Lab Notes vol III

Wednesday lulz

Wed, 06 Jan 2010 18:19:04 GMT

I love the idea of a religion whose sacred writings are actually technical documentation. (Church of the Machine God, established 2000, promptly forgotten about except for use as a pretty cool domain for an email address hehe).

Merry hexmas

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 05:04:34 GMT

Before you decide I've entirely lost my mind, click 'play' :D

Christmas shopping... I think I'm doing it wrong

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 02:47:25 GMT

Went to go pick up a specific present for someone and instead came home with a Left 4 Dead 2 ~~video game~~ training simulator. Oops :D

Yes, we did find the actual intended present later that day. Now be quiet, or you'll startle the Witch!

Minor annoyance...

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 18:05:59 GMT

People and marketers who think this is a good way to imply "things or people working well together":

Think about it! Especially before you use it as a logo or something. Nothing says "do not buy" like an image of something that will never, ever, work.

Sun, 13 Dec 2009 01:28:18 GMT

Ahaha... or should that be boohoohoo? Probably both :/

This is pretty amazing

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 17:34:03 GMT

Crazy gear sale

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 06:52:36 GMT

For the shooty / outdoorsy / military-gear types on my flist:

armynavydeals.ca is having some kinda crazy sale. 20-90% off, $2 shipping.

These guys have a crazy selection. Cutesy pink camo babydoll shirts? check. Genuine British military surplus Biochemical warfare survival suit? Check. Tactical you-name-it? Check. Camoflage socks? You betcha. All kinds of camping, hiking, wilderness stuff, and lots of just cool military or military-inspired clothing, as well. It's actually somewhat boggling how many different items they have, in fact.

Actual product description: "This German Chemical Warfare Trench coat is so slick and stylish. It is an awesome froggy green, think Kermit with a tan. The collar is in drab brown corduroy, soft and gentle against your neck and face. For an added contrast the buttons are a large black matte finish. ... When I first saw this coat the first thing I thought of was a 1938 Ural caked with mud in the winter. It reminded me of my old days." :D :D

Lasers and boredom... never thought those two would go together.

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 23:03:49 GMT

Eye surgery appears to have been a rampant success. I'm not 20/20 yet, but that's expected to take a few days. I can read signs etc and not have to be right at them to do so, so that's a vast improvement. The whole walk home I was reading every license plate that drove by me just because I CAN :D

I'm not supposed to be at a computer, or read, or watch TV, which is turning into a bit of a problem. WTF do blind people do for fun? Another patient at the facility was talking about how she downloaded a bunch of audiobooks for today. That would've been smart :/

Back to following doctors orders. Think I'll have a nap.

sonofaBITCH

Tue, 17 Nov 2009 20:01:09 GMT

I was talking about making this years ago:
http://www.phantomalert.com/

That's what happens when you have great ideas and poor follow through, I guess :(

Back from hunting....

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:45:09 GMT

Empty handed :( And, while hunting season is not technically over, it is for me as next weekend I'm getting my eyes done and the weekend after that I'm out of the country. So, that's it :(

But, as they say (or if they don't, they should) "a bad day hunting beats a good day working" and it was two days spent sans cell phone coverage and deadlines, and plenty of opportunity to hone my trail-reading and woods-ninja-ing skills.

I'm still utterly lacking the stealth gene, but I'm improving my ability to compensate. I've started to get a rhythm down for walking through the bush: Look down, pick a quiet-looking thing to step on, step, look up, repeat. Otherwise I'm either loud (looking up) or oblivious to my surroundings (looking down). I'm starting to get a better feel also for which diameter of log is likely to be much more quiet for me to step on than the surrounding leaves and snow, and which is likely to be much louder :/

I've started to be able to figure out how recently a deer has used the trail I'm following, too (albeit very approximately). 4bitdecoder tracked one and actually caught up to it, which I've not yet accomplished.

While I did feel myself improving my skills in some regards, I still have absolutely no sense of direction. None whatsoever. The only improvement in that area is that my current phone has GPS built in ;) The downside being that it drains the battery in record time. Obviously the iPhone GPS is no replacement for an actual dedicated GPS device (mental note).

