A Little Off Code, Computers, Photography and Guns

28Aug/090

Guns in a Bank

Pardon me for the terrible pun on Snakes on a Plane in the title but I just couldn't resist. Anyway the main point of this post is to discuss a recent experience my brother had, in a bank, with a gun.

Considering that Arizona is pretty conservative I'm still constantly surprised at how skittish people here are about open-carrying. My brother constantly has his precious Kimber Desert Warrior[1] with him. Basically if he's not at home or at work it's on his hip.

Today he an unpleasant experience at the local bank. He regularly visits the bank to deposit checks and do other bank-like things all while carrying his gun with him and has never had any trouble with anyone//anything until this point. The employees have never had a problem with it, it was a patron that did.

He was standing in line at the bank waiting for a teller to become available when a woman of unknown age (older than him he said) came into the bank to the merchant teller and promptly said very deliberately to the teller "I'm surprised to see a gun in a bank" the teller was very confused by this and replied with a simple "huh?". The woman then turned around and extended her arm fully to point at my brother and say "Him, he's got a gun", now my brother being generally a quiet guy in public replied very calmly "it's perfectly legal". This of course rubbed the woman the wrong way since she didn't get the kind of reaction I expect she was trying to procure from him, so she scoffed and went about her business.

Not a terrible experience, just supremely awkward for my brother to be confronted like that in a public place where he'd done absolutely nothing wrong but land on the wrong side of a woman who clearly holds distrust for anyone carrying a gun that doesn't also have a badge.

  1. Kimber Desert Warrior [↩]
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25Aug/090

School Has Started Again

I'm finally back in school with all of my friends and so far it's not been too stressful of a transition from full-on nothing to full-bore school. Well speaking from not much experience since today I only had work lol.

I was lucky enough to not have class on Mondays and Wednesdays for my particular schedule. Which leaves me pretty large chunks of time where I can actually get useful things done at work.

I'd have to say the only stressful thing I've had to deal with until this point was fixing my sleep schedule which during the summer had lapsed into some sort of nocturnal scheme. Though I managed to tackle that really and here's how:

First i did my research on sleep disorders and typical treatments for them, I even thought for a little bit there that I had a mild variety of DSPS[1] which you can read about in decently good detail at the footnote link. One particular treatment i read about that sounded really promising and really easy was a melatonin supplement which can be had at just about any pharmacy without prescription. As it turns out this actually works really well, granted I still have trouble sleeping all the way through the night, it is much, much easier to go to sleep when I intend to.

The other thing Idid that helped greatly to reset my sleep schedule back to typical hours of operation was going camping with some friends the weekend before school started. Besides being great fun, being exposed only to natural light and having a more or less forced sleep//wake time helped loads. It is kind of amazing to go for a couple of years living entirely with artificial light after sundown straight to camping with nearly no artificial light at all. Turns out it only took me a grand total of 2 nights in the wilderness to reset my sleep schedule. I can now wake up at a decent hour in the morning and not feel sick, sleep deprived or robbed of my sanity.

This bodes well for my classes.

On a somewhat related note: the University of Arizona is absolutely packed this semester. According to president Shelton's email yesterday the freshman class is the largest it's been, ever, at a whopping 7000. The university is the academic home to 38,000 students total.

I'm still trying to wrap my mind around how ridiculous all this financial crap is. I was talking to my mother on google talk the other night[2] and she was getting ready to pay my tuition online and asked "Uhh, why is your tuition $700 more than it was last semester?" to which I replied in a similar to but not exact wording "You see mom because of all the financial disasters the school is hurting for money so they're taking it from who they're used to taking it from, the students."

On an even more unrelated note: I hate paid online services associated with classes. If you've taken math at the University of Arizona in the last 2 years you'll know what I'm talking about. In just about any math class you have to fork out something like $15 to register for webassign[3] which you'll do a portion or all of your homework on. In my english classes this summer I had to pay $35 for an online service[4] that the professor ditched 2 weeks in anyway because of technical difficulties; never got a refund for that. Now all of the sudden my thermo//optics class is having us do homework online, $45 for that[5]. It's like they're charging me just to do my homework.

