Found: One Troll

Speakers arrived today. I’m setting them up now, then I’m going to watch Independence Day. Party tomorrow, review Sunday.

Yesterday I passed the CCIE Routing and Switching Lab Exam on my first attempt. I guess I owe myself an AR-15.

I’ve scheduled my CCIE Lab exam for 26 August in RTP, NC. Wish me luck.

I used to have two blades on my keychain. Now I only have one. The TSA in Phoenix confiscated my Necessikey knife but not my Utili-key knife, despite the fact that the woman who took the first one had my keys in her hands. I also got patted down in San Francisco for the sin of setting off the metal detector with my belt. My belt which did not set off the metal detector in Phoenix. This happened after I was telling one of my co-workers in the security line that the only good thing to come out of TSA was standardized screening. I was wrong.

Lately, it looks like a lot of people have forgotten that Americans are supposed to be individually independent as well as nationally. Our government wants us to believe that we are all so interdependent that we should just let them manage everything. It’s For The Children^TM, after all.

Happy 4th. I’m going to go have steak and study.

Look, I hate those damn speed cameras as much as the next guy, but you don’t have to slow down to 45 every time you pass one. The speed limit is 55 and they flash at 66; if you can’t handle doing 60 then maybe surface streets are more your style.

Or not. I’m awake right now because about 30 minutes ago my dog shot out the bedroom doggie door like a rocket, barking her head off. There are two odd things about this;

1. This behavior is normally reserved for when she spots cats and birds in the yard.
2. It’s the middle of the damn night.

Now, we get cats on our roof all the time. My next-door neighbors “rescue” cats, by which I mean they put food out for strays and then ignore the fact that the wretched animals wander through my yard crapping all over my roof and lawn and giving my dog some new friends to chase. It could have been my barely-post-REM monkey-brain over-imagining things, but the sound I heard immediately after my dog burst outside sounded a lot like two 200lb cats sliding swiftly off my roof and subsequently jumping my fence.

This concerns me because last week my water heater broke and started leaking all over the place, which means that late last week and today I had a pair of plumbers (read: strangers) in my home to replace the unit. I don’t live an ostentatious lifestyle, but I do have nice things. . . things a potential criminal would certainly notice. Also, the plumbers themselves were both flaky fellows, arriving late or not at all for each appointment, taking much longer than necessary to complete their work, and trying to sell me or my landlord on various crap we didn’t need. They were lazy and inefficient.

At one point my landlord, an ex-cop, remarked that he was concerned that one of the contractors may have been on drugs. I have to trust his judgment on such matters because I really don’t know a thing about the effects of illicit mind-altering chemicals; I’ve avoided them and their users my whole life^[1]. Besides, dammit, I’m an engineer, not a pharmacologist. Both of us agreed that we just wanted them to finish the job they started and never come back.

All of these things were running through my mind as I tried to determine what could possibly make a noise like two very large animals scurrying off my roof in such a hurry in the middle of the night. Fun fact: cats on my roof don’t scurry off when my dog barks at them. They look at her with an expression that says, “Dog, I’m 12 feet off the ground. What the hell are you going to do about it?”

I know that both plumbers know that I carry a firearm. I had my carry piece on me every time they were here, sometimes openly. Unable to put my fears to bed, I did what may have been the worst possible thing to do, but it was the only way I was going to be able to allay my concerns and get back to sleep. I grabbed my 1911 and my Surefire, and I went outside. I inspected my roof and found nothing. No intruders and no cats. Nothing unusual in the back yard itself. The dog seemed to have calmed down. The Surefire: really damn bright. Shining that thing at something is like turning on the Sun.

The whole incident highlights my need for a dedicated home-defense shotgun. My 870 is a trap gun; the 28″ barrel is too long for effective close defense, and I don’t even have any buckshot or slug loads for it. I could get a shorter barrel for it, but it’d cost almost as much as buying a whole new shotgun, especially when J&Gs sells police trade-ins all the time. My M14 is not suitable for aiming at anything on the roof (missed shots would travel for miles), and even with level shots overpenetration is a serious concern with that weapon. I love the 1911, but it shouldn’t be my go-to weapon if I’m concerned that I might be walking into a situation. Plus, a good tactical shotgun would give me someplace to put my M6X.

I’m going to try to get some sleep.

1. I have this phobia of ever not being in complete control of my actions. It’s the same reason I don’t drink alcohol. [↩]

I’m probably one of the few folks who, upon seeing the Kindle and Kindle 2, thought, “I really want one of those, but it’s just too small for me to read textbooks and manuals on.” Well, Amazon heard our wishes and responded with the Kindle DX, which was officially released yesterday. I pre-ordered mine the day it was announced and it finally arrived in the mail today. A lot of people say the Kindle is too expensive, or too locked-down to be really useful to them, but it’s perfect for me.

With the Kindle DX I can carry hundreds of reference books in a package about 1/4 as thick as my Eee. I’m the kind of person who will be in the middle of reading five or six books at a time. Usually some sort of pulpy sci-fi, some hard sci-fi, a couple of non-fiction books, a serious study book or two. . . all at the same time. With the Kindle, I can take them all with me, and many more. Sure, I have to purchase some of them again in Kindle format (my only real complaint), but most of the textbooks I buy come with a PDF version and the Kindle DX is a native PDF reader. Previous versions of the Kindle required PDFs to be converted to .mobi format for reading (a free service from Amazon.com).

The e-ink screen is just awesome. Reading the Kindle is just as easy on the eyes as reading a real book. The main reason I bought the Kindle, in fact, is that I find I cannot read from a backlit LCD screen for a long period of time. Sure, I can work on a computer all day without trouble, or play video games for hours on end, but I can’t read a novel or a long PDF, even in white-on-black text, for too long before my eyes are screaming for relief. The Kindle solves that problem, forming a perfect union of electronic geekery and dead-tree reading.

Here are some photos of the Kindle DX next to some other books for comparison.

It’s 91 degrees Fahrenheit right now. At 5:30PM. In Phoenix. In July June. Is Al Gore in town?

I hope this continues through the weekend so I can get some quality range time.

Edit: date fail.

Chris and Melody are in a serious legal battle for the custody of their children. The situation is so desperate that Chris has sold all of his firearms except for his carry piece.

When I wanted to buy my first gun back in 2005, I started looking for information on the intarwebs for legal and technical advice. I was determined not to go into the decision uninformed about my rights and responsibilities. I got most of my initial gun information from four sources: Kim du Toit‘s Nation of Riflemen (now retired from blogging), Kevin Baker, Alan Korwin’s Gun Owners Guide, and Chris Byrne. From the three blogs in that list I found most of the others that I read today.

Some of their best blog posts are their Recipies for Real Men series. I’ve often thought that I would gladly pay for a cookbook of those recipes, and now I can! I encourage you to help them in their fight by doing the same.