mcb's blog

G.I. Joe

2009-11-09T15:55:24Z

So I watched G.I. Joe Saturday night. Yes it was a very bad movie, but despite the bad acting bad lines I really enjoyed it. Having grown up in the eighties and having nearly all of the first 4-5 years of the action figures and toys and an avid watcher of the cartoon the movie brought back much of those good memories. The massive submarine battle at the climax was very reminiscent of the cartoon. It all it was a pretty good conversion of the cartoon feel into a live action movie.

I did find it funny how many actors from The Mummy movies was in G.I. Joe it almost became a distracting trying to see who would show up next.

Abby and Halloween

2009-11-03T15:18:12Z

We all had lots of fun with Halloween. Abby had funny walking around in her costume. She was less excited about going up to stranger's houses. I couldn't get her to say "trick or treat" or "thank-you" but she would frequently say by-by as we walked away. After we went up and down our street she had a lot of fun handing out candy as long as the trick-or-treat'er was not too scary. Little princess got an extra big handfuls of candy.

Happy Halloween!

2009-11-01T01:18:25Z

Tactical Reload

2009-10-24T17:36:54Z

<- Notice this is grumpy Troll as opposed to the geeky Troll in the previous post. :)

I have probably ranted about Tactical Reloads before but Tactical Reloads have always bugged me. What's a Tactical Reload? Well that it is, in a gun fight, reloading a weapon while retaining the partially used magazine in the gun for possible later use. Part of my angst for it comes from the draconian enforcement of it in IDPA competition. Part of it comes from my realization that in a real gun fight the likelihood of it being useful is slim and is something I would never want to try while suffering an adrenaline dump.

This YouTube video covers sever good reasons why I don't like it and when and why it might be appropriate to use, better than I probably can.

Abby, your dad is a geek, sorry.

2009-10-19T01:30:22Z

So we were at Grandma's and Pa-pap's tonight for dinner. While we were getting ready for dinner Abby got a small pot lid and a triple-spoon-rest from under the range top and as she walked around the end of the kitchen cabinets my first thought when I saw here was she has a buckler and was wielding a small battle axe. Sorry Abby, your dad is a geek!

Abby meets lobsters

2009-10-15T18:43:35Z

So we had a lobster/claim bake at the bosses house yesterday afternoon. Abby found the lobsters interesting.

RPS

2009-10-13T14:46:55Z

If you don't get it your using the wrong calculator!

Proud Engineer Father

2009-10-13T03:07:39Z

Abby built that entire tower of Duplo Blocks pretty much on her own tonight. I built a short wide base and she very carefully and deliberately stack the very tall thin tower of blocks. The best part was when she had a block in both hands, as she attempted to stack the block in her right hand she realized she had grabbed the block upside-down. Rather than dropping the block in her left hand to help adjust the right hand block she put the miss-grasped block in her mouth adjusted her grasp on it and then placed is successfully on the tower follow shortly by the block in her left hand. Watching the intensity and focus with which she went about her building was very cool.

A little high speed video of bullets hitting things.

2009-10-07T20:46:42Z

Enjoy!

Stick a fork in the towl and thow it in.

2009-09-23T08:45:31Z

Proposals are finished time to get some sleep and start writing a progress report.

Time flies when your swamped.

2009-09-17T01:12:47Z

Until last week things at work where going pretty good. I was up to my eyeballs in some pretty gnarly multi-physics finite element analysis and was as happy as a pig in mud. Then starting last week all the unpleasant parts of being an engineer in a small company caught up with me.

I had to do an internal business plan presentation to upper management!? WTF why the business development guys couldn't do about 80% of that without me, is beyond me. Some good office politics there for sure. Then I have a presentation on that same project to a very likely new outside commercial partner this Saturday. I am still not happy with the presentation but don't have alot of time to work on it. In addition the Saturday meeting is going to make me miss the Hunter's match out at the club and riding miniature trains with Abby. :(

On top of that I have two DOD SBIR proposals due next Wednesday at 6:00AM. One I am writing on my own the other I am compiling for a colleague that is at a conference this week and on vacation next week. If he takes vacation again during SBIR proposal next time and thinks I am picking up the slack on his proposal he's going to get...

