Category Archives: Work

Stuff related to my current job of a broader interest.

Differing only in degree and implementation

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Ry stopped by my office today and after we completed the work discussion I mentioned that I had lunch with a friend who is in the health insurance industry. I repeated part of the rant I heard at lunch. It went something like, “We spent years implementing Obamacare and we had to get information from the Whitehouse blog because they did rule-making via the blog. Then last week it was from the President’s speech. And today they came up with a letter we will be ‘required’ to send our customers?”

Ry replied, “I hope they like discounts on Samsung products.”

I thought about that for about five seconds without being able to make any sense of it. I was a little behind in the news. Venezuela is nationalizing businesses and selling things at “fair prices”. Samsung is the most recent to enter into a “joint venture” with the government.

“So you think he will take over the insurance industry with the stroke of a pen?”, I asked. Paraphrasing just a bit; Ry replied, “Just like in The Matrix where there was no spoon, here, there is no pen. He is playing 3-D chess and we are trying to play checkers against him. We are concerned about the rule of law and he has changed the legal landscape and moved on. What is happening here only differs in degree and implementation from Venezuela.”

I have no counter to his assertion.

I’m at ground zero

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Every day I go to work I see the park where this admitted Socialist Seattle Council person gave her speech the other night:

Councilmember-elect Kshama Sawant told Boeing machinists her idea of a radical option, should their jobs be moved out of state 

“The workers should take over the factories, and shut down Boeing’s profit-making machine,” Sawant announced to a cheering crowd of union supporters in Seattle’s Westlake Park Monday night.

This week, Sawant became Seattle’s first elected Socialist council member. She ran on a platform of anti-capitalism, workers’ rights, and a $15 per-hour minimum wage for Seattle workers.

There are people, ironically, selling communist newspapers on many of the street corners near here.

One street over, 3rd Avenue, is what Barb L. calls, “Mug Me Street”. The Seattle Police department says that location is one of the crime hot spots in Seattle. All the warning alarms go off in my head as I walk on that street to get to my bus. Things “just aren’t right” there. It is rare not to see at least two cops on that street when I briskly walk through “the danger zone”.

The SPD and King County Sheriff’s Office just finished doing some street cleaning in the park and on Mug Me Street:

Just in time for the holidays, Seattle Police and King County Sheriff’s Office have wrapped up more than 30 drug dealers and suspected gang members following a months-long undercover operation around Westlake.

“This operation was about helping downtown businesses and their customers as well as Metro Employees and transit riders downtown,” says Sgt Thomas Flanagan from the KCSO’s Metro Police Unit.

In September, members of SPD’s Gang Unit, Narcotics, West Precinct Bikes Anti-Crime Teams and deputies from the King County Sheriff’s Office’s patrol and Metro Units began Operation Happy Holidays after receiving numerous reports of drug dealing and gang activity near the 3rd Ave corridor. For months, police documented hand-to-hand drug deals and purchased crack cocaine, powder cocaine, pills, and marijuana in the downtown core and developed cases against 40 people. This week, police began making arrests.

Last night when I was leaving work I saw two police officers with a guy up against the wall just outside the parking garage for our building. They were going through his pockets.

This morning I looked around some. I didn’t see any of the usual shady people hanging around. Maybe it will stay clean around here for a few days.

I really wish I could earn the kind of money I’m addicted to back on the farm in Idaho. This is ground zero for criminals and, redundancy alert, Marxists.

Shakedown?

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I got a request from a guy who works for one of the gigantic firearms magazine publishing companies. They put out several major gun magazines, all of which you know well. He wanted high resolution images showing off some specific products of ours. I was heading out of town at the time and could not change my plans, no way, no how, and so I went to GREAT lengths, using digital back-channels, running into road blocks, fiddling this and that, and finally I got him his images in short order. It was a pain, but when a major publisher indicates that they want to run an article that shows off your products, you jump, right? So I jumped. I know the guy. He’s a big name in a huge industry– Why shouldn’t I jump?

Days later, after hearing no reply, I get this;

“Thank you for the images.

I am also interested in getting one of those [product name redacted] for myself…

Let me know what I would owe you.”

