Eric's Arcana and RiderX

Previously in Naked Came the Null Delegate:

Chapter 1. “I, Disposable !” by James Curran

Chapter 2. “Unhandled Exception” by Charles Petzold

Chapter 3 – “Heaps of Trouble”

Project 4.0.30319
Classification: Alpha November Golf Romeo Yankee Fruitcake
*** INTERCEPT *** 
[C=1,20.97,156.83,18:35Z]

V1: and you can call me Algol.

V10: Okay, my pants have been located. Let’s go.

[C=2,18:38Z]

V1: You need prepare yourself, to be reedy.

V10: Reedy?

V1: No, ready.

V10: Ready for what?

V1: To meet him. He’s a bit…

V10: Imposing?

V1: …

V10: Scary??

V1: …

V10: Dangerous???

V1: They call him “The Collector” for a  reason. Just be ready.

[C=3,18:45Z]

V10: What is this place?

V10: and what is that *smell*?

V1: Garbage. Here, put on this mask.

V1: Yo, Garbman, how’s it hanging?

V11: My cache lines are hot and my FDIV is patched.

V1: WTYM. So, you got it?

V11: Is a hashtable faster than a binary search? Is inheritance often a bad idea? Is bubble sort a ridiculous algorithm? Of course I got it.

V1: 0A28? Get straight?

V11: 5050. Slap dash?

V1: S’cool. Here you go. Hold back the dawn.

[C=2,18:55Z]

V10: So, what was all that about?

V1: 0A28? Think about it.

V10: OMG. OMG. You’re part of the hacker underground, and the collector is the leader. OMG OMG. OMG. Have you met Trinity?

V1: He just sold me a copy of “Eli’s Ladder”. They only made like 40 of them.

V1: And he’s not a hacker, just some dude.

V1: And stop saying “OMG”. You sound like an idiot.

[C=1,18:66Z]

V1: Ok baby. Lose the pants.

*** INTERCEPT ENDS ***

“and then they?”

“Yes. 2.4 times”

“And?”

“I’d rather troubleshoot a Packard Bell bios conflict.”

Special agent Elmer P. Mark leaned back in his Herman Miller Aeron chair, his forehead furrowed in concentration as if he were remotely debugging an optimized FFT.  He put his feet up on the desk, crossed one Robert Cavalli pointed-toe python shoe over the other, and accidentally knocking his leftover plate of Nachos Belgrande onto the floor. He absently nudged the resulting mess off to the side with his left foot, soiling the perfection of the exquisitely tooled leather with a dollop of sour cream.

Special agent John “Sweep” Swepenski sighed as if CHKDSK had found 5000 errors on his main hard drive, and regarded the scene with dismay.

“Dude, I’m tired of cleaning up after you. For a guy who wears $1000 dollar shoes, you are such a slob”.

“They’re Italian. Say it in Lire…”

“The Lire no longer exists. The Maastricht Treaty of 1993”

“SAY IT IN LIRE!”

“Okay, $1.4 million Lire. But you’re still a slob.”

The discussion escalated until each executed their personal implementation of IEEE 802.3-2008 Section 4.1.1.2, and an uneasy silence resulted. The two regarded each other across the crowded office. Finally, Mark broke the silence:

“What do we know about this Collector fellow? How is he related to Vissa, the email, and the schema?”

“He isn’t”

“Then why did you read me that whole transcript?”

“Hello? Eli’s Ladder? That a seriously rare game. Wait until the guys on #rgvc hear about this! OMG”

– – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – – –

Next: Chapter 4 – “Ego, Impatience, Sloth and Zombies” – Aaron Goldman

For links to all the parts, and the story behind the story, visit: http://nakedcamethenulldelegate.wordpress.com/2010/10/09/the-story/

We have a deck on the north side of our house, outside of our kitchen and dining room.