And just to make it interesting I have a progress report for an Army program that was due yesterday. And even better I expected that Army program's Phase II to kick-off in November or early December. Well the Army is on the ball and contract negotiations have gone quickly and that contract is probably going to start next week or at the latest the week after. It's good because it mean I have my full budget to throw behind the work but at this point it just feels like the biggest meanest dog landed on top of the already large dogpile.

2:30 in the morning...

2009-08-28T06:39:42Z

I should be sleeping but I fell asleep on my should wrong and it hurts like hell. I think I end up pinching a nerve or something. The PC is grinding away with a virus scan and I can't sleep with the fan changing pitch at least not until the Advil kicks in.

The books you have read more than twice.

2009-08-22T12:29:16Z

So I started the third book in the Old Man's War series, The Last Colony by John Scalzi. The first two chapters have been very entertaining. After putting the book down to go to sleep, for whatever reason, my mine got thinking about books that I have enjoyed so much that I have read them more than twice. There are lots of books that I have read twice. Maybe this is because my reading comprehension is probably below average and it often takes two read for me to comprehend it all. I know the list of books that I have read twice would be rather long and probably incomplete due to me forgetting about some/many of the books. The books that I have read more than twice is much shorter and comprises the books that I not only really like but also ones that I like to revisit. Some books are immensely entertain the first time through but a second read does not make them better. The books on this list are one that when I finish reading them invariably for days to several weeks after I find myself missing one character or another as if a friend died or moved away.

Anyway if your incline, post your list of books you have read more than twice. Here's mine:

The Hobbit by JRR Tolkien
Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien
Neuromancer by William Gibson
Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The Sword and the Dagger by Ardath Mayhar
Decision at Thunder Rift by Jr., William H. Keith
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
The Mouse and the Motorcycle by Beverly Cleary
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
Most if not all of the Sherlock Holmes stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Alien vs Predator (graphic novel) by Randy Stradley, Chris Warner, and Phill Norwood and the Novelization: Aliens vs Predator: Prey by Steve Perry and Stephani Perry

Battery life seems good.

2009-08-18T23:56:46Z

So I started up the new netbook this morning on battery power at about 9:30AM just after I got to work. Our internet connection was down so I played on the laptop moving some files around, and let Windows install an update it has already downloaded. After that the laptop was in and out of standby several times throughout the rest of morning as I was in and out of my office. After lunch myself and two co-workers worked on a cost proposal and time line for a project we are proposing. We used my new laptop with it attached to the conference room projector (screen off just the external display). I moved the standby time out to 15 minutes and the laptop ran pretty much continuous from 1:00PM until about 5:20PM working on a Word and Excel document and occasionally looking up info on the web (internet was restored just before lunch). I turned it off for the trip home and then watch the parade for the county fair with GFWTR and Abby. Sat down a few minutes ago and send those documents to another coworker for review and started this post... I just looked and the battery is down to 27% left. Not bad for nearly a full day of use.

More rambling on the new netbook and angst for AVG.

2009-08-17T01:47:47Z

So I got all the software installed that I wanted. Microsoft Office was easily copied to a SD card and installed from that without a problem. I was please that the internal ballistics software I had been using, that would not run under the 64-bit Vista, runs just fine on this machine. It sort of sucked to have to do my load developments at work on my work computer. The only other software I installed was Notepad++, Filezilla, and Photofiltre.

I did run into one problem. I had installed the free version of AVG Friday night. It was the second thing I did. First I downloaded Firefox and installed it. Removed the trial version of Norton and then installed AVG. Saturday afternoon the AVG resident shield returns a likely virus on a svchost.exe. I did a little research and it appeared I might have gotten a false positive. As a backup to AVG I installed Malwarebytes and just after installing it AVG reports the same virus (win32/Heur) was infecting a file that was just installed by Malwarebytes. This seemed unlikely to me and further research seems to indicated that some programs like Malwarebytes can sometimes return false positive on files inoculated by them against certain types of virus. Apparently AVG cannot tell the difference between this type of virus or a file inoculated against that virus.

I hope this is the case I am not sure how I would have gotten a real virus with how little surfing I had done. Most of the time spent on the system was installing software. I don't know where it would have come from. Later scans have come up clean with both AVG and Malwarebytes. Any other suggestion on how to make sure the system is clean would be appreciated.

Other than that one scare the system has been pretty good. I am looking forward to putting it to work this week on some proposals at work.

