Haven’t played with this in a long time, but gosh it’s fun: BallDroppings.
Author: hsoi
She loves texting
Daughter loves texting.
Wife and I have been conservative in our mobile phone use, which parlays into our choice of service plans. Once Wife got her own iPhone (instead of the old crappy phone we once had), then her friends learned about it, Wife started to receive and thus send lots of text messages. The same happened to me, I blame Jay. 🙂 Originally we did AT&T’s minimum 200 msg/month plan, but I quickly realized that as each month passed we got closer and closer to our limit.
I caved and went for the Unlimited plan. It was only $5/month more, so why not.
I’m glad I did.
Daughter LOVES texting.
My father-in-law had a triple bypass surgery a couple of weeks ago. Wife and Kiddos have travelled up to be there, help out, etc.. I would go, but there’s work and well… Sasha is still a high-maintenance dog (we’re working on this, another topic for another time). So since they are gone and I am home, Daughter misses her Daddy.
She makes up for it by texting.
She uses Wife’s iPhone and folks… I’ll tell you this girl can type. I think texting is improving her spelling, her typing speed, everything. Plus, I think it’s great that she finds it a fun way to be close to Dad even when she can’t be close to Dad.
At this point what I want is an iPhone service plan that doesn’t cost me an arm and a leg. 😉
Sunday Metal – Scorpions
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 – now available
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.
Carry your damn gun, people!
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!
Weighing a (more) accurate charge
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.
Basic Home Security
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:
- Lock your doors and windows! So many crimes like this are crimes of opportunity. Yes, locks ultimately can’t keep out a determined enough person, but if a criminal wants an easy target, why make yourself an easier target?
- Make sure they are locked. Close, lock, then tug and ensure. I’ve had a few times where I thought I closed the window the whole way and locked it, but then when I tug-checked the window came up.
- If you have an alarm system, use it. I know many people with alarm systems but they don’t use them or maybe only use them when they go away for vacation. Why? Do you know when something bad is going to happen? Probably not, so why are you gambling?
- One of our window sensors went stupid a couple of weeks ago and had to be replaced. The tech noted to me that he was amazed at the number of “zones” (sensors and other things) we had in our house. He said our setup is rare, most people just get something like their doors and a motion detector. While I understand the cost factor (it wasn’t cheap to put a sensor on everything), I don’t understand how “swiss cheese security” actually works well here. Need to have everything secure.
- Oh, and test your alarm regularly, at least monthly. Ensure the monitoring center is getting the signal.
- If you have an alarm system, be sure signs and stickers are posted in the yard and on the windows. Make sure they know there’s a warning system.
- Got dog?
- Sure a firearm is nice, but let’s put perspective on it. The one family we knew that got hit, by the time they realized what was going on the guy was long gone. And while legally in Texas you can use deadly force in such a circumstance, should you? It will of course depend upon the exact circumstance at the time, but just remember: maximize beer & TV enjoyment.
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.
It protects what you don’t like
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.
Writing installers
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?
WordPress DDOS
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. 😉
