DHS and Wal-Mart

2010-12-08 / hsoi / 3 Comments

From the “you gotta be kidding me” files….

The US Department of Homeland Security is teaming up with Wal-Mart to fight terrorism

“Homeland security starts with hometown security, and each of us plays a critical role in keeping our country and communities safe,” said DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano. “This partnership will help millions of shoppers across the nation identify and report indicators of terrorism, crime and other threats to law enforcement authorities.”

Napolitano will also appear in a video that will run at select checkout counters. The Secretary somehow manages to stave off a smile as she tells shoppers to alert Walmart managers to possible threats of terrorism.

This is an extension of the “If You See Something, Say Something” campaign.

Well you know… it will be Wal-Mart, and if you’ve visited PeopleOfWalMart.com well… there’s sure a LOT of things to see.

This should go well….

Of course my serious reply to this is if they truly believe that security starts with each one of us, then I think we need to do something about carry laws and eliminating all those 2A restrictions. But you know…. DHS isn’t about doing things that actually improve security, just ways to dance about, accomplish nothing, and spend lots of money doing it.

Blacktooth Grin

2010-12-08 / hsoi / 3 Comments

Miss ya, Dime.

If you know what I’m talking about, have a Blacktooth Grin today to remember Dime.

Getcha pull!

This is why I want a bigger sidearm for the field

2010-12-08 / hsoi / 8 Comments

Via EDNO, some guys go bear hunting and despite a high degree of lead ingestion, the bear just keeps coming. Full story.

Fifteen-year-old Chris Moen of Glide, who had drawn the tag, hit the animal in the shoulder with a .338-caliber rifle round, but he and his father couldn’t pick up a trail of blood.

They called on Wyckoff and friends to help track it. A few hours later, Wyckoff went up a hill for a view.

He heard a rustling in the bushes behind him, then a grunt. The bear had apparently circled around the group.

“We never even heard him,” said Wyckoff.

Wyckoff said he fired a round into the bear’s forehead, but the animal kept coming and climbed on top of him. From beneath, Wyckoff said, he got off three more rounds.

Then he tucked the gun beneath the bear’s chin. But it quit. Wyckoff, left-handed, said he had accidentally released the ammunition clip.

Odd that a .338 to the shoulder didn’t drop him. I’d be curious to know if there was an entry wound, if the shoulder joint was shattered, what the path through the bear’s body was. Very strange.

Then lots of .45 shots. I’m sure it was a .45 ACP round, and again I’d like to know if there was actually any penetration into the skull. My guess is the bullets glanced off the forehead.

Justin Norton fired a round from his .44-caliber pistol into the black bear’s stomach, to no avail. He approached the bear, put the gun behind its ear and fired again. It finally rolled away.

“I walked right up to his head, and he didn’t even look at me,” said Norton, 26.

With the dying bear still struggling, a final round finished him off.

And so… this demonstrates why I continue to look for a good backwoods sidearm — my 9mm might be fine for social purposes, but is an inadequate tool for the woods. While .460 Rowland certainly has much appeal on paper, the above situation demonstrates a couple good reasons for revolvers: 1. you’re not going to accidentally hit the magazine release on a revolver (unlikely with a good revolver that you’ll hit the cylinder release and drop your cartridges), 2. you can do contact shots with a revolver. There’s also 3, if there’s a malfunction, just keep pulling the trigger… when a bear is gnawing on you, you really don’t have time to do remedial actions.

Things that make you go hrm.

The best write-up of the TSA mess

2010-12-072010-12-07 / hsoi

Written by Evan DeFilippis and published in The Oklahoma Daily. This is absolutely the best article I’ve read to date on the whole TSA stupidity.

The money quote:

There’s no purpose in security if it debases the very life it intends to protect, yet the forced choice one has to make between privacy and travel does just that. If you want to travel, you have a “choice” between low-tech fondling or high-tech pornography; the choice, therefore, to relegate your fundamental rights in exchange for a plane ticket. Not only does this paradigm presume that one’s right to privacy is variable — contingent on the government’s discretion and only respected in places that the government doesn’t care to look — but it also ignores that the fundamental right to travel has consistently been upheld by the Supreme Court.

(emphasis added).

I’m going to quote the entire article here, for posterity. This is a write-up that cannot be lost to the ether of the Internet.

Continue reading →

Tutored

2010-12-07 / hsoi / 10 Comments

Doggie is going to get “tutored” today.

This is showing what sort of “not a dog person” I am. I have been agonizing over it… knowing she’s going to be left “alone” at the vet’s office, how much it pains her to be away from us and additionally locked up at some strange place with strange people. And then having to come home wearing “the cone of shame” and how miserable that’s going to be for her for a few days.

It’s been one of those “hurts me more than it’s going to hurt her” sort of situations.

Even Wife and Kiddos aren’t as pained about this as I am.

Yes… I’ve become a total sucker for that dog. *sigh* 🙂

About that global warming thing…

2010-12-072010-12-06 / hsoi

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?

Full story here, complete with data.

What to teach the kids?

2010-12-072010-12-06 / hsoi / 3 Comments

A friend pointed me to this article by Eugene Wallingford titled “I Just Need A Programmer“.

