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diamond & firearms 2009 April 6 19:54

Posted by diamond in : Random , 1 comment so far

Today, i got my first experience of shooting firearms. A group of us from the office went to a local shooting range, just outside Zurich. It was located in a rather bizarre place, off of the 5th floor of an underground car park beneath a shopping center, down a maintenance tunnel. I was pretty nervous when handling the weapons, as i was well aware of the damage they could do, but not of what not to do. Thankfully the instructors were very patient and clear (with one of my colleagues acting as an impromptu translator). I learnt many things about guns today:

When it was finally time to have a go, i braced myself for the sound. I’d be warned not 5 minutes beforehand by a friend who’d had army experience that it was going to be louder than i expected. So i expected Loud. It was much louder than that. I was very grateful for the ear protection -) Here’s what i can remember firing, in order of calibre:

and another .45 pistol. I shot 25 rounds with the glock, and 5 rounds each with the others. My favourite has to be the USP, it was so easy to shoot, and deadly accurate. The recoil on the .50 cal firearms was enormous, more so for the revolver, as it doesn’t have the semi-automatic mechanism to absorb some of the force. Those around the desert eagle got blasted by the shockwave, even if you were 3m away. Scary stuff.

After all my years of playing FPSes, i was curious to see how well (or not) that might translate to real life. As it turns out, i was a natural at it, surprising the instructors. On my last go (which was 5 rounds with the desert eagle), the instructor put up a clean target for me (previously we’d just patch up the exist targets with stickers to cover the holes). When i managed ot put all 5 rounds through the center of the target, he asked if i’d like to take it home, which i happily accepted -) So, here’s the evidence:

diamond + desert eagle

Coincidentally, 7m happens to be the longest range required as part of the Swiss gun license practical exam. I’d just chosen that as it seemed about the right distance to stretch myself a bit, but still be possible to be accurate.

diamond & breadknives 2008 November 26 21:25

Posted by diamond in : Health , 2 comments

Today, i went down to the break room at 16:00 as usual, looking forward to a few games of pool, and a delicious combination of swiss bread, cheese, and meat of unspecified origin. Peter was the only other pool player available from our group, and we quickly got stuck into a discussion about how load-balancing works in linux.

So deeply was i engrossed in this conversation that, while cutting myself some bread, i failed to realise until Too Late that the knife was going to end up removing a significant portion of my left index finger’s exterior. The knife was efficiently sharp, so i didn’t notice until about 1cm of my skin was hanging off (shuddering as i type this. I hate that memory). The doctor has told me “in a year’s time, you won’t even see a scar”. I’m guessing that was meant to be reassuring. I’m not convinced it had its intended effect however.

Still, my finger now looks like it’s dressed up for a black-tie event, with a very tasteful bow keeping the outer layers of cladding in place. And boy was i glad to have noirin only one floor away when the incident happened, as her first-aid skills (and general Competence) were put to good effect.

It’s, of course, typical that i was getting back into guitar playing. Here’s hoping i don’t have to wait all of the 6-8 weeks of healing before i can go back to that.

Filled this under the things-i-wish-i-had-been-paying-more-attention-to-so-i-could-have-avoided category.

diamond & speling 2008 November 3 19:47

Posted by diamond in : Work , 1 comment so far

A conversation just now:

aug: you know the decommission script we have, since forever?
diamond: oh yeah, i wrote the first version
aug: oh! then it’s your fault!
diamond: eh?
aug: in all that time, it’s been misspelt. there were 3 s’s in it. no-one noticed until last week, when ciaran went “wtf?”
aug: and when we renamed it, we discovered that its (misspelt) name was all through the documentation
aug: so we had to update all of that as well
diamond: oops. that certainly sounds like me

I wrote that script a year ago. Sigh.

Apple remote desktop + vnc 2008 September 16 18:25

Posted by diamond in : Random , add a comment

I’ve been using Apple’s in-built VNC server for the past year or so to control the g4 powerbook we have hooked up to our tv. Unfortunately, the VNC server, which is part of Apple Remote Desktop, is a piece of shonky tat, and regularly crashes. This is ‘easily’ fixed by restarting the remote desktop service, except, of course, that requires going over to the machine, thereby defeating the entire purpose. Finally, after it crashed twice in 5 minutes, i was motivated (read: enraged) enough to spend the 45 mins or so necessary to hunt down a way of restarting the services remotely. And here, for the sanity of anyone else in the same situation, is the answer:

sudo /System/Library/CoreServices/RemoteManagement/ARDAgent.app/Contents/Resources/kickstart -activate -configure -access -on -restart -agent

As usual, trying to find documentation is like pulling teeth.

diamond@zrh:/tmp/accom$ cd ~ 2008 August 15 20:27

Posted by diamond in : Random , add a comment

Today we had the handover of our new apartment from the estate agency. Despite all our worries that they might be mean, things went smoothly, and we’re now the proud possessors of a shiny set of keys for said apt. As we saw in the newspaper yesterday, out of the 206000 apartments in zurich, only 57 were vacant at one point in June. So, not only were we lucky to get an apartment at all, we were also extremely lucky to get our first choice, and after only one day of looking at that. Our (wonderful wonderful wonderful) relocation agent, Aline, has never had clients get a place so quickly. I think she was in even more shock than we were.

This marks a major milestone in our whole relocation saga. Tomorrow we are due to receive our airfreight shipment (which took a week longer than expected) which was meant to contain essentials to tide us over until we found a place and our main (surface) shipment arrived. Now, of course, we’re suddenly in need of things like crockery and towels and bed linen etc, and it could well be weeks before that stuff arrives. I guess that’s our fault for getting accommodation sorted so quickly ,-) We’re off to ikea afterwards to try and buy the bare essentials in furniture to start with. Coming from a country where all rental accommodation is furnished, it’s quite a shock when you have to buy things like light fittings and curtains as everyone is expected to supply their own.

Anyway, we have an early start as the shipment is being delivered at 07:30 tomorrow morning (it was a choice between that and wait another 10 days), so i’d better head off to bed.