Me

NetNewsWire and NewsGator – part deux

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I like NetNewsWire. I never used their NewsGator service because I had no need. I get my iPhone, I want an RSS reader there, I see NNW exists for it, and using NewsGator I can sync up and go and keep everything merrily in sync between my MacBook Pro and NNW and my iPhone and NNW. But then, NewsGator opts to change how things are done.

Originally I wasn’t happy about this, but now, I don’t know. Now that NNW exclusively performs its syncing and updating via the NewsGator service, I notice that I’m often lagging behind in feed updates or not getting updates entirely. This is not a step in the right direction. Who knows. Maybe the Google Reader mechanisms will work better here. I don’t know, never used it.

But honestly, all of this is feeling like a big step back in functionality. If NewsGator/NNW is honestly going to make things better, then fine go forward with the changes. But so far, my confidence is shaken and I am thinking about finding another RSS reader. 😦

Sometimes violence is the answer

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Matthew, over at Straight Forward in a Crooked World, has an entry titled “Failure to Comply.”

It’s a compelling read, and you’d do well to take a few minutes to read it, then a few minutes more to think about what he wrote.

There’s one thing he wrote that really caught my attention:

We are taught early on and reminded as adults constantly that violence is bad and that it never solves anything, and that no one wins in a fight. This is simply untrue. In fact it is horribly untrue. This is the result of political correctness infesting everything. It skews how we set and train our minds to win.

Violence does solve problems.

Reactive violence can and does routinely stop evil offensive violence. When you are left (regardless of your sex) on the ground and fighting to win to keep your life violence is the answer…and it is the only answer. And you should not apologize nor back peddle for that.

It made me think about my children and what I teach them.

When I started my parenting career, we opted to do the “no hitting” thing. There was no spanking, we taught Oldest not to hit, period. Basically, violence was completely frowned upon for any and every reason, in every context, every angle, you name it.

It didn’t take long before we abandoned that to a small part. Spanking came around. Why? Because you can’t reason with a 2 year old; they just don’t know enough about life to understand greater things. We didn’t and don’t beat our children, but all living things respond in a simple manner: seek pleasure, avoid pain. We saved a swat on the behind for those times when you really needed to enforce a negative consequence to some action. That is, spanking was not the general punishment; it was reserved for times when you needed to make a strong negative impression because there was no natural negative consequence of the action. For example, child runs into the street; that could warrant a swat on the behind because there’s no question there could be tragic consequences of that action — it must not happen again. However, the action itself has no natural negative consequence (apart from the undesirable of the child getting hit by a car), so you must impart a negative consequence so the child will not undertake that action again. The child must know that action leads to painful consequences so they will avoid partaking in actions that lead to pain. Political correctness compells me to say that we also are into positive reinforcement; frankly that garners a lot more compliance and a happier household. But sometimes, a spanking is the right and only answer. Heck, even my old college roommate just went through a little “my son got whacked” situation. He’s still of the “no spanking” camp, but there’s no question the little whack his son got straightened him up and made for a better long-term experience.

When I started getting serious about self-defense, martial arts study, firearms study, I realized that when our kids hit each other, to condemn them and lay down a rule of “no hitting, never” was not correct. Here I was studying all sorts of violent things because I know that sometimes violence is the answer, and now I’m telling my children never to use violence? That didn’t jive, and I had to correct myself.

I teach my children differently now. I teach my children that yes, sometimes violence is the answer, but you must know when that is. If your sibling took your toy or is being annoying, violence is not an appropriate response. If someone is attempting to harm you, abduct you, your sibling, your friends, your Mother… then yes, violence can be an answer. I do what I can to teach my children the proper contexts, to know how to respond in these contexts. I wish my children to live peaceful lives, and while I know the world has mostly good people, there are enough bad people out there that we have to take care and be prepared.

Some months back I posted about guns and church and reconciling Christian doctrine against violent activity. It doesn’t preach it, it doesn’t desire it, but even it acknowledges that sometimes yes, violence is the answer.

It’s not pretty to think about, and it’s far from politically correct. But where do you choose to live? In fantasy or reality?

NetNewsWire and NewsGator’s questionable changes

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Long ago I adopted NetNewsWire as my RSS reader. Suffice it to say while on the go I want to keep up with my news and blog reading, so I was happy to see that NNW existed for the iPhone. Furthermore, just sign up for a NewsGator account and now everything stays in sync. I can read on my iPhone or my MacBook Pro and when I switch to the other, everything’s up to date and chugs along merrily. This I’m happy about.

