Author: dale

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Shooting at The Bullet Hole

Played a little hooky today; I took an hour and a half to take a trip to TBH with Pete and his friend Austin.  We managed to come home a couple of pounds lighter, having gone through 100+ rounds of .40 S&W, 50 or so rounds of .44 Magnum and a couple boxes of .22 ammunition.  Much fun was had by all, and I think I may have brought home more .40 brass than I started with for a change.

The guy in the next lane had a suppressed .45 and a suppressed Walther – didn’t see whether it was a .22 or a 9mm.  On a bright note, it looks like Titegroup works quite well in the M&P .40 Compact, so I can go ahead and load up a bunch of rounds with that.

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The French Cafe

We’ve seen a lot of restaurants come and go.  Many follow a path that is, by now, rather predictable.  We saw it with Colton’s most recently.  A new restaurant opens, and it’s great – great food, great service, nice decor, etc.  We go there fairly frequently (for us anyway).  Then something happens; the food quality falls off, service gets sloppy.  Pretty soon we don’t go there any more, and more often than not the restaurant ends up closing.  So, it’s good to know there are some places that have not lost their edge over the years.

If you have not eaten at the French Cafe recently, you really do owe it to yourself to do so.  Lisa and I had our anniversary dinner there.  It’s really the only place I can think of that has remained consistently close to flawless over the years we have been going.  Our most recent visit was every bit as impressive as our first.  The service was spot on, attentive but not intrusive.  The food was beyond excellent — where else can you get French onion soup that good, and escargot?  Nowhere that I know of, not around here.

The menu is fresh, not just the same thing year after year.  Tony and Valerie Abbott keep things new without getting too far out in left field.  I can only hope they keep it going at the same outstanding level until they can pass it along to someone who will do as good a job.  I hope to have our 50th anniversary dinner there too!

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Ford Fusion Hybrid

Well, we’re now the proud owners of a Fusion Hybrid.  Nice car!  The highway mileage is around 35-36 so far, and about the same in town.  It’s supposed to get better as the car breaks in, we’ll see how that goes.

the new car...
the new car...

All the toys; heated seats, LCD for the nav, radio, backup camera, and other displays.  The sound system is pretty good, sounds great – but no HD radio?  What were they thinking?  That’s really pretty much my only complaint, though.

Lisa at the wheel
Lisa at the wheel

Smooth, quiet, adequate power and then some.  500+ mile range on a tank of gas, so far (we haven’t filled it yet).  10,000 mile oil change interval.  Plenty of room for even tall people in the front and back.  Looks good.  Drives quite well, and they didn’t skimp on anything that we’ve found – right down to the fatter-than-expected Michelins.

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Going forward

I think one of my least favorite little bits of corporate doublespeak is “going forward“.  We no longer plan for the future, do things from now on, or talk about beginning now or starting tomorrow.  “Go-forward” seems to have also replaced most adjectives.  Nothing is new, it’s “go-forward” – likewise, nothing is old, it’s “legacy”.

I’m in a meeting this morning.  12 minutes in I had already lost count of the number of times the speaker mentioned the “go-forward solution“, the “go-forward organization“, “go-forward method“, or the apparent favorite du jour -  “from a go-forward perspective” and “on a go-forward basis“.

I can only hope this particularly insipid bit of drek falls out of fashion soon, though I suspect it will be replaced by something equally stupid.

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What does “Enterprise ready” mean?

“Enterprise Ready” means, in the end, that you have a vendor to blame if something goes wrong.

Let’s assume I spend a million bucks of company money on software from major vendors and pay a few million more per year on maintenance and support. Now let’s assume something goes horribly, horribly wrong — we’re dead in the water for a day, for example, or our online stock trading application crashes at market open. I have spent millions of dollars on high end software from top tier vendors, who all work very hard to get us back up and running. Eventually it’s all sorted out, and everyone is satisfied. I keep my job, and when it’s time to renew the support contracts the vendors remind the senior execs about how they pulled our ass out of the fire. Total cost: Let’s snatch a number out of mid air and say $12MM annually on software and support, and a $6MM outage. $18MM total.

Now let’s assume we go another route. We use all free, open-source software and save millions of dollars.  The same “something” happens, but now there ARE no vendors to call. We, our loyal, courageous and highly skilled technical staff, work tirelessly to solve the problem. We’re up in HALF the time it would have taken the vendors to rescue us. Total cost: a $3MM outage, plus say the two mil I spent on consultants and contractors to implement everything. We just saved $13MM, woo-hoo!

