I’ll begin with a conversation I had recently with my optometrist–it’s the same dialog I share with everyone who asks me about hunting:
Optometrist: “You hunt squirrels? What do you hunt them with?”
Me: “Typically a 20 gauge.”
Optometrist: “A shotgun? Is there anything left?”
This is, without fail, the exact followup response, to the word, of everyone who has ever asked me this question. I’m not sure where this idea came from that a shotgun was akin to a mortar, but I’m assuming the usual source of dramatized misinformation: cinema. I too have seen many a scene where shotguns have blown people through windows and violently severed appendages, so the masses must think I’m out in the woods Rambo-style, half-naked and clutching a knife in my teeth, blasting animals apart and painting the trees in blood.
So, as a PSA to the casual reader of this post: shotguns aren’t naval cannons.
Now to those who do know what shot sizes are and how they’re designed, I was at a local Cabella’s and saw this:
It’s rare to even find buckshot in 20 gauge, but this Cabella’s not only had that, but 00-buck , 3-ball, and this (2-ball). Granted, if I ever hunted squirrels with these and actually managed to hit one, there might not be much left. This is approaching what we could call small artillery, so I guess there is a shred of truth to people’s shotgun presumptions, were I to hunt with grossly inappropriate shot sizes.
But anyway, of course I needed these as an immediate addendum to the zombie-home-defense .30-06. At the time I was putting that together, my dad asked me if the 150-gr rounds would be sufficient. I assured him that it would, provided I get a proper head-shot. But he suggested I needed something with less finesse and more total damage potential. So here you are, dad. If any zombies break through the perimeter, a close-range blast with one of these should do the trick.
And of course, if any home-invasion should occur while I’m waiting around for the Zombie Apocalypse, I can dispatch the ne’er-do-well with my 2-balls.
Well, initially I was just involved with another one of my web design projects. I had previously built a dashboard of sorts–a web page that had embedded widgets. I would open the page with my Raspberry Pi, and plug it into the TV. Then I could just switch inputs and see the displayed info–weather and news–on my main TV.
The problem with this method is that I could never figure out a way to automatically open the browser upon boot and enter kiosk mode. Usually this wasn’t a problem, but whenever the Pi got unplugged, I had to hunt down a mouse and keyboard so I could relaunch the browser. The Pi’s browser also had a habit of timing out, so I’d have to refresh it manually, which again meant hunting down a mouse/keyboard. Eventually, the novelty of the project wore off and the irritations outweighed the benefit, so I moved the Pi to the basement where it sits idle–serving only the purpose of being a low-risk device with which to practice remote shell Linux commands from the command line terminal.
Then I realized that since the Xbox has a native browser, perhaps I could revive the dashboard project to simply run on the Xbox. I dug up the URL from where I had buried it, and launched the site.
The news feed wasn’t working, and the embedded calendar was redundant as I had a setup already running that in the basement. So the dash would need a redesign after all.
I settled on 3 panes: my embedded NOAA radar, a weather forecast widget, and a news feed. The first 2 I already had working, and some CSS got them positioned right. But for the life of me, I could not find a reliable news feed that allowed iframe embedding. The former method I had been using was a free Google service, which they had since deprecated. Everyone wants you to sign up for things now. Apparently something as minor as general news is no longer considered a free service. Pity. After failing to find a replacement, I abandoned the news feed idea.
I needed something else to fill the space, and I concluded that I would just complete the weather theme and find a free webcam. I began with local news stations, but as with their Doppler radars and news feeds, nothing was intuitive, embeddable, or truly free. Does everything have to be a source of revenue? There was a time when the Internet was considered a free medium.
Further searches revealed a local webcam. It was good resolution, too, and a genuine live-feed (something that rarely exists anymore). Plus, the hosting server didn’t have any lockouts on iframe embedding. Some more CSS and I had the webcam feed on my dashboard.
It could have ended there, but I grew curious. Who would host a publicly-available webcam? I began poking around the hosting domain.
The website’s design was pretty basic by modern standards–no HTML5, no adaptive content, no CSS styling. It was a refreshing throwback to the Internet of the 90s. The site itself was a resource on radio: HAM, scanners, AM PSA; and where to learn about them and buy equipment. I tuned in to 1660 AM–the listed station, and heard a local broadcast of a High School sports event.
Further intrigued by this grass-roots site, I did a WHOIS search on the domain, and found to my surprise that the site’s registrant’s information wasn’t blocked. The address of his office was public, and as it turned out, just a mile north of my house. The webcam couldn’t have been much more local than that.