No mention of any specific, up-coming article in any specific magazine, just an implied request for a special personal deal on some special hardware (nod nod, wink, wink).

So I went through all that dorking around just for this?

This ain’t my first rodeo, bitches– I have decades of experience dealing with people attempting to use their very real influence for personal gain, and with those who accommodate them at every opportunity. Many of them have been in public employ too. I’ve also seen more than few of them fall flat on their faces for doing it.

Most people in any business, and all industries have this sort of thing going in spades, take the position; “Aw, just go with it. Don’t be a fool– It’s how the game is played and there’s nothing you can ever do to change it.” I’ve had it said to my face.

Uh huh. Well consider this post my reply to that, and count your blessings that I haven’t mentioned your name and your employer. Yet. Now let the reprisals begin, if you’re dumb enough. I’m ready.

Quote of the day—Barb L.

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You don’t get to be your own museum.

Barb L.
September 15, 2013
[I moved to a new clock tower today. I now have a clear field of fire into the lawns of homes over a mile away. It’s awesome!

I sorted through dozens of old boxes of stuff. Some of them contained stuff from 40 years ago. I’m a packrat and it’s difficult to let go of things. But I threw out garbage bag after garbage bag of stuff.

There were some things I had received from Microsoft that I considered historic. I help build Direct X and Windows Phone 7. I participated in the attempt at worlds record for the largest number of paper airplanes in flight at the same time and have one of the airplanes.

When I came across an artifact from the launch of Windows Phone Seven I wanted to pack it for the move. Barb was there and said to throw it. I started to explain how it was from the launch but she interrupted me with the above quote.

My response was:
WP_20130915_004Cropped

Picture by Barb.--Joe]

Quote of the day—Larry Correia

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The most (maliciously) creative guys I’ve ever worked with were Army Special Forces soldiers. Their imagination can come up with a million fantastic ways to ruin someone’s day. They make authors look like pikers.

Larry Correia
July 18, 2013
Ask Correia 14: How to be a Professional Author
[Good to know.

There are a few reasons for this.

One, it’s their job and they do this stuff a lot so they get more practice than you, I , or Larry.

Two, they have a different mindset. When I used to do computer security stuff I would spend a lot of time “thinking like a bad guy” and try to break things. You don’t normally think like that. It sort of rubbed off onto other things I did and thought about. I could walk through the grocery store, or drive through farm country and get distracted by all the things someone could do to contaminate the food supply from a terrorist point of view. Or I would walk through a hardware store and “see” things for improvised explosive devices in nearly every aisle.

Three, they have had a lot of training and knowledge that has been handed down through the generations. It may seem incredibly creative to you or I but it’s only a minor variation on something that has been repeatedly done for the last 100 years.

Try changing your mindset. You might be surprised what you come up with if you decide to go all Firefly and “be a bad guy”.—Joe]

In my other life I am also a mechanic

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I started repairing musical instruments in the 1970s. My hippie days. Started a business doing that when I was 19. Taxes and red tape slowly turned me, or helped turn me, into a conservative, if by conservative we mean someone who believes that people should stay the hell out of other people’s business.

Anyway it’s difficult to get away from the musical instruments completely. Below is a Yamaha 894– solid silver body and keys, and this one has a custom headjoint made by Drelinger in White Plains, NY. The Japanese have been making some fine instruments and this one is no exception. Each key is like a piece of jewelry, not in the sense that certain guns are said to be “jewelry” but literally.

Every key is fit to its pivots or shaft to perfection. Any tighter and it would bind with temperature changes. One key can have a half dozen or more parts, silver soldered together in a jig and hand polished. The soft pad each key holds must produce an air-tight seal with a light touch to the tone hole, it must do it quietly, and it must usually do it in mechanical combination with one or more other keys, so there is a fair amount of regulation of each key, and more regulation between keys.

image

The soft pads are leveled to the tone holes by use of paper shims of various thicknesses. I work with .001″, .002″ and .003″ shims mostly. Mark, remove the pad, cut a shim, paste it on the back of the pad, reinsert the pad, and try. Repeat as necessary, which can be many times per pad. You can see the punches, of which I’ve made several to fit various pad cup sizes, and bits of round shims, and a razor blade for cutting them into pieces. Sometimes you use whole shims to increase the effective thickness of the pad.

