Chris Conlon

The Obama Effect

2009-04-22T02:38:26Z

Rock River Armory is running a 4 to 6 month backlog on orders despite an inflation in price of the basic Tactical A4 carbine of about 30%. The run on ammunition in the last few months has been nothing short of incredible. My guess would be that the Dems will not try and resurrect the AWB until after the mid-term elections as that makes the most political sense. Seems to me getting on the list for 300 bones deposit is a pretty decent options play. Worst case I end up with an AR-15. By the way unlike Governor Ed "I don't have a clue" Rendell I really don't care weather I am shot by a semi-automatic rifle that's black or has a wood grain on the barrel shroud; either way it sucks.

Mickey D's Madness

2009-03-30T23:58:33Z

I've had this same complaint with McDonald's for a long time although shooting up the place is a little over the top... It must be the NY in me with all of those delis and diners that don't give a damn what the time is and get you what you want as long as they are open. I don't know how many times I've been at the airport waiting on line while the breakfast to lunch switch occurs whilst craving a Egg McMuffin.

I am so glad not to live in this state

2009-03-25T21:32:26Z

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/03/25/california-to-reduce-carbon-emissions-by-banning-black-cars/

Dude ever hear about International waters?

2009-03-10T01:57:10Z

To paraphrase Crocodile Dundee

That's not breaking the law this is breaking the law.

The last thing anyone needs when they come home from work...

2009-01-30T05:10:14Z

Listening on BPF/fxp0/00:a0:c9:39:94:48
Sending on BPF/fxp0/00:a0:c9:39:94:48
Sending on Socket/fallback
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 4
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 5
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 14
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 11
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 18
DHCPDISCOVER on fxp0 to 255.255.255.255 port 67 interval 9
No DHCPOFFERS received.
No working leases in persistent database - sleeping.

Change We Can Believe In

2009-01-28T04:21:25Z

Who didn't see this coming?

June 14, 2008
"Under his plan - which would be the largest tax hike in at least a decade - the 6.2 percent payroll tax would be applied to the entire income of workers making $250,000 or more a year."

Jan 17, 2009
"The full credit would be available for 2009 and 2010 but is limited to those making $75,000 or less ($150,000 or less for workers filing joint returns)."

Jan 27, 2009
"President Obama told Republican House leaders Tuesday he plans to stand firm on the part of his $825 billion economic recovery plan that calls for tax rebates for nearly all working Americans -- including those who make too little to owe income taxes."

Rockin like 1999

2009-01-06T06:09:03Z

Ok it isn't much but this little project really threw me back to the good old days. I decided to whip up a little proof of concept Perl CGI to control my Marantz SR7002 receiver via the RS-232 interface in the back. As a result I think I might be the first person to mute the SR7002 from an iPhone. Maybe one of these days I will get around to buying that Mac Book and writing a real iPhone app that acts as a remote for this thing.

Deja Vu

2009-01-03T17:00:38Z

Obama's NASA strategy for moon landing

Yea we can use the Atlas rocket family, to launch manned flights, in an effort to speed up a moon landing program to beat a communist competitor in a space race. We shall call it project Mecury.

Example of our media failing us badly.

2008-12-31T01:09:44Z

CNN can't read

So mattw and I took a few minutes today to actually read through most of the 400 page report since things were slow here in office. It is a very informative and easy read. Of course CNN throws a very misleading headline and tag line on the article about it. The report certainly did not imply the deaths of the astronauts were from faulty seat or helmet equipment. They were already dead or unconscious and almost dead at that point in the timeline. The primary cause of death was from rapid and unexpected depressurization of the crew compartment probably from the pressure vessel being compromised by the forward fuselage crashing into it while breaking up. The report goes on to say that if they were alive and conscious they probably would not experience the lethal level injuries from the helmet and lack of restraints as they would have braced themselves and resisted the moderate ~3G forces during loss of control. Either way it is academic since last time I checked flying through the atmosphere at hypersonic speeds sans spacecraft is pretty lethal.

Race to the bottom

2008-12-09T23:00:54Z

These guys really give Louisiana a run for its money on public corruption

SUBSAFE

2008-11-09T06:50:58Z

Please implement SUBSAFE. Thank you, the management.

Why am I still shocked when I hear this?