It’s not a terribly good place for a deck, since the north side doesn’t get much sun. And the deck was made with non-pressure-treated wood, and had deteriorated so that it was not longer certain that it would complete the primary function of a deck – to hold you up. If we had been doing a simple deck, replacement would have been relatively simple, but we decided that we wanted a covered deck (otherwise known as a “porch”), and, to make it more complicated, we wanted the roof to be clear so the kitchen and dining room would still get natural light.

Which led to a long and complicated design process and then a fairly involved permit application process, but that finally resolved a few weeks ago. I’ll start writing more when I get the pictures imported, but I thought I’d start with the design.

the base is like a normal deck, though it will have tile instead of deck boards. The railing will be a wall instead of an open railing. All of the upper structure will be stained wood. It will be very pretty.

Two words that one doesn’t expect to see together, assuming one knows what they mean.

Brisket, of course, is a cut of meat from the chest area of the beef animal. Brisket is a cheap cut ($3.99/pound from my butcher) because it’s a working muscle, and therefore has a lot of connective tissue. Which makes it tough if you cook it like you would cook any other cut of meat. But if you cook it for a long time and it gets to a nice high temperature (195 degrees F, or so), the connective tissue breaks down and you end up with a very tasty piece of meat.

The best way to cook brisket is on a smoker – you can add a wonderful wood smoke flavor to the already flavorful meat. But there are a few downsides.

First, smoking takes a long time. A *long* time. Cooking times of 12 hours are not uncommon, and that means that if you want to eat brisket at 7PM, you need to get it on the smoker at 7AM, and spend the day tending the smoker. Or you could use an electric smoker like I do, though you still need to tend it every hour or so to add wood.

The second downside is that the time it takes to cook is quite variable. It takes energy to break down the connective tissue and the amount of connective tissues varies from brisket to brisket, so the amount of time it takes to get to the final temperature varies. It might be 12 hours, or it might be 16 hours.

Purists would say that that is the price of good brisket, but I’ve been looking for a shortcut, and I think I’ve found one.

You start the way you normally would, by trimming the fat off the brisket and using a nice dry rub one it. You can trim off more fat than you normally would because you don’t need to protect the brisket from the heat for as long. In this case, I cut the brisket into 7 pieces so that I wouldn’t need to cook them all at once (more on that later). The brisket went in the fridge for the night.

In the morning I set up the smoker (a cheap electric bullet one), put some mesquite in, and put the brisket pieces on the grate. After an hour, I replenished the wood, and went on a 4 hour bike ride. It probably would have worked better to keep putting wood in every hour but I was time-pressed that day. After I got home, I took all the pieces off, and put all but one in the freezer. I need to do that because the foodsaver I use to vacuum-pack won’t seal the hot chunks of meat – it will must pull the juices out of them and pull that into the foodsaver.

So, now we have a chunk of meat that is nicely smoked but only at about 150 degrees or so.

The second step is the Sous-Vide one. I get out my rice cooker and hook up my temperature controller, setting it at 195 degrees. Generally when you do sous-vide, you use a totally sealed package. If you do that with high-temperature sous-vide (say, about 180 degrees or so), the moisture in the meat that you are cooking will go into gas, which will blow up the package until it bursts, at which point you are now poaching it. What I do is make a tiny hole in the corner of the sealed package, thread a bit of butcher’s twice through it, and use that to hold that part of the pouch above the water. That does compromise the heat transfer rate but it doesn’t matter much.

So, make sure the twine holds up the pouch, close the top of the cooker, and then leave it. For the one that came straight of the smoker, it was nice when it had spent 5 hours. I did a couple that were frozen and then thawed in the fridge, and they did pretty excellent in 9 hours (I put them in before heading to work and took them out when I came home).

After it’s cooked, pull it out, cut it up, and then put it in a bowl with the juice that was in the pouch.

Downsides? Well, you don’t get the same crusty ends that you would get in the cooker, but other than that it’s great.