To be perfectly fair, we did see 6 deer, and in over half of those cases the only thing between them and our scopes was the law. So it's not so much a failure of the hunter, as it is a concession to wildlife management that has kept my freezer empty :D So, this year I guess if we want free-range, organic non-steroidal meat we'll be making more trips to the farmer's market. I can live with that as a distant second.

Range report, AKA 'a brief history of fail'

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:49:20 GMT

Today, for the first time, I went to the "local" outdoor range to properly sight in my hunting rifle's scope.

Last year I did it at The Shooting Edge, which is nice in that it's closer and indoors, but limited in that it only has a 50 yard range. Last year I zeroed at half an inch high at 50 yards, called it done, and went hunting. As luck would have it, a deer happened to jump out 50 yards or so in front of me, so it all worked out.

Not expecting to be so lucky this year, I figured I should do it right. so off I go to the Homestead public range. I have no idea what to expect; I've never even seen pics of the place. I show up with targets, guns, and ammo and find out that there's nothing to attach the targets to, nor any way of attaching them. Luckily I'm one of those nutters who always carries duct tape (you never know when a car's going to break down on you) so between that and some plywood and 2x4s laying around I was able to rig up what seemed like a passable target stand.

Then the wind kicked in. And then stopped, and then blew just as hard in the other direction, then resumed at double strength in the first direction, etc. By the time I trudged the 100 yards through 2 inch mud back to the benches and turned around, my target stand had blown over. Pieces of plywood were floating around at the 100 yard line like balloons at a kid's party. My target stand was face down, fresh targets in the mud.

That was most of the afternoon... walking back and forth, putting my targets back up, against the wind. I got a few shots off in between, but again the wind was affecting those, too. I couldn't even compensate for the wind, because it was so unpredictable. By the time I estimated the wind speed, counted clicks, and regained my sight picture, the wind had shifted. So I set back to zero windage and hoped for the best, figuring I'd concentrate on vertical only. Of my first 3 shots, only one even clipped the paper. My next few were slightly better. A couple more times my targets were gone before I got back to the bench, so I shot at leftover targets or debris on the ground on the berm. My spotting scope blew off the bench and landed in the mud... twice.

My "shooting vise" is probably the most useless gadget I have ever purchased, and those who know me well will know that that's a pretty damning review. Its purpose seems to be to hold the rifle in such a way that it cannot physically be aimed at any target without 5 minutes of fiddling, by which time, in those conditions, the target had moved if it was still upright at all. I gave up on the POS and just went with bench position, both elbows on the table, with the sling around my support arm. Scope zeroing should be done with the rifle pretty secure and stable, so that one's own wobbling or inaccuracy doesn't result in erroneous adjustments, but sometimes ya do what ya gotta do.

My last shots of the day, before I swallowed my pride and gave up, resulted in a 4.5 inch 3 shot group. Considering the conditions, and that the center of the group was roughly bullseye, that's not too bad I suppose. Deer-scale accuracy, at least. Sadly, those 3 shots were part of a 5 round salvo, and the other two were nowhere to be found.

So, I drove for roughly 2.5 hours to fire maybe a dozen and a half misses. Awesome. >:(

Next time:
A: proper target stand
B: bipod
c: heavy thing to tie my spotting scope to

Skinny Puppy

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 00:38:20 GMT

nimonic and I went out to Vancouver for just under 24 hours to take in Skinny Puppy's live show. I'd never seen then before.

The first song started with Cevin Key on keyboards/random machines and Justin Bennet on traditional drums. As the music started, Ogre slowly hobbled into view from between stacks of gear and a tarp-covered, man-sized glass box, wearing a 3 foot dunce cap, a skull mask, a long, flowing beard, a straightjacket, and using a walker.

After that, things got strange.
Except, actually, they didn't. The was pretty much the one gimmick of the show; Ogre's costume. Eventually he stripped off the beard, and then the mask, and then the hood/mask thing he had on under that, and by the end of the set his face was visible and you could actually hear the lyrics clearly. The box was for him to stand in occasionally, and once he spattered it with fake blood. The lighting was psychedelic to say the least (and played well across Ogre's all-white costume) but the sound was muddy and the view was terrible.

