It was gonna happen.
I’ve copied all my cigar related posts (err… both of them) over to my new blog! (yes that’s #5.)
So go visit Cigar Noob for… well… exactly the same content I posted here over the last couple days.
But I’ll be doing all my cigar-based writing over there from now on.
I brought my unfinished sudoku solver code out of retirement as a chop builder this past weekend.
I was noodling around with it, primarily adding test cases (as I hadn’t worked on it since I’d built my C++ unit testing framework) and surveying the state of the code.
I was struck by how overengineered it was. Classes and objects flying all over the place. Sure, methods were relatively small (after some banging around) and to the point. But the whole thing seemed pretty damn overwrought, with an awful lot of the code being designed around managing the code.
It occurred to me that the couple/few algorithms were buried in this structural schlock, removing any possibility of elegance.
So I thought to myself I thought “self? YOU need to prove that you actually know how to program.
The best way I know to do that is by being forced to get rid of all that crap.
I’ve decided to go back to C. It’s the only way I’ll be able sure I’m not just hiding behind abstraction layers.
And so yesterday I kicked off a project with the simplest of makefiles, my testloop script and “main.c”.
It took some wrangling to get started (do I want to represent a sudoku board as char[9][9]? Or just as char[82]?) But once I’d proven that I could parse and serialize the boards (making creation of test cases a breeze) I was off to the races.
Two or three simple functions on top of that and most simple to easy boards were solved.
The wisdom of the approach became clear when I realized that I spent 20 minutes unable to determine why:
sprintf("[%s]\n”,serialized_board);
segv’ed all over the place.
Looking forward to finally getting my C legs back.
Another first from the Thompson “classic” sampler, I’m about to light up the Cordova Robusto
It’s a Dominican cigar from Augusto Reyes with a cuban seed long filler and a Dominican Olor binder and Sumatra wrapper.
I noticed a little tear in the wrapper on the end of the stick which I’m pretty sure that’s from my hamfisted unwrapping and boxing.
I did make an effort to ‘calm the hell down’ on my smoking and not draw on it like a… well, you get the idea. This definitely made a difference in my smoking experience, so I’m going to go back over the last few cigars I smoked and try them again with the addition of uncharacteristic restraint.
But the cigar just didn’t have much in the way of flavor. It was neither a pleasant nor unpleasant smoke. I kept waiting for something to happen.
As it burned down the wrapper started peeling away in advance of the light.
While on the phone I let it go out at about the half way point. Just no reason to smoke it. I’m not saving it.
I’d imagine this would be a good smoke for someone who was terrified of smoking. Granted, I’ve had less cigars in my life than I have fingers, but even I am a bit past this point.
I’ve got four more of these taking up space in my humidor. I think I’ll wait a few weeks or a month for the next one to see what happens to it.
But it’s going to be tough to reach for it intentionally, having a bunch of smokes I quite enjoy in the box already.
I wonder if I’m trying to rush into stronger cigars.
Because of the size of this blog, I get an awful lot of google search hits here for this cigar, even though I’ve moved this post (and others on the same topic) over to my cigar blog, Cigar Noob.
Here’s the link to the specific PH 681 post. Enjoy.
(Great cigar by the way ;)
That’s what they’re looking for…
Left Employing Sexist Tactics to Discredit Giles, O’Keefe?
The Left is seeking to employ sexism as a way to take down yet another young woman. A rationale after Ike Turner’s own heart! Leftist ideology replaces “barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen” as the modern-day female prison; step out of line and you will be virtually and emotionally abused by the burdensome patriarchal undercurrent that powers this political rationale. They’re only for choice if that “choice” is the genocide of the female sex; they’re only for female empowerment if it doesn’t disrupt the fragile liberal status quo – and Giles is the most recent example.
What did you expect to find when you got here from your google search?
UPDATE: Yeah, it’s a dirty trick. But think about it, now I can track IP addresses of people who get here from web searches. Smile! You’re on candid camera.
As an ongoing project I’ve decided to start and maintain:
The List Of People Who Will Never Pay For Their Own Drinks If I’m In The Room (or TLOPWWNPFTODIIITR, for short.)
So far there are two:
To be continued.
(And my first cigar review.)
I cracked in to the first cigar from my Thompson sampler today. For no particular reason I picked up the Corojo Cubano.
It’s definitely a mild smoke. I don’t quite have the cigar vocabulary for those overwrought descriptions. The flavor itself I can best describe as having a leather/woody taste.
Throughought the first third of the smoke I noticed myself overdrawing to try and get more flavor.
The middle third or so it really came to life. The flavor rounded out and was a little bit richer (still pretty mild.) I’m not sure how much of that was my palate acclimating to the stick and how much was a change in flavor itself. But it was very pleasant.
Towards the end the smoke seemed to disappear unless I blew through it to overheat it, which got me the smoke but resulted in overheating, leading to a pretty unpleasant few puffs. I tried letting it sit a bit, but I couldn’t find a happy medium, so I put it out at a little shy of 2 inches.
Verdict: I definitely like the cigar. It’s a bit mild for me in general. Glad I have 4 more of them. Definitely a good score for Thompson
Note: I subsequently saw a review someplace where someone referred to the Corojo Cubano as Thompson’s best house stick, so I may have started at the top. But I’m determined to not let that influence the others.
We’ll see.
A couple months ago I had a scare that turned out to be a GPU burnout (fortunately.)
Anyway, I decided that my backup solutions needed some serious work. Sure, I had everything important saved off to my 2T NAS, but it’s only through an awful lot of real drudgery.
I went looking for a backup solution with the following requirements:
- Moderately priced.
- Easy to set up.
- Used simple file copy rather than some obtuse proprietary data format.
