Neanderpundit

Partner and I and Mr B and Midwest Chick drove Mr B’s Prius down to the Indy 1500.

No, I did not self combust.

The show was good. A good assortment of solid old rifles and shotguns.Not a lot of good deals on modern or new guns, according to Mr B, but I never go to gunshows looking for them.

Actually, I wasn’t looking for anything today, I just go to look- to me, a good gunshow is like a museum where you can pick up and touch the museum pieces. There was a very nice Darne, one of the most elegant and lovely double gun designs ever- you can see one open at this website. There was a Ljungman that was in absolutely beautiful condition, for a pretty damned nice price. I saw a very nice 8mm schutzen rifle, faling block, sweet and clean, case colors still intact. And a Ballard rifle- I looked at it, saw a small stamping on the edge of the barrel near the breech, and picked it up with trembling hands… but it wasn’t a Pope Ballard.

I would have had to kill Partner and steal his cash to get it had it been- I don’t have a pot to piss in right now.
I would gladly kill to have a rifle in my hands that Harry Pope made.

The blogmeet was replete with Too Much Information.
No, really. Mr B and I traded info about how you sometimes have to knot the elastic on your hips to keep your drawers up, sometimes, and how eventually the elastic got so stretched out you could pull it right up over your shoulders. I suppose it would look kind of like this. We dubbed them Bib Underwear.

Brigid showed up, and had been sick, so I managed to confirm she was past the vomiting stage by a sort of “Litmus test” I call “the barfolator”. She passed with flying colors.

Of course being a cracker over 50, my Barfolator is not as expansive as it once was. Soon enough, I’ll need suspenders, or I could just wear bib underwear.

Tam, the inimitable Ms X, Old Grouch, and Joanna showed up, and many survived. Food was eated. Drink was drunk. Midwest chick tye-beered a pair of jeans, which was as close to a wet tshirt as I was going to get.

Burroughs always said junkies with foresight (called “Squirrels”) would put a drop of heroin in a seam in a piece of hem on their clothing and when hard up would suck on that seam to get their fix. A couple of drunks could have a good time with Midwest chick’s pants knee.

I learned that sitting on a lawnchair with a cast aluminum weave design makes your nutsack look (and feel) like a belgian waffle.

And I forgot to snag a copy of Concealed Carry, dangit.

was a bit of robot programming, which should have been extremely simple. A robot picks up a part from a vibratory feeder, deburrs it, and puts it in a tray with little nests for the parts.

No damned reason on earth there ought to be 1500 lines of code.

The programmer decided rather than teach each individual point in the tray, (48 each tray) he’d write a complex algorithm that calculated the position of each nest.

Problem is, the nests are injection molded plastic, and most are warped, improperly assembled, or just plain fucked up.

So it makes more sense to teach each point individually, since the calculations were full of little circumlocutions that compensated (or tried to) for irregularities as well as the original calculations.

All in all, it should have been maybe 250 lines of code. I’m going to correct that, as soon as the customer can afford the downtime for me to do it properly. And it will run.

I spoke a bit about this to the maintenance folks, and they lit up at the idea of learning to program robotics; they were a bit apprehensive but I did a ten-minute primer at one of the cells as to how robots work, and it removed all trace of concern. Robots- especially Fanuc robots- do not have to be complex. I have taught robot programming for fifteen years and it’s not that big a deal, if you pay a little bit of attention.

Programmers who are too cool for the room. Guys who write unnecesarily complex code so they can show off their programming chops. Guys who don’t comment code, and write ten lines of code for every one needed so they can display their 1337 math skylz.

No, actually I don’t care about those guys at all.

What drives me nuts is cleaning up their messes.

Good lord what idiots geeks are sometimes. I always prided myself in SMALL code. Guess unlimited memory has made people sloppy.