If you’re not already crazy it can drive you there. Many, many attempts, by many people (myself included) have been made over the decades to come up with a pad that’s more or less self-leveling and that can still hold up to moisture and all the rest, without sticking or making more noise, and so far it’s still the old felt and bladder skin pad that’s generally preferred.

It takes hours and hours, but I love it when it all comes together and the instrument finally becomes a “single thing” again, rather than the many parts I’ve been working on separately. You could even say it’s music to the ears. Lately though I’m given pause, wondering what good any of this does for anyone.

This flute is one of several owned by the principal flutist in a Northwestern U.S. orchestra, and yes; she knows that her flute is being worked on by a gun accessory corporation president. We’ve known each other for decades. She’s also a university professor and so it is safe to say that our world views differ somewhat. Two worlds. We get along very well all the same.

It’s a small world

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Yesterday while walking from the bus stop to my work a guy going the other direction looked at me kind of funny, approached me, and said, “Joe Huffman?”.

In the first couple of seconds I was concerned it was my “stalker” but then I had a glimmer of recognition and said, “And you are?” He replied, “Microsoft, Direct X…”

It wasn’t so much the words but the sound of his voice and matching the face to memories that enabled me to pull out a name without significant pause, “Nick W. Yes, I remember you!”

We had worked together (I think he was my lead) in the late 90’s at Microsoft about 15 years ago. We ended up talking for probably close to 30 minutes. He had left MS before I went back in 2005, worked in NYC for a while, then came back to Seattle and now works for Amazon.

This is the second time I have connected with someone by seeing them on the sidewalk in downtown Seattle. The other time was late last year when I chatted with Jeff O. who I also originally knew from my Microsoft, Direct X days.

It’s the whole point

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There seems to be some surprise and indignation at the idea that the IRS would be used as a weapon against political opponents. I don’t understand.

First; what did you expect from a communist administration? Really. Can you say, “DUUUH!”? Second; the entire tax code is a weapon of political power. Always has been. It is designed to nudge you into behaviors you’d not be engaged in if you were left to your own devices, and to nudge you out of other behaviors. The very concept of a progressive tax is a political weapon, designed to substantially reduce wealth creation and accumulation. Raising revenue is far down the list, or it is only an ancillary function of the tax code and the IRS. I could on and on, but you should have gotten the point by the time you received your very first paycheck.

The specific targeting of individuals and groups is nothing new at all either. The Clintons were famous for it. Rush Limbaugh has been getting audited every year for many years. The list is longer than this whole blog since its beginning.

A “Gosh, we’re sorry” will change nothing. The only solution, assuming anyone wants one, is to abolish the tax code, abolish the IRS and go to a single digit flat tax. Otherwise quit your bitching– this is exactly what you’ve been asking for. Begging for, actually. Don’t bother pretending to be surprised– it makes you look even more stupid.

Tab clearing

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I have a bunch of open tabs in my browser and I only have a few minutes before I’m leaving for 10 days to put on Boomershoot. I’ll have some time to make a few blog posts but I want to clear these up before I go.

It’s rare but sometimes they really do say the incredibly stupid things that we accuse them of:

Rep. Jackson Lee: ‘Don’t Condemn the Gangbangers’ – We Need Gun Legislation

Jackson Lee took the House floor on April 9 to argue in favor of increased gun control legislation, “Don’t condemn the gangbangers, they’ve got guns that are trafficked — that are not enforced, that are straw purchased and they come into places even that have strong gun laws.”

“Why? Because we don’t have sensible gun legislation.”

Jackson Lee continued by saying that current gun laws need to be enforced,  “I’m going to agree with my friends on the other side of the isle. Our Republican friends, let’s enforce the gun laws that we have – - who would run away from that. That’s a sensible proposition. Put a resolution on the floor of the House – - let’s enforce gun laws that we have.”

Yes. She said that. Blame the gun not the criminals.

Yes. She said that. Put a resolution on the floor to enforce existing laws.

Her babblings should qualify her for dementia medicine trials.

