One of the best ballads from the Scorpions, “Holiday”
Honestly, I think the original studio recording is the best… but for whatever reason YouTube isn’t able to embed a lot of things. So, this acoustic version will have to do. It’s not bad, but it’s not as good as the original.
HsoiContextualServices 3.0 is released.
It’s a long-overdue update to my old Finder contextual menu plugins, now updated for Mac OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” compatibility.
Via Uncle, a story on why it’s important to carry your gun.
Mrs. Maughan kills both of the attacking dogs and it turns out her dog is expected to recover. Good job and nice shooting there**. But her son takes the story to a scary place:
Brian Maughan said the event made him think about how vulnerable children or older adults would be to a similar attack.
“What if it had been a human being?” he said. “That’s just what was really scary about it.”
Mrs. Maughan is 60 so if the other older adults in that neighborhood are like her, then they be bad! But there is no reason it couldn’t have been a small child instead of her dog that was attacked. And if it had been Mrs. Maughan grandson being mauled by these feral dogs, she would still have had to go back home and retrieve her gun. Fate isn’t going to hit the pause button because you weren’t ready and need a time-out.
Tom Givens has had nearly 60 students involved in self-defense situations. Only 2 died, because they weren’t carrying their guns (I believe they had to disarm themselves due to legal reasons). Those that carried their guns lived.
The reason you carry your gun is because you need it, right fucking now. If attacks happen that sudden, if they go from 0 to ugly in no time, if so much damage can be done within seconds… do you really have time to go fetch a better tool from the house or the car or wherever it might be stored? No! You need it immediately. Really, the only place you can have it is immediately on your person, ready to go.
To borrow from Tom: Carry your damn gun, people!
Dave Re has a good write-up and video on how to more accurately weigh a powder charge.
Nice technique! I shall have to adopt that myself.
Apparently there are a rash of break-ins happening, middle of the night, in neighborhoods in South Austin. We know one of the families that got hit, 2 laptop computers stolen. I’m still trying to get hard details, but the impression I’m left with is they removed the screen on a window, opened the window, got into the house, took 2 laptops, then left by the back door. Nothing broken, just stolen laptops, and easy access to them.
Like I said, I’m still trying to gather information, but I can think of a few things from this:
A truly determined person is going to get what they want. But why make their life easy? Granted, it’s also a balancing act between making your life difficult in exchange. But there are some simple things we can do to minimize such violation and disruption in life. It behooves us to do them.
People are more than happy to support the things they like.
When it comes to things they don’t like, the best we can usually hope for is ambivalence, but usually people want to stamp out things they don’t like.
But that’s why here in the USA we have the Constitution and Bill of Rights. The precise goal is to allow people to live free, which understands that living free isn’t the same as living popular. Much of what those documents are about is protecting that which is unpopular.
Take the beloved “freedom of speech”. I know there are people right now upset at the SCOTUS ruling regarding the Westboro Baptist Church, but folks… they ruled the correct way. Even tho I think Fred Phelps and his crew are distasteful assholes of the highest order that in no way are doing God’s work, we cannot deny them the ability to be the assholes they were born to be merely because we find them to be such great assholes. If there’s any speech these days that’s unpopular, they’d be it, and that’s what 1A is all about protecting.
Sure, Albert Snyder got hurt, bad. I can’t imagine what he went through nor would I want to be in his shoes; I have only compassion for the man. But when you step back from it all, he just has a big case of his feeling getting hurt. I mean, there are lots of other behaviors in this world that could elicit a similar situation, yet are we going to outlaw hurting people’s feelings? Don’t construe this as minimizing Mr. Snyder’s situation, but we have to consider the slippery slope.
What makes this more difficult is the best way to deal with assholes is to ignore them, but Phelps makes a living out of making himself and his group impossible to ignore; it’s hard to ignore someone being so ugly right in your face. But part of what is supposed to make America great isn’t that we try to abridge others because we don’t like them or what they do (tho, you’d think these days we’ve lost sight of that), but rather we allow people to freely act and react. So one of those free reactions is groups like the Patriot Guard Riders.
Yes, I wish Fred Phelps and crew would shut up and go away; actually do God’s work and quit standing on the streetcorner. But if he wants to continue being an asshole and letting the world know what an asshole he is well… he’s got that right and we cannot abridge it, else we don’t really understand what freedom means.
In my developer career, for whatever reason I’ve escaped having to work on Installers.
Maybe I was part of a team and someone else was assigned to do the installer work. I might poke at a script here or there, but the bulk was someone else. Or I might be working on a project that didn’t need an installer, either we’d just distribute an archive, or we could do a simple disk image with a drag-install. Consequently, I’ve never really had to experience the pain of creating an installer from scratch.
I’m working on a small project that required the files to be installed in an obscure location within the User’s Library folder. Due to that, I figured it’d be best to use an installer. Besides, earlier this week I had to do a little installer tweaking on another project and felt rather clueless about how Iceberg worked so hey… might as well try making my own installer for the learning experience.
Holy crap, Lois.
I’m just amazed at how powerful yet how restricted package-based installers are. Good grief, Apple. Why is it so difficult in the second decade of the 21st century to write an installer that places something in the Home directory? Why do I have to resort to strange hacks, and having to resort to strange hacks is the established way to accomplish this? For a company that likes to promote how their products “just work”, this is FAIL.