New Laptop

2009-08-15T04:18:04Z

So late last year GFWTR and myself bought a new desktop computer, a big quad core Dell. It replace my old Toshiba laptop that was basically being used as a desktop machine. The old Toshiba went to my brother to replace his dead IBM laptop that had a hard drive die. I took that and put a new drive in it. I was never able to get a valid version of Windows to run on it despite having what I thought was a valid Win 98 license from the bottom of the machine and a supposedly valid Win XP upgrade license. So that old IBM 900Mhz PIII got a copy of Ubuntu installed on it. That worked OK, a bit slow but for a downstairs, secondary computer it was passable. It had a curious bug though, if shutdown it would take a several attempts (upwards of 8-10 times) of booting it up to get X-windows to start up correctly, it usually just had a blank screen. Apparently it was some weirdness with the particular graphics card in that model from IBM. No one had found a reliable work around. Anyway it was a bit annoying to use, especially for GFWTR and since it was so old it would not run for more that 15-20 minutes on battery power.

So I have been looking to get a new truly mobile computer. Something I can take on trips both for work and play. For what I wanted, a mobile web surfing and word processing machine, I settle on a netbook class machine. I did a good bit of research over the last month or so (a whole heap the last few days) and settled on old laptop manufacture that is apparently fairly new to the netbook class laptop machine. I bought another Toshiba. This will be the third Toshiba laptop I have owned. All three are still running, including the Toshiba Satellite Pentium-120 I wrote my PhD disseration on. The new machine, the one I am using to write this post, is a Toshiba N205 ultra-portable. As far as netbooks go it is pretty much standard. Its a 1.66Ghz Atom with 1GB of ram 160GB of HDD and a 10.2 inch screen (1024x600). This is pretty much standard for 85% of all netbooks.

What sets it apart is it does have bluetooth built in, a small web cam, and one of the three USB ports can be set to remain on so you can use the laptop to charge your iPod or cell phone off the laptop power supply or even battery when the laptop is shutdown. The keyboard looks similar to the new MAC laptop keyboards and despite the funky look it is pretty well laid out for a compact keyboard. The screen is very sharp and bright. From the reviews I have read the battery, a 6-cell lithium, is reportedly able to run the machine for upwards of 9-hours on a charge. I have not tested that but will.

Now I just have to figure out how to install Office 2003 on it without a CD-ROM drive. First attempt will be to copy the entire CD to a SD card and try the built in SD card reader. And on a related not how to make recover CD without a drive too...

Anyway, time to go to bed and finish installing software in the morning.

Flooded basement.

2009-08-04T13:21:46Z

Yeap... I thought I had all my plumbing issue finally resolved... I did... It's just the air conditioner threw me a curve. The drain for the evaporator and humidifier decided to back up yesterday and last night at about 10:00pm GFWTR went down stairs to start a load of laundry and notice the laundry room was soaked and about an inch of water was standing by the hot water tank and furnace/air-conditioner. It took me about twenty minutes to figure out were the water was coming from. At least it was clean water. I sucked up most of it with my shop vac. Tonight I am going to try to blow the line clear with my compressor. It a 1 inch line that runs twenty plus feet across the basement and two small in diameter to snake. The snake will not go around the 90 elbows and there are several as it runs to the other side of the basement to the floor drain. If that fail I guess I will probably just replace it with some 1 1/4 or 1 1/2 line so I can snake it next time.

3AM I should be sleeping...

2009-07-28T07:17:17Z

Woke up with another strange dream about being back in college. I was sleeping in class, in the front row, as usual, and it was being taught by the "chick" that was my undergrad basic electronics lab partner. She was not doing a very good job. I never did get a date with her, despite the effort back then. Despite the effort now I can't even recall her name. Even in the dream I was trying to figure out why the hell I was back in college. Messed up dream.

Flight Helmet

2009-07-28T01:47:16Z

I got to purchase an HGU-55 flight helmet for a project at work.

Fun Fun!

If I have an communicable decreases everyone in the company probably has it now. I am pretty sure everyone has put that helmet and mask on. Most have also walked around the office looking like a goof-ball giggling like a school girl.

Every have one of those days you'd been better off staying in bed?

2009-07-22T02:43:08Z

That was most of last weekend.

