Serious Surgery

If that looks like my workstation laid out on my couch and getting it's guts torn out, it's because it is.

I have suffered a most impressive list of hardware failures over the past week or so. First my notebook hard drive simply failed without warning (sounds like the head motor is toast, as it spins up but no seeking sounds and won't be recognized by any BIOS). Boo.

So I start using my desktop for primary use. I buy a monitor to make it usable (a 37 inch LCD TV is fun for about 5 minutes) and the power supply, coincidentally, decides to give up the ghost after 5 or 6 years of faithful, continuous service.

I guess that's part of my problem. Notebook hard drives aren't really designed to be left on for two years. I should never have been using a notebook as a primary workstation. Even my ancient desktop suddenly made me realize how bad the memory and disk I/O bottlenecks are in a laptop.

Oh and then the hard drives fail in the workstation, one after the other. I guess five years of continuous use is reasonable for a consumer hard drive... and they did travel 2500 miles across the country not that long ago.

But then I bricked my motherboard. That was really dumb of me. The old BIOS images ASUS supplies for its legacy boards are apparently incompatible with their newer Windoze based flashing software. So let that be a lesson to you!

Let that be a lesson to me, actually.

For about $130 I upgraded to another crap motherboard and bottom of the line processor, and it's just orgasmically fast. No, really. So, I think the only thing that's still left in my workstation is the DVD writer - everything else has been replaced in the past couple of days.

Hardware fails. Back your shit up. That's the lesson for last week.

I Hate VB (Don't You?)

I have no idea when I wrote this, but I was digging around in an older module, and found this ode to the most busted language ever written (apologies to COBOL):

' i hate vb
' -------------------
' a poem by henry j. mason
'
' i hate vb
' quite passionately
' i hate vb
' and it's clear to me
' that while there will be more to write
' (and write until my hair turns white)
' my love for programming has waned
' languished under basic's bane
' indeed, so fundamentally broken a language
' could do naught but cause in the most boring programmer deep, bitter anguish
' a twinge of pain
' as again, and again
' the sisyphus must recite
' the banal syntax, and despite
' obsolescence, this poor slave knows there will never be
' true death for such mediocrity
' unkillable, the vb zombie
' feeds, slowly, feeds... upon you, and me

Clearly I am somewhat passionate about this subject. The same could be said, I suppose, about any legacy language left in place to support some vital business function, and maintained in perpetuity...

VB (and don't talk to me about VB.Net, as that's a whole 'nother can of worms) irks me mostly as it was created to allow non-programmers to write code. WHAT?? Non-programmers should be kept as far away from a compiler as possible.

It's funny, though. Microsoft has long had a reputation as being user-unfriendly, beyond surface details, at least. It requires a very competent user to keep a Windows system running smoothly, even more so in the age of the Internet. It's a hackers OS, to a point, and that's why I like it.

Maybe that's why, when they try and make something for the non-hacker crowd, they fail so epically?

Experiments in Raw Feeding

So, we get home from a week in the gorgeous city of Cleveland, only to find this note from the dog-sitters.

My first reaction was disappointment. Man! I missed my baby's first kill! What a bummer. I also felt bad for the rabbit. Visions of it suffering on my back lawn as the dog sitter held back the slavering woof-woof went through my head. Oh well. It could have been hit by a car.

Then, inevitably, I started wondering what happened to the rabbit. Had they buried it? Thrown it in the trash? Apparently Miyuki had caught and slain her prey only hours before we got home. Good timing, as it turned out. A message to the dog sitter confirmed the presence of a freshly killed cottontail in a bag in the garbage container under the car-port. It was a cool, 55F day. I wasn't worried about spoilage. So, out of the trash came one big-ass bunny. I'm guessing it was over three pounds, as fully dressed it came to 2.25 pounds on the scale.



Yes, I cleaned and 'dressed' it. That is, whacked it into half pound sections with a cleaver. I'm pretty sure my neighbors think I'm certifiable. I regularly hack up carcasses on the patio. Is this normal?



I've never cleaned and dressed a mammal before. Gutted plenty of fish. I have to admit, as a vegetarian, it really wasn't that bad. I mean, I don't plan on eating it - it's going to those that deserve it, our dogs.




The fact is, rabbit meat is expensive. Ground or whole expect to pay $7 a pound. There is, as far as I know, little demand for it as food for humans, it's the raw feeding movement that make this meat so lucrative.

So, all is well, and whatever guilt I felt about the suffering of the rabbit has been assuaged. It's painful end shall not have been in vain - it will be consumed, and the life cycle shall continue.

It's now in the freezer for a month. We'll see how they like it.

Trouble...

There's something new in my driveway. Something that's just begging to be tinkered with.

Mazda Furai concept race car

I'm not sure why I hadn't seen this before, but Mazda built a one-off three rotor race car that's just, well, stunning doesn't quite do it justice.



It's a runner, unlike most concept cars, and has an engine built by Racing Beat that produces this prodigious wail, reminiscent of the 787B, but throatier.

Watch it.

Batch 2.4: Clover Pollen Treat, redux

Ok, just tweaking the recipe slightly. Let's see how it works with a little higher starting SG:

Batch #: 2.4
Brew Date: 2009-05-14
Type: Extract
Malt Extracts:
8.5lb Briess wheat-barley liquid malt extract
Adjuncts:
1lb Clover Honey - 10 minutes

Malted Grains:
1lb Gambrinus Honey malt 25L
Hops:
1oz Sterling - 45 minutes
Yeast:
Wyeast 3086 Wheinstephan Wheat


OG: 1.069 at 60 F

Yeah, pretty straightforward, honey added right before flameout, otherwise totally standard. Shooting for a slightly more potent batch this time, and rigged a blow-off tube as the Wheinstephan is very aggressive. Definitely need a temperature controlled primary, next. Right? Right.

Best of Craigslist: Miata hunting

I just had to preserve this for posterity:

http://seattle.craigslist.org/see/cto/1163055823.html

Hi. I am posting this because I have become very disgruntled at the amount of stupidity in the minds of miata owners. I do not understand how someone could possibly believe that their dented miata in need of a new clutch with 250,000 miles on it could ask $5000. IT IS NOT A DAMN FERRARI. WE ARE IN A RECESSION. IF YOU DO NOT SELL YOUR CAR, REPOST WITH A LOWER PRICE. Its simple economics people. Nothing about your car makes it worth $3,000 more then blue book. NOTHING. This means you, retarded dealer that's trying to sell a miata with 150,000 miles and a salvage title for $5000. Are you ill in the head? If you have a miata with a dented fender and a replacement sitting in your garage, then fucking replace it and try selling it. Don't just sit there and say that you just don't have the time to do it. Do you want to sell your car or not? Its been on here for over a month and the fender isn't going to un-dent itself. FIX THE DAMN FENDER OR LOWER THE PRICE.

So true.

Next up: I finally post something about tinkering. Which I have been doing, despite all appearances to the contrary. Serious tinkering.