However, I read in the latest TidBITS about NewsGator’s changes. Suffice it to say, I’m not happy about this. I can understand the reasons for some of their changes and have no problem with that. However, it seems there’s a big loss in functionality and that the whole transition is not being handled very well. That services will end in about 3 weeks and they still don’t have the software nailed down, pay strategies nailed down, or really anything nailed down… that’s not good. They need to have their act together and a solid plan in place, THEN they can go about transitioning people to the new scheme. I’ve been in the software business for many years, and I know if things look this bad publicly, they’re even worse internally. They risk a massive fuck-up if they don’t pause, regroup, and rethink this.

My opinion is they should back off for now. Put off the end-of-life for a few more months, get their act together, figure out their strategy, get all of their software updated, get things ready to go including fielding some feedback from users and taking the time to improve or fix things prior to the big shift. Make this as smooth as possible for users. Keep users happy, that will lead to good things. Piss your users off, you’re just screwing yourself both short and long term.

If they don’t pause and regroup, they risk backlash and losing far more revenue than they hope to gain by this move.

Yes, I’d be willing to pay for the software if it means no-ads and the price is reasonable. But if they opt to botch this up and even the full paid versions are going to lack features we presently have (e.g. clippings), well… I suspect I may be looking for a new RSS reader and service soon.

More iPhone tales

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Today we had to travel across town to visit the kids’ dentist. Oldest is going to be getting braces, and this was the consultation… for my cash-ectomy. 😉 It’s going to hurt me more than it’s going to hurt him, but thankfully his braces will be “routine” and not any major ordeal. The big hope is improvements in well… attitude and long-term outlooks on the part of Oldest. As you can guess, he’s not thrilled about getting braces, but it’s one of those teenager rites-of-passage so here we are. How long? Dentist said 18-24 months, but ultimately it depends how his body responds to the treatment. Wife did braces a couple years ago and she was over the top with her oral hygiene during the process. As a result, she was able to get hers off a lot sooner because her mouth was in fantastic shape. Oldest has observed this and at least mentally has acknowledged that the ordeal will end sooner if he takes good care of things. Of course, that will still require over a year of dedicated every day work on his part. So, we’ll see what it leads to for him in terms of longer-term goal accomplishment and such. That is, Dad looks at this not just as a way to improve Oldest’s smile, but also a lot of other things for him too. 🙂

But that’s not what this is about. This is about my new iPhone!

I knew I’d use this thing more for data than phone. That I can be just about anywhere and do things I need to do is awesome. I was working on my news feeds while in the waiting room. I’m rather behind on things due to the way the weekend was, so it was great to be able to catch up and not be further behind. I use NetNewsWire for my RSS reading, and they have an iPhone app version of the same. Cool thing? If you sign up for their NewsGator service, it will keep all your subscriptions and read/unread information on their server. So I was reading things while on the road, but didn’t complete all the reading. Get home, get things synced, and I can pick up where I left off using my MacBook Pro and the desktop client. Very nice to have not only the ability to do what I want where I want, but to be able to keep various devices and mechanisms in sync. Cool!

I’m still adjusting to how the iPhone does things. I wish there was a more direct way to flip around between apps than to always have to click the Home button then re-navigate to the app. That is, some apps will launch other apps (e.g. NetNewsWire might let me view a page in Safari), then I can’t just easily switch back to NNW but I have to go back Home, refind NetNewsWire, then get into it. Granted the app doesn’t lose its state, which is nice, but it’s still one of those navigational annoyances.

One thing I really would like is a better way to access Facebook. The Facebook iPhone app is nice, but 1. doesn’t support landscape typing, 2. is really just an accessor for Facebook itself. To play games I found I have to use Safari, ensure I bypass the mobile login for Facebook, then work from there. It’s rather cumbersome, but at least I can toodle around on Facebook games if I want to while on the road. 🙂  Gotta mind the important things in life, right?

And yes… Wife has bigtime envy. I’m sure I’ll be getting her one soon. 🙂

New Kitteh update

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On Friday, Wife noticed new kitteh has worms. This morning was the first time we could get to our vet.

She got her checkup, shots, de-wormer, the whole treatment. She’s quite fine and healthy.

The big news?

She’s only about 9-10 weeks old. So much for our Internet armchair kitten aging technique. We’re about a month off.

Wow.

So she’s quite young, which changes things a little bit. Not much, but a little feeding and other care differences to do. Plus, it does mean that spaying will be further off (maybe late Fall, early Winter time), which is just fine… one less expense to deal with right now.

iPhone impressions

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So I have a new iPhone 3GS. It’s my first “mobile device” from Apple.

