Me

Couple random things

/ hsoi / 12 Comments

Oh, before I go… couple random things.

1. Feeling a lot better. I think whatever I had is now gone… but last night I felt really bad. My guess tho? The cigar and glass of wine did it… body just wasn’t quite ready for that yet. 🙂   But I’m on the mend, almost 100%. Thank you for the well wishes.

2. Daughter did something cool.

My father-in-law has a deer lease (natch) and the first couple weeks of January there’s a special youth season. He invited Daughter out to come take a doe or a spike during that time. I spoke with Daughter about it and she declined. Why? because she doesn’t feel her marksmanship skills are quite there. She would rather pass on the opportunity than recklessly take it. I am mighty proud of her. I know  she’s got the ability to put a rifle round within an 8″ circle at 100 yards, but she’s not sure of her ability to do it on demand especially given the excitement and pressure of “the moment.” I respect her thinking here; she wants to do the right thing and would rather wait than rush into it and do things wrong.

So it just means more range time. No arguments there!

Make me think… maybe time to buy a second Ruger 10/22 and do an Appleseed with the kids. I’ve been wanting to do that for some time. Hrm.

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

/ hsoi

It’s back to the reloading bench I go.

I don’t know why I stopped reloading, but I just stopped. My guess? The daily routine of loading 9mm until I had a mountain of surplus just burned me out. I don’t WANT to reload .38 Special, I feel this NEED to do it to use up the rest of my Titegroup, build up a bit of surplus there, and also finish pistol reloading so I can shift to rifle.

But you know… I just haven’t had a burning desire to do rifle reloading right now. I think it’s a matter of time and the lack of it. To properly do the rifle reloading I’d have to spend a lot of time at the range, more than usual, and it’s not that I don’t WANT to, but I just don’t have the spare cycles these days to do it, let alone all the researching to come up with a good recipe and so on. It’s not lack of want, it’s lack of resources mainly time. And when I look at all the things I need to spend my time on these days, other things are taking priority.

I think that’s why I didn’t hesitate to order another 100 rounds of SSA 6.8 SPC 85 grain TSX. It’s the time vs. money tradeoff. I’ve got the money, don’t have the time.

Nevertheless, I need to get back in a groove so…. enough writing. Off to reload some .38.

’tis the season….

/ hsoi

… for being sick.

Kids had something, mild but no fun. Seems that Wife and I now have it.

My throat is so sore I don’t want to talk. I’ll let you smartasses decide if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. 😉

I’m starting to feel the Benedryl kick in… asdjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjjj;

Sorry, did my face just hit the keyboard?

How did we manage before Google?

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I’ve been working on a new programming project that’s new in every way. It’s a new project, it involves new API’s, new platforms, new paradigms, new things to explore… just about everything with this project is new.

When I get stuck and wonder how to get something done, first I turn to documentation. The docs are useful but generally are straight API docs. I need more conceptual docs, I need more HOWTO docs. So I look for sample code, and while some code is linked to from the docs, it many times hasn’t been enough to satisfy my question. So I do what has become natural in this day and age: turn to Google. Within a few keystrokes and clicks, I tend to find what I’ve been looking for. I can implement a solution in my code, get back to work and get on with things. Progress is quite rapid, all things considered.

What did we used to do?

I recall having to walk down the hallway to talk to other engineers at the company and ask for their help. Working from home for the day job and then having my own side gig, I just don’t have that luxury any more. Oh sure there are people I can turn to when I need it via IM or email or phone, but the world is growing so diverse in languages, technologies, platforms, APIs, and then the depth of what’s within those areas that often I ask someone a question and their response is “never used that before… never did that before… I don’t know”. 😦   While that isn’t solely a problem of today, in the old days we’d then turn to things like Usenet newsgroups or ad-hoc mailing lists; today we’d use web forums and official mailing lists But no matter whether we walked down the hallway or posted online, those all took one thing: time. If you walked down the hall you had to keep asking until you found someone who had a clue about the problem set, then you’d talk at great length, you’d get sidetracked, and eventually get back to your desk and work. If you posted online, you had to wait for a response with netiquette saying you should give it at least a day or two for people to respond. That sort of lag time isn’t always acceptable.

