Month: April 2008

Melon Popping through BF2

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Some recreation for the day hehe: found decent infantry only server of BF2 running my favorite city map. Rotated between weapons as I usually do when I’m not in a squad that is ‘serious’, eventually wound up as a Squad Leader going helmet popping with a Accuracy International.

I had a couple major runs, just found a nice covered spot and started sighting targets. After pushing the ammo counter to it’s limit I racked in a Veteran Sniper Combat badge +S. Normally I aim for centre of mass, some times the heart or lungs of a target specifically when sniping. But I usualyl go for a head shot when dealing with a threat, in BF2 I find them quite easy to manage on other snipers in particular.

It’s rare though that I usually stream though targets like that though, like 20 some rounds and almost as many kills later I’m still sniping lol. Given a good mark to shoot at, a secure firing position, I’ll usually be able to hit what ever I can see… Having to do that while every one and their dog is trying to shoot you, is a different story >_>

urxvt & utf-8

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Found an interesting problemo tonight with using vim in rxvt-unicode. Since the German umlauts and the old double-S (ä ö ü ß) are a bit tricky for me to make without a copy/pasting then where needed I usually use the alternative (ue oe ue ss) where possible. Since vim 7 has spell checking, I’ve got spelllang set to handle US and British english plus German in the spell checker. Which really works very nice because my spelling is a bit of a hodge podge for those ‘differences’ in English spelling.

While I was working on the translation last night, I employed both Vims spell checker and a translator program to help me with the grammer. Vims spell checker has the lovely ability of being able to correct things, taking the form I can easily get out of a US QWERTY board and replacing with the proper characters (ä ö ü ß), I knew there was some thing I loved about vim xD

The only thing is, trying to open the file again with vim caused it to display weird, all of the umlauts replaced with strange characters. I checked Vims idea of the files encoding and it was UTF-8, just like my system locale settings should be saying.

Yet, (n)vi, cat, and other utilities were showing them fine. Setting the terminal encoding in vim or launching it with LANG=de_DE.ISO8859-1 got them to display properly but still senseless :. My ~/.zshrc sets LANG to en_US.UTF-8, why nothing seemed to work right i dunno. Forcing urxvt (rxvt-unicode) to run with the C locale set (LC_CTYPE=”en_US.UTF-8″) got it working fine.

I’m not familiar with that end of C++ but I wouldn’t be surprised if it relied on the same setlocale() routine as C apps tend to. The FreeBSD handbook said to set LANG and MM_CHARSET and not LC_* variables for the environment. I’ve fixed it so the system kicks urxvt off with the right locale settings so the problem is fixed.

still a little odd imho lol

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Nothin ever stops all these thoughts n the pain attached to them
Sometimes I wonder why this is happenin
Its like nothin I can do would distract me when
I think of how I shot myself in the back again
cuz from the infinite words I can say i
Put all pain you gave to me on display
But didnt realize instead of settin it free i
Took what I hated and made it a part of me

It never goes away
It never goes away

And now
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be right here
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be my fear
I cant separate
Myself from what I’ve done
Giving up a part of me
I’ve let myself become you

Hearin your name the memories come back again
I remember when it started happenin
I see you n every thought I had and then
The thoughts slowly found words attached to them
And I knew as they escaped away
I was committin myself to em n everyday
I regret sayin those things cuz now I see that i
Took what I hated and made it a part of me

It never goes away
It never goes away

And now
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be right here
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be my fear
I can’t separate
Myself from what I’ve done
Giving up a part of me
I’ve let myself become you

It never goes away
It never goes away

Get away from me!
Give me my space back you gotta just Go!
Everything comes down the memories of You!
I kept it in without lettin you Know!
I let you go so get away from Me!
Give me my space back you gotta just Go!
Everything comes down the memories of You!
I kept it in without lettin you Know!
I let you go

And now
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be right here
You’ve become a part of me
You’ll always be my fear
I cant separate
Myself from what I’ve done
Giving up a part of me
I’ve let myself become you
I’ve let myself become you
I’ve let myself become lost inside these thoughts of you
Giving up a part of me
I’ve let myself become you

— Linkin Park, ‘Figure. 09’

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Dropped off around 0630 last ngiht :

Spent msot of it hacking on the SOP Rewrites and chatting with friends. The room clearing section is quite difficult, it needs to be sufficantly normalized which is a sticky operation. Trying to balance between short and sweet with completeness makes managing its verbosity a tricky one to.