I could only see four out of the ten weapons being in the category “you won’t believe are legal”. And then only if you don’t understand the 2nd Amendment. They had to be desperate for content:

10 Weapons You Won’t Believe Are Legal

  1. Flame Thrower
  2. Miniguns
  3. Katana
  4. Cannon
  5. Crossbow
  6. Grenade Launchers
  7. Nunchucks
  8. Umbrella Sword
  9. Speargun
  10. Chain Whip

There has to be more to this than what I have had time to dig into.

Judge: lawsuits can proceed against theater owner in Colorado massacre

A federal judge refused on Wednesday to dismiss wrongful death and personal injury claims brought against a movie theater chain on behalf of victims of last summer’s mass shooting at a suburban Denver screening of the Batman film “The Dark Knight Rises.”

U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson ruled that Cinemark
USA, owner of the theater where 12 people were shot
dead, could potentially be found liable for damages under a
Colorado law that holds landowners responsible for activities on their property.

What? The best I could come up with for a plausible grounds for claiming the theater was responsible was if the plaintiffs believed they were disarmed and unable to protect themselves. And I think that is only about 10% chance of being the case.

Yes. Some people blamed the 2nd Amendment for the Boston bombing:

I once had a boss suggest that I was making so much money at time and a half on weekends that I shouldn’t fly back to Idaho to visit my family. I should just hire a hooker to give me blow jobs under the desk while I continued to write code. I laughed and went home for the weekend.

It turns out there might actually be a market for that sort of service:

Silicon Valley’s other entrepreneurs: Sex workers

In a quiet cafe outside San Francisco, “Josephine” — a local prostitute — arranges a collection of t-shirts across the table. They’re emblazoned with phrases like “Winter is Coming” and “Geeks Make Better Lovers.” She wears them in her online ads to catch the eye of the area’s well-off engineers and programmers.

“I’m trying to communicate to them that I understand a little bit what it’s like to be techy, nerdy, geeky,” she says. There’s another thing Josephine and her clients have in common: Like many of the techies she caters to, Josephine views herself as an entrepreneur.

Unintended consequences

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Or; Action, Reaction, Synthesis
Or; Thesis, Antitheses, Synthesis
Or; “I’m not sure that it means what you think it means.”

Refusing to sell to government entities that attack the second amendment is fairly popular, it certainly has made good press, and I agree wholeheartedly with the sentiment, but I’m not sure people are thinking things through.

Oskar Schindler was a card-carrying member of the Nazi Party, and he had extensive business dealings with the Nazis. Just keep that in mind.

Let’s say we all refuse to sell to any government entity that even infringes (literally; “touches around the fringes”) on second amendment rights. That would be all of them. Just keep that in mind; we are talking ONLY about degrees of violation when we say that New York or Chicago is bad and OUR jurisdiction is…what…a bit less egregious? Or does your state and local .gov commit zero infringements? So we all refuse to sell to any government entities. What will be their obvious reaction, for 100% sure and for certain? Taxpayer funded, government owned munitions factories of course, with union workers, full benefits and a retirement plan, and now they are, one way or another, competing with the private industry. Good luck with that. OR, you know all it takes is for one individual company to sell to your worst violators, they will become the next General Electric, i.e. a pet company for the tyrants, funneling their profits via multiple channels into the Democrat Party. They’ll arrange it that way just for that purpose. It’s what Progressives do.

More on phonetics

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As often happens, I was talking to a customer over a poor cellular connection today. We have to exchange a lot of data to complete an order. He’s spelling the name of his street.

“Wait; that’s A, T, T as in alpha tango tango?” I say to confirm.
“No, it’s hotel echo papa”
“Wow!” I said “I really got that wrong” and I’m thinking to myself, “Bam! We’re home free– this guy knows standard phonetics.” Without it, we’d have had a hell of a frustrating time.

So, Young Grasshopper; learn your Standard Phonetics.

I’m still amazed and disgusted that most cop shops have their own systems, which makes it more difficult because for one, they don’t always use words that all sound completely different from one another, and too, if you know Standard Phonetics, their retarded cop phonetics don’t sound familiar and it therefore takes longer to comunicate. Moron phonetics.

