A hostage and a hard case

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It was a round of Island Estate on Hostage Rescue and unfortunately I was the last man. I had used up my 3 Flash bangs, one getting to the second floor from the stairs in the lobby, one in securing the room/balcony/bathroom area up top. And another in securing the upper hostage in the bathroom overlooking the pool.

Extracting the hostage I went back and checked the room joining the piano room and courtyard together and figured, “crap no bangs” so I jogged back upstairs. I figured if I would have to storm the lower hostage without tactical aids, that end would be the best.. Worst case bursting in and shielding the hostage if one of the tangos would flee rather then shoot…

Crossing the pool room I heard a tango, drew my second kit and realized I took frags instead of gas. Usually I’ll carry 3 Bangs, 3 CS/Tear Gas in Raven Shield or 6 Bangs but for some reason I had 3 Frags. So I said what the hell, lobbed one in the pool room and took it down.

Moved on to the bottom of the stairs right next to the courtyard hostage… MP5 locked cocked and ready to rocket. I figured to have the best chance of success I was going to have to use a frag. It might kill the hostage or injure him but it would at least give me a fair chance of getting inside alive.

I rolled the door open, careful not to flag my muzzle around the door jam as I got the grenade ready (pin out, spoon thing on). I knew there was a partition in the middle of the room and Raven Shield sadly always places the hostage behind it with the tangos walking around the room. I bounced the frag carefully off the wall so that it would land just far enough to hopefully be far enough behind that partition that it wouldn’t kill the hostage, RvS is that way lol. Realistically I would’ve expected shrapnel to go through the partition and injure the hostage at a minimal.

I stormed in after the frag, MP5 up taking down the tangos. There was two behind the hostage, using him as a shield as it happened. blew the one away with a stream of deadly taps and kept the last burst going until the final suspect was down for the count. Circled around (I was still in front of the hostage) and kicked in to the side bedroom with the hostage trailing me and gunned down the last threat. With like 2 rounds left in my MP5, I drew my Sig P228 and ran like my pants were on fire with that hostage all the way to the LZ before any threats could pursue us from the courtyard. I was not going to press my luck poking my head out !!!

The room looks like this, the X was where I put the Frag, the H is the hostage, and the T’s are where I found tangos.

_____________________________
|           me     [stairs] |
|___[door]__________________|
|               |           |
|              H        T   |
|               |         T |
|        -------|----[door]-|
|         X     |           |
|               [door]      |
| T             |           |
|               | T         |
|_____[door]____|____[door]_|

I was standing right next to the kneeling hostage when engaging the two tangos in the one room. So I guess you could say I used the human shield against them lol. The tango in the other side room I took care of by flanking around the partition and in through the door from the side where I placed the frag (X).

Some of us older troopers in [SAS] have thought about using frags to clear the room like that, but from the opposite side of the room. I’ve even done it once but this time I was really shit out of luck, I contemplated restarting the round for a moment but decided it was not my way, and kept going till the end.

To be honest, I don’t want to have to EVER DO THAT AGAIN !!! Clearing hostage rooms with frags is crazy. But hey, when you’re between a rock and a hard case why not go down with a bang? Uhh frag lol.

Broken hearts, broken glass

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sigh

There are a few family heirlooms that are mine, most of which belonged to my father and have been given to my by my mother over the years. Tonight as part of the operations to rearrange my room into a suitable working environment I’ve lost the one I love the most.

I put my fathers candy dish on my new “desk” along with the sacred heart statue (one of my mothers most treasured from her collection) and a small one of Matthew the Apostle (a gift because of my middle name). I figured, safest spot there is available while I work and my laptop was like a half a foot away, although with a major pile of stuff on it lol.

There’s a simple cloths hanging thing, basically two polls on rollers with a crossbar to hang shirts from, the darn thing is well known for falling apart and in fact has been leaning for months :

Trying to move it to get to my bookshelf, for which I plan to throw out the remainder of as my old friends stand is now there… The rack came apart, the one poll narrowly missing the sacred heart statue and the crossbar impaling the lid of the candy dish :'(

I would rather it have hit me in the heart then strike that dish.

There’s at least 6 or 7 large pieces of the lid and tens or hundreds of smaller shards. The glass was mostly just on the floor in one area and on the side of the desk. Both sets of my spare sheets were also close enough to catch glass as they were right next to it. So I can’t even change my bedding tonight. I vacuumed the area and most of the room as well as blocking it off so the dog can’t get there. With luck maybe my mother can glue the bigger pieces of the lid together… That’s what she did with Babies top. A very small oil lamp, I think my Grandmother busted it (her mom) and she glued the pieces back together.

The actual dish (bottom) is fine and the contents are too aside from the shards of glass. But the top is fragged. My father used to keep his keys and things in it. And so have I for about the last 10 years (that I’ve had house keys lol) along with some of my more personal items. Of all of the things that I have, I’ve always loved this heirloom.. I’ve always tried to protect it from damage, it had one lone chip in the lid and until now I’ve been able to keep it safe. I think it was my great grandmothers, I know it was from the farm and like over a hundred years old.. In fact I’ve only ever seen another one like it in my life.