2008-11-04T04:47:58Z

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI

Expensive Dinner

2008-08-14T02:20:33Z

Last night I went to take a bite out of dinner ended cracking a tooth. It was a moler that had a pretty large filling from years back that eventually weakened on one side and a little piece broke off. Since the tooth was pretty compromised anyway I decided to have it capped. Normally this would be a several week process of drilling, casting an impression, fitting a temporary then getting the real one installed. Not a fun process at all. However, I was pleasantly surprised my dentist bought one of these bad boys. Basically it is your garden variety CAD/CAM package tuned for dentists hooked up to a hand held laser line scanner. The idea to model the cap site with the laser scanner then tweak the shape of the cap in the CAD system. The best part is he has a tabletop milling machine on-site that can cut the cap out of a blank in 12 minutes. The whole process in the door to walking out is an hour and half and no further visit is needed. I find myself pretty technology jaded but this sort of blew me away. Primarily how the hand scanner had so little in the way of noise in the model data and how easy it was to drag a line around the 3D model to define the shape of the cap. This took about 5 minutes of tweaking right in front of me.

Crazy Media Day

2008-07-15T06:37:30Z

I started the day off by skimming the headlines on CNN to find the town I now live rated 16th out of a 100 small cities to live. I always find these sort of lists interesting for some reason. Then this evening I caught the first episode of Robocars on the DVR and noticed it featured several cameos of Rhubarb working on a team out of Virginia for the DARPA Urban Challenge! If that wasn't crazy enough I then flip past Fox News to find that a missing women was discovered dead near the lake where I golf once a week. Creepy...

Throwdown

2008-06-18T04:23:26Z

Just caught an episode of Throwdown with Bobby Flay shot in my home town. Crazy

And people wonder why we have the Second Amendment...

2008-05-23T18:11:34Z

Even coming from Maxine Waters this shocks me; although I suppose that is my fault.

Now that is impressive

2008-03-27T14:29:24Z

http://shock.military.com/Shock/videos.do?displayContent=164333&ESRC=marine.nl

Vacation Is Over

2008-03-24T03:09:46Z

I took this past week off from work while my family was in town. My dad, brother and I managed to get in three rounds of golf despite the crappy weather (Lochmere, The Crossings & Knight's Play) . The Crossings is an amazing golf course. Very challenging and beautiful . The best part is we had the course to ourselves on Thursday morning. I suspect that is what retirement feels like. I also installed 4 ceiling fans and a pile of other projects and appointments taken care of. One project was to re-arrange the office. So I disconnected my desktop computer for the day and didn't get around to setting it back up until Saturday morning to find it didn't boot. Apparently the Intel SATA RAID controller, built into the south bridge, lost the fact the second drive in my boot partition was part of the stripe set. All my important stuff is on a separate mirror set but this proved to be a huge pain in the ass none the less. The drive is fine and I assume all the data was there sans some bit of meta data the RAID controller uses to determine the volume description. Well I ended up wiping the volume and re-installing again since the docs describe no method of re-attaching the disk to the stripe set.

My former employeer will be happy

2008-02-21T05:16:03Z

Lately life has gotten busy as heck between work and the house. Not to mention that several trips look like they are in the near future; especially one to a certain South West Asian country. Looking forward to March because my family and possibly others will be coming down to visit. I already have a list a mile long of house projects to get done that week as well as at least 3 rounds of golf with my dad and brother.

Well we really can't turn down the opportunity to shoot a 700 million dollar target with a 10 million dollar missile can we?

SM-3 Block 1A hit-to-kill exo-atmospheric intercept

Back in 2006 I posted a journal entry regarding the need for real world testing of the SM3 missile after development really took off post exiting the ABM treaty. This whole topic is interesting to me for two reasons.

1) I used to work for a sub-contractor and we talked about it a lot.

2) I find the popular culture, for the last 10 years or so, about anti-missile missiles being an impossible feat amusing. If I had a dime for every time a satirist would make some comment acting as if some physical impossibility existed preventing any prospect of success. This sounds to me like I imagine those dopes saying that breaking the sound barrier was impossible sounded after Bell X-1.

For instance many failures occurred during the beginning of the Polaris program. And today we don't walk around under the notion that if a Trident D5 launch were to occur it would be a crap shoot weather or not the target would be incinerated. It's simply a function of 50 years of engineering and development to get from point A to B.

For more background:

For more background

Dialing in the home theater

2008-01-06T03:34:20Z

So I've been fooling around with the home theater, or at least the bits I have so far, for the last few weeks. The Saturday before new years I picked up a pair of B&W 684s for the fronts. BTW new years eve was a lot of fun mostly because I got to see some people I hadn't seen in a long time. I didn't feel like buying speaker cable that day so mattw was clutch in flying in from Florida earlier in the day and lending me his set of spare cables. This weekend joe714 was nice enough to lend me his powered sub woofer to fool around with as well.

