in the making of our vacation, by the way, and as we were leaving Sunday morning, Tess released the one (very confused to be awake in the daylight) bug she had caught the night before. All she wanted was a tiny chuckle throughout the night, I guess.

We stayed at the Leid Conference Center. It was a nice place, and an ironic place. It was built to serve "a resource for the National Arbor Day Foundation members, other conservation-related organizations, teachers, forestry professionals, and any other organization or company wishing to use a centrally located, high quality, and reasonably priced conference center". Its construction involved the most real, natural, interior hardwood I've seen since my youth in Pinetop, AZ. I'm talking cut logs on every flat surface, and everything held up by whole peeled trees. It was a Paul Bunyan wet dream. You can kinda see it in this small picture. Everything in that pic which isn't glass is wood. So I couldn't help but laugh a little (OK, a lot) when I found out that it was built for the Arbor Day Foundation, on the Arbor Day Farms. It's like PETA having a meat packing plant for its headquarters and meeting spaces.

I know this may sound improbable, but I've always wondered where Arbor Day came from. Really, I have. When I was a kid, I had this Peanuts cartoon book about holidays and Arbor day was one of them. Snoopy and Charlie Brown were planting little trees. It was the first time I'd heard of Arbor Day. You know when you hear about something that apparently everyone else has known about, but mention of which has somehow escaped you, how you get that feeling like you've been asleep too long? It was like that. Anyhow, I got to see where it was invented. And I think I know why it was invented, too. From the looks of the conference center, I can see how it's completely reasonable that the only holiday one could possibly imagine after constructing the center would be one involving the planting of new trees.

Here are some more factoids which are nearly completely useless: The guy who came up with Arbor Day (and who was probably no slouch with a saw himself) was J. Sterling Morton, of Morton salt fame. Apparently, Nebraska has a lot of salt in it's geological makeup, although it's no longer mined commercially. We got to see Morton's farm. They rebuilt it. You know when Arbor day is? Well, that depends on which state you're in. If you wanna join in, you can get 10 free trees with which to do so.

So environment aside, I had a great time meeting all of Tess's relatives. I especially liked meeting Little Ivan, who -- despite having Tourette's Syndrome -- owns and operates a worm ranch. No kidding -- I learned all about worm ranches from him (I'm not giving away the secrets, either; if you want to know what a worm ranch does, then ). He's an interesting guy, and if half the people his age had half his determination in spite of adversity, this country would be twenty times the economic powerhouse it is today. Tess's cousins (aged such that they could easily be mistaken for aunts) were extremely cool. We stayed up "late" Friday night and they were all taking time out to knock back a cocktail/beer or two. It was fun being there with them for the pregame show, getting a little one-on-one time. Earlier that day, I got a very manly and mostly-encompassing hug from Cousin Bill, an ex-Marine and a hilariously nice guy. I tried to dig into the hug and reciprocate as much as I could, and I think it was well-received. I should have him asked what aftershave he used. It was quite sexy.

I got to see Nebraskan food, which apparently exists as a condiment to gravy of various types. Nothing like a big helpin' of gravy seasoned with a little fried chicken and corn. It really hits the spot on a warm summer evening. I got to see apple trees, which I had never seen before (even though I did some field camp mapping trips in and around Willcox, AZ, where they grow quite a few apples). The ones we saw were scraggly little things, with the tallest being about 8-10 feet tall. I looked up apple trees on the web and the ones I saw were pruned shorter than normal. The apples were tiny green ones and not fit for eating. We saw corn and soybeans, too. Lots of it. I'd seen soybeans before, but not corn. I wanted to get out and walk around the rows just to see what it was like, but I never did. Maybe another day.

I also learned that on Sundays in July between the hours of noon and 5:30PM, Omaha is essentially a wasteland. If I ever have to direct a remake of Omega Man, I'm filming it in Omaha on a July weekend. Tess and I had 6 hours to kill (we hitched a ride from Nebraska City to Omaha in the morning; our flight left at night). We decided to rent a car, partially because Omaha International Airport has no lockers for personal items. Explain to me how an "international" airport can do anything but hang its head in shame when it doesn't even have basics like coin-operated storage lockers. I think it's putting on airs. Omaha is, geographically and culturally speaking, probably the farthest away one can be from anything international and still remain in the continental US. Next time I'm there, I'm looking for an international flight. I bet they don't have any (or only enough to claim the title "international").

We drove around downtown aimlessly for an hour or two amidst endless one-way streets (found the art museum and the high school, and even took a picture of the "Mutual of Omaha" building and one cool looking old house), until I hit upon an idea. I recalled seeing a lot of mention of the Cornhuskers, and I remembered that this was a college football team. I figured that Omaha, being the largest city in Nebraska, is home to this team and therefore the college for which they play. I further assumed that in spite of its predicted "Go Huskers" nature, the college might be the one place that has anything open on Sunday which might appeal to a young and hip (heh heh) married couple with a few hours to kill and a free rental car. So I fired up the GPS, found us, found the mall on the map, found the mall on the GPS, and got us properly oriented. Tess (who was driving the rental) steered us down the proper one-way road until we came to the mall. We went inside and looked around before deciding on a plan.

Omaha is actually an interesting place, and I learned a lot of about it from the cross-section of the people at the mall - at least as far as appearances and local styles are concerned. For example, I learned that, statistically speaking, if you are a male between the ages of 16 and 28 and you live in Omaha, you have a 87% chance of having a mullet and a 61% chance of wearing Lee brand jeans. If you're a female otherwise matching that demographic, you have a 47% chance of feathered hair parted in the middle or a 51% chance of having your bangs hairsprayed into a sheer wall rising up from your forehead. You also have a 74% chance of finding yourself wearing blue eyeshadow (and if so, a 24% chance of that being your only makeup). Either sex has a 67% chance of having arrived at the mall in a car with a dreamcatcher hanging from the rearview, with 97% of the cars sporting some sort of red "N" somewhere (the chances that you have a "I bleed Husker red" sticker was undetermined but observed to be high).

After sampling the mall and its inhabitants, we got some coffee, bought some books, had lunch, and headed back to the airport so we could wait for our flight to Denver. We got to Denver, got home and then prepared for the traveling the next coming weekend.

Well, that's about all I can dredge up as far as thoughts on my trip. In general, I liked everything and had a swell time. I'd go back in a heartbeat, and am looking forward to seeing Tess's relatives again.

I ordered some junk from Gary Olen's web site sportsmansguide.com last week. The order came today. I had to tear into the box as soon as I got home. There's always a good antique, surplusy smell in his boxes. Among the items I got was a pair of German Mil. Fleck Camo Shorts. They're probably the most comfortable item of clothing I've ever worn. I'm not kidding. Tess tried to steal them from me.

I wish I had bought more of them, though; my size is out of stock. I should have known to order more when I had the chance. The German "moleskin" clothing is exceedingly comfortable, and I own like maybe 2 dozen pairs of shorts and pants. I've been wearing that stuff for years and years (having a mother that can get bulk surplus at wholesale prices is a bonus when you're a starving student). Any surplus German item rules. I've never been disappointed. Next time I'm ordering multiple pairs. If the size is wrong, I'll ebay it or something. See, by the time you get the German surplus item, they are out of the "medium" sizes. So when you see an item that might be your size, you have to order a lot of them since you only get one chance.

Tess and I just went online. I got her and me a pair of the fleck pants, and a shirt for just her (my shirt is on backorder). Just the thing for paintball in the eucalyptus. And I can take hem the pants into shorts no sweat! w00t!