Something about the site inspired me. Maybe it was guilt at having access to free information and a webcam, or a desire to give back. Maybe I just wanted to see if I could help someone, or simply needed an excuse for another project. Who knows? Whatever the reason, I spent a couple evenings coding a new front page for the site. I modernized it and organized the information so it was easier to navigate. I assigned this redesign it’s own subdomain and hosted it on my server. Then, I sent the owner an email.
I told him I liked the information on the site and the webcam, and offered the redesign code freely were he interested. I told him that it was nice to see such a site, obviously self-hosted, and offering a public service.
The email was a Yahoo! domain, and as I was a random stranger reaching out from the internet, I didn’t expect to receive any response. But to my surprise, hours later, he answered.
He explained in great detail the site’s content–the public radio station for citizens to make announcements and what he uses to transmit local high school games. He confirmed the webcam is for public use, and that the local Channel 2 news uses it sometimes in their weather reports. He explained that his maintenance of the business he’s mostly retired from, but keeps it running for extra revenue for his hobbies. Consequently, he wasn’t interested in help with the web design, but he thanked me for offering.
I confess, I had always found HAM hobbyists to be weirdos, but this man was surprisingly normal, giving off a vibe of being an older man with hobbies that overlapped a personal business. We should all be so lucky.
I thanked him for the information and told him this was an interesting experience as a segue into another world of communications technology for me. It reminded me that while a technology inevitably becomes commercialized, and the large companies garner the most attention, niche groups and hobbyists remain, using the technology for its original purpose, free from the capitalistic motivations of shareholders. It remains as evidence that intellectuals still pursue knowledge for knowledge’s sake, and offer free benefits to the population as a whole in the process.
As a species, we’re obsessed with the metaphysical–a concept that has long predated the scientific method and its analysis of the empirical…and of course the two have always been at odds. The latter offers explanations based on irrefutable perception, while the former is more supposition. Perhaps it’s because the scientific method has and always will probably fail to answer every question that could ever be conceived by the powers of runaway brain growth and abstract cognition.
But historically, the greater unease has been the possibility that a mortal might tap into the metaphysical to produce very physical consequences. It’s easy to be understanding of a deity, who presumably has the knowledge and intellect to manipulate the metaphysical in a responsible manner, but were a human to dabble in the occult and gain unearthly power over the physical, well then the conclusion could only be that this power will corrupt and the practitioner would become evil.
That’s one guess anyway, although I think the greatest influence on changing the public perception has been Christianity. Alchemists and shamen became witches and heretics. Then again, so too were prominent scientists in their day. Maybe the greatest fear then was threatening the status quo and the balance of power.
Despite the lengthy introduction, this is not a post aimed to tackle these questions. No, this is a post of inquisition, though not in the scary torture type of religious context.
I went out to split some firewood, and saw these:
Naturally curious at what appeared to be a magic circle, potion, and wand; I asked my daughter for an explanation. Her simple answer: “It’s a spell.” Unlike what some of her more distant relatives might have, I did not start splashing her in holy water and waving a rosary. Rather, I was curious where she had learned about these things. The color of the markings even resembled woad. Interesting. I wondered what she was conjuring. Maybe she was trying to cure herself of the virus that had been plaguing her respiratory system for the last two weeks.
But upon further questioning, it was apparent that I had misheard. A child’s soft palate had lended a lisp to her words. It was not a spell. It was a stove. She had drawn a range and was cooking stew. It was no attempt to bridge the material and metaphysical, no, it was a simple emulation of the culinary arts.
I admit, I was a little disappointed. Then again, learning to cook is probably a more valuable life skill than making love potions.
To clarify, Liz’s car broke. It had chronic problems with the O2 sensor and electrical system shorting out, then she broke two axles and potentially the transmission. In short: definitively kaput.
I had previously told her that it was my turn to get the next car, and I had long fantasized about buying my first new car, fed by rental experiences, because as with any form of technology, what I currently have immediately becomes obsolete and I grumble with jealousy as each new feature hits the market. My car doesn’t even have a working radio anymore–a problem the kid has been consistently pointing out as we cruise down the road to my tech news podcasts playing from my phone on the passenger seat.
Yet in her impatience, Liz violated the arrangement and purposely broke her car so she could get an upgrade first. That’s what I accused her of anyway. She denies it, but I’ve also noted how her phones keep mysteriously breaking each year, hmmm.
