Recycling F-16's

As F-16's are turned into QF-16's and the QF-4's are running out, there is now a fairly straight market for the parts from a decommed Viper. As it turns out I'm able to get flight-ready components (as to maintain my flock of fighters) and build a "ground station" that can fly an F-16. My purpose is actually to use this for ground stations for Spun's UAVs. I can't wait. I haven't flown a Viper since 2005.

I'm going to love having a sidestick.

yes, i am asleep at the wheel. news later.

What's not to love?

just lookin to have some fun run my own tow shop and dont have time to get out much not lookin for a soul mate or anything just nsa fun with someone lookin for the same i dont smoke or drink but also dont mind if you do just tryin to stay young lol plus i need my wind at times hehe must have pics not going to lie cause they are important to me good size daddy from down town natti

Everything I've ever wanted in a man. Look at that haircut and the lovely 'stache. I think this may be the guy I'd go gay for.

God dammit, Sun

I would ordinarily wish I could blame this on Oracle, but clearly, this is all Scooter.

HPC for fucking dummies. Well, there goes the neighborhood.

Epidemics

It appears our fly intruders were breeding under the cat's water bowl. That's been cleaned and we added media to the bottom of the bowl to ensure the water evaporates. I would have preferred to educate the cat, but I think she's got a learning disability.

Where do I get a four-track recorder?

I am thinking about buying a 303 and an 808. I would also like to have a Korg Kaos pad. How expensive are four-tracks? Is there a "better" model?

fentanyl vs morphine

Using a sustained release morphine vehicle is fairly new. The standard seems to be Avinza (which is produced by a lab with serious financial problems...) for morphine and for fentanyl it's the 3-day patches from Sandoz and Mylan.

I have yet to find a sustained release morphine that lasts more than a full day (Avinza is absolutely a 24h pill, which is good; sustained hydrocodone/oxycodone are hard to come by because they're so widely prescribed. Note I am not even addressing Ox*C**tin, because it's been demonized in the press, and I feel like a criminal when I even say the name.

Subjective effects in vivo: Fentanyl takes anywhere from thirty minutes to a couple hours to start working. Part of this is your skin being used to it (I had "scales" at one time on my torso and couldn't find a piece of skin that worked. This is when I switched to Avinza.), part of it is that the patch, while a great vehicle, is not produced with the quality that most brand-label (in this case, Sandoz, but Sandoz patches are bloody horrible) meds have. There's a nonzero possibility that when you pull the patch out of its package, it will actually not have the adhesive/fentanyl on it. Worse, because it's Sched 2, I can't very well go back to the pharmacist and ask for a new one. Nor can I go to my doctor and ask for another. This is a real drag. That being said, Mylan is useful.

There's a small ramp up to feeling it, but I wouldn't describe anything as a 'high', a 'rush', or a 'buzz'. For me in particular, the patch just covers up a baseline of pain. I still get breakthrough pain, but the 'peak', and I do not mean the three previous words this time, either, ramps up gently in the period it takes to get moving, or, if you're stringing patches back-to-back (and you should be!), there's enough of a "tail" on fentanyl so there's no "let down" feeling. Say if you are due to change a patch today, you can leave the patch you had on in place while you affix the new patch. When you notice the new patch working, you fold the "old" patch so that the sticky stuff (fentanyl is a really serious drug and could kill children or spouses and certainly pets) and flush it. The overall effect of this is that there are very few "troughs" between doses.

I have read on forums on the webs that withdrawal from Fentanyl and Methadone (both are used in serious, chronic pain settings) is especially difficult (cf heroin, hydrocodone, oxycodone). This is not supported by the medical corpus and is probably variable per-user. I've been pretty blessed in that I've had only two serious DT's, both of which were related to the pharmacy's reluctance to order a full package of either of the drugs, as the market is very small (and some of these drugs cost a whole lot) The experience lasted a couple days and was miserable. No babies walking on the ceiling, but you feel like you're either really sick (see the lung butter sequence) or have a bad hangover (I've only ever had a hangover as bad as the DT's are). This, for me, lasts one to two days, and I'm cured. For some reason, I am interested in starchy food like a tv dinner macaroni and cheese (I do not eat that stuff, ever, except when I'm sick). I've never taken methadone, and don't intend to.