  1. Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome [↩]
  2. Google talk happens to be the only instant messaging system//service my mom is aware of // can cope with, mostly because it's integrated with her email account at gmail. [↩]
  3. http://www.webassign.net/ [↩]
  4. http://www.mycomplab.com/ [↩]
  5. http://www.masteringphysics.com/ [↩]
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13Aug/090

Quote of the <not very specific unit of time>

    The boy had a peculiar relationship with sound. When a fire engine passed, he was not troubled by the siren's howl or the bell's clang. But when a hornet got into the house and swung across the ceiling in a broad Lissajous, droning almost inaudibly, he cried in pain at the noise. And if he saw or smelled something that scared him, he would clap his hands over his ears.
    One noise that troubled him not at all was the pipe organ in the chapel at Bolger Christian College. The chapel itself was nothing worth mentioning, but the organ had been endowed by the paper mill family and would have sufficed for a church four times the size. It nicely complemented the organist, a retired high school math teacher who felt that certain attributes of the Lord (violence and capriciousness in the Old Testament, majesty and triumph in the New) could be directly conveyed into the souls of the enpewed sinners through a kind of frontal sonic impregnation. That ran the risk of blowing out the stained-glass windows was of no consequence since no one liked them anyway, and the paper mill fumes were gnawing at the interstitial lead. But after one little old lady too many staggered down the aisle after a service, reeling from tinnitus, and made a barbed comment to the minister about the exceedingly dramatic music, the organist was replaced.

--Neal Stephenson, Cryptonomicon

I just today picked up Cryptonomicon from Bookman's, Tucson's local used-book (or just about any kind of media) store and began reading. I rarely find books this amusing but I literally laughed out loud for a good few minutes after reading the bold section in that quote.

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8Aug/090

The Perfect Laptop

So I'm still convinced that my favorite laptop is my Dell Inspiron 700m[1]. Granted I sold it in order to get my new Eee-PC 1000h which isn't terrible, but isn't especially good either.

I find that the size of my 700m was exactly the properly proportioned size, the resolution of the screen was decent enough for nearly any program//application I needed to run on it. Now compared to today's laptops it is kind of a beast, 1.5 inches thick and 4.2lbs.

However I believe that given a little bit of modern tender loving care the 700m could be made into the absolute best laptop ever.

If Dell did decide to bring back the 700m I'd hope that it would have maybe 0.5-0.75 inches shaved off of the thickness and maybe... a pound shaved off it's weight. Apart from putting it on a diet, I'd expect that it would have a nice magnesium case like the Latitude series have instead of the albeit super-sturdy composite[2] they've used in the past.

I think of all the features on the laptop the only one I feel like I'd want to stay exactly as it was is the display, it was and still is the brightest//sharpest laptop display I've ever used//seen. Also the resolution was perfect as well at 1280x800.

If I could get a new 700m with a make-over for the modern day I'd expect it to have support for a nVidia 9400M[3]. And with the new graphics card I'd be willing to ditch the VGA port for an HDMI port.

As well as the inclusion of the graphics card I'd probably want at least a Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600[4] (ULV @ 2.13Ghz). Then throw in 3GB of DDR3, along with a 64GB SSD probably the the new Crucial SSD series[5].

And of course the last requirement: $1100 or less. Haha, yes I'm aware that this is an awful lot to ask for but, it would be my perfect laptop.

  1. Dell Inspiron 700m Review [↩]
  2. Very much like Nikon composite, it's nigh-indestructible. [↩]
  3. NVIDIA® GeForce® 9400M: This motherboard GPU redefines the notebook architecture by combining a mainstream GPU, system memory controller, and system I/O into a single chip for the smallest, most power efficient visual computing experience ever available in notebooks. [↩]
  4. Intel Core 2 Duo SL9600: 2133MHz, 6MB L2-Cache, 1066 MT/s, 1.050 - 1.150V, 17W, $316 [↩]
  5. CT64M225: 64GB Crucial M225 2.5" Solid-State Drive. [↩]
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