Video from the Portland show (obviously not mine) can be seen here. The sound quality in the video is actually a fairly accurate representation of what it sounded like live.

Nevertheless, while these faults would have ruined just about any other concert, this was Skinny Puppy - a band I have literally waited 20 years to see live. They (along with Ministry) are in no small part responsible for my musical tastes throughout all of my adult life, and their work started me in a musical direction that continues to this day. Almost everything I enjoy musically, from Winterkalte and Converter to Combichrist and Funker Vogt, I discovered because I listened to Mind: The Perpetual Intercourse in 1986. Some of their songs evoke very general memories of places and times that in turn evoke some fairly strong emotional reactions, both good and bad. SP was also one of the few bands that my brother and I shared interest in, so there was that as well.

We ran into a lot of people out there, too. Some from Calgary that we'd seen only days earlier, and some from Van that I hadn't seen in a decade or more. Sadly, we arrived and then left in too much of a hurry to really get to visit with anyone.

So, now I'm home from a rather whirlwind journey in a number of respects. I think tomorrow I'll go make sure my rifle is still zeroed :)

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 09:37:31 GMT

possting this from a browser on my pc via a vnc client on my iphone in bed in a different room. this is the kind of crap that seems like an amazing idea when i cant sleep :p

It appears my earlier optimism was premature

Sun, 18 Oct 2009 06:27:26 GMT

#ls lost+found|wc -l
473

That means that in the course of my fscking around earlier, 473 scraps of data were recovered and placed in the lost+found directory with names like #172560. I just spent 4 hours going through each one of them,figuring what they were by looking at the contents, and then putting them back where I think they probably came from.

Oh yeah plus a full re-install of the most up to date version of qmail on a command-line only operating system that was released in 2003. That part went smoother than expected, with only minor applications of duct tape and crossed fingers.

Followed by recreating what I could recall of whatever hackery I had to employ to get my web stats package working in a chrooted environment.

Now I think it's working. At the very least, it's passed a more rigorous test set than 'I can connect to the IMAP port and see my mail! Beertime!' :/

wtmffomfg breathe ok

Sat, 17 Oct 2009 18:56:48 GMT

Woke up this morning and felt like going out for yummy breakfast with D... mounds of pancakes smothered in whipped cream and fruit, greasy sausages, eggs in hot sauce, the works. Went to check my email quick and... instead of yummy breakfast, spent the next two hours dealing with a massive drive failure in my primary web/mail server. Wheeee. Bye bye, website and email records of multiple side projects, including the shirt shop. Bye bye, pics of Australia trip. Ciao, customer quote requests and records of in-process transactions.

Disassembly, cleaning, replugging, reassembly, and multiple passes of the incredibly aptly-named fsck_ffs utility and all is well. Shaky, but well for now. I should probably replace this old fossil in the really, really near future. Ironically, I've spent much of the free time of the last week (so, like two hours) building a replacement for my main workhorse box and the old hardware is slated to become the next server anyways. Time to put the old salvage P2 to pasture; I can't say it hasn't served me well for the last twelve-odd years.

Currently taking backups heh.

In other news, went to Datalink last night. It was fun, got to see some good people and listen to good music. Lots of old school gen 2 stuff; Ministry, Revco, TKK, Skinny Puppy etc. Interesting to see the punk and industrial scenes converging again. Door girl had no idea what to do with the firearms license I presented as ID, and then I walk in to see another customer with a backpatch that said "I don't relax, I reload" :D Good times.

And now... less computers, more beer. Yes.

Find new music

Sun, 11 Oct 2009 00:15:54 GMT

http://www.gnoosic.com

Enter 3 bands you like and it will recommend more. It's cool and very accurate, from its recommendations that I was familiar with - do it!

In other news... tomorrow is awesome

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 01:26:27 GMT

8am: Estate sale. Hopefully with cheap shop equipment.
10am: Gun Show. Nothing will be cheap, I imagine, but much of it will be interesting.
4pm: Demolition Derby. Smashy smashy.
7pm: Reunion with old friends I don't get to see enough; drinking.

Grmbl brbl snrk huh?

