What did you do this weekend?

We took the trailer out for our first trip! Just a single night in our friend’s driveway. It was very cozy, and we got to test out a lot of important things like the heater, fridge, and bed. Everything worked really well, and I think we could actually boondock (no hookups) for a few days!

Disconnected. I had a friend from Scotland in town and to pack in as many of the special local activities/places as possible within the constrains of his short weekend trip. Got in some camping, MTB, sailing, road cycling, and swimming in across 100 miles in about 40 hours. I think he might be a little tired and bruised for the rest of his business trip, but it was well worth it! I was even able to garden/veg out when he left on Sunday. A really, really great weekend.

I had my weekend schedule shifted to Sunday-Monday for a few weeks because a company we have to work with can't seem to get its shit together, so I went to look for stuff to do. I found out that there's an English-language standup comedy scene in the city I'm in, so I decided to go out on the town and attend a show. I haven't been to a comedy club since before the pandemic, so it was refreshing. There's an open mic night next week, and I'm thinking about participating, but I'm not sure if I'll get the nerve to do it.

One of my flight instructors flaked on me twice from Friday and Saturday so I spent Saturday returning some stuff at the store and going out to eat. On Sunday I had a flight lesson with one of my other instructors and he seemed to be pretty impressed with my progress after just 5-6 lessons. He thinks I am close to soloing so I'm doing everything I can in between lessons to get to that point. I'm close to taking my FAA written exam and received my third class medical last week, so I should be good to go.

I continued to work on the PC that I have started putting together. I started last weekend, but ran into a problem; the Motherboard is borked.

I got a EVGA x299FTW K, which is by all accounts a good motherboard, but when I got everything connected, instead of starting up smoothly, there was a brief flash and then everything turned off. I was convinced that I had put things together poorly, so I checked a lot of things:

• the wiring of the case so many times
• the RAM - there's 4x 16Gb sticks in, so I tried several combinations
• with and without the graphics card
• with and without fan
• I bought a different CPU fan (in fact bought a liquid cooled heat pump) and tried that
• I tested the PSU
• I took everything off the case and tested starting it completely clear of the case in case of shorts

Nothing worked. So I started processing an RMA of the motherboard. That has not been a fast experience so far, so in the meanwhile I purchased an MSI X299 Pro motherboard to use instead. That arrived... along with a new NVME SSD. I put the SSD together with the CPU and the heat pump and RAM, outside of the case, did a basic wiring and started it up... and everything started up just fine. So I'm going to put it all in the case, with everything attached as expected. On the plus side, this new motherboard is about 3cm less wide than the first one, so it has made some cord access points in the case more usable.

I haven't finished putting everything together yet, but things are looking much more promising. Now I'm on the lookout for an acceptable price on a 3080 (no rush, I currently have a 2080) to put in this beast, and then I should be well positioned with a PC for at least a couple of years.

I think I almost got my son into building, so I think that we'll put together another small PC at some point. I have a big old bin of computer parts, and a bunch of old computers to take apart too.