Hate Crime on Video

If your genetilia has been turned into a fine red mist by the dynamite vest you just blew up to kill 30 infidels in a coffee shop?

It is not a word spoken,
Few words are said;
Nor even a look of the eyes
Nor a bend of the head,

But only a hush of the heart
That has too much to keep,
Only memories waking
That sleep so light a sleep.

-- Sara Teasdale

I remember.

When you're at the range, and you line up your shot to center mass, and you pull the trigger, where you miss is indicative of what you're doing wrong -- if it's consistent. (Some short barrel concealed carry guns are not accurate at longer ranges; they aren't intended to be, either. However, the average full size hand gun is intended to be pretty accurate.)

Here's a link to a helpful free (PDF) target that may make you a better shot.

If I miss at the range -- which is rare -- I usually miss down and to the left of the bullseye (but not by much) because I'm pulling my index finger a little too hard -- I'm tightening my fingers.

If I was in a high stress situation -- say one where a yelling, large, aggressive nearly 300 pound man is charging me, I'd probably tighten up even more and miss to the left, say, hitting the assailant in the right arm. As I continued to pull the trigger, I would likely start missing up from the recoil of the gun -- more likely if I've firing a .40 cal, which has a sharper, more upward recoil than a .45 ACP or a 9mm does. (I've shot a few .40 cals before -- I've not shot a .40 cal Sig Sauer, but I have shot a couple of Berettas and I wasn't a fan. Besides -- .45 ACP is better than .40 anyways :) )

In this regard, the autopsy result of Michael Brown tends to support the officer's account of what happened. Brown was charging him, and under stress he over tightened, and missed to his left from center mass which would be the assailant's right arm / shoulder as he likely did not take a lot, if any, time to re-sight as he was in the line of a charging bull.

The other piece of evidence is going to be the brass. If it's all in a localized area, the officer was standing still. If it's scattered, then he was running toward the assailant.

The other question, which leads into another somewhat related point: How many rounds did Officer Darren Wilson fire? His gun had a 12 round magazine (+1 in the pipe) so it's possible that he missed a few times - which wouldn't surprise me, as here's a dirty little secret:

The police do not train with their firearms enough, or even as much as the average CHL holder.

A couple of my closest friends are police officers, and I can out shoot them any day of the week and twice on Sunday. Despite their "training" I have a much tighter grouping and many, many more bulls-eyes with the same weapon than they do.

The reality is, this trend tends to hold across the general population. You are far more likely to get shot by a cop -- whether intentional or not -- than you are a legal concealed carry licensee.

Consider that little fact the next time you want to think that "only the police should have guns".

And if you are a concealed license holder -- when was the last time you practiced? Find a range and keep those skills sharp.

I was talking to someone at work about how some of the best political wisdom I've heard came from a Douglas Adams book, specifically the bit about how the ones who aspire to positions of authority are those least qualified to have said positions. The conversation then devolved into how the Beeb had created a site to act as a real-life Guide.

Out of curiosity, I set out to see if I could find my posts, and I did. The problem is that I hadn't posted there since April or so of 2000. I had no idea what my login was, no clue on the email address associated with it, and certainly not my password. I went back and forth with their "Gurus", explaining all this and how I would gladly answer any question they had in an effort to identify myself. I gave email addresses I used at the time, too. Next thing I know, they're sending me my login and my password via email, in cleartext.

Wow.

Needless to say, I changed the password right quick.

Well, it's done. Had my Certification exam for GCUX earlier this week.

I passed. :)

One argument made on television last night by a Ferguson City Councilwoman was that the Officer used "excessive force" by shooting a 6'4", 240 pound man 6 times.

6 times! She said.

...... the ignorance is breathtaking.

Here's the reality: Remember this story of a woman hiding in her attic with her children? She shot the assailant 6 times. He survived his injuries. Link to Local News Story

I bring this up as an example to my larger point: Compared to long guns (rifles, shotguns) ALL HAND GUNS SUCK.

The woman in the story was using a .38 special, I do not know what caliber the Officer in Ferguson was carrying. I will wager an educated guess and say that most likely the officer was carrying a 9mm, as it's arguably the most popular police issue handgun. A size comparison between the .38 and the 9mm reveals that they are very, very close in size. The 9mm is faster, as the cartridge contains more powder.

Hollywood has lied to you.

When people are shot, even with the mighty .45 ACP (well, mighty for a hand gun, that is), most people do the following: They psychologically react, think, "OH MY GOD I'VE BEEN SHOT" and lay down, where they are either captured, taken to the hospital, and recover or pass out due to loss of blood pressure and bleed out. They do not fly through the air emitting a Wilhelm Scream only to be stone dead when they hit the ground.

The only way to *stop* an assailant with a hand gun, barring the psychological effects, is to hit someone in the following areas on the body: The pelvic girdle, shattering the hip bone making walking difficult if not impossible, severing the spinal cord, or a hit to the brain. Even a direct shot to the heart is not enough to stop immediately, as a person with a destroyed heart could still have anywhere from 30 to 60 seconds of combat ability before they pass out due to loss of blood pressure.

Here's what we know: According to the officer and eye witness testimony, Michael Brown was rushing the police officer, who fired. The first few shots hit the assailant's arm, and did not stop him. Finally, a shot that hit just above his eye (autopsy report) ended his life.

Far from being a cherub faced child, Michael Brown was a 6'4", 240 pound giant who had just committed a strongarm robbery of a bunch of Swisher Sweet cigars, popular for hollowing out for use with marijuana (which was found in the toxicology report).

