Weekender

Only worked for a few hours yesterday and then took off for the day with Jenny to play outside. We went up to Bridger Bowl to ski but cars were parked almost to the highway so we decided to go hiking instead. We hiked up Grassy Mountain for about 45 mins and enjoyed the views. The dogs were happy to be outside and were whipped and tired during the car ride home.

Today I got out for 2 hours on the road bike for an easy spin with Ryan. The sun was out but the temp sat at 30F. Should have known not to ride the roads today since it snowed 12 inches only 36 hours ago. Icey bike but no harm done.

Tonight we are playing it low key, making dinner and maybe heading out for a beer.

Jenny bought some ski boots and poles to go with the CC touring skis that my brother sent out for us. We are heading to Bohart Ranch tomorrow for some time on the snow. Looking forward to a hard workout on the hills...

Home Theater

Some people think I just hook up DVD players and TVs at my job. This is partly true. But for the next two months (if I am working here that long) I will be stuck in a rack room with one other installer working on hooking up a system. This is one of the biggest systems in the US and costs more than ten times what my home is worth.

The pictures below show the progress made in the last two weeks. It doesn't seem like much for 80 hours of work but we have to run one wire at a time and cut each to a custom length. If we didn't it would just end up as a rats nest of wiring and would be impossible to service in the future.

The top two pictures are of the amplifier rack for the distributed audio for the house. There are 18 16-channel amps. There are 200+ speakers in the house plus subwoofers so the system needs a lot of juice. Each channel gets a Left and Right RCA cable, a Left and Right Speaker cable and each amp is connected to the Network with a Cat 5 wire.

The bottom picture is a fully switchable 256 channel audio matrix switcher. There are only 3 of these systems in houses on earth. One is in the Ukraine (oil magnate), one is in the Middle East (oil magnate) and the one here in Big Sky (hotel magnate). This little baby costs 250K and is most commonly used in millitary applications like NORAD where you need to distribute audio and video to hundreds of TVs. Anyway, the switcher lets you send any source to any speaker independently of every other speaker. What this means is that in this house, every single audio zone can play a different source at the same time.

Geeky post but I thought you might like to see what installers really spend most of their time doing.

time for a new post i think

It's only been a month. Stop hating on me. Don't hate the player, hate the game.

OK. So....

Hmmmmmm....

Home theater work is as busy as ever. We actually scored two new 16,000 square ft. jobs in the past week and a half. Wealthy people have money. If you have $100 million in the bank and you lose 40% of it would you change your lifestyle? Probably not.

Bechtle Architects is picking up steam so it looks like I may be back at the firm for 30 hrs a week. That would be really nice.

I am starting my own company. Design 5. My articles of organization and operating agreement should be filed next week. It's going to be official. And I have three clients!! Yes!!!

So.... If you know of anyone who needs any landscape planning, landscape architecture work, planning work or project installation oversight... CALL ME!!! 406-600-0342. Available for projects in MN and MT.

No tires on the Zipps yet. I am waiting to see if there is a MN connection for rubber...

I am sick right now. That's no fun. Was almost 53F today and I sat on my ass. Oh well.

I spent the last two weekends at the Human Performance Lab at MSU. Dr. Seifert was conducting a study for a sports drink company. I was paid $250, pizza and four other meals. The study was conducted in three parts. First part was a VO2Max test. My max has gone down 6 points, to 56. I should see significant improvement by the end of June with proper training. The first Friday I showed up to the lab, was weighed naked, pissed in a bottle, handed that steamy bottle to a guy with gloves and then had Dr. Seifert shove a large needle into my arm so they could draw blood for the next 4.5 hours. After being prepped I went into a room with nine other bikers and started to bike on my bike set up on a trainer. The company bought two new 42" LCD tvs for the study so we watched Tour highlights. The point of the study was to lose 2.5% of your bodyweight in sweat and then drink it back. It took me 1hr15mins to lose the weight then I had 20 mins to drink three full Nalgenes of water. That sucked. Then I just had to sit around. I had to have blood drawn, pee in a bottle and get weighed every 30 mins for the next 3 hours. After that you get to eat pizza and then take off. I repeated it again last weekend. That's it. Money in the bank. I don't know what the drink was because no one could say anything unless Dr. Seifert and Dr. Heil get favorable results. If the top secret drink didn't help hydrate better no one will ever know it existed....

Jenny and I booked tickets to Las Vegas for early May. I have never been there. We found a screaming deal through Allegiant air. Three nights hotel, airfare and two tickets to Cirque de Soliel for $215 / person. Not bad...

Next trip to MN is in July for my brothers wedding. I looked at the schedule and I think I can make it to 4 bike races. Marty RR, Hopkins Crit, Dakota Crit and Black Dog. Depending on the plans maybe the Tour of Granite Country RR (if they let you only do one stage...)

Peace out....