So I’m about to shut off my Ethernet connection in order to avoid distration while I read several books about the Internet. With paper and stuff. If only there were some way to get information about the Internet electronically. . .
Blogging resumes tomorrow.
I just got home from work (more maintenance) so I figure now is as good a time as any to do the whole “what are you carrying” meme. Here is a photo of the items I was carrying when I came in the door (click for big):
Not pictured, but carried in my laptop bag:
With the exception of the .45 and the Necessikey, I use every one of the items on this list on a near-daily basis. I got the Necessikey for free with my folding knife, but for every situation where it might be useful I already have a better tool. I carry it anyway just in case. I used to use the utili-key all the time, it is surprisingly functional. Since I bought the Leatherman, though, I mostly lend it to people who for some reason don’t carry their own knives.
The Galco Royal Guard holster is very comfortable, I have one for my Gunsite 1911 and a 5″ Royal Guard for my Springfield Armory GI .45. For open carry I have a Galco FLETCH OWB holster for my GI .45.
The DIFR wallet works well. I’ve tested it with a variety of RFID devices and so far it’s blocked them all. I’m very satisfied with it. The Leatherman and SureFire come in handy in the office when I just have to duck into a wiring closet or server rack to check on something and don’t want to bring my whole toolbox, or when I’m traveling and don’t want to check my good tools. Another engineer at work had all of his favorite tools stolen by the TSA while traveling to one of our remote offices, so most of us don’t carry them with us when we travel. I guess wire cutters, cable crimpers, and bit drivers are a threat to national security. Or something.
Anyway, that’s a quick inventory of the items I carry every day.
So there’s another anti-meat study out there now. I’ll go ahead and say it right now: any years that I gain by not eating steak and bacon are not worth living.
Starting tonight (Sunday night) I get to spend all week working during the maintenance window to finish two of my aforementioned projects. For those of you who may not be familiar with the joys of maintenance windows, that basically means that instead of my usual 8am-5pm type hours, I’ll be working more in the neighborhood of 8pm-5am for the week. On the one hand the hours suck, but on the other hand there’s no management around and no traffic. It could also be worse, since last week I worked alternately days and nights, which is a really good way to drive yourself crazy. I don’t know how some people can deal with having a schedule like that varies so much all the time. Especially that whole 28-hour day thing. Blogging will occur at odd hours.
Via Alan at SnarkyBytes comes this video on perspective amd education in the 21st century. I was going to leave this comment there but it got a little out of control.
It seems to me that some of the conclusions drawn by the writers of the video do not necessarily follow from the data, or that they are not as significant as the video makes them out to be. Example: The video states that half the information learned by freshman students enrolled in a four-year technical program will be obsolete by their junior year because the amount of new technical information is doubling every two years. I can’t agree with this conclusion because these students are learning the basics during their first two years, and arguably during their entire four years of education. The mathematics and physics that an undergraduate student in a technical field learns will probably not be obsolete during his or her entire lifetime, let alone after two years of education. The same is true of the fundamentals of design and problem-solving. Even for a degree program in a very rapidly evolving field such as computer science, the basics of logical programming and object-oriented languages are useful, even fundamental, even if the languages you learn become obsolete. Also, new information does not necessarily (or usually) invalidate old information.
Likewise, haven’t we always been expecting our students to solve problems never previously considered, and to do so with new technology? Did physics students in the 1920s expect to go on to develop weapons capable of killing millions of people? Did they expect to use room-sized computers to make those weapons possible? Did engineers of the 1940s expect that during their lifetime they would be able to ditch their slide rules and solve even calculus problems with an electronic computer that fit in their pockets? Moreover, that students a generation or two later might not even learn how to use a slide rule?
This is not to say that the times we live in are not amazing. I’m just not sure that they’re more amazing than any other time since the industrial revolution. It’s difficult for me to put modern technological advancements in perspective with past innovations, and based on videos like this one I don’t think I’m alone. In the last 110 years we’ve come from a time with no powered flight to a permanent human presence in outer-fucking-space. Space flight right now is so unremarkable to so many people that shuttle launches barely make the newspaper. Space travel didn’t even get a mention in the linked video.
A century and a half ago an overland trip from Philadelphia to San Francisco took nearly a year and there was a 1 in 20 chance that you would perish from illness during the trip. Today you can make the trip in six hours by flying through the sky and you have a greater chance of being killed by lightning than by any travel-related mishap. 60 years ago if you moved from one continent to another you traveled via ship and the trip took you at least a week. Today a family can be on the other side of the planet in less than 24 hours.
I’ll leave off with one of my favorite videos on the matter of technological advances and perspective. I wish I could remember where I found this:
As I carry more often and find more things I will post them. I’m sure there are a world of items that belong on this list.
Work has been ridiculous since last week and will likely continue to be a pain until the end of the quarter. Several long-term projects (ranging from 4 months long to over a year) are due at the end of this quarter. In addition, there are the usual smattering of fires to put out (most of which I consider minor enough to wait, but our customers seem to have other priorities). Some of the deadlines will likely get pushed back, but I’m not going to count on it. The fact is that I work best under a time crunch. Working long hours dense with troubleshooting and deploying new technology is one of my two favorite things about my job, the other being the amount of learning that comes with the new technology.