Why are losers like Eric Holder, Al Sharpton, and other race baiting idiots involved? We have now seen two incidents where an "unarmed" black male was assaulting a police officer in one case -- breaking his orbital socket bone -- and in the other case breaking the nose of a neighborhood watch volunteer. Both were committing a felony assault when shot, and both died from their wounds. Both are now Liberal Saints, Trayvon Martin -- aka Saint Skittles, and now Michael Brown, now Saint Swisher Sweets -- who despite committing felony assaults at the time of their deaths -- and quite frankly, already received their "justice" -- were "good boys who didn't do nuffin".

Both also led to outcry and criminal trials. Much like George Zimmerman, I would normally expect Officer Wilson to be acquitted -- but with the current mob mentality, and the desire for their pound of flesh, there's no way to predict the outcome of what is now a politically charged event.

... while nary a word is said about the epidemic of black on black violence that is occurring in Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, and Washington DC -- where in many of those cases the victims, unlike Brown and Martin, were innocent.

My, how this country has fallen so far in just 6 years.

I'm going to open up a small restaurant that specializes in finger foods -- ham and cheese crackers, small BLTs, etc. with an extensive wine and liquor list.

I'm going to call it the Allahu Snack Bar.

So this is a thing. It inspired me to write this:

Day 1: A "git clone git@github.com:thegreatoldone/offerings.git", "make -f makefile/unix" and I'm off generating Cthulhu Offerings cryptocoins!

Day 2: I managed to find a couple optimizations. It's almost as if the code is speaking to me! Also, switched to clang 5.1 and got an extra 8% performance boost with the LLVM toolchain. Awesome!

Day 4: My cryptocurrency generation is going quite well! I'm hoping to have enough to pay my tuition at Miskatonic University by the fall term.

Day 9: A quiet scraping noise seems to be coming from one of my hard drives. I should maybe have sprung for SSDs to save my coins.

Day 12: I awoke with a fever in the night, and the scraping noise has transformed into a frightful howling. Though the console monitor is off, strange non-Euclidean symbols reveal themselves from time to time on the screen. What it means I cannot say.

Day 17: My fever has broken, but I can no longer tolerate the sound from my compute cluster. I have pried the cover off to diagnose the problem, and the drive array is not in there. There is only a horrific eldritch non-emptiness that sears my very soul.

Day 22: Turning, turning, falling falling, Oh! How you speak! It is so...

Day 26: vvvvvvvvvvvmggggngl;l;;m122222

NO CARRIER

The Catholic Church considers the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics to fit with our theology. But it also occurs to me that it fits with the problems I've run into converting analog to digital measurement. And THAT points to the theological idea that many people worship not the Creator of the Universe, but an image of God that is a model of the actual God.

I have a Table Valued Function that returns a simple parameterized view. I want to turn that view into a string.

Can anybody tell me why the first query works and the second one doesn't?

DECLARE @JobID INT
DECLARE @strOut VARCHAR(MAX)

SET @JobID=2861

SELECT @strOut =Coalesce(@strOut +',','')+ ISNULL('[' +
MP.ModelPointName + '] int', 'ErrorInFactoryModel int')
FROM (SELECT TOP 800 ModelPointName, Sequence
      FROM dbo.GetReferencedModelPointsByJobID(@JobID)
      ORDER BY Sequence) MP
WHERE NOT (MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Ship%'
        OR MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Scrap%')

PRINT @strOut

SET @strOut=NULL

SELECT @strOut =Coalesce(@strOut +',','')+ ISNULL('[' +
MP.ModelPointName + '] int', 'ErrorInFactoryModel int')
FROM dbo.GetReferencedModelPointsByJobID(@JobID) MP
WHERE NOT (MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Ship%'
        OR MP.ModelPointName LIKE '%Scrap%')
      ORDER BY Sequence

PRINT @strOut

The 2nd one returns a single field name, the first, returns all the field names.

Back in the early 1990s, when CD Roms were first invented, on major use of them was for the conspiracy dial up bulletin board system. With a CD Rom online on your bulletin board, you could "host" a CD full of downloadable text files on everything from government cover-ups to UFOs.

I was into such things at the time, and read many of these files.

Fast forward to today- and Pope Francis gives us a conspiracy theory: that rich first world nations are promoting war in the third world as a prop to economics. All over the first world Catholic blogosphere, there is outrage- how dare the Pope tell us capitalism is supported by warfare?

Of course, Dwight Eisenhower, upon leaving the U.S. Presidency said the same thing,- warned us about the military industrial complex.

But I seem to remember a "secret" document passed around those old BBSs from the Vietnam Era that basically said the same thing, only actually recommending it as a policy. Does anybody else remember this document? Can you remember something I can google on? I'm coming up empty.

It means, in the end that corporations, at least until they are sold out to the stock market, have to actually be ethical and live by the ethics of the entrepreneurs who created them.

My employer pretty-well insisted that I get a certification. They went so far as to pay for the training and the first exam attempt.

To that end, I'm working on GCUX through SANS. So far, so good. It's pretty interesting.

From what I'm reading about how to prepare for the exam itself, it would be to my benefit to prepare a thorough index- something in the area of 30-50 pages long. O_O

Does anyone have any experience with that sort of thing? How does one know what should be in the index and what should not?

...the more they stay the same. I think.

A little over a year ago, I wrote about how I stopped playing WoW and took up ST:TOR. Now, I don't even play that.

Things have been a bit hectic at my house- My wife's computer died (constant, unpredictable reboots and a corrupted hard drive), so she's taken to playing WoW on my system. She raids often, now that she's found a guild that does that sort of thing in the morning. My sleeping period has me getting up late morning. By then, I have an errand or two to do before I start getting ready for work. Rinse, repeat.

I need a vacation.