ScratchyBadgers itching post

AFF Level 1 video

2008-10-22T16:36:00.003+01:00

Courtesy of google, I hope they don't remove this like they did my tandem dive, SOB's.

Name change and AFF

2008-10-20T15:50:00.007+01:00

I say goodbye to "Me, My Pipes and I" and 'ello to "ScratchyBadgers Itching Post". The pipes and been on hold for a while whilst I cop out and get quick nicotine fixes from Swedish Snus. Now summer has past, autumn is here and winter is approaching the pipes should come back into rotation but I've found a new drug to feed the cravings, C₉H₁₃NO₃ or adrenaline. I come by copious amounts this wonderful adrenal excretion by way of skydiving.

Ever since the tandem jump I did last year for Breast Cancer Care I said I would start going for my BPA 'A' license. The tandem was so much fun I just had to do it again, but this time I didn't want to be intimately strapped to another guys torso.

October 11th was my ground training, it took most of the day and the light was leaving so I was scheduled for my AFF level 1 the next day. Typical British weather and my luck conspired against me so jumping was rescheduled for the next Saturday.

Saturday's weather held out and I was a go for my first jump. After a check of my arch position, reserve drill practice and AFF 1 drills I was climbing into a jumpsuit and gear then squeezed like a sardine into the plane with some sport jumpers, my two instructors and camera man. Apprehension sets in after 10,000 ft and before I know it I'm making my way to the door, get into position, do my HOTEL check and am out the door. Everything I learnt on the ground and was ready to do was left at an altitude of 13,000 ft.

I completely forgot to do my H.A.S.P. check and had to be reminded to do my three practice rip cord touches. The main canopy opened fine and I was talked down to a safe landing in the field. Jump 1 over and I was completely pissed off with myself. Oh well, put mistakes behind me because I moved on to AFF level 2.

Food, water and a quick chat to the wife, bro and kid and in for a debrief of my jump and briefing on the next jump.

The AFF level 2 jump went great, HOTEL, H.A.S.P, two PRCT's, a turn to the right, a turn to the left, lock on and wave off at 6000ft and throw main pilot chute. The main canopy was big, square and there, no problems with the canopy or lines, no twists and slider was where it should have been. Two flares, left and right turn all OK so it was off to the holding area. The wind was getting up I was again talked down to a landing. This time I was in a field way out in the drop zone. I'm not sure why I was brought down so far away, I think I could have made it much closer. Sweating like a pig I made it back to the packing shed and was pleased to hear this jump was one of the best AFF 2 jumps my primary instructor had seen. I was far happier with myself. I only hope I can keep my wits about me like that again next time. Don't concentrate on the fact you're in apparent nothingness plummeting towards the ground, concentrate on arching and doing the drills as soon as you're out and forget about everything else.

The winds were too high for student jumpers after this so it was in the car and back home. I was glad about the weather this time and not getting to jump again, I was fucked. I wish my DVD was taken on my second jump and not the first, I'd rather not see how I screwed up level 1.

Tobacco Cellar

2007-03-05T15:24:00.000Z

There's this great place called The Online Pipe Tobacco Cellar. I use it to keep trac of what is stashed in my office cupboard.I was finding adding tins to be a pain. You see, I'm very impatient and searching through the large list of blends (even though it's ordered alphabetically) was annoying when adding new tins to my cellar. I saved the HTML of the page and spent an hour hacking together some javascript (instead of working >:) ) to make searching for blends far easier. I contacted the maintainers to see if they're interested in my changes. I'd like it if they wanted to use them. I'd find them useful and I'm quite sure others would as well.

It's only simple, it's just a text box to type your search text in, as you type it iterates over the blend list and jumps to the matching entry, it even allows for searching of next and previous matches. It would mean I didn't waste my time ;) If they don't use it I suppose I could always turn it into greasemonkey script so I at least get to use it ;)

Retail Therapy to cure Stir Crazy?

2007-03-02T17:00:00.000Z

With the crappy weather and crappy work keeping stuck in this crappy house for far too long I went a little stir crazy.

I got bored and I went spending in an attempt to get rid of the crazies. I bought a nice new Wild Olive pipe from Jobert Pipes in South Africa. It's very nice, superb grain, a larger bowl than I'd expected even though the dimensions were given on the website. I prefer smaller bowled pipes as I don't waste so much baccy but this is going to be great on a little camping trip I'm thinking of. Since I'll have all the time I want, I'll be able to smoke a full bowl without any rush and might actually smoke to the bottom of the bowl.

In addition to the pipe for the trip I bought a hammock. Not a regular lounge in the garden type hammock, an expedition hammock from Hennessy Hammock. It's small, it's light, it's quick to set up (apparently). I spent a little time practising tieing the figure-8 knot before taking it out to experiment setting it up. I was at it for quite some time. I cose tree's that were too fat for a first try, then too close. I eventually had it assembled and then ran out of time and packed it away using it's neat little snakeskins and stuffed it in the stuff sack. It has to be the first tent like piece of equipment I've managed to get back into the original bag with no trouble. I realized when I got home that I'd tied it to the tree wrongly, and didn;t attach the rainfly correctly, so better luck next time.

