mcb's blog

The John Varley Reader

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:36:04 GMT

So quite some time ago I asked for book suggestions. madeofmeat made several suggestions, most of which were good ones. One of the suggestions was a collection of short stories by John Varley. Well last night I finished reading that collections, The John Varley Reader.

All in all it was a good collection of Sci-Fi Short stories. My favorite was probably "PRESS ENTER" but I have a soft place for old Sci-Fi that projects out what the "net" is going to be like. "PRESS ENTER" has a nice precursor to what would become cyberpunk.

My mistake in reading this book, though, was reading the authors introduction to the stories. I have found the less I know about authors the better. Too often I find that there is some aspect of their personality that rubs me the wrong way and then I have to make and effort not to see that in their writing and let that color their writing. There were several times in these introductions that Varley irked me and usually what irked me really did not appear to help intro the stories.

So if you ever get a chance to read this collection I would suggest first reading the stories and then, if so inclined, go back and read the intros.

Next book: Brisingr [Book Three Eragon Series] by: Christopher Paolini

ETA: Scratch that book they sent me the Spanish version. Anyone got a suggestion?

Silly connnections

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 16:46:25 GMT

Start on netbook
-> VPN into work network
-> Remote Desktop into my workstation
-> NoMachine connection from workstation into the Blade Server running Ubuntu
-> Run Firefox to post silly post on Blog

Reloading binge!

Fri, 11 Dec 2009 05:17:53 GMT

I think tonight is a new personal record for me. I loaded just over 750rd of 40S&W. This included case caging each round and boxing them up in old used UMC 250 packs. Since Monday I have loaded a bit over 1700rds of 40S&W and long-40S&W. My normal load is a 180gr FMJ loaded to standard over-all-length for 40S&W The long-40S&W uses a 200gr bullet loaded to 10mm over-all-length but in 40S&W case. This seems to give me the best accuracy in my S&W 610 revolver. This expends all of my present powder for both the regular and long 40S&W, all of my 180gr 40cal bullets, and nearly all of my non Federal (reserved only for the revolver) small pistol primers. Time to start shopping for some deals on primers, powder, and bullets.

The upside down revolver may become reality.

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 01:09:42 GMT

So way back in August 2006 I wrote a post about a conceptual revolver that was "upside down". Not completely but the barrel lined up with the bottom of the cylinder rather than the top as a traditional revolver does.

The project never seemed to go anywhere but last week I can across the following:

source: Daily Gun Pictures

Looks like the project did have legs and the results looks really good IMHO. Supposedly they will be coming into the US early next year. At present it appears that they will offer a 2" 4" 5" 6" barrel length all chambered in the 357 Magnum. Hopefully other cartridges will follow. The 2-inch version is supposed to sell for under $800 dollars, price to be announced on the longer barrels. The question is do I get a 2-inch version for carry or a 6-inch version for competition/hunting?

Travel Extreme MEM

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 15:23:16 GMT

Longest distance ever traveled: - Chicago O'Hare Int. Airport to Kahului Airport Maui Hawaii (~6750 miles)

Farthest North: - Haliburton Scout Reserve east of Haliburton, Ontario

Farthest South: - The island of Barbados, Caribbean

Farthest East: - The island of Barbados, Caribbean

Farthest West: - Lanai Hawaii

Highest Mountain: - Baldy Mountain (Colfax County, New Mexico) 12,441ft above sea level

Hottest Temp: - I remember a summer back as a teenager were I think it might have gotten to 103F IIRC.

Coldest temp: - I once camped in -15F in a tent while in the Boy Scouts.

The Abby Jeepster

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:58:21 GMT

So early this summer I picked up a Barbie power wheels jeep at a garage sale for Abby. It was in rough shape but for $30 with two batteries it seemed like a good deal. I was talking with a coworker about what work needed done and a few weeks later he brought me a nearly identical power wheels jeep to use for parts. It was the "boy's" version but otherwise identical. Today I finally got some time to Frankiestine the two power wheels together to make one good one. It came together pretty good. Its ugly but should work. Its the pink Barbie chassis and rear end with the other jeeps front end, grill, hood, and roll cage and seats. The best part is I have a complete and functional power system (wiring, gas pedal, fwd/rev/speed selector, motors and transmissions) in reserve if something wears out or is damaged.

Here's Abby checking out her new ride.

Long week.

Sun, 22 Nov 2009 02:02:52 GMT

Was out to California for most of the week for a business trip. Flew out Sunday back on the red-eye on Wednesday-Thursday. Over all it was a long, busy, but good trip.

Monday was in LA to meet with a potential commercial partner a tier 2 Defense contractor on Monday. Got to see the assembly lines for the CAS (Control Actuation System) for the Mk 82 & 84 guided bombs, SDB (Slender Diameter Bomb) and AIM-9 Sidewinder.

Later that day I got another tour of NASA JPL. I toured it once many years ago back just after the first mars rover was launched. This time I got to see the sand box where they have a rover set up in the same stuck position as Spirit is as they try to figure out how to un-stick it. Got to see some of the actual subsystems and a full scale model of the new mars rover. That was pretty cool. The funniest thing was a machine shop we went through had vending machines that would vend tools (end mills, drills, etc) to the machinists and allow them to charge the correct project for the tool.

Tuesday we traveled up to San Jose.

Wednesday we kicked off my Phase II program with the Army on the rotorcraft program I have been leading up. That was at NASA AMES so I also got a brief tour of that facility. AMES is home to the first and second largest wind tunnels on the planet. They are huge. All in all I saw probably 6-7 wind tunnels that day.

So in the four day gone I flew five times and compared to US Air, Southwest is like flying first class. US Air sucks big rocks! Their people are as friendly as a grumpy badger and their gates have less power outlets than some Amish homes.

Good trip but it was better to be home.

Even the "people" are starting to get it.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 18:13:54 GMT

Source

I am not sure I can say too much meaningful on this subject but I find it encouraging (in a very very small way) that people are starting to see and realize that government running our health care system is likely to be worst not better than the crappy system we already have. Even if your of the opinion that it is the governments responsibility; the above graph and associated article seems to point at the fact that the government has done such a crappy job in general, and specifically in selling the idea of government run health care, that the people are coming to the conclusion that its not a good idea.

Out of the frying pan, into the fire!

G.I. Joe

Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:55:24 GMT

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

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 15:18:12 GMT

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!

Sun, 01 Nov 2009 01:18:25 GMT

Tactical Reload

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 17:36:54 GMT

<- 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.

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 01:30:22 GMT

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

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 18:43:35 GMT

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

RPS

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 14:46:55 GMT

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

Proud Engineer Father

Tue, 13 Oct 2009 03:07:39 GMT

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.

Wed, 07 Oct 2009 20:46:42 GMT

Enjoy!

Stick a fork in the towl and thow it in.

Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:45:31 GMT

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

Time flies when your swamped.

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 01:12:47 GMT

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...

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 06:39:42 GMT

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.

Sat, 22 Aug 2009 12:29:16 GMT

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.

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 23:56:46 GMT

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.

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 01:47:47 GMT

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

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 04:18:04 GMT

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.

Tue, 04 Aug 2009 13:21:46 GMT

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.