So on to the Avinza. Usually I don't even feel it working until I realize maybe six hours later (which was the very worst. Usually it's 1-2h) that it's working. Compare this to the Fentanyl which really lets you know what's going on. The taper-down that the patches have is not really evident with morphine. You've just got to take them systematically (because you may accidentally over dose yourself. I do not speak of an "overdose" here, but a titration you didn't mean to start). Further, because it's a once-a-day version instead of a once-every-third-day, you get a trough every single time, and this means your (well, mine anyways) behavior is sort of erratic. With large doses (I've taken the 25, 50, 75, and 100µg patches, and the 60mg and 120mg Avinza), this is more pronounced. So my spouse notices it, I am sure people that know me well enough to see that I'm "off" know that something is up. At least they're polite enough to ignore it. This is a real drag, and a good reason to avoid it.

When I have shortened the period between dosing on the morphine from 24 to, say, 12 or 18 hours (consider, you're going to be outside all day or out of town, or whichever, and you dose now rather than later to avoid a trough on the third day) This is entirely avoided by the patches.

While I have medical insurance, and I pay for my drugs on my FSA card (for people who have socialized health care, this is a credit card that's tied to a pre-tax deduction at the beginning of the year, up to $5,000), I am stunned to read the "RX Price" vs the "Insurance price" on the paperwork. Avinza, for a single month, costs just a few bucks short of $3,000. My copay is about $35. Again, though, it "feels free" because I don't have to provide cash.

There's one upside. There is not much in the way of cross-tolerance between morphine and fentanyl. So when I get to a point where I am very tolerant, I can take a "rest" and switch meds for a month or whichever. But, despite it seeming to have lots of promise (sustained morphine vehicles have been poor, and Avinza's vehicle is really slick) and a wide range of doses (up to 300mg; I take 120mg). Other than that, fentanyl wins every time.

I don't know why nobody talks about their experiences with seriously bad pain and spinal injuries on the webs. I haven't found much of anything except prn uses and junkies. So I don't put this up to show how cool I am, or stupid I was when I had the accident, but rather to provide a little insight into the drugs and how they work. It is worth noting that both Fentanyl and morphine are usually used at this dosage with hospices. Due to being more stupid than the norm, I tend to get in pretty bad accidents fairly frequently. I make these things publishable because nobody else will. Doctors don't like to talk about it, you won't get it in an ER if you're passing kidney stones (!) and when you first get yourself good-and-injured, it's easy to become lost in the bureaucracy without sufficient medications for pain.

In America, pain is one of the diagnostic criteria during your initial work-up with a doctor or nurse. This means it goes down on your chart at the same time with things like weight, height, blood pressure, temperature, and so on. This means you are allowed to have serious pain, and your doctors have a responsibility to treat you. If they don't play ball, leave. Get a better doctor. Doctors are squeamish about these kinds of drugs, but there are a large number of doctors who specialize in pain treatment (some of them just depend on an addict community, which sucks... they're really the bad element in this equation).

You own your person and you have a right to adequate treatment.

note: no, I will not sell, mail, give, or lose any of these drugs on my account. Don't ask. Please.

Homesick

I was looking through 303'a and 808's on ebay and their multitude of clones. It's less expensive to buy a used one than it was in 95-99. Most of those things are behind me, I guess. Quite a long time in the past these days. But listening to 303's immediately snapped me back to the deserts of California, where we heard them in performance. I am profoundly homesick, and it makes matters worse when I realize the "rave" is dead, and Budweiser sponsors "rave parties".

It may be that the only place left to go is ****tribe. And here I am, three thousand miles away.