All the blame for the outage now falls upon me, the hapless putz whose idea it was to use all this “home-brewed” hacker stuff the vendors warned our CEO, CIO, CFO and everyone else about. It matters not what happened, why it happened, nor how well we handled it. A few stockholders (who coincidentally also own stock in the software vendors) file a class action suit. Blame is assessed, disembodied heads demanded. I’m out on my ass, along with anyone associated with me, probably my boss and maybe his boss as well.  I can’t find another tech job because it’s all my fault my company took a three million dollar outage.

You think I’m making this up? Think again. There’s a reason big companies pay loads of money for next-to-useless support contracts from Red Hat and Novell to run SLES and RHEL, instead of using free Linux distros. And there’s a reason they spend tens of millions (in the case of a large company) for software and services from Microsoft, IBM, BMC, HP, BEA, EMC, Oracle and all the rest. And for the most part it’s got nothing to do with technical considerations.

It’s one of the lessons we learn when working in an “enterprise” environment.  Of course no one ever wants to talk about the real reasons; we talk about “value propositions” and “core competencies” instead.

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Dayton Hamvention 2009

Going to Dayton this year — first time ever. Lisa and I will be loading up the truck with as many kits & new keyers as we can carry.

Oops — did I say new keyers? Guess I must have slipped.

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Addicted & obsessed

I’ve been completely absorbed in trying to get a new product finished. I’ve already pretty much committed to making it to Dayton this year with inventory to sell. I have all fo the basic stuff working, and quite a few of the “whiz-bang” new features that no one else has. I keep hammering at getting the code finished, or at least to the point where I feel comfortable to taking it to Dayton.

I have been hacking away at this code (which is now somewhere upwards of 7,000 lines of C) for months.  The last couple of weeks I’ve been doing that and virtually nothing else.  I can now copy a limited set of Morse characters at over 20 WPM, sometimes 30…  and I still have not been on the air in a couple of years.

So, if you know me, I apologize for being completely out of the loop.

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Web site overhaul

I have been helping a friend of a friend who is trying to get her web site going.  In the process, I took a look at what others have done with osCommerce.  There are some pretty slick sites out there.  I had been trying to figure out how to integrate somethings I wanted to do into OSC; now I see I was thinking bass-ackwards.  Build a whole site, and wrap the osCommerce shopping cart into it.  Duh.  I’ll be looking at different ways to do that.

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I call shenanigans!

OK, so now we have an uproar over a political cartoon in the NY Post.  If you haven’t seen it, it shows a chimp laying dead on the ground, having been shot by a cop.  Two cops are standing there; one says something to the effect of “Now they’ll have to find someone else to write the next economic stimulus package”.

I have seen the cartoon.  It’s about as funny or un-funny as most; it very clearly uses a current story (pet chimp goes nuts, has to be killed) to illustrate the fact that the economic stimulus package recently pawned off on the US taxpayer could easily have been written by a demented chimp.

Of course now we have Al Sharpton and the rest of the usual band of jackasses claiming that this is somehow a racial attack on Saint Barack.  OK, ‘scuse me?  Are we going to have to change the color of the ink in the newspaper, lest we be accused of trying to make a racial slur against the Anointed One?  Close down zoos for fear of us white devils telling our kids that black people look like monkeys?  Get serious.  This is 2009, not 1949.  Like it or not, we are a whole lot further than we were 10 years ago, or 20, or 30 — but I think we’d be a lot farther were it not for people trying to make things seem worse than they are,  just to increase their own power and line their own pockets.

If I may be permitted to candidly discuss a racial issue, it’s people like Sharpton and the rest of the nattering nabobs of the left that cause most of the racial issues I have encountered.  I cannot tell you how many times it has been presumed that all white people are somehow biased against blacks, usually secretly, often unconsciously.   If something doesn’t go the way the black person feels it should, well then obviously it’s the white guys secretly banding together to keep the brother down.

Hogwash.  I can count on my fingers the number of white people I have encountered in the past year or two who have shown any detectable bias against or dislike for blacks in general.  On the other hand, the more time I spend in Charlotte the more I hear my black fellow citizens bitching about how all the cards are stacked against them.  I think a lot of it is the constant harping of Jackson, Sharpton and the rest of the so-called “leaders” of the black community.