Learning the standard system is easy. There are only twenty six of them, and as it happens, each one starts with a different letter of the alphabet (fancy that) so it’s really easy. It’s an international system, and most pilots, military and ham operators already know it hands down. Whaterya waitin’ for?

Practice. For example, if I look to my left on my desk, I can read off in my mind, “Hotel Papa…Delta echo sierra kilo julliette echo tango.” Stuff like that. Road signs, what have you. This should be taught in school, except for the fact that kids should know it before they get to school.

On a similar note; use text on your phone when the signal is too poor to use the more bandwidth-hogging voice communication. If you have only one bar on the s-meter it still works like a charm whereas vioce communication is two steps below impossible. I explained that to my daughter a while back, and was surprized that she hadn’t thought of it. I’d though it would have been obvious even to a teen-aged school girl– a few dew drops of bits verses a tsunami/torrent of bits, you know.

My morning adrenaline rush

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As I was riding the bus into downtown Seattle to go to work this morning we stopped at Yale and Stewart for a traffic light. Initially I thought there were gunshots close by. Then as I did a “playback” in my mind and observed the subsequent sights and sounds more carefully I realized the flashes were white. Muzzle flashes are red/orange. Multiple explosions? But the flashes from explosives I am familiar with are reddish too. I was on the far side of the bus from the source but I ultimately located the origin.

A NW bound truck on Yale had tangled with a power line, and broken a power pole holding three transformers. The sounds were the breaking power pole, arcing of the power lines, and the exploding transformers. The truck stopped for a bit then left. Our bus remained stopped at the intersection and most of the passengers exited out the rear door and walked around the intersection. Some stupid and/or ignorant people walked OVER the downed power lines. At least one person turned around and took a different route after I yelled not to walk over the wires.

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The bus in the picture above is the one I was on.

I was late for a meeting at work.

Update: Ry sent me an email with this link to the news story.

Kelvin-Helmholtz Waves

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Or KH waves, or a KH instability. It’s a result of two distinct layers in a fluid traveling at different velocities. You’ll see it in rivers and streams, between bands in the atmospheres of Jupiter and Saturn, in your coffee cup, etc. In this case it’s made visible by the bottom layer being cloud, interacting with a clear layer above. The wave pattern extends from one side of the photo to the other. I had to darken the image a lot to bring out the detail. Through my polarizing glasses the waves could be seen curling in on themselves more dramatically. For really good detail in sky photos you need a polarizer, and probably a UV filter too, but my little point-and-shoot isn’t set up for such things. These KH waves are over the Clearwater River canyon above Lewiston, Idaho, seen from the south end of Moscow on my way to work the other day.

Kelvin-HelmholtzWaves

It isn’t complicated

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We occasionally get someone who wants to submit an idea for a new product. They’ll want us to evaluate it in hopes that we will help manufacture and market it for them.

Here’s the deal. If it happens to be something we’re already thinking about, I most certainly do NOT want to even know what you have. You can figure out why.

Somehow there has come to be this strange attitude, or belief, that if you’re a “little guy” with scant resources, that you must tug on someone else’s coat tails and convince them to “give you a chance” otherwise you have no chance.

It doesn’t work that way, or rather it certainly doesn’t need to work that way. If you have a little gizmo you want to turn into money, start searching for companies that do machining, or injection mold building, or casting, or whatever type of manufacturing you need, contact them, get some quotes for a few hundred or a thousand units. There are small shops that do these things in practically every town larger than a mere whistle stop. Many of them will not want to talk to you about such small numbers, but some will. Keep at it. Register yourself a domain name, take some nice photos, build a simple web site and get a web host for it, place a cheap ad in Shotgun News or what have you, and BAM! You’re in business. Just like that. What’s stopping you?

It probably will not cost more than the annual or twice annual beer and cigarette expense for the average, unemployed trailer park dweller. The rest is leg-work– finding people who can provide the specific services you need, and so I think that if you’re not willing to give yourself a chance, why should someone else give you that chance? Hmm? You won’t go out on a limb for your idea, but you want me to go out on a limb for your idea?