I also spent some time doing a little translation work. I quite like trying to translate small portions of text between English and German, because it gives me a chance to get a greater feel for the language. You’ve got to learn to think a different way when using another language, I generally try to be as accurate as I can but enjoy the ‘soft spots’ where the idea becomes clear but, trying to put express it in the other language is hard.

I would love some day, the opportunity to learn it in a lot more depth. I’m generally able to read well enough when I have a dictionary to help, but… Trying to express things well is a bit more challenging. It takes time and experience to learn a languages grammer. It’s not quite like learning a programming language… Given decent documentation I generally can pick up most common programming languages in an hour or two depending on it’s size, I especially love it when some kind of Backus–Naur Form (BNF) listing is available, makes learning a programming language much faster lol.

Conventional languages for people on the other hand, ain’t quite so simple :

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I’ve had a special briefing to give, a Rct to train with, two SNCOs to join int he shoot house for a few things, a ban/unban issue, yukes live op that almost launched, finishing [most of] my auditing and tending to a few site matters, and setting up a reminder should any thing remaining slip my mind.

I’m finishing my report and the last of my work for the day if I’ve gotta lock myself in a closet to do it >_>

Hopefully this time I won’t be working on it at 0500Q lol.

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The good news, I’ve got the first draft done on my report (yay!), the bad news is it is 0550Q and I’m less tired then I was at 1300Q loool. All that is less I guess is one or two more sections that I need to write.

One thing I really need to do is start organizing more of my common things into packages, I freaking love TeX :-).

Also good news is I’ve gotten auth for putting TeX Live PBI’s on their testing server so that means I can get cracking on field testing it here, then start trying to push it on to PBIDir.

With luck, tomorrow might be a SWAT4 Live Op so I’ll have time finish work on the site and get some more interesting work done too xD.

I was trained in Rvs, I took that route for the Selection Course and wouldn’t change that decision for any thing. But I do rather feel at home with SWAT4. I’ve been playing S4 since the beta and bought the game shortly after it came out. The thing I dislike about RvS is the door bugs, SWAT4.. Hey some suspects might draw faster then Jesse James but at least they eventually go down when you shoot them, can’t say the same for Raven Shields occasional super tangos dancing between bullets ^_^.

What pisses me off is I paid $50 for SWAT4, $30 for SWAT4:TSS and SWAT4:TSS although it is an expansion pack is implemented through the (very shitty compared to SWAT3s) mod system, which is probably the ONLY reason they ever released the SDK. Because the change in dev-teams meant a need for a quick way of hacking in the other 40% of the freaking game!

What a company…

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Oy…

Set to work on preparing my report, down to the AFK again the second half a butt cheek is in the chair level of interruptions as normal 8=). Finally took a break for dinner, a nice double whammy of Whoppers

BK Whopper

Crashed on the couch for awhile until Coco finally succeeded in guilting me out of my spot, jeeze it’s only been _my_ spot for the last decade ^_^.

Dropped off to bed, never made it through most of Mission To Mars and woke up ~0300 in search of some Raspberry Danish.

May as well get back to work eh?

Some times I wonder if I ever sleep without being ready to drop :

task.done() ? rest : work;

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Not an overly busy day compared to the last few but the tiredness is catching up. Current plan of action is 5-10min to lay down and then start getting to work on things.

I need to finish evaluating things, start preparing my report, and get things done as necessary lol. I’ve also got a related appointment for this weekend so I’ve noted that my report should be considered due by Monday.