People find it odd that I’ve been an Apple fanboy since my first Apple //e as a child, owning many Macs over the years, and being a Mac software developer (amateur and professional) for nearly 20 years… that with all that Apple-ness in my life, I’ve never owned an iPod or an iPhone.

iPod was simple. I had no desire for music in my ears. I love music, but I also love my hearing. I’ve already done enough damage to my hearing from loud music (either the Walkman in my ears as a kid, or attending loud concerts), motorcycles, guns… all sorts of things that until I had done enough damage to my hearing I didn’t start doing things to avoid damage to my hearing. I just don’t care to do such damage any more. Furthermore, when you have earplugs in you end up tuning out the world around you. I prefer not to do that. I enjoy just listening to the world around me, most of the time. Of course, there’s things like situational awareness too. All sorts of good reasons for hearing things other than piping music into my head. Still, from time to time I thought an iPod would have been useful but never enough to justify buying one.

iPhone was also simple. At first it was cool, but not practical enough. I didn’t have much need for the mobile phone, and the original iPhone’s really lacked in features and support. But now with iPhone OS 3, and the iPhone 3GS, things are finally coming along. I actually think I want the phone more for data than telephone. I’ve had more than enough times where I’ve been somewhere and went, “Gosh, if I had an iPhone…”. One recent incident was buying my Savage 11 hunting rifle. If I could have looked up the specific model information on the Internet from right there in the store, that would have made things very simple. Instead, I had to go home, look it up, then go back. Furthermore, I’ve always felt on long trips to new places that such a device would be useful. Sure there’s the TomTom, but that’s a one-trick pony. Heck, in going to the Hunter Education course, I realized that the directions I had vs. the Google Maps vs. the street signs vs. my own knowledge of the area… everything was actually slightly off and didn’t mesh with each other. I was pretty sure I was supposed to turn at one intersection but opted to go forward a bit just to see if maybe it was ahead. After going a bit it dawned on me that I now had an iPhone. I pulled over, pulled up Maps, noted my location via GPS and realized that yes, that intersection was the correct one to turn at. Just the sort of thing as to why I was happy for an iPhone.

I can’t wait for the next big family road trip. 🙂

So Far

So far, so good. I’ve gotten her all hooked up, updated, synced. I’ve gone through various address books and gotten things updated and in order. I can’t get my work’s POP email to work for some reason, tho SMTP is working. Probably just a configuration thing, despite it matching the config on my laptop. *shrug*  I’ll deal with it in the morning. Plus I’ve been on the App Store and have a bunch of free apps and silly things. Bought a couple little games too.

I’m getting better at typing on it. I’m sure in short order I’ll be rather fluid with it and things will flow just fine.

I admit that I think ringtones are stupid. I just want a basic “ring”. I see far too often when someone gets something they think is a cute ringtone, then their phone goes off around “other folks” and the embarrassed look the person gets on their face as everyone hears their ringtone. It’s hard to find something that’s just plain and simple and won’t sound stupid being played over and over for the world around to to hear while you fumble for your phone. 🙂

The only other bump in this? The physicalness and limits of iTunes.

I wanted to use my personal MacBook Pro as the sync point for the iPhone. Makes good sense. However, I do not have my iTunes music library on this machine; music runs out of another box. I’m trying to find out a way to deal with this… so I can have some music with me. I tried hooking up the iPhone to the other box to manually sync just music, but when I tried that I got told “we’re going to erase everything because this iTunes library isn’t the same iTunes library”. Ugh. I really don’t want to deal with this. It’s just a limitation of iTunes, in that there’s no good way to share music. It’s so one-person/one-computer oriented. I’m not sure how much of that is bug, feature, imposed by Apple, imposed by the media groups. I don’t know, but it really hampers the user experience. I’ll be Googling around to see what I can do on this.

Oh, battery life is interesting. Just having the device sleeping on my nightstand lost about 10% charge… just sitting doing nothing (if you will). That’s nuts. Don’t forget your charger.

To bring a gun thing into this, one of the first gun-related apps I downloaded was SureFire’s ShotTimer. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet, but I can’t wait to. 🙂

I’m an educated hunter

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To hunt in Texas, you must pass the Texas Park and Wildlife’s Hunter Education course. It tends to be only offered prior to Fall hunting seasons, so to hunt like I did I had to get my license with the course deferment then ensure I took the course within a year. So, that’s all now out of the way. All done, don’t have to take it again.

I wanted to give a review of things, both of the course and my experiences.

The Course

I took the course as offered by the Austin Rifle Club. It consisted of two days: Friday evening and all day Saturday. Most of the material is classroom, and there is a live-fire event.

