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Category Archives: Misc

Pardon the Nuclear Fallout

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So I spent yesterday and today migrating my blog to WordPress.  This while mostly successful has had a few minor hiccups.

First up, clean URLs is currently broken.  For some reason I have to manually touch every blog post *merely clicking update* for the clean URL to work properly.  I haven’t found the PFM in the database that is changing to allow it to work.

While doing that would be an inconvenience there is another issue which makes me want to touch every post.  None of the categories imported correctly.  The database and content nodes appear to line up correctly but alas the rendering fails for some reason.  Updating the content by hand again fixes the problem.

So the wife and I are going to work on going through all 1171 posts updating their categories and getting the clean URLs straightened out.  I did spend a decent amount of time creating a list of 301 redirects for all my previous posts.  Any and all previous incoming links should still be going to their respective content.  They will just have the ugly ?p=xxxx at the end instead of the nice clear /2012/05/23/This-Post-Is-So-Awesome/ url.

The last problem was brought on by my use of Disqus.  I wanted to get an export of my comments so I could reimport them into Drupal and then import those comments into WordPress.  Disqus would be used on all future content.  Well I didn’t get an export of the comments this weekend and I got tired of waiting.  If and when they come in, I will work on getting a snap shot of the database and migrating those into the system.

I was going to leave a domain up with the Drupal blog intact, alas for some reason I have not been able to make a subdomain.  Why I do not know other than Murphy hates me with a passion.

So yeah, if you notice other stuff that’s broken let me know.  I’m working on cleaning up the mess.  On the upshot I can blog from my phone now.

If you’re feed broke, let me know.  The feedburner feed should have continued uninterrupted.  I am working on getting the contact forms back up tonight.  Any of you who have my contact info in your address book, bump me a line if you notice anything grossly out of place.

Busy Weekend… Kind of

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I have some stuff planned for Sunday and today I’ve got some back end work planned.  Success may or may not be achieved.

In the mean time, enjoy this gratuitous gun porn from Boomershoot.

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Wish me luck.

In Which I Forget a Recent Lesson (And some testing)

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I still haven’t written up a couple posts from Boomershoot.  It hasn’t been as much laziness as I have had other things of interest distracting me.  From ideas, to projects, to wish lists(migrating the platform for the blog from Drupal)*.

There is one story from Boomershoot I do need to write up.  The lesson though evidently was skipped over yesterday during some testing with Ry and Joe. 

You see, after one of the boomers went boom, Ry had a new look.

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I made the mistake of standing just slightly further back than Ry, not thinking about the amount of rain and how close we were.  I had the same outfit afterwards.

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(Yes it was cold).

Eventually I will write up a post on what happened at Boomershoot, one of the other reasons for the delay is it will also contain a review of the eye protection I’m wearing.

On to testing:

So Joe and Ry had a couple project ideas they were working on and I offered to go out and help.  While they were working on mixing up explosives for some of the tests I worked on an idea Joe had for making primers go bang.

In this section, I verify that all that Hollywood crap is exactly that.  Ry had a setup to create an arch between two wires with AC.  It didn’t make the primer go boom.  Joe had another idea using DC to make the primers go boom.  Stuff got warm but still no joy.  Then by luck I inadvertently made the circuit pass through a piece of metal in the primer construction.  That turned into a light bulb filament.  I attached a primer to it, rigged it up and gave that a shot.  10 seconds after connecting the battery I hear a pop.  So heat, not electricity makes the primer go bang.

So they go bang, but not enough for solid computer control.  Well we still have the question of will boomerite go off?  Put it in the bag of boomerite, wire it all up and it was the most anti climatic thing I’ve ever seen.  The pop was so faint I could hear the conversation between Ry and Joe who were further away than the primer.

So primers were a bust, what about the lift experiments for getting a good fuel air mixture?  I have video for that, and everyone likes vide!

This is probably one of the more interesting stills from the testing.

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You can see the water vapor form the lift, this was with ground under the targets.  Ry also had some targets with bags of water underneath.  I’m not sure it really made a difference, though it’s hard to tell with a sample size of one. 

We have a new target type we’re seriously considering putting out for the shooters.  This year things were a bit more difficult that usual.  Target distribution didn’t end up in the amounts we would have preferred.  This resulted in a lot more 4 and 3 inch targets on the hill than we would have liked.  Believe me, I don’t like it when that goes wrong.  I made a nice quote of the day that made everyone chuckle but no one remembered to actually blog it… yet another story to be told about this year.

