Life

Catalogs

/ hsoi

The kid might grow older but that doesn’t mean the kid has to grow up. 🙂

I remember as a young boy flipping through the JC Penny master catalogs. I don’t know how many pages were in there, but it was a thick catalog; endless pages holding everything you could think of and more about almost any category one could shop for. It was so cool to flip through all the pages with toys, making your list for Santa. Just dreaming about all that could be had. Then you get a little older and discover the lingerie ads, and a different sort of dreaming goes on. 😉

We get older, our tastes change again. Today I received in the mail my Brownells #62 master catalog. And the dreaming shall commence all over again.

But these days I wonder if catalogs are worth all the cost and expense. I’ll never actually order out of the catalog. It’s so much easier to go to a website to search and find things, then to make the purchase via their website. So what purpose does the printed catalog really serve, and could the company be better served by not incurring the costs of making and printing and distributing the catalog and passing along those cost savings to the customers by way of lower prices? They know their business better than I, so I suppose as long as they’re seeing a good return on their investment it’s worthwhile to do.

Besides, it is tough to beat the tactile feeling of sitting on the floor, flipping through pages, and dreaming. 🙂

More iPhone tales

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

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. 🙂

Here, let me translate that for you

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

A couple of good posts on modern day translations. What they say vs. what they mean.

First, tgace gives us the language of the street.

Then Marko gives us some political translations.

All fairly accurate. Certainly no “all your base are belong to us” sorts of problems here.

New Kitteh update

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

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.

Gettin’ better

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

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. 😎

Random grossness

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Actually… I have two random bits of grossness.

Random gross #1

The other day when I came home from the indoor range, I put a tissue up my nose to clean things out. When I pull the tissue out, there’s black on the tissue. Eh? I do a bit more cleaning in and around both nostrils and find more black. I am not 100% sure what it is, but I can only deduce it’s from the indoor range… all the smoke, especially given the guy shooting the muzzleloader in the bay next to me. Who knows what else I inhaled. This is just another reason why indoor ranges aren’t the greatest thing… or that Red’s needs to massively improve ventilation. Rather gross, and unsettling as to what I took into my body.

Random gross #2

The new kitty? She has the most god-awful farts, and has them rather frequently. Or at least, it seems the cause-effect is pick up kitty, get a nasty fart for your troubles.

Joy. 😕

Quiet…

/ hsoi

I’ve been quieter than usual lately. Bunch of stuff came down at work… not necessarily bad, just has necessitated most of my attention.

Thankfully I have kali class tonight. That should be some welcome stress relief. 🙂

I’l resume shooting my mouth off as time permits… hopefully soon, as fires are coming under control.

Work the unfun

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

ToddG makes a good point about practice:

You want to be prepared for war, prepared for a mugging, or prepared for your next IDPA match … and that is why you practice so much. Right?

Wrong. You practice because you enjoy shooting and you enjoy the results of the practice. Practice, for most people, is fun. But therein lies a trap. Too many shooters choose to practice only the fun stuff. Shooting at longer distances, for most pistol students, is unfun. Shooting strong- and weak-hand only is unfun. Doing just about anything that is hard, or that we’re not good at already, is unfun.

There’s no question about that. All living things are pretty simple: we seek pleasure, we avoid pain. To work on fun drills brings pleasure so we work on those. To work on the things that we like, that give us great groups and results on the target, that’s pleasing to us. Things that won’t please us because it’s hard or because we know the results won’t be immediately gratifying, we don’t work on it. It’s just how we are.

But if we really want to be good, we must work the unfun stuff too. What we have to program our brains to think is that the fun will come in time. So maybe you’re not good at 25 yard shots with your pistol. It won’t be fun to work, but you have to focus on the long term outcome because you know that will be fun. I mean, won’t it be fun to be shooting with your buddies and have everyone shoot at 25 yards and there you go whipping out the fastest and smallest groups? You know that will be fun. 🙂

We must always work to find a way to turn the unfun into fun. That’s what will separate the good from the great, in shooting or anything in life.

The Making of an Agent

/ hsoi

A story of one class’s journey to become US Secret Service agents.

A good read. It’s just a good story and a peek into the training involved to become a Secret Service agent.

You can also pick up a few bits of good tactical advice, like “keep moving.”

Les Lye passes away

/ hsoi

You may not know who Les Lye is, but if you watched “You Can’t Do That on Television” then you know. Mr. Lye died a couple days ago. TCDTOTV was a favorite of mine growing up. I remember the first time I saw it at a friend’s house: they had cable, we didn’t. Because of that show, I wanted to get cable TV.

Kids today watch Nickelodeon and see all this green slime being dropped all over the place. Ask them if they know how the slime originated and I’m sure their response will be “I don’t know.” 🙂