A question for the President.

We all gave Bush shit about waging a war on two fronts (WWII anyone?). Personally I think it's important work, if misguided. But there's a dichotomy there. One of Obama's key goals for his presidency (which at this pace is only a four-year term) was the war in CENTCOM. He talked up and down about what he was going to do, what could be done, and so on.

As a person who's worked with the IC, the first thing that comes to mind (no, not body snatchers) is that when he became POTUS, he was probably briefed on the state of the union and very likely the state of the world. Such a briefing would probably have included military capabilities of our forces, as well as nations or organizations like North Korea. It would certainly have included high resolution from-orbit photos, various captured gitmo dodos. And of course, no such briefing would be complete without bringing to light all the little bits so he doesn't get flummoxed by sharp reporters.

So, really, wouldn't aid be sent to Iraq? Why the hell are we creating a national health service kind of like the UKs nhs, only without the good parts? Why not make our hospitals up-to-date and able to work with the initial burst of traffic they get. It will taper (the huge influx of people) over time, but the laws have no teeth unless the patient requires treatment and the local hospital is equipped with the necessary toolsL  CT or MRI, and so on. Employment goes up (if temporarily), the overall health of Americans could actually be measured, and I'd guess it was to the positive. Start with the facilities, and then force them to accept whatever platypus laws this administration come up with.

What then is Obama doing? I suspect he was read in to whatever they call the president's clearance, and it spooked him mightily. I consequently noticed that he stfu'd after taking the office. He has done nothing about the wars. He hasn't made the country well enough (a very broad pun, that) for a health bill to be viable.

Clearly, he's doing something, and it's not what he said he would do. I don't exactly mind this, but I'd kinda like to know his agenda.

fossils

Looking at ads on Craigslist, Monster, Dice, etc... I can't help but think that the time has finally come to sweep Unix and Unix-like operating systems and their assorted toolchains under the rug. Maybe what I am seeing is an economy that no longer values the incredible potential that both Unix and its derivatives as well as its associated friends (coming to mind approximately now is perl, BIND, DNS, packet filtering, ip6, gig, 10gig, and 100gig ether, and so on. There are lots.). People hiring right now a mush of support staff and second-level helpdesk; I've seen ads for ts/sci fucking sharepoint admins (that's abominable in so many ways).

So, maybe it's dead. Maybe it's quitting while it's on top. Maybe that's a good thing. I keep thinking of model planes, ham radio types, assorted hacker types (you think steampunk is getting bigger? what happens in 2048 when all this affluence and explosive growth is fifty years old!), and getting together to sit down, hack, share software (if the term even remains useful), and hax on a Unix. Maybe instead of nostalgia for what went out of style (as with bell-bottom pants, we can hope they come back in thirty years, to!) only to engage is haxing on this sort of stuff as a hobby. Be nostalgic, as it were, for the early-century-2000's.

That seems reasonable to me. Go pick up new skills in the process, and you have no idea where technology will take us, but it is not into the future, a-la Slim Pickens ride on the atom bomb. No, our ride will be into the past. Our wings today are very much the product of where we are going rather than where we are.

But it still makes me sad.

macroantibiotics

We've developed a problem in the house. Somewhere, common houseflies are reproducing. We're not sure where. It could be any of a number of plants, and because of the hydroponics setup, we also have a number of places where there is (mostly) static standing water. However, I'm not going to cull any of my babies on account of flies.

Today I came up with the solution (hopefully the solution, not just a solution): carnivorous plants. Turns out there are a number of people growing them in hydroponics and there's a fairly healthy industry of cultivators and distributors (though nothing even remotely as active as orchids and cannabis cultivators).