I took the class with Daughter. I asked Oldest if he wanted to take it, but let’s just say that he’s learning about priorities. It so happened that foo.c was also in the class too. A good number of students were minors; probably a slight majority.

The course itself is overall a good one. It discusses a wide range of topics related to hunting. From firearm basics (e.g. types of rifles), to safety (gun safety, hunting safety, rudimentary first aid), hunting ethics, game identification, and even things like how to field dress a deer. I think the material covered is useful because they can’t know what level of experience people will have coming into this, so they have to start at the beginning. The problem of that however is it then requires a lot of material to be covered. There’s only so much time in the course, thus to be so broad it cannot go very deep. If any topic was explored in-depth, it was hunter ethics, and I think that was a worthwhile thing. Another problem with such a wide amount of topic coverage is if you already know the stuff, it makes the class boring. While I understand some aspects here, it’d be nice if there was a way to place out of this. For instance, me being an NRA Certified Rifle Instructor, it’d be nice if I would have been able to bypass a fair portion of the course material. But again, I understand the course construction and it’s generally fine how they do things.

After a lot of classroom instruction, there is a 50 question multiple choice knowledge test (closed book). Then there’s a short round on the gun range, which appears to be more about evaluating safe gun handling than it does marksmanship or anything else. There is no instruction on the shooting portion… you need to know how to shoot. The only instruction given was if you borrowed one of their rifles, they of course showed you how it operated (e.g. safety here, magazine release here, etc.).

All in all, I thought it was a good course and, while it was long, I was glad that I took it. A lot of the information was stuff I already knew, but I know Daughter didn’t know a lot of the material so it was certainly good learning for her. For me, seeing the video on how to field dress the deer was probably the most informative. I wish that was on YouTube (went looking for it via my iPhone during a class break, couldn’t find it).

I will say, there is apparently a home-study option for this course. If you are a long-time hunter and shooter and know your stuff, you may be better off doing the knowledge portion via home study. For instance, to hunt via the lotteries of some states you must have an education certificate so some folks that normally don’t need to take the course may need to take the course so they can do such things. So if you’ve the long-term experience, that may be less painful for you to do; then just find a way to do the field course. If you have less hunting knowledge/experience, especially for all young people even if they have gone hunting, they certainly should take the classroom course. There’s a lot they will get from it.

Personal Experience

The hardest part for me in the course was just that it was long. The gentlemen teaching the course were very knowledgeable and friendly, but they weren’t the best teachers. They just weren’t that engaging, mostly reading from their notes or the handbook. Every so often they’d break off and talk about things, tell some stories, or some such, and that would be good. But they just didn’t feel like the most engaging of teachers, especially for all the young folk in the class. This isn’t to say they were terrible; they did just fine and obviously the kids got the needed information as I think most everyone passed the test. So, the job was done.

For Daughter, it was tougher. The first night went until 10:00 PM and that’s way past her bedtime. Then having to get up very early the next morning to head back was tough as well. I also wish they could have done the shooting portion first thing Saturday morning instead of at 2:00 PM, when it was 100º+ outside. But they did it how they did it, and thankfully the outdoor portion didn’t last too long in this oppressive heat.

What also made it tougher for Daughter was the test. I recall looking over at her and seeing her holding back tears. At the time I wasn’t 100% sure why she was breaking down, but I just put my arm around her and kept encouraging her to do her best, to go to the next question if that one was stumping her, and just trying to continue to encourage her and support her through the test. I spoke with her afterwards, and the main issue was just testing overload. She just wasn’t sure about some questions and that number of “I don’t know” seemed to stack up against her. She didn’t want to fail the test, so she built herself up a lot of pressure. I will say that was one tough thing about the course (especially for the kids). There was a great deal of information presented in a limited amount of time. Often times the answer to one question might have been covered in the span of 5 seconds and if you missed it you missed it and there’s just no way you could reason your way to the right answer. Furthermore, some questions would be things that were of questionable merit. Does she really need to know what a percussion cap looks like (not is, looks like)? It’s arguable, but I’d say questions about hunter safety and ethics were more important. I watched her mark her answers, and I noticed that the questions that really mattered she did just fine on; maybe not knowing the answer right off the bat, but was obviously able to reason it down and mark the correct answer. She had the most trouble on more esoteric knowledge. But, since you don’t need a perfect score to pass, such questions are able to be missed and still produce a passing score. Daughter did pass, so no real troubles. Once she found out she passed, all her stress over the test was gone. 🙂  In fact, the gentlemen running the course complemented her on her tests (hey, she shot a better group than I did…. she used our scoped Ruger 10/22, I used one of the club’s Winchester bolt action .22’s with open leaf sights).