I will say, Iceberg has some flaws, but seems to get the job done a little better than PackageMaker. I think Iceberg isn’t perfect either tho, like how it was non-obvious the Gestalt selector had to be entered in decimal not BCD hex, how if I checked the preflight script box before I selected a script, it wouldn’t select the script. It’s lacking some modernisms like automatic package signing, which PackageMaker has, and while that is something I can manually do, it’s nice to have it automatically part of the process.
I got the installer package created and it works, but geez. How archaic can you get?
Looks like WordPress.com (who hosts this blog) is under a DDOS attack.
I am able to post this, so maybe it’s over, maybe it’s paused, maybe they’re mitigating it. Don’t know. But hey… if you can’t get here for some reason then I doubt you’ll be able to read this. 😉
I was reading the February 2011 issue of The Blue Press. Someone had written in that was up in hackles about people not cleaning their guns. He couldn’t understand why someone would want to brag about never (or hardly ever) cleaning their guns. He asserted that if you don’t clean your guns your lazy or don’t care.
I beg to differ.
It’s good to know your gun can run despite being very dirty; that you can give it that level of abuse and it still runs. If your gun craps out after 50 rounds, would you trust your life to that gun? If you know you’ve put 2000+ rounds through it without a cleaning and it doesn’t hiccup, at least to me that instills a level of confidence in the gun that it can run even in less than ideal conditions. Life isn’t full of ideal situations, and I like to know my gear will run regardless.
Is it that we’re lazy or don’t care? Perhaps for some. For me, I’m not religious about cleaning my guns because I have only so much time in a day and too many other things taking priority. I know my gun will run dirty, so do I really need to agonize over ensuring it’s sparkling clean after every range trip? How about when I take a weekend-long shooting class where we’ll put 1000-2000 rounds down range? When the days are that long, it’s nice to know I can reholster my carry gun and know it will still work for me while I travel home, sleep, and drive back the next day. Sorry, but in a case like that, spending a little time with my family, taking care of chores around the house, and tending to other matters (like sleep) tend to win out over cleaning my gun before the next day’s class. I know the gun will run. And honestly, if I can discover it won’t run, if I can discover its limits, I’d rather know that when things are calm than when the fur is flying.
I’m not saying to never clean your guns. After hunting season I clean my hunting rifle and prep it for storage, figuring it probably won’t be pulled out again until next Fall. After a good training session I will give my handguns at least a quick boresnake, wipedown, and oiling. I don’t think it’s wise to never clean your gun, because a dry gun is going to wear, a dirty gun is going to have build-up that will eventually cause a problem. But I just don’t feel a need to worship at the altar of the spotless and shiny gun. I buy guns that are rugged and dependable, so if I miss a cleaning, I don’t sweat it. To me, it’s about finding a reasonable balance.
To each their own tho. And hey… if you’ve got a lot of time on your hands, you’re welcome to come clean my guns. 🙂
And another from John Farnham, on Pain.
This hit me for two reasons.
First, I’ve hit a point in my life where I need some serious change. The pain of staying where I am is now outweighing the pain of changing. It may flux, the level of pain may change, I may revert back. Who knows, but I hope not. I hope my motivation to move forward will continue.
The only way any of us ever move forward and improve our lives, is when the pain associated with our current lot exceeds the pain of moving on. It’s a universal formula, and it applies to all of us. Life is motion. Stagnation is always associated with wretchedness and mental illness. For the sake of our own mental health, we have to move on, no matter how painful it is!
John’s writing just hit home with me on that personal level. It is what’s going on for me: the pain to stay is greater than the pain to go.
Second, the real focus of John’s writing is about panhandlers. Personally I don’t have anything to do with them. Wife is more compassionate than I about this, and she is right: we don’t know their story, they could truly need help. But when I see the same guys on the same street corner day after week after month, I’m just not convinced they really care to change, that they really are down on their luck. You offer them a job, they don’t want it. Food they might take; money, or booze or pot they will take. Sorry. I bust my hump at multiple jobs to earn my money and you want me to just give it to you so you can flush it and your life down the toilet? I won’t have any part in that.
John makes a perfect point:
Yes, he claims to be miserable, hungry, homeless, et al. Yet, regardless of what you do, or don’t do, he’ll surely be back on that same street corner, with the same hand-scribbled sign, next week, and the week after, in perpetuity. As miserable as he claims to be, the pain of self-improvement perpetually exceeds the pain of staying where he is.
So, in giving him cash, or even food, you are “easing his pain,” and thus assuring that he will never change. There is only one thing he really lacks, and that’s ambition, and well-meaning enablers virtually insure that ambition never rears its ugly head!
Pain is firmly attached to all our lives, and pain is a relentless headmaster. Thus, in forestalling anyone from the full enjoyment of the logical consequences of their own carelessness, stupidity, vanity, sloth, naivety, and bad habits, we ultimately do them, and society, no good service. “Giving ” cash to someone who has done nothing to earn it, is ultimately destructive of their mental health. In fact, you’re doing little more than supporting a drug habit!
This Civilization already has far too many healthy, able-bodied, yet sleazy and willfully-unproductive cowards. Preventing them from ever growing up, from ever squarely confronting their own shortcomings and moving forward, is ultimately a crime against humanity!
Stuff From Hsoi 