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BEEEPPP!!!

Carteach is holding a contest, and the result is donations to a good cause.

If you make a donation to the Wounded Warrior Project, he’ll put your name into a hat and then draw for prizes from the official goody bag.

Wounded Warrior provides services to help our wounded get back into normal life.  They do good work for those who have already given too much.

If you’ve got a few extra shekels, consider sending them to a good cause.  Who knows, you might just get something back.

The other day, Gibson Guitar factories in Tennessee were raided by federal agents.  The company reports that wood, computer files, and finished guitars were taken in the raid, but no-one will tell them the charges against the company.  Indications are that because the company had some wood from India that hadn’t been finished by Indian artisans, they were in violation of the Lacey Act.  Basically, if possession of the wood would have been illegal in the country it came from, then it’s illegal here.

Are all of you sure that the wooden grips or stocks on your guns wasn’t made from wood that could bring the weight of the government down on you? “That’s a nice stock on that rifle.  Do you have proof that the company that sold it to you didn’t break any laws in Turkey?  Why don’t you hand it over until you can prove it’s legit?”

Let’s think about that for a moment.  You have a commodity or product in your possession that you purchased on the legal market here in the United States, say some Brazilian hardwood, that you want to spend a winter making furniture out of for your home.  You bought it from a reputable outlet, and have no criminal intent and no reason to suspect that the wood was harvested, processed, or exported from Brazil illegally.   Some arcane aspect of the Brazilian lumber law makes someone think that your future dining room set might be illegal if you had it in Brazil.  Let’s say that Brazilian law says that a special tax on hardwoods must be paid, and you don’t have a tax stamp or something from your supplier to say that the tax was paid.

So your home could be raided, your wood, tools, financial records, computers, and anything else they think was related to this “crime” could be taken, and you could be charged with a crime for possession of something that is three or four levels of separation away from its origin in South America.  You didn’t cut it down or mill it.  You didn’t export it to the United States and sell it.  All you did was buy it and try to use it.  The law that you are accused of breaking is outside of the control of your elected representatives, so you can’t even appeal to them to get it modified or repealed.  But you’re the one who got raided.  And it doesn’t have to be raw lumber.  Can you prove that the Brazilian hardwood dining table you inherited from grandma was made from wood imported before these restrictions were put in place?  If not, when you are questioned, you are out a dining table, out a fine, and out of luck.

Now go back to those last two paragraphs and substitute the offending products with the following words:  gun, book, movie, recording, photograph.

If the government wants, it can try to impose the laws of another country, however diametrically opposed to our freedoms, on our citizens.  I support the efforts to stop over-logging of the world’s forests, both here and abroad, and I also recognize the need for our government to work with other nations to keep their cultural and environmental treasures out of the market.  But the consumer in Kentucky should not be responsible for the bad acts of others, which may have occurred thousands of miles away and decades ago.

Those of you along the Eastern Seaboard should be preparing for the imminent arrival of Hurricane Irene. Since you’ll get 500 storm tracks from 500 meteorologists all looking at the same data, you never know what this storm will do or where it will go.  Heck, I live in Kentucky, and Irish Woman and I are talking about what we should do if it makes a radical turn and comes over the Cumberland Gap.

Here are some tips for weathering the storm:*

1. Leave.  Staying in the path of a hurricane is the definition of idiotic.  Pack your kids and everything you care about, call a relative further inland and get out of Dodge.  Preferably a relative who lives two states towards the center of the continent.  Things you should take include heirlooms, food, clothing, weapons, pets, and liquor.  
2. Remember the liquor.  Living with your brother-in-law for a few days with all of your and his kids is going to be hard enough without trying to do it sober.  Don’t get sloppy drunk and for heaven’s sake don’t drink tequila.  Just a nice mellow buzz.  Bonus points if you share with said brother-in-law, especially if you break out the good stuff.
3. If you can’t get out, or your brother-in-law is already full up with the rest of the family, then you’ll have to sit out the storm.  While this is sub-optimal, it can be done.  Just be ready for Lord of the Flies for the next few days.
4. Arm your significant other and send him or her to the grocery store now.  They will need to fill up a cart with as much stuff as possible if you don’t already have half a year’s worth of food, water, liquor, medicine, clothing, books, board games, cat food, cat litter, and dog food.  Kiss them goodbye, as she may not return from this mission.
5. You’re not out the game, though.  Your job is to go the hardware store and get all of the other stuff your family will need to survive.  This includes tarps, visqueen, shingles, nails, nail gun, compressor, sheet upon sheet of plywood, flashlights, batteries, extra keys for the outbuildings that will soon be spotted off of Nova Scotia, tie down straps, bungie cords, 550 cord, sail cloth, gas cans, gasoline, 25000 watt generator, extension cords, and roofing tar.  All of this will be used to weather and water proof your home and survive the storm’s aftermath as much as possible, and in the event that you do get washed away, you can lash as much of the debris as possible together and sail to Scotland where the weather is much nicer this time of year.
6. Take all of the hardware store goodies, and start nailing, screwing, glueing, lashing, and welding them to the outside of your home, especially the windows and doors.  Note:  Have someone other than your family secure plywood to the last door to your home after you have gotten yourself and other members of your family that you care about into the house.  Anyone who gets there late should be advised to hole up in the tree house for the weekend.
7. Put all of the supplies you bought in the highest room of your home.  That way it’ll stay dry when the first floor or so become an indoor swimming pool.  Put an axe up there too so that you can cut your way out of the house once the storm has passed.  Remember, you’ve cut off all of the windows and doors from the outside for your own protection.
8. Remember, this storm has already been to the Caribbean, where the zombie menace originated.  Watch your spouse and children for evidence of zombie infection carried by the wind, and respond as necessary.
9. Once you have your supplies secured and every opening to your home has been boarded over, settle in for a nice quiet weekend of listening to the soft rain and gentle winds of mother nature re-landscaping your yard into a beautiful water garden.  Good movies to watch during this time include Storm of the Century, The Abyss, and of course The Shining.  If you prefer reading, I suggest Misery, Moby Dick, and The Road.
10. When the storm hits, keep your children up for every minute of it so that they can have the rare life experience of hearing shutters ripped off of the roof or the cap on the chimney embedding itself in the old oak tree in the front yard.  This is an experience that they will relive every time the wind blows for years to come.
11. Play games with the family to keep spirits up.  I suggest “Beer beer, who’s got the beer?”, “Where did Mommy hide her ‘medicine’?”, and “Who can sit quietly while Daddy tries to figure out how to get wet matches to light?”.