Now with so much content being online and Google’s amazing search capabilities, it takes almost no time. Chances are your problem isn’t unique, thus someone has asked about it before. And if you’re lucky, someone has responded with a useful solution… and Google was there to index it. Just craft your search string well and hopefully you’ll dig up what you need and be back on track within a few minutes of typing, clicking, and reading. The only thing we need is for people to keep their data online: websites can’t go away, blogs can’t close up, else that knowledge and information goes with it.

I’m quite impressed with how much I’ve gotten done this past week. With everything so new and having to wrap my head around so many things it’d normally take me a few weeks to get done what I’ve accomplished this week. The immediacy of the giant collaborative network that is The Internet is becoming a more awesome thing and powerful tool each day.

on a dog

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I don’t know why you were given to me.

But here you are, part of my life from now until the end.

You have your issues, but don’t we all?

We have to work. We have to adjust.

We have to sacrifice.

I sometimes wonder if it’s worth it. But you look at me and I melt. Yes, it’s worth every moment.

We are learning. You don’t speak our language; nor do we speak yours. We are learning, and I can only hope you are patient and forgiving of us as we learn. It’s our job to understand you.

All you want is to protect us. That’s why we have you. We need you to gain perspective. We need you to understand the UPS Man is cool. Our friends? Allow them into the house and protect them like us. But otherwise, your instincts should remain true.

You are work. You are sacrifice. But you are awesome.

The pork has been smoked

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

This morning I took care of the hog I shot a few days ago. Drained the ice water, brought the quarters inside, trimmed and cleaned things up. Since I’m taking the week off work, it was a perfect day to put something on the smoker for numerous hours. So I did.

I took both shoulders, cleaned them up, and put some Special Shit rub on them. Got the smoker going, initially with briquets but then went all oak wood once things got started. Temperature range was 250º to 350º… a bit of a wider swing that I wanted, but I’m still learning this smoker. It was mostly on the lower end of things, but the occasional 300º+ spikes. As soon as the smoker temperature stabilized, put the foil-wrapped shoulders on the grate. I opened the foil a bit for the first hour to ensure a good initial smoke. After the first hour I then mopped both shoulders with some apple cider vinegar and onion (each shoulder got half a yellow onion, sliced and broken apart). Sealed the foil up mostly tight… I want smoke to get in there, but retain as much moisture as I can. After a couple of hours I see one shoulder has less moisture than is desirable, so I baste both shoulders in half a bottle of Samuel Adams Boston Lager. Reseal the foil. After about 6 hours it’s evident the pork is done. I pull it off the smoker, leave it sealed until it cools enough to be handled by bare hands. Pull the meat off the bones, and all is good.

I even fixed a small plate for Sasha.

I think she was unsure of the rub spices, so I took the meat and ran some water over it to wash off the spices. She seemed to like it better. 🙂

If I do anything different next time, it’d be ensuring more moisture retention. One shoulder was great, the other wasn’t… there was a foil puncture due to the bone and while I tried to seal things up I think it wasn’t good enough (and I was out of foil). Still, that shoulder turned out fine, and it shows the key to the long smoke of lean meats is moisture retention.

Anyways, everyone seems pleased with how the pork turned out. So I guess it’s time for a beer and some pork tacos. 🙂

Chillin’

/ hsoi

Might be light on posting this week. I took the week off work and have been busy with things that keep me away from the computer.

For instance, this morning I did some processing work on the hog I shot on Thursday. The 2 shoulders are presenting bathing in oak smoke. 🙂

So, posting should happen, I just expect it to be light as I’m otherwise occupied this week.

Hard Drive Upgrade

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

It appears the hard drive upgrade for my MacBook Pro is mostly complete and successful.

I’ve had the stock hard drive in the machine and space was running tight. As a developer you can quickly fill up your hard drive with all sorts of things, especially artifacts from the compile process. Since the MacBook Pro still has a lot of life left, why not just upgrade the drive? Looking at Other World Computing‘s prices, I am amazed at how much you can get for so little money.