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The tubes though are 1.5 inches in diameter (inner) and 4 feet long.  We figure we can put them horizontal or vertical.  Either it will require precision on at least one axis to make a successful hit at distance.  Personally I think they’d just be fun.  Yeah you want to get a boomer, but if it was easy that wouldn’t be saying much now would it? 

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*I’m in the beginning stages of investigating moving from Drupal to WordPress.  The latest version of Drupal is lacking a bunch of the features I want that help me with my blogging.  I could write and build the features I need but I don’t blog as a forte into working on the computer.  I have enough other projects that the last thing I want to do is work maintaining my website.  The migration however has me a bit nervous mainly because I don’t want to break any incoming links for other sites to material I’ve written here.  I think I have a solution to the issue, but even then it will probably take me about 48 hours to rip apart the databases and port the content to WordPress.  I have a VM I am using as a testing area currently and I’m learning what exactly is going to have to happen and how to do it before I bite off more than I can chew.

This is Never a Good Thing

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Yeah I’m going to probably be offline tonight.  I left work about an hour early because the wife called…  I won’t say what exactly happened but there was a large amount of water that was dumped into our laundry room.  It was not a failure of the washing machine either.

By the time I got home the wife had most of it cleaned up.  Some of the awaiting laundry soaked up a good majority and acted as a barrier to the far side of the room.  However it got into the carpet outside the laundry room and it appears it got behind the furnace though in very minor quantities.  What isn’t comforting though is I found two holes that head into the crawl space that were not thoroughly sealed.  The wood I could feel felt damp.

I have baked  the wood dry with a hair dryer, as well as dried out all the floor molding.  The wife is continuing to hit everything with more heat to help dry it out.  The faster the better. 

I have the thermostat set to 90 to try and help dry things out further.  The humidity in the house is slightly higher than the usual 20% and that’s thanks to the weather.  The humidifier is off and the temperature is rising quite rapidly in the house.

I suppose this is a good time to mention, I’m not a heat person.  I hate the heat and much prefer the cold.  As I say, I can always put on more clothes but there comes a time where I will either be arrested or have nothing else left to take off… both of those occur at the same time interestingly enough.

I will say this has confirmed my plan that if I ever build a house, the washing machine and by proxy utility sink will have sloped concrete floor with a central drain.

Combining Hobbies…

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So I have a friend who likes building model airplanes.  I like building model airplanes.  I also like building control systems.  I don’t think either of us remembers exactly how it started but there was mention of building a scaled replica of a B-29 and dropping an egg.

To which I replied that if we were going to drop an egg, given all the technology we could try and be reasonably accurate from a couple hundred feet with it.  Then I realized that we could go one step further and make it a full blown UAV.

Then his dad had to send him this video:

See, that’s a 1/5 scale B-29 and holds the world record for largest R/C aircraft.  Well that just answered the question of how big we need to go… The answer is 1/4 scale.  Now I wonder if I can get any 1/4 scale radial engines for this puppy.

We’re also going to work on making it exceedingly light for a decently sized payload.  We have other plans for the system as well.

I’m wanting to make the system much more automated only requiring direct human control for takeoff and landing.  The other side of this is I want the cockpit to be a computer instead of your standard radio controls.  It would take a minimum of two pilots to fly it by regular controls so,  my solution is to make it just like a drone cockpit.  That way he has everything at hand and doesn’t have to maintain constant pressure for all the controls.

Note while doing all this, I want to make it cheap, easy to reproduce, and compact enough to put in smaller aircraft.  I have other uses for such a system, so would some of my friends.

So I have yet another fun side project to work on.  We’re building a much smaller test bed version first.  Good thing I know someone with an electronics company.

Modeling the Old…

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There are times I wonder why I didn’t go the mechanical engineering route.  It is so much fun.

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I spent today modeling the cylinder of a cap and ball revolver loaned to me by a friend.  For the most part I’m happy with the results.  The only thing I’m not really happy with is the cylinder incrementing on the recoil pad.

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Getting the precise dimensions for the correct location and depth was quite difficult.  The measurements are quite close, but not 100% there.  It will take some more tweaking.

I also need to pull one of the nipples and take the measurements to make sure I have the interior threading specified correctly. I think I might actually model the threads at some point too, just for grins.

If anyone wants to try and guess the type of revolver based off the cylinder feel free.  No prizes, just ultimate bragging rights.