Hopefully you’ve found these suggestions helpful.  Good luck, and enjoy your North Sea adventure!

*Of course these are all tongue in cheek and are meant as a joke.  If you are in danger from the storm, I hope that you will be able to take care of you and yours.  Something tells me y’all are smart enough to get out of the way or to hunker down without losing your mind.

Well, final for now. I’m not going anywhere.

I had my last check-in with the surgeon today.  He says I’m doing about as well as can be expected.  I’ll still have a few weird things that need more time to heal or become the new normal, but otherwise I’m good to go.  I’m sleeping better, can breather better, and overall I feel pretty good.  He released me to go back on my arthritis treatments, so I’ll be feeling pretty good in a few weeks when I go back into the rheumatologist to get my Remicade topped off.

Now that I’m on the other side of the surgery and recovery, I’m glad I did it.  I was cautioned that the surgery only helped with the sleep apnea and snoring in about 60% of patients, so I guess I was in that 60%.  Irish Woman says I don’t snore anymore at all, even when sleeping on my back.  I wake up without the headaches and sore throat, and I feel like I actually got some rest.  I’ll be going back in for another sleep study to prove that I don’t snore anymore, but I’m doing that more for the doctor than for me.

I mentioned to the doctor that I’ve lost my taste for some of the things I used to enjoy, and he said that that should correct itself over the next few months.  I hope he’s right.

So, I’m back and as ornery as ever, but I don’t make funny noises when I sleep.  Hopefully this is the last surgery I have to go through for a long time.  The recovery on this one was a pain, in more ways than one.

I don’t talk about work too much here.  My employer’s policy on blogging and other uses of social media is very strongly worded, and I’m under no illusions as to the speed with which my employment would be terminated if I brought up dirt on the company in such a public forum.

The IT organization I work in is pretty mature.  In a field where you expect to move to a new job every two years, our company still expects that if you work hard and stay out of trouble, you will retire with a pretty generous set of benefits after more than 20 years of doing various jobs within the organization.  The trade off for that is you don’t tend to work with the bleeding edge of technology, and you do things their way unless told to figure out something new.   Big companies don’t stay profitable by chasing the technology dragon and trying every high-speed thing that comes up at conferences.  There’s something to be said for using mature, stable technology to turn a profit.

We work under a lot of guidance to use the same procedure to do the same thing every time.  Standardization and lots and lots of planning is the order of the day.  This can lead to a lot of talking followed by short bursts of actual technical work.  My normal rhythm is to spend six to eight weeks of planning and coordination followed by four to six weeks of implementing those plans.  Of course, there’s always the day to day work of monitoring my systems and fixing things that break.  Also, not everything is as well planned as it should be, so there is also a lot of work that goes from requirements and planning to implementation and documentation pretty quickly.

Sunday night was supposed to be a pretty boring example of “plan a lot, implement a little”.  All I was doing was patching the OS on a few servers and working with a hardware technician to update the firmware on the box itself.  Sounds pretty simple and boring, doesn’t it?

Three quarters of the work was exactly that.  I worked from a good project plan, and the techs who worked with me were competent and had done their part before.  Everything went smoothly, at least for a while.

It’s that last quarter that made the job interesting.

One of the servers went into a reboot loop.  That means that after applying power to the system, the operating system would try to come up, something would happen, and it would restart.  Repeat ad infinitum.

One of the other servers refused to even get that far.  The system would come up and test itself when plugged in, but would stop before even trying to boot.

For the first box, we did a lot of troubleshooting.  Booting into a maintenance mode didn’t show anything wrong with the system.  The hardware logs were useless, and when we’d checked everything and bounced the box, it went right back into its loop.  The technician grabbed a spare box, put the hard drives from my system into it, and it booted as if nothing was wrong.  Well, almost.  All of those reboots had damaged a few things, so I had to fix those too.  Eventually, though, the system came back up as happy as could be.