My mothers not killed me yet, maybe she knows I’d do it myself if I thought it would help : but I know my Aunt (Dads sister) would fracture me if she was here and he’d probably break my ass with a belt if he was alive, although in that case it would’ve happened in the first place…

The most important items I have in this world, that dish, the radio, and the gramophone… all of which are much older then me and have been in the family for generations… Heirlooms even before they were passed onto my Dad I would reckon. It’s long been my hope that some day I would have the means to restore that radio to working condition. I doubt that workable vacuum tubes and replacement parts would be around by then even if I knew how to do it but hey, a man can dream can’t he?

I’m sorry pa…

Writer’s Block: Last Night’s Dreams

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What did you dream about last night?

Live Journals Writer’s Block

Oddly enough a subject on my mind lol, dreams :

At first, the pilot of a ‘Mech on some sort of commando run. Like a cross between the RX-78-2 Gundam and a VF-1 Valkyrie. I remember I ended up walking into an ambush, knocked out half of the enemies flight pods but trying to retreat back to cover. Resulted in a pair of Gundam Sandrock like ‘Mechs piloted by famous magicians trying to make minced metal of my ‘Mech, each with dual heat-sickle swords in hand.

Closed in and took them down point blank with Hyper Bazkooka, Shield, and Beam Sabre.. What an odd way to deal with the threat lol. Get close and get “in your face” with a bigger weapon <_<
After that it changed to a DOOM like setting in FPS mode. I remember coming to the end of a corridor over looking an area with several small structures with zombies, deamons, and imps in infantry formations on guard. I remember jumping and doing the walking in/out of sight trick to pick off enemies using the Super Shotgun (double barreled), the trusty chain gun and plasma rifle.

Strangely I find myself often dreaming about games. Especially stuff in the light of SOCOM, Syphon Filter, and Raven Shield / GRAW / SWAT. The Doom, Quake II/IV, Aliens, and various others of course making the rounds too.

I must admit though, I find the issue of programming and the graphical work involved (code wise) for such games quite fascinating. But sadly to complex and time intensive for me to study on my own :

A classic

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Just watched Red Dawn on TV tonight, first time I’ve ever seen it actually.

Needless to say, you don’t fuck with the Americans: We’ll put a cap in your ass.

The movie lays out a real nightmare scenario, a political shift in Germany pushing NATO into collapse, Russia in a massive enconmic disaster and the USA a land ripe for the plucking so they thought… The “Wolverines” proved for then an annoyance to the occupation forces. Supposedly as World War III kicked off most of Europe sat our their duffs watching the Russians and the Americans slug it out. While the British remain the only loyal friend on the US side.. much to the comment “they won’t last long”, I’m sure some one thought that during world war II hehe. And that China ended up getting involved on the American side, based on the drop from a Billion to 600 million or so “screaming Chinamen” mentioned it’s probable that the the tactical nukes were’t limited to the invasion :

The beginning of the movie is down right unnearving. The kids sit in class listing to a lecture about Atilia the Hun as Soviet paratroopers land outside. Shooting the (unarmed) teacher as he approaches and firing RPG’s into the school.. War is one thhing but slaughter is another.

A small band high schoolers flee into the hills and resist. When townspeople are executed in retaliation for the Wolverines actions they launch a counter attack killing the a group of executioners and wreaking havoc on the enemies rear lines. Going so far as to dar to bomb an HQ under the noise of the guards.. The passing of coded messages over the radio, one heard in the Longest Day in point of fact does suggest they were not the only ones giving them a run for their invasion money.

An interesting tid bit from the IMDb’s trivia section:

“The film’s replica Russian T-72 tank was so precise that when it was transported to the studio, two CIA agents followed and wanted to know where it had come from.”

Hahahaha !!!

Restructure and Refeeding

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Well, got some work done.

Completed the change over (mostly) from a single hard-coded dialog for handling the output of processes to being a subclass of a display builder like parent class. Python doesn’t support abstract classes as far as I know or even private members for that matter (but has a nifty name mangling like thing for a making a naming __convention).

The original reason I wanted to do this is I figured that A.) The class was cluttered with code common to any ol’dialog window and B.) The rest of it was just specialized for the task of running a process and nabbing it’s output.

So I moved the common code into the NPM_AbstractDisplayDialog class and wrote a NPM_ProcessDisplayDialog subclass of it to replace the original NPM_DisplayDialog which also will allow me to use a similar dialog for other tasks without having to duplicate the code they would share if I was to implement another like-wise class in parallel. Because for example the NPM_DisplayDialog class was setup to ensure the process was neutralized before completing it’s termination I setup NPM_AbstractDisplayDialog::aboutToDie() as a signal to connect a slot from my subclass(es) to be called to do clean up, basically an advisory destructor you could say. And I connected it to the button to call QWidget::close() to this slot so aboutToDie() is sent when the dialog is about ready to be terminated.