Some Times Life Hits You Without Warning

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So two of my friends lost their father early this week.  I’ve been there, I know what that’s like, and it’s never easy.  For them though it was with very little warning and quite rapid.

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I met Jack Zimmer the first time at Corina and Dan’s wedding.  Awesome guy, no matter when I saw him he had a huge grin on his face.  Not only did he have a grin though, he loved working, even more than that fixing.  After the wedding he helped Corina and Dan remodel the restaurant, he would fix Dan’s truck.  That was who he was.

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His response after I say put your best side forward… Dan and I thought it was funny.

Come to think of it, I think the last time I saw him I ran into him at CD’s and he was climbing back under Dan’s truck to fix something.

He came up to visit family last week and spent his time fixing things for his children and playing with his granddaughter.  For that I am thankful.  I just wish that the story kept going to a happy ending.  Alas it does not.  I won’t go into details of what happened, but we’ll just say Ambulance Driver was pissed about Law Dog’s incident for a reason.  Not the same condition, but stupid behavior on the part of some doctors strongly contributed to aggravated the issue, and yes there are some angry medics.DSC_0013_tonemapped

Good bye Jack, I’m sorry I’m not able to sit down and have another beer with you.  You will be missed.  Thank you to you and your wife for raising two such wonderful girls my wife and I are glad to be able to call our friends.

For a friend…

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A friend posted a realization she had about herself this morning.  It was a big one and a good one for her to make. This ear worm is just for her, it’s close enough to her story.

I was blessed with two wonderful parents, however there’s always that thing in the back of your head.  You never want to turn into your parents.  You don’t want to become the unhip square, the authoritarian, the alcoholic drunk (a good buddy of mine refuses to drink for that reason), it bites us right straight to the core.

There are definitely some things that are genetic for our personalities.  My sister (who is adopted) and I prove that to a T.  She recently discovered the family she never knew and it ends up that personality wise she was the spitting image of her mother.  I on the other hand have been informed by my mom that when I go into a long rant I sound exactly like my father.  Sometimes saying the exact same he said long before I was born and never would have heard him say.

At the same time I know my dad hated his parents.  He absolutely did not want to be like them in any way shape or form.  He had very few pleasant memories of his father and there’s a reason he hated yard work.  When you tell your kid you’ll pay him for the work, and then never pay him it leaves a sour taste.  To give you an idea of how split they were, I never met my dad’s father.  The first time I met my grandmother at my grandfather’s funeral.  I was in 4th grade.  My dad was booted out of the house at 16 because he was old enough to be on his own.  My uncle, my dad’s brother-in-law took him in.  I also know my grandfather was very upset I was named what I was instead of after him.  For you see, I was named after the uncle who took him in instead of my grandfather.

We all have demons of some kind.  Some have demons worse than others.  Some are afraid if they uncage the beast there is no going back.  In some cases that can very well be true, addictive personalities for example.  In many cases though that is anything but true.  Just because I channel my father, at many of the times it’s probably for the better, doesn’t make me my father.  Just the same as I’m sure my dad probably did something at some point in his life where he said, “Oh my god, I’m turning into my father.”  The thing is, my dad hated and despised his father and he left those parts out.  What I was left with was man that I only wish I could compare to.  A man that I look at and say I wish there were more people like him.  He wasn’t perfect, but the positive and good far out weighed the bad and even the bad isn’t that memorable.

While genetics might be a strong tie, so is will and determination.  Just because you get angry or violent doesn’t mean you have to like it.  It also doesn’t mean you have to be angry or violent at everyone all the time.  I hate being angry, doubly hate becoming violent, which is funny because a lot of my friends tell me I’m really good at being angry.  The thing is I actually hate it, I hate the feeling, but I know some times it has to happen.  When it does happen, I need to make sure the rage gets channeled to it’s proper location.  There are times however I wish I didn’t snap like a drill instructor.  Anger alone can scare a lot of people quite quickly with the fear of you becoming violent, doubly so when they don’t realizing that being honest will quickly cause it to subside.  But I digress.

The bottom line is this, no matter what our parents have had an effect on who we are.  Both through genetics and our environment.  They’ve had an effect, but they don’t define who we are absolutely.  It’s a combination of the two that creates who we are in the very end.  While genetics might predispose us to particular vices, we can choose to avoid them.  We can choose to dislike or even hate them.  We can also just the same realize that a particular trait is bad in one setting but OK, even valuable, in another.