- Supported multiple backup jobs running on independent schedules.
It wasn’t SO long before I found SmartSync.
It fits the bill in ALL cases. The thing is a damn pleasure to work with. So much so that once I’d gotten it set up I forgot entirely about blogging anything about it and giving credit where credit is due.
At the $50 price point, it’s a bit high, but it’s perfectly usable, does EXACTLY what I want it to do, does it reliably and quietly. In fact it’s got a tremendous amount of flexibility that I suspect I will grow in to as time goes on.
I’ve set up a half dozen “backup profiles” (individual jobs) that run on independent schedules and keep things humming nicely.
I will eventually want an online backup system as well, but that will only be for the “in case someone blows up my apartment, I want … whatever it is I’d want” cases.
Good job guys o/
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, …his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with approval of their own conscience.”
– C.S.Lewis
Among the 50-60 dvds I have on my shelfpile are the three Star Wars movies (note that there are only three Star Wars movies.) I was able to pick up the “re-release + original” back when they still had those (I seem to recall Lucas getting his knickers all in a twist and offering the theatrical releases for about 6 months on dvd.)
Looking for something to watch on Sunday night I lit upon Jedi, which I’d never seen the “digital remastered Disneyed edition” of.
So I cued it up.
Now, when I saw this the first time I was 13, but I remember all that talk about getting sucked in to the dark side being somehow problematic. I haven’t seen it in several years, but the ending was a lot more clear (and made an awful lot LESS sense.)
Remember this quote from Yoda’s death bed?:
“… a Jedi’s strength flows from the Force. But beware. Anger, fear, aggression. The dark side are they. Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.”
How about this?
“Good, I can feel your anger. I am defenseless. Take your weapon. Strike me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete! ”
hmm…
“The hate is swelling in you now. Take your Jedi weapon. Use it. I am unarmed. Strike me down with it. Give in to your anger. With each passing moment you make yourself more my servant.”
really?
So I guess according to Lucasosophy, when faced with the obvious ultimate evil, right action is to… stand and watch?
Only artist to have two Cap Funk acknowledgements. I usually post a particular track from an artist to showcase the kind of thing you can expect from them.
But while Dub Fx uses the same hardware, this is just not the same style of music as Love Someone,
Unfortunately, though predictably, most of you won’t like this at all. It took me a couple run throughs to click over. But I’m now utterly with it.
I need a thing.
This thing is a motor that operates on battery power.
It rotates at a rate of about one revolution per… 15 minutes or so.
Difficulty: It needs to run stand-alone in a freezer for about two days without interruption.
How the hell do I even begin to find such a thing?
If you don’t like bacon you’re a racist.
The peeps over at Big Government will never pay for a drink if I’m in the room.
Pamela Gellar (<3 *our hero sighs longingly*) has a nice treatment of this: Exposing Acorn
Fucking monkeys.
err… the video:
Here’s Beck’s website roundup of this (is this just a direct transcript? Dunno, I don’t have a radio.)
UPDATE: Steven Den Beste thinks they should win a pulitzer (no not acorn.) I agree. They did some potentially dangerous hard core digging.
UPDATE: Gotta love Larry: Kudlow segment on Acorn last night.
Here’s a link to some more about the Brooklyn DA’s probe
UPDATE: Andrew Cuomo opens an investigation. Not my favorite human but I won’t deny he’s the man for the job.
UPDATE:
No snarkiness, no bullshit.
Two great things the Democrats accomplished today.
First and foremost: Defunding Acorn. It’s a criminal enterprise and needs to be treated as such finally.
And, believe it or not, one from the Potus himself:
“Obama calls Kanye West ‘Jackass’ ”
Apparently it was off the record, but the tweet got out (as tweets are wont to do) from ABC’s Terry Moran. But GayFish is one of that teeny list (far fewer than some might expect) of people whom I would take great joy in seeing publicly humiliated. Really, just called out in front of his fans.
As I said elsewhere. I’d call a 12 second truce with Teh iWon to hi-five him for that.
I know, I know…
Ya know, the democrats have a supermajority in the Senate. We do all understand that this means the Republicans are powerless to stand in their way on health care right?
Ok, so explain to me what the problem is then?
Why all the arm waving and blamestorming? If there’s so much support for it then bring it to the floor.
Or… isn’t there.
If you told the architects of this Great Nation that there would be a time when elected officials held their constituents in such naked contempt as this, I’d almost bet they wouldn’t have bothered.
(hat tip to Pamela Gellar)
(Posted this as a comment for the 9/11 post. But it’s big enough that I thought I’d give it it’s own real-estate.)
Hey thanks everybody. I don’t get it but for some reason it’s a lot worse this year. It usually doesn’t really BOTHER me so much at all. After all, the net effect on my life was actually positive (cosmic wake-up call and all that.)
But this year? Eh, it took the wind out of my sails. It might be because I spent most of the preceding 72 hours editing this, filling in details, correcting time sequencing and all. It is a bit like bobbing for apples in boiling water.
I can’t really respond individually to everyone.
@Candice: Yeah, there’s no “right thing to say” not really. It all goes on at a different place than that. V. glad I got a laugh out of ya though. That’s one of the important bits ;-)
@Mom: It is published. Right here. ;)
@KisPers: Y’all are the best. I’m still just sort of on the edge of the porch most of the time. (I just can’t keep up with the volume over there. How the hell do you do it?)
I worry every year about the my (no bullshit) narcissistic tendency to bring this all up. But when push comes to shove there are always a few heartfelt “thanks for writing this” responses. I know I don’t write enough here during the rest of the year to keep readers (especially now that I have 3 other blogs as well.) But I do enjoy it when y’all come by.
Thanks again.
o/