The other box required some hardware voodoo to fix.  The technician rolled the bones, muttered some profane incantations, and the box came up.  From my perspective, this one was easier than the other one, but still required some recovery work to fix things.

Guess which portion, the easy and sane or the harder and insane, portion of the nights work I enjoyed more.  If you said “You enjoyed reacting to unforeseen problems”, there is a box of cookies in the back of the room.  You can help yourself.

There’s a fine line between challenging and grinding, and that night I was in the zone.  Three quarters of the night was spent following a project plan.  The other quarter was spent diagnosing and solving problems, and I had a ball doing it.

In any job, you have to strike that balance.  If all you do is follow procedures all day, you’ll get bored and lose interest.  If all you do is fight dragons, eventually you’ll burn out.  Finding the right balance between boring/easy work and interesting/challenging work keeps your head in the game for the long haul.

I wanted to say thank you for giving me an opportunity to examine another aspect of my monthly expenses and compare what I pay for with what I actually use.  I’ve been getting disks from you for a year or so, but I realize now that I only exchange one or two disks a month, which makes the cost of renting them from you very expensive on a per disk basis.  Now that you’ve decided that you want to bring the cost of having physical media delivered to my home expensive enough that I have to make this calculation, I’ve decided I no longer wish to pay for a service that I do not use very much.

Since we do use the streaming content portion of your service quite a bit, we will continue to do business with you.  But I must tell you that there are other options for streaming movies and other content.  You can either improve the number of titles you provide across the Internet, or wait for one of your competitors to overtake you and earn my business.

It’s your choice.

Sincerely,

Daddy J. Bear

The United States Olympic Committee has announced that there will be no United States city competing for the 2020 Olympics.  Apparently there’s some high level pissing match over money that’s blocking the process.

My reaction:  It’s about darned time.

I like sports as much as the next guy, and you see the best athletes in the world come together every couple of years in the Summer and Winter Olympics. I think the ideal of young athletes from around the globe coming together to compete on an even plane is wonderful.  Unless of course you count the professional athletes screwing up basketball and hockey, but that’s a rant for another time.  Or the athletes that dope the heck out of themselves with the full support and cooperation of some of the the best bio-chemists on the planet, but I digress.

But you also see the country, state, and city that are hosting it spend years of time and billions of dollars getting ready, running the darn thing, and then figuring out what to do with all of the venues they created for the games.  Seriously, does Chicago need more swimming pools and stadiums?

The Olympic ideal of young people and nations coming together peacefully without regard to politics fell apart in 1936 and has never come back.  The rampant nationalism of the Cold War continues to this day as the U.S., Russia, and China hiss and spit at each other every 2 years.  Instead of natural talents being nurtured and displayed to show how humanity can come together to peacefully compete, we get academies for gymnastics, figure skating, and whatever other events countries want to stake their national pride on.  Instead of talented teenagers being plucked from academic sports programs and sent to compete, we get battalions of five-year-olds doing nothing but figure out how to put one more spin into their ice skating jump when they turn 16.

The United States needs to rethink whether or not it wants to continue to make NBC rich by participating in the Olympics at all.  Yes, we don’t directly subsidize the USOC through tax dollars, but any time one of our cities gets delusions of grandeur about hosting the games, we end up spending our treasure and prestige to ‘convince’* the IOC to honor us with their presence.  From a hardnosed financial and national policy perspective, we need to ask what we’re getting out of it.  The answer, as far as I can tell, is less than nothing.

We don’t get credit for running a good set of games once the torch goes out.  No country that opposes us in the real international arena gives an inch because we were gracious hosts to their athletes.  No third-world oil baron decides to buy American equipment or services because he liked the way the stadium at the Olympics was built.

The United States needs to wake up and realize that the Olympics are a vanity project at best, and a money pit at worst.  Our time and treasure would be better spent on something that produces better results than a few metallic trinkets on ribbons and a really neat track and field stadium.

*convince:  (konvins), noun, see “bribe”

Irish Woman, baking Girlie Bear’s birthday cake – DB, can you come in here?
DaddyBear – Yes, sweetie?
Irish Woman – Can you get the vegetable oil down from the very tippy top shelf in the pantry where you put it?
DaddyBear – Of course, love of my life, apple of my eye, cream of my coffee, Jessica to my Roger, Juliet to my Romeo, Mary Ann to my Gilligan….
Irish Woman – Would you just get the darn oil down, you goof?

Oh yes, it’s love.

We were discussing guns in GBC last night*, and I brought up cap and ball revolvers.

Then it occurred to me.  People who shoot cap and ball guns are really proud of their guns (I know, who isn’t?), and they might like some apparel to get people to notice their rather unique firearm.

What I have in mind is a t-shirt with a picture of a cap and ball revolver with the slogan “My gun has nipples” across it.  Sell them at gun shows and such.

What do y’all think?  Too juvenile, or just juvenile enough?

*I know, go figure.