I've been thinking about this some, and it occurs to me I have an opportunity to create an ecosystem rather than just another hydro tank. I'm picturing a shallow fish tank with aquatic plants and goldfish being used as the nutrient solution, and plants with expectation of poor or no nutrients (e.g., orchids and the carnivores) suspended into it via grow buckets. I still haven't quite figured out how to work that, and it almost certainly requires use of lighting (which I kind of don't want because it's hot and it costs money). It works out to be a pretty simple closed-loop ecosystem, and with a heating pad or two, I think I can even get everyone to agree (maybe even my truculent fern!) that it's tropical. ish.

And so it would seem that 2010 is the year when my garden fights back, taking sides with the humans. Not that it had much choice, heh.

Archaeology, 2009 style

I just cleaned up my books-read pile that started around February. It's enormous. In sum, it's a hair shy of 15,000 pages of reading. To apply perhaps more meaningful metrics to that, I normally allot one minute per two-hundred words of text. Rounding out something like three million words, or one hundred solid days of reading (2400 hours), of course not accounting for sleep. I generally don't take sleep in eight-hour increments (usually long gluts of sleep on the weekend and relatively little during the week), but if we are to assume that we are awake only two-thirds of our lives (244 days a year), we can further extrapolate this to 41% of my time awake is spent reading words-on-paper. Obviously, I'm not including time reading text on my laptop or otherwise busy with work stuff (which has been remarkably light this year), or with audio books, as I'm not sure how to "measure" how many audio books I've "read" or how to normalize the time spent "reading" them (as it is split between reading and managing traffic or on the subway, or whichever).

So, in 2009, I spent very close to half my waking hours (we can construe this as "my life", rather than "waking hours," but I'll wager some people would argue that sleep is statistically significant) reading. Remember, too, that I had a serious concussion in February and couldn't read words-on-paper for about a month thereafter. The number becomes far more than half if we factor in the missing months (thus making it a ten-month year instead of twelve) or the time spent completely unable to read or move due to (among other things) motor vehicle accidents.

I am still gnawing on a seventies-era CJ Cherryh book (Finity's End), and I received the concussion (in February) while reading Regenesis (also Cherryh), so that's a cute little pair of (chuckle) bookends to those numbers.

As to the content of the books: if somebody had asked me to project how much I would read in 2009, and in what ratios of content, I would have said something like 10% glossy magazines (The Economist, The Atlantic, SuperBike [and lots others, there...], and various trade rags [regarding IT or aerospace and defense]), 60% fiction, with the overwhelming majority there in the science fiction genre, and the rest either as-needed (and usually non-fiction, like O'Reilly books) or handed to me (the chronicle of Herodotus, Caesar's Anticato, and the like). On looking back, it's really a lot more evenly split. I think I spent a very small minority of time on magazines, and split the rest between non-fiction (history, technical, literature, and "homework," such as reading up on the new Wankel engines before diving headlong into an RX-8) and fiction, with the fiction split about 35/65 in favor of science fiction (note I do not use the term "speculative fiction") and the rest being, idunno, garbage I picked up here and there. Thud, for example.

Only two books were thrown across the bedroom in disgust (but this is of course not where all the reading gets done): Lucifer's Hammer, and something else that was so hideous I only remember throwing it across the room, not what its title was. I'm rather afraid to go looking after that last one. It's probably lurking somewhere.

Reread in 2009 were Corky Bell's somewhat dated Maximum Boost, Iain Banks' The Algebraist, and Richard Morgan's Woken Furies ('make it personal'). Perhaps that's a useful enough sample in and of itself.

Also interesting is that my wife began reading Alastair Reynolds this year, as well as Richard Morgan. Banks is kind of a towering ogre of a writer, and she didn't like The Business (which I loved to pieces) because he (her words, but I mostly agree) seems to be using the reader as an outlet to show just how very clever he is. But that's definitely a first. One wonders what she will wind up with in 2010.

Someone at this point should probably ask "why on earth do you have a stack of books ten months old?" Well, I don't have an answer for that. Now we need more bookshelves. I've dug out of this heap, and realized there was nowhere to place the books that weren't already on shelves; the shelves were full already.

Now I need something new to read. Dammit.