It's going to be great camping in the hammock and smoking my new pipe, I'm really looking forward to it. I just received a small box of Cornell and Diehl baccy blends as well but I'm gonna have to keep this one hidden from SWMBO ;)

I don't know if it really worked as therapy, since I am still stuck at home, only now I want to get out of the place even more so I can try the hammock. I think I only made things worse!

HenPlus patch

2006-11-22T16:40:00.000Z

Found a bug in HenPlus, the describe command doesn't show the decimal digits on numeric fields. This has bit me a couple of times when reverse engineering some tables from a customers DB. I did a little poking around and fixed the issue in version 0.9.7. It's not thoroughly tested but works fine for me so far. I contacted the coder and sent him the patch but havent heard back so I'm posting it here.

The patch:


--- henplus-0.9.7-orig/src/henplus/commands/DescribeCommand.java 2006-03-19 23:11:26.000000000 +0000
+++ henplus-0.9.7/src/henplus/commands/DescribeCommand.java 2006-11-21 16:33:23.000000000 +0000
@@ -257,8 +257,14 @@ public class DescribeCommand extends Abs
                             row[2] = new Column(colname);
                             String type = rset.getString(6);
                             final int colSize = rset.getInt(7);
+                            final int colDp = rset.getInt(9);
                             if (colSize > 0) {
-                                type = StringAppender.start(type).append("(").append(colSize).append(")").toString();
+                                if(colDp == 0) {
+                                    type = StringAppender.start(type).append("(").append(colSize).append(")").toString();
+                                }
+                                else {
+                                    type = StringAppender.start(type).append("(").append(colSize).append(",").append(colDp).append(")").toString();
+                                }
                             }
 
                             row[3] = new Column(type);

DomainBuster/Fast24

2006-11-07T13:51:00.000Z

Well, if anyone is reading this who has been trying to contact me at kronos@fluxcode.net,.. forget it. Domainbuster, the cheapo domain hosting I was with have royal screwed me over. They handled my mail an web hosting.

They are owned by Fast24 Ltd. They used to be quite good a couple of years ago but things went sour. Their service was shit for the last couple of months. I was looking into moving my domains somwhere else when they fucked up. I can get no mail, the domain for a family members website was also handled by them and is screwed just the same.

What is worse is that I can no longer move the domain since I require them to update the TAG of one domain and give me an auth code for the moving of the other. I'm pretty well fucked. I've had my domain for over 4 years and I thought it would always be around no matter where I moved to without using some web based email. Fast24 screwed that up for me, wankers.

I don't know what, if anything I can do to get my domain back. Fast24 have done a runner, there are reports they are not even in the building they worked from anymore. The boss has fucked off and can't be found or contacted.

Domainbuster busted my domain. Fuckers. It should have been a warning really, but they used to be quite good. Now domainfuckers or fuck24 are more suitable names for them.

Happy Lappy Dance

2006-10-17T15:48:00.000+01:00

Sorry, it's nothing to do with real lap dances so most of you will be performing an about turn right about...... now.

I dusted the cobwebs off my wallet and sprung 600 goodies on a laptop. It's a nice little (well, actually, rather large) Acer Aspire 5612. It's got a 15.4" screen, 100G HD, wireless and wired networking, 1G of RAM, Core Duo 2300E processor, built in webcam and other little bits 'n' bobs.

I had a little fun getting rid of the data partition and resizing the main partition put on by acer so I could stuff linux on the thing. The main issue was after partitioning Acers eRecovery software went nuts when it couldn't find the data partition and decided to max out the CPU.

To do the partitioning I used the gparted LiveCD which is without doubt f'ing awesome. Very straight forward, very reliable and it got the job done nicely.

I had linux on it within a couple of hours, Ubuntu to be specific, which is also f'ing awesome. I've been using linux for about 12 years now and know my way around but it's nice to not bother sometimes. My biggest pain was getting the wireless working with WPA using NetworkManager. NetworkManager just refused to allow me to use WPA so I dumped it and did it myself. Now, wireless works great with the ipw3945 driver and wpa_supplicant, I just wish my wireless access point was as reliable. Wireless sucks when the AP freezes and has to be power cycled.

The only thing I haven't got working under linux is the webcam which isn't that much of a loss, but it just looks like there isn't a driver for it yet so I'll just wait.

It's a nice machine, it's quite fast and very comfortable to use and certainly worth the money. The only things I have to do is get an extra cable for the power supply so I can plug it into US sockets and get a nice bag for it then I'll be all set to take it on my business trip. Oh, and I have to get apache2, tomcat and jboss going, but that's too much like work so I'll leave that along for a while ;)

I think I have a problem

2006-10-11T11:25:00.000+01:00

In the pipe world there are two serious afflictions that plague it's bretheren. I suffer from them also. They are conditions of the mind that are impossible to treat once infected, although the syptoms can be alleviated by indulgement. These problems are:

PAD: Pipe Aquisition Disorder, and TAD: Tobacco Aquisition Disorder.