Sous-vide would seem to be a great solution – it’s designed to get a food to an exact temperature

If you’ve been shunning the bakery section of your supermarket for a while, you may not be up on the “two-bite” phenomena. Basically, “two-bite” is brand for an assortment of deserts that come in clear tubs. I’m not sure why they are named “two-bite”, since they are more correctly called “byte-sized”, and if you try to eat them in two bites you get crumbs all over.

I’m a fan of both the brownies and the scones.

Last week I needed to pick some snacks for the meeting, and came across a new “two-bite” produce – a brookie, a combination of a brownie and a chocolate-chip cookie. Sounds great, right?

Yes it does. In fact, it sounds better than it is.

The first problem is the cookie. The essence of a chocolate-chip cookie is something that spreads out, is a bit crunchy and still a bit soft. What you get is a cookie-cake, which everybody knows is not as good as a cookie. The brownie also suffers – it’s dry rather than full of creamy and chocolatey goodness.

Not recommended.

I wrote some custom code to convert the community server blog entries to a blogml version so that I could import it into blogengine.net. I considered using the blogml assembly to create the code, but decided to hand-code it instead.

The way to use this is to create a blog, write one post, export it out (settings->export), and then hand-insert the categories and post sections into that exported file, then re-import it back. I decided to skip comments to make things easier.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.IO;

namespace blogconverter
{
    class Program
    {
        static SqlDataReader Execute(string query)
        {
            SqlCommand command = GetConnection().CreateCommand();
            command.CommandText = query;
            SqlDataReader reader = command.ExecuteReader();
            return reader;
        }

        static SqlConnection GetConnection()
        {
            SqlConnection connection =
                new SqlConnection(@"Data Source=HOMELAPTOP\SQLEXPRESS;Database=BCCommunityServer;Integrated Security=SSPI;");
            connection.Open();

            return connection;
        }

        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            using (StreamWriter writer = File.CreateText(@"c:\data\website\posts.xml"))
            {
                string categories = GetCategories();

                string posts = GetPosts();

                writer.WriteLine(categories);
                writer.WriteLine(posts);
            }

        }

        static Dictionary _CategoryLookup = 
            new Dictionary();

        static string GetCategories()
        {
            StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder();
            b.Append("");
            SqlDataReader reader = Execute(QueryCategory);

            while (reader.Read())
            {
                int categoryId = (int) reader.GetValue(0);
                string name = (string) reader.GetValue(1);

                Guid id = Guid.NewGuid();

                _CategoryLookup.Add(categoryId, id);

                b.Append(String.Format(
                    @"
                       

My hosting company, Webhost4life, has basically imploded – they have been upgrading all their user sites and apparently killing most of them in the process, so I’ve decided to switch to a different provider (the hard-to-pronounce arvixe.com), and I’ve also switched over from commumity server.com to blogengine.net to make thing simpler. I’m going to have to do some hand-work to get the old posts to show up.

I’ve also decided to merge together my two blogs, just to make things easier. I’m not sure yet what’s going to live on thegunnersons.com, as soon as I get the domain transferred over.

That’s my second lesson on this – park your domains on a domain company, not with your service provider. If you do that, it takes 5 minutes to make them point to a new set of servers. If one of your domains is registered by your service provider and they get in trouble, you have to work to get it back.

There were, to the best of my recollection, three of them.

I generally try to pay close attention when I’m riding, but this time I got a bit distracted.

There I was, minding my own business, about 18 miles into a beauuuutiful evening ride with the group. I had put on a new chain and sprocket, the bike felt fast, and I was feeling pretty good, too.

We came to a narrow spot, and I saw him. Usually I try to avoid him, sometimes I even get off my bike so that I don’t disturb him, but this time I was, as I said, a bit distracted. And then he jumped out in front of me. Usually that’s not an issue, but then this b*tch threw me off balance so that I found myself face-first with this dude, and I’ll tell you, he may be nice to kids but he was pretty mean to me – he up and whacked me in the face.