I’d rather play with explosives

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I work in downtown Seattle. I don’t like cities in general because I have strong introvert tendencies and crowds of people “drain my energy”. Go to a lower, more detailed, and less personal, level and it just gets worse.

This happened January 1st in a place I walk through twice a day:

Several shots were fired inside the Westlake bus tunnel in downtown Seattle Tuesday night, according to the Seattle Police Department. But, officers were unable to turn up any suspects, witnesses or victims.

Two bike officers heard the shots while patrolling Westlake Park around 11:40 p.m.

Several people were running out of the Metro tunnel when the officers arrived. But, the man officers stopped said he only heard the shots and didn’t see the shooting.

Officers found six bullet casings and fragments on the tunnel’s mezzanine level and are reviewing surveillance video in an attempt to come up with any additional information.

Within the last few months the bank, essentially across the street from where I work and where I do most of my banking was robbed at gunpoint and there was a shooting in the hallway I traverse to get to the pizza place in the mall where I frequently get lunch.

This morning as I was riding to work the bus was stopped and could not enter the Westlake tunnel station where I usually get off. There was a fire in the tunnel and it was being evacuated.

Two years ago this happened in that tunnel where I get on and off my bus.

Had someone been kicking a 15-year old girl in the head while she was on the ground when I was around and within range they likely would have been shot (the guards just a few feet away doing nothing could have been collateral damage that I wouldn’t have been too concerned about at the moment—They have standing orders to “observe and report”). That would make for a very messed up existence for weeks and perhaps years for me.

I just want to go home to Idaho away from everyone but a few close friends and do something safe in the middle of a 100 acre field. Something like play with explosives.

People who actually DO things

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I installed an Aimpoint sight on a 500 S&W pistol for a guy today.  He lives in North Idaho and has been hunting here and elsewhere for 30 years.  He’d been in and out of our shop, trying to figure out how to make the little Micro sight stay put on his 500 bore, G-force production factory, so we’ve gotten acquainted.


Today he brought in one of his many hunting photo albums.  He keeps records of each harvest; date, details of the animal, distance, and so on. 


One of his kills was of a circa 2,000 lb Bison bull he got in South Dakota using a traditional muzzleloading rifle.  He used a 200 grain XTP 45 caliber handgun bullet in a 50 caliber sabot.  Muzzle velocity; ~2000 fps. (he could state his velocity extreme spread off the top of his head).  He knows his rifles and his trajectories from years of practical use.  That bull was shot from 150 yards.  I ran the numbers in Modern Ballistics, and the impact velocity would have been around 1280.  The jacketed hollowpoint bullet struck inside the front shoulder (so as to avoid the heavy shoulder joint, he said) in a quartering-toward shot, penetrated the heavy hide, busted a heavy rib, penetrated both lungs, the diaphram, and stopped in the spleen.  The bull walked a few yards, laid down and never got up, shot with what amounted to (energy-wise) a 45 magnum handgun.


Some (most)(no; virtually all) would say that his choice of round was drastically too fragile and drastically under-powered, taking a shot at the “practical” range limit of the firearm, but he’d worked with this system for years and knew it’s capabilities and limitations from experience.  Do not try this at home.


Anyway; it’s fun to talk with people who actually do things.


By the way; Installing the Micro sight on a 500 Smith requires the “permanent” red (as opposed to the “high strength” red) thread locker.  I had to special order it as no one in town knew it existed.  According to the tech I spoke with at Aimpoint, you also need to crank the cross-bolt down far beyond the 180-after-contact spec in the instructions, if’n you’re mounting it on the 500 hand cannon.  This time we used a ratchet wrench.  He’ll try it out tomorrow after the required 24 hour cure time and we’ll see if it worked.  I wish they’d go with a square cross bolt for high recoil applications, but in nearly all other applications it matters not a bit, one way or the other.

Overheard in reality

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Phone salesman; “How soon do you need it?  Right now, I suppose.”


Me; “Yeah, I have the thing apart, and the customer standing right here, waiting…


continued in my head…


… How much to get it here yesterday?”


Phone salesman; “All the money in the world, times infinity”


Me; “OK.  Do you take installment payments?”