I also found a fixed a small error in the pkg_info parsing, things like that is some thing that most concerns me.. lol.

Now the remaining problem is I’m starving and it’s 0746 Zulu (that’s 0246 local morning)… Must find food, then I guess I should get some sleep :

Days coding

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The current stage of things for the settings menu. As can be seen I still have a few things to do with the layouts, I think a grid would be better personally. At the moment it also doesn’t actually set the settings it front ends for yet. I still need to test out the QSettings class first to see if I want to replace the custom system I’ve done with Pythons build in INI parser or not. I also need to cook up some icons and finish the portsnap entry. Right now it is purely a Qt3 program but if PC-BSD has finally fixed the ‘ugly’ theme settings for root under KDE I might consider a conversion to KDE modules before Qt4/KDE4. At least since what ever version I used to install on my Laptop the default Qt3 themes for Root are even worse…

Another thing I want to do is look at Pythons ability to handle manipulation of UID, it would be kind of nice to prompt for roots password and only elevate permissions when necessary. I aim for things to be the best they can be but paranoia never hurt in programming… hehe. Some day I would also like to expand this beyond explicitly using portupgrade/pkg_*/portsnap/csup/cvsup/psearch in the background but I don’t have time right now. I could get more done if I had a peaceful working environment…. any way here are some screen shots

click to enlarge images

ports settings
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logging settings
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network settings
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I think this is pretty good considering I rewrite most of what I already had today and most of this was done in about 6 hours of work, between chores, dog walking, lunch, interruptions, and phone answering ! Plus another hour or so of minor changes and additions so far tonight. I wish my strength could hold out for another 5 hours worth of work so I could get done some of the other things on my list for the night…. Hopefully I can get at least some of the other work done before I pass out. because I do need to get some shuteye if I’m ever going to make it to work in the tomorrow on time.

*SIGH*

thinking ? crazy : sane;

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The one thing my room lacks, a comfortable working area..

Problem list

  1. furniture is expensive !
  2. my room is “used” for storage… with and without my permission
  3. no raw materials
  4. raw materials are costly too

Now on the other hand, I do have an old book shelf that has been a pain in the neck for years.. I don’t think I could make a worse desk of it then it already is as a miserable book shelf !(^_^)!

A simple pedestal desk like design comes to mind but without the drawers, to complicated and time consuming to build without either spending $$$ I don’t have or finding some thing else to cannibalize for parts. I figure, cut the main vertical boards in half’ish from the book shelf.. Mount them side by side on top of a set of boards (legs/pedestals). And use one of those old project board things from school as a backing to lend stability to it. Much the same trick used by whoever designed the computer desk that I bought lol.

The question of it being free standing or making a bottom board for it to rest on the desk with is a variable factor. It would be simple enough to duplicate the top piece, in effect making the desk usable upside down if necessary haha! But for the primitive building knowledge I have which is basically common sense. And the limited resources, namely what ever I have “inherited” which hopefully still includes one of my Dads saws!

I’m not exactly a handy man but one could always hope for a little Genetic potential… My father was quite skilled and so was my mothers father. My logical ability however out weights my operational experience, needless to say common sense + few resources = all I got if I try it. If I actually had enough money to buy material (or newer tools) I could probably afford to buy a bloody desk and assemble it myself <_<.

Because what I’d be dealing with here is using a bookshelf for wood and mostly being limited to a hammer, nails, and sandpaper for putting it together lol. Crude by most peoples standards of the job but effective when you’ve got nothing better to work with I must admit. Hmm, I wonder if I could actually pull it off… The only real problem is where to put the darn crap from the shelf, since other people have already filled my last free space.

It really would be nice if I could get away with it and a big plus, I could cut it to just the right height to sit at it and use my laptop 😉

brooding

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I think if I thought it would do any better then either breaking my knuckles or cracking the air vents I’d give my PC a reverse punch…

Oh how fun it would be to exact some revenge from this GeForce 8400GS…. worthless piece of micro-shit !!!!!

NPM Settings Menu

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Photobucket

Work begins on a settings GUI for NPM. I have a QIconView standing in for the list of config topics, I expect in the end it will probably be some form of widget stack or some thing like that. The changes I’ve committed to the trunk tonight are purely cosmetic, there is no link to the exsisting settings code that revolves around an RC file yet. I’m actually interresting in moving to using QSettings instead, tests will show the direction to be taken.

At the moment it has the majority of important options. I want the logging section to allow the user to set the logging level and files e.t.c. one thing that I think would be cool is to save the result files from portupgrade with a proper time-stamp appended to the file name. Although it would only take a minute to check the script to see if it would truncate the log file if reused.

There also needs to be a small network section whether separate or added to the others that can handle setting the portsnap/sup servers to use. And I would like it to be able to have a list of servers to query set. So that if it can’t reach one it tries the next (pardoning the retry options set).