It happened fast enough that I didn’t have time to get my hands off the bars. I’m not sure if I clipped before I hit the ground, but it wasn’t more than 30 seconds before I was on my back, my nose bleeding, and my friend Greg telling me that he was calling in an ambulance (really, an aid car). He’s an EMT, so I was lucky to have him there, and he was very subtle in the way he kept his hand sitting on my chest so that I didn’t try to get up. My nose hurt, my lip hurt, and Greg told me that I had a lac (aka “laceration” aka “cut”) on my forehead that was bleeding a lot and a contusion (aka “boo-boo”) on my lip. My nose stopped bleeding and I got as comfortable as one can get lying on cold concrete in biking clothes at 49 degrees (or so). The rest of the group (minus Greg) finished the ride (our usual approach when one of our members is attacked), and the EMTs showed up, proceeded to backboard me, collar me, and load me in the back of their unit for a short trip to Overlake. The whole EMT concept was created in Seattle, and the ones in Bellevue are very good.

Special kudos to Greg at this point for staying at the scene with my bike in the cold and waiting for one of the other ride members to come pick him (and our bikes) up.

I was talking with the EMT in the back about cycling, and he asked me if I was a serious cyclist. I know many people who are more serious than I am (both in the amount of riding I do and the seriousness that I bring to the riding), and many people who are less serious. I settle for telling him I ride about 2400 miles each year, I give him some bike-buying advice (which boils down to “fit is king”), and then we show up at Overlake. If you are having problems staying awake, I recommend getting yourself a backboard, just as comfortable as the aforementioned concrete sidewalk but considerably more portable.

The advantage of taking the aid car is that you get right into the ER, so they take me to a room, and finally I get warmth (from the LPN and the blankets she brought – not much warmth from the nurse). Greg has agreed to pick me up, but the EMT calls my wife who show up about 15 minutes later. I see the ER doc pretty quick, repeat my story, he does a full exam, unhooks me from the backboard and takes off the collar, and says that I don’t need xrays, but he will stitch up the forehead lac and the one I have inside my lip (which is, according to my wife, sticking out approximately as far as my nose (the lip, not the lac)). Nurse compassion comes back in, numbs up my forehead (not really very bad), and the inside of my lip (painful enough to bring tears to my eyes), and the doc comes back and sutures up my forehead (9 stitches or so), and my lip (no idea how many stitches). Greg shows up with his girlfriend, disappointed that he missed the forehead suturing but happy to talk to the doc and watch the lip suturing. Oh, and he tells me that I might have a slight fracture of the nose, and refers me to an otolaryngologist to follow up.

And then it’s sign-out and off to home. There I discover a sore spot (aka “osteo contusion” aka “owwie on me bum”), and then its time for a quick picture and facebook photo (in case people are worrying about me), and off top bed.

Which is, frankly, what many of you already know or suspect. What you don’t know is what happened after…

I was a bit keyed up so I was reading in bed, and my nose started to bleed a bit, but after the application of highly absorbent Kleenex brand facial tissue, it stopped, and I went to sleep. At about 3AM I woke up, and my nose was bleeding pretty hard and didn’t want to stop, so I woke up Kim. With my tiredness (and frankly, lack of calories, since I didn’t eat anything when I got home), I had forgotten the right way to stop a nosebleed. I can tell you that sitting up while your nose is bleeding is decidedly not the right thing to do, since it leads to Vasovagal Syncope.

Vasovagal (named after one of Attila’s sons) means a vascular issue having to do with the vagus nerve, which, among other things, controls your heart rate. And I’m sure you all know what Syncope is, so I won’t bother to define that.

What happens is that, under certain stimuli (and nose bleeding is a common one), you trigger an autonomic reaction in your body, and it lowers your heart rate. And you pass out.  Kim says I passed out twice, but I’m sticking with once because I have no recollection of the time between them. While I was passed out, I exhibited what I think are known as “Clonic limb jerks” (a *killer* name for a band) where I apparently shook my arms and torso back and forth, in a poor recreation of one of the more memorable scenes from 1973’s “The Exorcist”.