I settled on a Hitachi Travelstar 7K500, which is a 500 GB 7200 RPM drive. It’s one of the biggest and fastest 2.5″ hard drives you can get today. It’s not the fastest nor the biggest, but when I looked at all factors it ended up being the best all around. If this was going into a desktop machine I might be able to accept a little more vibration, a little more power consumption, a little more heat generation, but since this is a laptop, sorry, no.

The upgrade process was fairly smooth. I purchased the drive with OWC’s upgrade bundle, which includes their “On The Go” enclosure kit with the FireWire 800 interface. I thought it was also cool that their little upgrade toolkit was included. I didn’t really need most of the tools within it, but the nylon pry tool was useful. I installed the new drive into the enclosure, plugged it into the MacBook Pro, and used Disk Utility to format and partition the drive. I then used a Mac OS X 10.6 OS install DVD to reboot the machine (boot from the DVD). Once rebooted, I launched Disk Utility, selected a drive, selected the Restore panel and restored my internal drive (source) to the new external drive (destination). I let that run overnight.

Waking up this morning, I shut the machine down and went about taking the MacBook Pro apart. It’s actually pretty easy to do, so long as you have the right tools (e.g. anti-static wrist-strap). Plus, OWC makes a series of videos that show you exactly what to do. It’s mostly unscrewing a lot of little screws, the details once you get inside are where the videos helped most, but even then it’s pretty painless… just a matter of figuring out what to do.

So the old drive comes out, new drive goes in, reassemble the MacBook Pro, put the old drive into the external enclosure, and restart the machine. She started right back up, no fuss, no muss!

Performance? I can tell there’s an improvement. Going from a 5400 RPM to a 7200 RPM drive, plus whatever other advances are in the drive yeah, you can tell things are peppier. Any sort of read from disk is going faster, even just basic things like browsing in the Finder and listing the contents of a folder. I have noticed web browsing is faster, since web browsing can be very disk intensive as it reads to and writes from cache files. A good test will be later on when I start running Xcode and compiling, pushing real memory to the limits and involving a lot more virtual memory… how will swapping improve? I figure some, but just how much remains to be seen.

So far so good. There’s a lot of work still yet to be done, but that’s just a matter of time. I’m shifting around some files since I was able to make a better partitioning scheme. Spotlight is doing a full reindex and that’s going to take a while. I’ll suspend Time Machine backups during the day today and let it run overnight tonight since I’m sure it’ll have to do quite and extensive backup.

All in all, a good upgrade. Went smooth. More storage space. Better all around performance of the machine.

Now if I really wanted to see a performance upgrade, those solid state hard drives would be cool, but the price tag is scary! (OWC’s Mercury Extreme Pro SSD, 480 GB, $1579.99!!!). But OH the performance is wicked. 🙂

Updated: Now that I’ve been using it a bit longer, a few things to add.

It’s quiet. In fact, I think it’s quieter than my OEM drive (which was also a Hitachi). When I was working with the old drive in the external enclosure, I could hear it, clicking, whirring… not loud, but noticeable. But the new drive never made noise that I could hear above the rest of the din of whirring drives in my office.

Speaking of whirring, I don’t feel any vibration through the case of my MacBook. And maybe it’s just me, but it actually feels like there might be less. It’s hard to say. My body, specifically my left hand, is having a feeling of “something’s missing”. Like any vibration before was slight so the loss of it is barely noticeable. So maybe I’m imagining it, maybe I’m wanting to feel less vibration, but I can’t even say it’s vibration I am or am not feeling… just there’s a sense in my left hand (which rests over where the drive is located) that something is missing.

Heat generation doesn’t seem to be any different, at least that I’ve noticed so far. In terms of just what I feel through my hands on the machine, and smcFanControl’s temperature readout. That’s good.

Power consumption? Just have to wait and see. Not going to be using my battery any time soon.

The machine is still the machine. I can’t go faster than the CPU and video lets me go. But without question anything needing disk i/o is faster. Not some giant leap faster, but you can tell things are peppier.

I’m happy! All around good upgrade.