Saturday I had the piston rod on my lawn tractor disconnect from the piston and come through the side of the crank case. If anyone has a line on a used 8Hp Briggs and Stratton vertical output shaft I'm in the market for one.

Sunday's pistol match was really rough. 5 rounds into the first stage the trigger bar on my XD-40 breaks. Had to shoot the rest of the match with my Production gun but as Limited-10 Minor. On my second run shooting Revolver I got five misses on my last stage due to serious meat-ware malfunction.

Yeah, painful to say the least...

Abby's first birthday.

2009-07-13T01:33:55Z

Yep it's been just about a year. Her 1st birthday is technically this Wednesday but we celebrated it with family and friend today.

Mechwarrior 5

2009-07-09T17:04:10Z

It appears that Mechwarrior 5 will be set early enough to be all inner sphere, no lousy clans. And it appears that at least some of the old classic chassis are back. I thought Battletech had lost the rights to the Warhammer mech (the mech who's perspective you are viewing from in the video.)

I haven't bought a new computer game in many years and the only new game I have played recently was Halo 2 my brother got me for Christmas. If this games becomes reality I will be spending money on it. No doubt with much consternation from GFWTR. The game, a new video card and a good joystick.

ETA: Apparently they will be giving away Mechwarrior 4 free as a way to generate interesting in the new game. BattleTech.com supposedly will have it for download "shortly".

Good Weekend

2009-06-30T14:09:35Z

-Friday took GFWTR out for a nice dinner while Na'nah watch Abby.

-Saturday me and Abby hung out all day. Went shopping in the morning and that afternoon tried out my big wheeled stroller I got for father's day with a little exploring off road at an old park near our house.

-Sunday was a USPSA match at the local club. Got beat in Limited-10 by 0.38% by a high-school kid. Good match the kid and I were squaded together and egging each other on all match.

-That afternoon did a little more shopping and out for dinner with both GFWTR and Abby.

-That even cleaned guns and watch Aliens, again. I forgot how good that movie was I hadn't watched it in nearly two years.

-Monday night GFWTR and I went on a double date with the new priest and her husband, went out to dinner and saw the new Star Trek movie. Overall it was enjoyable. Felt rushed at the beginning and weak on plot but I thought the new versions of the characters were pretty good. I especially liked the new Bones.

Busy Day, in bullet form

2009-06-23T03:39:39Z

-Abby was up relatively early this morning.

-Off to the the Ohio BMV for a new drivers license. Service was surprisingly fast and friendly.

-No internet access at work and more detrimental to getting work done, no network server so I could not run my CAD software (network license) or access the main color printer.

-In the absents of real work progress:
--I made a stainless steel bushing for the clutch of my poor old lawn tractor
--I also fix a Co-worker's nephew's RC truck that has been sitting in my office for two months

-Left work early (since I was not getting any real work accomplished) and got a new set of Hankook tires put on the Element.

-Got home played with Abby when I could drag her away from the mother-in-law.

-Got Abby ready for bed and then washed bottles.

-Use above mentions stainless steel bushing and a few other parts to rebuild the failing clutch in my poor old lawn tractor.

-Cleaned all three guns from the 3-gun match. (Eugen Stoner is still a filthy engineer)

-Came upstairs to find an email stating that I have receive notice of award of my first Phase II program with the DoD (Army specifically) as PI!!!

Random statement post

2009-06-22T03:24:42Z

-Abby is going to walk any day now. She has taken as many as three step on her own before converting back to linoleum lizard mode.

-The large aperture on a standard rear AR-15 battle sight does not work at 200 yards. This cost me second place at last weekend's three gun when I got a big fat zero on the long range rifle stage.

-My aunt is still using a broadcast TV signal, on a 46 inch 1080p capable TV. I installed the a new antenna to help boost reception of the new digital signal this weekend.

-I finished slogging through Charles Stross' Accelerando. It is a neat interpretation of the technological singularity. That said, my "Leave it to Beaver" childhood clashed severely with the painfully dysfunctional family that was the focus of the story. In addition my desire to shoot cats and drowned kitten was also accentuated, greatly. I can not recommend the book.

-The Ohio BMV does not send a reminder until after your driver's license has expired.

-The Element needs tires badly, almost 70K on the OEM ones. 215/70R16, any recommendations?