I pick up the story to find my wife on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, and soon get to play the home version of the “Bellevue Aid Car” game. At this point I have the other symptoms of vasovagal syncope, cold sweats and nausea, and my nose is still bleeding, though it’s slowing down. The usual questions to determine my mental state, an IV, and they tarp me out of the bed (literally, they slide a tarp under you slide you onto it, and use it to lift you up) – thankfully I can skip the back board – and after a few problems in applied furniture moving, I’m out of the house, into the aid car, and back to Overlake, for visit #2.

They wheel me into one room which really isn’t much larger than the average bathroom, and after they view the bed (“There’s *no* way he’s going to fit in that bed”), I leave and head out to room 21. If you visit Overlake, I definitely recommend asking for it as it is convenient to both the entrance and the CAT scan room.

This time I get an EKG (fine), and a lot of discussion about my heart rate (56 BPM), since under 60 beats is an indication for Brachycardia, which could be more serious. I spend a lot of time telling them what my resting heart rate is these days… And I have both the leftovers of the syncope and the adrenalin afteraffects, which means I get some nice nausea medicine, but even with that I have a choice between shivering and nausea. I also have some pain on my chest right where the Nike logo is on my blue fleece sweatshirt.

Then, it’s off to the CAT scan, where I get to move from the gurney to the scanner, and I figure out what is causing the pain in my chest. A quick 2 minute scan, 2 minutes sitting on the gurney (note to scan tech – you do not take a patient who has syncope, raise the head of their bed, and then go in the other room to process the scan). Back to the room, a switch to a saline IV, and half a bag later the doc comes in and turns me loose. This time I go home and actually get to sleep, and the rest of the night passes uneventfully.

Here’s what I look like right now. The forehead cut – which was caused by a ridge on my clear riding glasses – is luckily up a bit so I don’t have too much of the unibrow effect, and anyway, chicks dig scars.

Oh, and the chest feels soooo much like a cracked rib – and I’ve had enough that I have a CrackedRib category on my other blog (well, one of my other blogs). It’s what I call the “type 2” cracked rib – it hurts a fair bit when you breathe but doesn’t really constrain your movement as much as a type 1 cracked rib.

It *might* just be the cartilage between the bones, in which case it will hurt for a couple of weeks, while if it’s a cracked rib it will hurt for 6 weeks. 

Last spring, I had the pleasure of spending $1200 to replace a set of brake rotors (because you can’t resurface BMW rotors) and the window mechanism on the driver’s side (a design defect in 3-series cars). That, combined with the spousal desire to have a second AWD car led me to sell the BMW in September and start looking for a replacement. I didn’t need to get a replacement right away since we had the car that I got for my daughter – a 1998 Honda Accord – but when she gets her license in May, I’d be stuck driving the Ranger.

After a bit of research, I settled on a not-so-obvious choice – a Subaru Legacy sedan.

Subaru spends a lot of effort marketing the Outback, the Forester, and the WRX. They’ve spent – at least until this year – very little money marketing the Legacy.

This perplexes me. The base legacy is a pretty nice 4 door AWD sedan at a good price. And they also put a slightly detuned version of their WRX turbo engine, making it a bit of a stealth racer. 0-60 under 6 seconds.

So, of course that was the one we wanted. But there was a problem.

We wanted a manual transmission. We wanted the Limited version (leather, heated seats). And, if at all possible, we wanted it in red. After a couple of months looking through auto trader and craigslist, I found one in San Jose at a dealer, but that one fell through. Then I finally found one in Portland, and picked it up about a week ago.

It’s quite the sleeper. Looks like a normal 4-door sedan, flies on the road.250 hp, 250 ft-lbs of torque, intercooled turbocharger. Needs a new stereo to round it out.

Very nice, but according to the rules, it doesn’t count as a midlife crisis because it’s not a 2-door, so I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere…