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.