Managed to get in server for some SWAT4, *finally* game time this week. Only had time for two or three rounds though, got to move through on Point and First Cover positions. Been awhile since I’ve done any serious point work, much of my time as SSM/RSM had me in EL’s boots lol. Glad to see I’m still effective though, was able to keep a dynamic pace as Point with an MP5 and as First Cover with the M4A1 and still keep accuracy up.

Firing the M4A1 in SWAT4 when on the move is not very hard but takes practice to do it, gotta learn to control and manage the weapon. The recoil in the game is unrealistically appalling but it makes taking threats out as you move to your Point of Domination a little more challenging then in Rvs or using one of the SMGs.

It’s also nice to see how far one of our new Troopers have come, Big12… He’s come a long way since the first day he set foot in our server hehe.

It’s just the way I am I guess, work a bit, game a bit, work more. When I’ve got a big task list it tends to weigh on my mind to much to spend an entire day off totally lol.

Today also is my Fathers birthday, he was born in 1946 iirc so it would have been his 62nd.

Happy birthday Dad 😉

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Been in my usually hyper-jumping multi-tasking state as usual.

I’ve had enough IM windows open simultaneously of late between friends, business, and other matters to be aiming for a new personal record. It’s a good thing I didn’t expect to get much done as Virtual WO1 on day 1 or day 2 looool.

Some times my systems load is light, at the least I usually will have a web browser, instant messenger, and a command prompt open some where (local or network). Other times even on my desktops 1600×1200 resolution screen space can be hard to get hehe.

That’s just the way I am though, I’m usually avail about 14-18 hours a day or more depending on working hours lol. Most people know, don’t call me, messenger me ! One thing I do love about IMs over phone calls is you don’t have to respond instantly, and you the message buffer handles incomings between AFK spikes… It’s sort of necessary with the way life at home is lol.

A few things on my agenda are already in the works… Most of which do to with things with the new AoR in [SAS] and the SOP Rewrites. You could say taking over a larger scope of things calls with it a bit of nose poking around hehe. With the SOPs I’ve been trying to get work done & keep the RSM informed.

Another thing I would like to do is find some time to learn Perls OO features. I’m no real fan of Object Oriented programming although I believe it is just a means of doing the right things a certain way. In this case it really is just the simple fact that I don’t know much about Perls Object Oriented syntax and I’m not interested in waiting for Perl6 to learn it lol.

For me Perl is getting to be kind of like an old friend in the tool chest, like a trusty hammer or a favorite screw driver. I often find my self using Python, Perl, and Ruby for scripting tasks or random programming that I either can’t use some thing else for or just don’t have time/energy for using another language for.

And for languages and tools I often put to work, I like to know them like a well read book 😉

What can I say but I love to learn!

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Having dived down the rabbit hole an RSM and landed a Warrant Officer Class 1 in Wonderland, I know the red pill was the best choice.

I’m not really sorry to see the RSMs post go, it is really a lot less to worry about. I still have responsibilities but of a different nature, the one thing I really do like about the WO1 task set is the potentional jack of all trades nature it holds.

Some people don’t do things by halves, including me. I know many things but am master of few, yet I often study well beyond my skill sets own domain.

I’ve been transferring as many files as I think relivent over to our new RSM but I havn’t had time to formally report for my own orders yet. Now being the most healthy one here I’m stuck on the on call every 2 minutes at the drop of a pin instead of ht emore normal 5 minutes :-(. First time I’ve seen my mother throwing up in almost 20 years, whether she has a cold or not I know I’m only with allergies. Ended up with blood in the output of one of my allergy attacks today, not sure if that is a good sign or a bad sign but I know one thing — my sinuses feel a hell of a lot better !

With luck the down time won’t be to much… I’m usually like a butler around this house any way :. I’m not exactly the best person for the job imho but there is no other course of action. What would my family do if I didn’t act the way I do…. lol.