The Slashdot entry sums it up best:

“As head of the CS Department at the University of Northern Iowa, Eugene Wallingford often receives e-mail and phone calls from eager entrepreneurs with The Next Great Idea. They want to change the world, and they want Prof. Wallingford to help them. They just need a programmer. ‘Many idea people,’ observes Wallingford, ‘tend to think most or all of the value [of a product] inheres to having the idea. Programmers are a commodity, pulled off the shelf to clean up the details. It’s just a small matter of programming, right?’ Wrong. ‘Writing the program is the ingredient the idea people are missing,’ he adds. ‘They are doing the right thing to seek it out. I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.'”

The interesting thing was, before reading this article my friend and I were talking about teaching kids how to program. He’s been studying this nifty 2D graphics library and given how well-written it was, maybe he’d be able to use it to teach his son how to program. Maybe, but the problem I saw there was there was still too much other stuff to deal with, like the language issues, because the first time you try to figure out pointers in C/C++/Objective-C well… it’s mind-bending. 🙂

The thing that hit me was the last sentence of the Slashdot summary:

I wonder what it would be like if more people could implement their own ideas.

And as I was thinking about teaching our kids I realized what we need to give them are the tools that enable them to realize their ideas.

One cool thing about programming computers is computers are such general purpose tools, that with a little work you can get them to do almost anything you want. Such is a great thing about learning to program. But kids tend to not see that, they just see they want to play a game. So if they want to write a game, give them those tools.

Daughter is very artsy, so we ensure she has a constant supply of art and craft materials. For example, yesterday morning, inspired by the movie “Tangled”, she took some paper plates and painted some really neat stuff on them. We have to keep brushes, paint, pencils, paper, and all sorts of art supplies around at all times for the kids. I’ve even bought software for them to help them be creative. In fact, I think our Christmas card this year is going to be one designed and assembled on the computer by Daughter.

Or if the idea your child has is to create music, ensure they have instruments or other tools to create their music… even software like GarageBand.

The point is, in whatever realm the kids are having their ideas, don’t let them just dream about their ideas coming true; give them the means to make their dreams come true. And that includes a lot of encouragement and support.

Observations from the morning dog walk

2010-12-06 / hsoi / 5 Comments

Dog walk this morning was well before dawn. Point being, it’s very cold, it’s very dark.

Loose pants are good. I can put some long johns on before the walk, then easily slip out of the pants and remove the long johns upon return. Layers are good, but only when you’re out in the cold. Tac Pants 1, Jeans 0.
- I state that because I find myself gravitating back to wearing jeans. Tactical/cargo pants are very useful, but they have zero style. That said, I am looking at “tactical jeans”… not many out there, but they don’t even have to be “5.11”. Just the chief requirement being the front pockets have a more open mouth.
Christmas lights are very useful for detecting movement. They put down a blanket of predictable and traceable light patterns, so when a deer trots out it’s very easy to spot their movement.
There’s this buck living back here. Oh he’s pretty sweet. If he’s the same guy we’ve been seeing and he lives another year, he’s going to be a monster (for the Texas Hill Country) come next year. Shame we all live in the city.
Someday I’ll get more into star-gazing, such that I’ll be able to spot-recognize more constellations than just Orion. 🙂
An essential part of good home security is having a well-lit property — cockroaches don’t like light. This morning I noticed an interesting pattern. Houses that were well lit (interior and/or exterior) also were near street lights. Houses that had little to no illumination from street lights were also dark (no interior nor exterior lights). I could make lots of inferences as to the meaning of this, but they’d be only hypotheses. Still I found it interesting that if the house was in the light, it was really in the light, and if the house was in the dark… well, there were lots of places one could hide and do evil things without anyone noticing.
It’s good to carry your flashlight in your hands at all times. It doesn’t have to be on throughout the walk, but if nothing else it’s useful for letting that guy backing his truck out of his driveway know you’re there. Besides, if someone did jump out at me, having the flashlight already in hand means it’s the first line of “give ’em a WTF moment”: flash ’em in the eyes to disorient them while you take the precious seconds to side-step and assess the situation (or immediately draw). Of course, having big killer doggie at your side doesn’t hurt either. 🙂
Doggie likes cold weather — a lot. Some weeks ago Daughter said she can’t wait for summertime, because doggie will mellow out. 😉

The Ghosts of Pac-Man

2010-12-06 / hsoi

I figure most readers should know what Pac-Man is and what it means in its place not just in video game history but computing and cultural history as well.

The thing about the game was how simple yet how challenging it was to play.

Over the weekend I found a cool article that talked about the “programming logic” of how the ghosts behaved. Don’t worry, it’s not all programmer-geeky to read; in fact, it’s just like the ghosts: simple. When you read how simple the ghost’s “behavior logic” was you almost want to smack yourself on the forehead for all those quarters you spent on the game yet were so easily defeated by such simple logic. But it really shows the beauty in simplicity and how often that is the better solution.

That article links to The Pac-Mac Dossier, which is an amazing in-depth analysis of the game. Crazy how even after all these years the game still draws us in. It’s not always about flashy fancy graphics. Oh sure that’s nice, but gameplay (and in movies, story) are king.