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 16:00:33 GMT

Weird dreams again. Stuck on a ledge of a lowrise, starving and cold. Eventually figured out I could jump to a tree and climb down. People on the ground laughing at me.

I think the longest uninterrupted sleep I got last night was from 6:30 to 7:00 am.

Today on LifeHacker

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 23:39:46 GMT

LifeHacker is this neat little community that is kind of a clearinghouse for interesting ideas about... well... living. If you've ever wondered how geeks do laundry, or how math can be used to optimize ordering books on a shelf, etc, it's a great site. One of today's topics.... knife throwing!

So, one, it's cool that they covered knife throwing, because well, KNIFE THROWING.

Two... why does the graphic involve throwing one at R2D2???

Hahahaha

Mon, 17 Aug 2009 18:55:27 GMT

Mon, 10 Aug 2009 17:29:05 GMT

(11:08:12 AM) buddy_who_shall_remain_anonymous: Help! I have a Mac virus!
(11:23:08 AM) subdermal: oh no that's not possible
(11:23:12 AM) subdermal: macs cant get viruses
(11:23:20 AM) subdermal: steve jobs is maaaaaagic

Harhar, if schadenfreude is the lowest emotion, sarcasm is the lowest form of humor and "i told you so" is the lowest response to bad news, I'm pretty damn low right now :D

Clutch!

Sat, 01 Aug 2009 19:23:37 GMT

nimonic, myself, and several friends all went to see Clutch's live show last night. D isn't what you'd call a Clutch fan, but she enjoyed the show and it was a privilege to share the experience with her for the first time.

A note about "the experience". I think that being at a live show of this nature is the closest thing to religious enlightenment a hardcore atheist can hope to experience. At the very least, it's the closest I've ever felt to what I imagine theists are referring to when they discuss such things. There is something primal, ritualistic, and reinforcing about being in a room with 500 people all screaming the same words in unison. The nature of Clutch lyrics specifically only adds to the experience. I expect that that sounds terribly cheesy, but the fact is that they do explore some fairly serious themes in a an acerbic manner that I can especially relate to. Neil Fallon himself resembles nothing so much as an irate and half-mad street preacher lecturing a congregation of the fallen (in between rants about monster trucks, Cthulu, storming the Canadian border, alien conspiracies, D&D references, the inherent brutality of the natural world, alternate histories of the American civil war, muscle cars in space, hillbilly folklore, and... well, a lot of things :D )

It's odd that I would wax so relatively verbose about a band that falls so far outside my usual musical interests, but really, they're just that good :D

Oh right, and this...

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 22:59:18 GMT

While at the bike shop yesterday I picked up some tail and signal lights for the other project. Now, being in a rush this morning to get back to work I didn't put them in the garage, but didn't want to leave the wires exposed in the kitchen where the cats could chew on them.

The solution ended up looking like electronic plastic flowers, so I had to take a pic.

I seen a python swallowing a Dobermann whole; Piranhas swimming in a mixing bowl

Tue, 28 Jul 2009 16:16:21 GMT

It's been a strange week for dreams... even more than usual. Twice in the last week I've dreamed that all the animals in the house got out (3 cats and a ferret). Once one of them got seriously injured :( Poor dream-kitty.

Yesterday I worked a 15 hour day with an hour off in the middle to go pick up my motorcycle. I went to bed fearful that I'd be dreaming about database structures and 8-way inner joins, but hopeful that I'd dream about motorcycles hehe. Nope - I had a dream that I got deployed to Vietnam in 1973 near Da Nang. After a week of not finding any enemy forces, we hotwired a late 60s VW Beetle we found in a shed on the berm around a rice paddy and swapped in a 200 hp 1.8T engine from a modern day Jetta (the dream wasn't clear on how we obtained this in '73) and then put the whole thing on airbags. Hey, gotta keep morale up, I guess. Then it snowed and I woke up cold because IRL it was raining :/

And now, back to database queries and waiting for results. Yesterday, while doing the same, I was listening to industrial speedcore, which I found is not terribly patience-inducing. Today, some Tom Waits may make the delays more bearable.

Ouch

Thu, 23 Jul 2009 21:19:58 GMT

Just found out that a guy I went to high school with has a grandson. We're not even 40 yet, people!