Truthfully, when I’m not up against a deadline I have trouble finding motivation. The solution to that problem is simple and taught in every time management course anywhere: set smaller short-term goals like “by the end of tomorrow I will solve x small problem with this design” instead of “by the end of May I will have a working design.” Set the goals as short as possible; don’t give yourself a week to do something that should take you a day, and don’t give yourself a day to accomplish a task that you can get done in 30 minutes. I find I get best results if I make my goal time shorter than I think it should take me. I always seem to underestimate how much work I can get done per unit of time. If I think I can develop a working configuration for a new deployment in four hours, I give myself two. I’ll usually have it done within 125% of my alloted time.
On semi-related note, I wasn’t having money problems in our new socialist economy, at least until today. My father has been out of work for a while and apparently my parents have been having trouble making the mortgage on only my mother’s wage. Actually, I knew they were struggling but it’s finally gotten bad enough that my dad admitted that they are having money problems (sort of, he and I are both prideful and do not like to ask for help). Anyway I gave them basically my entire savings so that they can make their mortgage for the next few months. He says that they will pay me back but I don’t really see that happening, and I can’t begrudge my parents some money after the hundreds of thousands they must have spent raising me. I guess I’ll be eating in for a while, and the custom work I was planning to have done on my SA GI .45 will have to wait. I’m just glad he asked today and not next week, when my gun would likely have already been in the shop and I would have made several other minor purchases that would have put me in a position where I would not have been able to help them without jeopardizing my own situation.
My Arizona Concealed Weapons Permit came in the mail today! Today has officially been an awesome day.
I started reading Dune again the other night. Dune is one of my favorite sci-fi novels, but it’s been a while since I read it last. This time, almost immediately after I started reading, I was struck by a particular line on page five of the paperback version:
One does not obtain food-safety-freedom by instinct alone.
It occurs to me that food-safety-freedom represents a possible gradient scale of human perceived needs (which may be different from actual needs). On the far left of the scale, we have people who are starving or who otherwise believe that obtaining sustenance is the most important thing to ensure their continued survival. Safety is at best a secondary concern and freedom is completely unimportant to a person at this point on the scale. In the middle area of the scale exist people who believe that they have enough to eat and drink, and are primarily concerned about their personal safety. A person in this area is willing to sacrifice at least some degree of freedom to achieve that safety or feeling of safety. On the extreme right end of the scale are persons who believe that they have enough food and enough safety, and percieve that their primary need is freedom (however they personally define freedom).
For purposes of clarification, let us consider someone approximately where the arrow is on this handy gradient. A person at this point on the scale does not necessarily have any food or any safety, but he or she may have arrived at this point for one of several reasons:
Let us also consider this person:
This person believes that his greatest need is more food. He is probably starving, but does not have to be. A person in this position is willing to give up all of his freedom and all of his safety in hopes of gaining more food. This may represent a person who is so starving that he is willing to risk life and limb in order to hunt game in a dangerous environment, or it may represent a person who has given responsibility for his entire existence to his government. Any person left of center is willing to surrender all of their freedom to some other power.
It seems that (at least) since September 11th, 2001, a significant number of Americans have moved to the left on this scale. Perhaps many Americans were already closer to the center than to the right, and have always been willing to surrender their freedom. We have a duty as Americans to fight our way as far to the right on this scale as possible. It is part of our national creed that all humans deserve to be at the blue end of this scale, but no government will ever give us freedom. We have to take freedom from the government, and once it is earned we have to fight to keep it. We must always be vigilant against its abuse of power.
As if yesterday didn’t contain enough shooty goodness, I made arrangements to spend this morning at the Ben Avery Clay Target Center with my friend Mike. Initially we were planning to spend our time on the trap range, but at the last minute we decided to do something we’ve been meaning to do for a long time: Sporting Clays. We each shot 100 clays on Ben Avery’s 15-station “Rattlesnake” course, and it was a blast. I was shooting my Remington Sportsman 12 Pump Magnum (the precurser to the 870 Express) and Mike was shooting his Browning BPS Hunter. Incidentally, if you’re looking for a new pump shotgun for clays or hunting, especially if you need it to be ambidextrous, I highly recommend the BPS. The action on that thing is smooth as glass.
If you’re not familiar with sporting clays, it’s a completely different animal from trap or skeet. In trap you know that the clays are always going to be flying away from you. In skeet they’re always flying along the same paths from the high and low houses (which makes it sound a lot easier than it is). In sporting clays you walk a path of 6 or 15 stations (at BASF), and you fire into basically an open field. The clays may be thrown in just about any direction to simulate birds in flight. They might fly away from you, straight up in the air, or toward you. The throwing machines are often hidden behind berms or trees, so you have no idea until you call for the clays which direction they’re going to be flying. At each station you shoot clays in pairs, either by report or in “true pairs.” When you shoot pairs by report, you call for the first clay normally (Pull!) and your buddy launches the second clay as soon as you take the first shot (or as soon as he hears the report, hence the name). “True pairs” occur simply when both clays are launched at the same time.
All-in-all it was a great weekend. I think we will be shooting sporting clays a lot more, and I hope Agrise will be joining us at the range more often.