My overall impression is very good. The system sounds great and even better since the speakers are broken in. Some little annoyances I am going to either workaround or have to deal with have popped up. So TWC does not stock a SA set top box that does HDMI but not DVR, although SA makes them TWC refuses to see the case distribute them. One is left with HD component, no thanks, or a box that does DVI; which completely shocked me that they would have and distribute to customers. This is fine with me but it does mean I have to run TOSLINK or S/PDIF between the receiver the the cable box. That is not really a deal breaker up front however I would like to use HDMI pass through in the future to drop the audio to the TV directly when I don't want to use the amp to listen the TV. This can only be done if the audio is in the HDMI in the first place. I decided the long term best solution would be to get a cable box that does do HDMI directly and a 2 port HDMI multiplexer. Then run two separate HDMI feeds up to the TV and this would allow me to select either way cutting the receiver out when I don't care. This will also solve my second issue. The Marantz, as far as I can tell, won't let you double book an HDMI input for two separate input presets. In other words while I am listening to iTunes via the Airport Express on AUX2 I can't have the video for the TV playing as well because the HDMI input from the cable box is already mapped to the DSS input. If I wanted to dump S-Video or Component out of cable box as well I could map that to the AUX2 input then up-convert to HDMI to the TV. This might be a nice hack until I get around to the better solution.

List of things to do:

1) Hang TV on the wall (Wall mount kit on order)

2) Get a center channel

3) Install secondary left and right channel speakers on the living/dining room wall.

4) Get rear channels

5) Replace existing entertainment center

I'm glad I am not working tonight...

2007-12-31T22:47:55Z

http://www.engadget.com/2007/12/31/texting-delays-a-given-on-new-years-celebrate-accordingly/

I see ,'high cpu', 'linkset congestion' and 'Subsystem Prohibited' in someone's future. I just hope is stays cool for the European midnights.

Cart before the horse

2007-12-13T01:20:03Z

Since I moved down here, about 2 1/2 years ago, I gave up my receiver and speakers. They were not all that good and I didn't feel like moving them. Besides I was moving into an apartment making them somewhat less useful.

Now that I have the house and an HDTV it seems a damn shame not to have any method of listening to music outside wearing headphones and my alarm clock. So I decided to pick up a Marantz SR7002. I got a great deal and it should arrive tomorrow. The only problem is I don't have speakers and I haven't decided what I want yet. But how long can my self control hold out? I am guessing not too long.

Sore Back

2007-10-30T02:15:33Z

We decided to walk 18 holes of golf yesterday at Lochmere. I don't own a push cart so I carried my bag the old fashion way. The course is a bit over 6100 yards and the pace was slow as hell with all the Sunday traffic. One group, ahead of us, was jamming up the entire queue behind them. We were the ones walking and kept waiting behind them using carts! We had a 2:00 tee time and didn't walk off the course until around 7:00. This makes the last 2 holes pretty interesting without lights. All I kept thinking on the way home was how the model for my house had a sign over the bath tub saying how you can relax after a round of golf; my back was a bit sore. I came home took one look and then proceeded to just take a shower. Who needs the hassle?

1995 or 2007

2007-10-22T15:05:39Z

So I decided to pick up an OEM copy of Vista and install it on my desktop machine. It really needed a reinstall anyway and since I didn't have a legit copy of XP I decided to take the plunge and buy Vista Ultimate. The install went very smooth since they basically stripped all the options out of the install process. You basically tell the installer what language you want and what partition to install it on and your done. Of course the hardware business gets a bit messy. With a little work I believe I have everything working except for the on board sound controller (C-Media CMI9880 HD) on my Asus mobo. The weird part is when I went to Windows 95, back in the day, I had the same problem with a sound card for my Gateway 2000. I ended up finding the phone number for the sound card manufacturer's BBS to download a beta '95 driver.

Now I seem to be in the same hole. The PnP stack probes the sound card to use the Vista reference HD Audio driver but it fails to load properly and the vendor seems to be off the ball so far it makes me wonder if they will ever support it. Another suggestion was to upgrade the BIOS to hopefully make the sound card appear HD standard compliant. So I whipped up a DR-DOS boot cdrom and had at it. Of course Asus didn't put release notes on the Beta BIOS upgrade so I didn't have any idea if it would fix the problem, which it didn't. Last option I've read was to force the XP driver to install. I have not tried this yet for a few reasons:

1) I know from reading a lot of technical docs the audio subsystem was changed significantly in Vista. Making the chance of success lower and the chance of stability even lower.

2) 9 out of 10 crashes in Windows can be attributed to 3rd party hardware drivers and this doesn't seem like a way to reduce those chances.

3) This driver running on XP wasn't the most stable in the world. I had on occasion audio hang in an infinite loop in some play out buffer that could only be recovered with a reboot.

Status of Vista drivers for:

C-Media PCI sound chips: buggy half-working BETA (no ETA for working driver)
C-Media AC97 audio codecs: NONE! XP drivers only (no ETA)
C-Media HD audio codecs: NONE! XP drivers only (no ETA)

Interesting...

2007-09-14T04:06:46Z

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/products/services/2007-08-09-vonage-loses-voip-subscribers_N.htm