As an aside, looking back on things, I realize that during our lunch break (written test was after lunch) I should have gone back over the course handbook with Daugther. Problem was simple: with the new iPhone we were both wanting to play around with it and so we did. I’m sure if we spent time reviewing prior to the test, she would have fared much better.

Anyway, long days, but good days. I learned something. Daughter learned something. We’re both certified. And Daddy and Daughter had a lot of good time together.

My new iPhone

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I finally get to join the ranks of the cool kids. I bought an iPhone 3 GS. Trying out the WordPress app.

More later….

Updated: oh… man I gotta get used to typing on that thing. My poor thumbs…  I’m fixing and updating this post on my laptop.

I always knew the smooth face of the phone was good in a lot of ways, especially that it allows you to do well, anything as it’s adaptable. But the total lack of tactical feel of keys beneath your fingertips doth suck.

Heaven Six in tonight’s class

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Sometimes the stars align and life is good.

In Kali class tonight we spent most of the time working on Heaven 6. Just a few days ago I blogged about Heaven 6, taking it beyond the use of sticks and applying it to empty hand work. That’s just what we did tonight. It’s been on my brain, and to take it further in class was serendipitous.

I have no idea what my problem was, but take the stick out of my hands and suddenly I couldn’t do it. 😮  I could do a single pass at it, but to just flow constantly just wasn’t happening. Could be that I’m mentally distracted, I don’t know. But regardless, it means lots of homework and practice for me, which isn’t a bad thing either way. So to make up for it, I just slowed down. That’s just as well. Better to be slow and correct. Speed will come.

It’s also important to realize that while there’s a lot about Filipino martial arts that’s common, there’s also so much that’s different. There’s thousands of “flavors” of FMA and while foundations are similar, details are different. Little details in how my Guro applied the empty hand Heaven 6 was really nice. For instance, assume you’re facing an opponent and they throw a right punch at you (e.g. the classic “right haymaker”). Doing the 3 motions you use your right hand to parry/block, then the left hand comes in… and that becomes basically a backfist into the inside of their bicep. It’s not how Janich was doing it, but boy I like this way because it works to continue the flow of things but not just being defensive but damaging as well. Nice stuff.

Nevertheless, I continue to be impressed by the simplicity and effectiveness of Filipino martial arts. Something as fundamental as Heaven 6 is just awesome and ever so useful. I need more practice.

Gettin’ better

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I’m a hard workin’ man, doin’ all that I can, tryin’ to make ends meet.
Just a makin’ my way through this jungle today, it’s gettin’ the best of me.

But I know it’s gettin’ better, and a change is gonna come my way
Yes I know it’s gettin’ better, better every day, a-huh yeah.

Been a changin’ the scene, if you know what I mean. Good things are comin’ my way.
Now I’m livin’ my life, and I’m doin’ it right. Sun shinin’ every day.

I can feel it gettin’ better, and a change is gonna come my way.
Yes I feel it gettin’ better, better every day.

— Tesla, “Gettin’ Better”

Yes, things are getting better around here. Past some days have been kinda shitty for me, but you accept the lemons life gives you and you make lemonade. There’s a Taoist notion that the way to be rid of a disease/sickness is to welcome it, be with it, and let it pass through you. Just roll with it, be like water.

Presenting sitting in my backyard, enjoying the fact I live in the city but the unique location of my house on the outskirts of the city makes it like I’m in the country… one of the local does came up to have an evening nosh… I’ve got my laptop with me, playing some Led Zeppelin via iTunes (let’s hear it for wireless networking), blogging, enjoying a Rocky Patel Vintage 1990, a Dogfish Head 90 Minute IPA,… life is good.

I’m not really a cigar smoker, but back in my college days me and 3 buddies from high school had a ritual. When we’d come back to home base during our respective college breaks, we’d gather and have a “stogie night”. I miss those guys… we’re in touch, but haven’t physically seen each other in years. Haven’t smoked cigars since then (I quit cigarettes many years ago and have zero desire for them; in fact, they sicken me to breathe/smell). But my buddy W is a cigar smoker and he introduced me to Rocky Patel’s. I tried one to see if I’d care for it or not, and lo.. I liked it. I don’t intend to make cigars a habit, but today I couldn’t help but go out and buy one to enjoy. Don’t know why… just felt right and I went with that emotion.

No real point to this post… just relishing that in the end, life is good. We have our hardships, we have our shit to deal with, but in the end, life is still good. In fact, to make it better, we have to sometimes just put the shit aside and forget about it… and find something to just enjoy and lose yourself in, even for a little bit. Gotta keep our sanity, gotta keep our balance.

And never take life too seriously. 😎