An explanation more grounded in reality, however, is that her commute is much longer, and cars break down quickly. AAA calculates the average cost per mile of driving to be 59.2 cents, so it costs her somewhere around $58 per day. With most of that being highway driving, I’d say she uses 3 gallons of gas per day, which I’ll estimate as $6.87. Therefore, let’s round it off and say each day, after subtracting gas from the total, she racks up $50 worth of wear and tear on her car. So it’s easy to believe that within the year that she’s had the job, say 260 work days, minus vacation, benefit time, work at home days, I dunno, wild guess of 160 work days…that’d be $8000 worth of wear and tear–more than the vehicle was even worth, and probably consistent with the price of repairs for axles and a transmission, unless my math is totally off. And of course, expenses aside, I’d rather not lose my wife to a horrific highway accident when something finally broke catastrophically. So, it was off to the dealership.
When I bought my car as an unmarried young 20-something, the dealership ran a thorough background check on me before I was even allowed to touch a car, and when I did get to drive one, they accompanied me. Now, as married 30-somethings with kid in tow, they just chucked keys at us for any model we asked about. And upon the day’s conclusion, home we went with a brand new Honda CR-V. I had never seen an odometer in the single digits before.
So there’s the lengthy backstory.
I went to move the new car from the driveway into the garage. A lot has changed in vehicle design since I bought my car 10 years ago. No more are quaint mechanical keys. Rather, they’ve been replaced with digital transponders. I entered the car, which had sensed my presence and unlocked itself, and pressed the ignition button. The car did nothing. Hmmm. I felt the remote in my pocket, so I wasn’t missing anything. I pushed the button again, then again and again, varying the delay and time of push, similar to my method for getting touchless faucets to provide water in airport bathrooms, except I was pushing a physical button rather than waving my hands around like an epileptic Jedi (that’ll be the future of cars when they get rid of the button).
I’m sorry Dave
The car still didn’t start, but it did fall into gear, despite the shifter being firmly still in Park. As a consequence, the car was now rolling backwards down the driveway. Reflexively, I push the break pedal, and the car stopped–which is fortunate, because the car was very obviously fully drive-by-wire, so there must still be a physical connection to the calipers somewhere.
I pushed the button again and the car started immediately. Curious, I parked the vehicle in the garage and turned it off, but other distractions soon occupied me and I forgot all about the strange experience.
A couple days later, I went to pull the car out of the garage. The scenario played out as before, except since the garage was level, the vehicle didn’t begin rolling away. This time, however, I noticed the dash flashing a message:
TO START VEHICLE, PRESS BRAKE PETAL AND PRESS START BUTTON…IDIOT!
It was something like that anyway. The realization finally sunk in. I had started the car last time when I pressed the brake to stop it from rolling into the street.
I dwelled on this experience, thinking that even the humble automobile was outpacing my ability to intuitively operate it. It was a scary thought. Amidst news of autonomous vehicles and companies promising the eventual obsolescence of the human driver, perhaps I was already seeing the beginnings of my own obsolescence.
Then, yesterday, I was walking from the parking lot and to the office entrance. In the guest parking, there sat a black Nissan of some sort. A young Asian lady, wearing an outfit which exceeded business casual, complete with tight black skirt, stood next to it with an armful of paperwork. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have given it much thought, as we meet with clients regularly and our other offices travel here for meetings. This lady, however, waved and walked up to greet me. She explained her plight: she had accidentally popped the hood of the rental and didn’t know how to close it, and did I possess such knowledge?
And so, very politely (as I didn’t want to make her feel dumb), I felt along the hood’s gap and explained that all cars generally have a little latch you just have to feel for, subsequently found said latch (except it was slightly different than any other hood latch I’d encountered–what the hell, Nissan?), and explained that you just drop the hood to close it. She felt a little sheepish and said that she couldn’t believe she had driven all the way here like that.
I feel better now, realizing that we’ve reached a point where each generation is now less knowledgeable about their vehicles than the prior. It was an inevitability, since the operator no longer controls the vehicle directly now–they send input into a computer which then determines what action to take. It’s less important to know the physical mechanics of a car now, since if anything breaks, the proprietary systems that control the vehicle would also be affected, and would therefore have to be fixed by a technician anyway. The future will indeed deprecate human input. Whether or not that’s good–if software will ultimately prove safer and more reliable than the person–will be left to history.
My daughter is still going to learn how to change a tire before she can drive though.
Yet in her impatience, Liz violated the arrangement and purposely broke her car so she could get an upgrade first. That’s what I accused her of anyway. She denies it, but I’ve also noted how her phones keep mysteriously breaking each year, hmmm.