I don't have them as bad as some, although they are always there. I am always looking for the next pipe to purchase or the next tobacco blend to try. I have a list of tobaccos I've heard about, and when finances allow (or the urge gets the better of me) I will buy. I already have 10 pounds of tobacco on my shelves, much of it in original unopened tins or sealed in jars aging. Given the rate at which I smoke, this will keep me going for many years. This may be good given that it looks like tobacco will be outlawed in years to come due to the anti tobacco zealots. This just serves to fuel my disorders as I must accumulate as much as I can while I still can.

I'm currently awaiting a new pipe to arrive. It's being made as I write this. It's the smokersforums.org pipe. This year it is being made by Stephen Downie, a regular of the board and down right awesome pipe maker from Canada. His designs are different and can easily be identified as his because they have a very distinctive look. A look that appeals to me very much as I like every single pipe I've seen of his. There are 55 being made and one of them is mine. I managed to get away with ordering one as soon as I heard about them and have been waiting for almost a year. The time has almost come and I am eager to be the owner of a Downie Pipe as I always wanted to own one but unfortunately the cost has always been a little too much. The issues I'm currently struggling with are 1) What to smoke in it, something I already have or something new and 2)What will the next pipe aquisition be?

It never ends, and I'm not complaining ;)

Strange things happen?

2006-10-11T11:03:00.000+01:00

My wife passed her UK driving test recently and she took the car out on her own for the first time since moving back here. I have been driving her car on and off for a year. When she got back home I went to get something out of the boot to find that the lock was broken and hanging out of the door. If I hadn't have been able fix it her car wouldn't have been very usuable, and she only just got her freedom with it.

This reminded me of the time I finally got around to setting up her own computer downstairs. She would no longer have to wait until I had finished working to borrow my computer to check her mail etc. We had her future machine a long time, it was our main machine when we lived in the US, it ran for nearly 5 years there. I set it all up again for her and had it running in my office for a couple of weeks while I tinkered with it. When I set it up downstairs for her, she had it a day before it broke. It wasn't in any of the replaceable parts, it was the motherboard, an old motherboard for a processor type that new motherboards are difficult to come by for. I ended up getting her a new machine, which she still didn't get for a month due to a buggy BIOS which caused serious issues with linux, but that's a whole different story!

Why do these things happen to her? things that she has waited so long and patiently for? (okay, so not too patiently, nagged on and off(and rightly so) until I got off my lazy butt and did something about).

Leylandii, oh hoy I hate thee

2006-08-28T15:20:00.000+01:00

Leylandii, what purpose do you serve, other than to frustrate the shit out of me?

My brother and I spent all of sunday chopping down the infernal plant. The previous owner of my house, a landscape gardener who should have known better planted about 30 of these things in the back yard. He had expertly trimmed and pruned them in a very thick hedge along the outer edge of the garden. The garden isn't very big to start with and by putting the trees he had removed and area of about 600 square feet. The poor old lady next door hasn't been able to grow potatos in her garden since they were planted, the leylandii would suck up all the available moisture stunting the growth of her spuds.

They're not very nice to remove either, even the green bits are as sharp as needles, the brown bits are worse and my mauled arms prove it. Thankfully all that is left of them is a very short stump now, which will soon be drilled and filled with Dead Root stump killer.

Farewell suckers, I shall not miss thee!

I've got all the fuckin work I need

2006-08-24T18:39:00.000+01:00

I watched Weeds last night, a rather like the show and it has some good music. Last night had a song with the words "I've got all the fuckin' work I need", and it was awesome so I went on a hunt for it. It turns out they are the only words in the entire song, repeated over and over. I could relate to it. It's a song called Work Song by Dan Reeder. I found some more of his stuff on MySpace and loved them as well. It's great stuff, but not for those who don't like bad language.

Those haunting chimes

2006-08-24T13:36:00.000+01:00

I think I've turned into a grumpy old man and I'm only thirty. I used to love hearing the icecream van play it's music nearby, it meant imminant sugar rush. Now when I hear it I want to rip the speakers off of the thing and make the driver eat them. It's the summer holidays here and the icecream van comes around at about the same time every day, right when my two year old is taking her afternoon nap! She stirs when she hear him, sometimes she wakes and I am left crossing my fingers and hoping that she'll calm down and go back to sleep. But it gets worse, he doesn't come past once, he comes past twice! Just as she is getting back to sleep he'll come past again playing that incredibly annoying music. We're getting double glazing soon since the current window frames are somewhat lacking, I only hope that they block most of the noise as advertised and that icecream filled hell hole on wheels is unable to wake her again.

The only problem,... they won't be installed until late september, not long after the neighborhood kids have gone back to school and the iceream van has gone to haunt some other poor soul.

So does hating the icecream van alone make me a grumpy old man,... probably not, but I also hate the neighborhood kids. They're noisy, unruly and they keep hanging out in the street outside my house. The next door neighbours kids must have an increased mass density to normal human beings, I can hear them run through the house and upstairs like a bunch of rhinos doing the hurdles. Their football keeps landing in our front yard and I keep swearing the next time I'm gonna keep it or pop it.

Back To The Future II was on TV last night and I found myself really wanting Biff's cane with the brass fist, it would be excellent for shaking at the little blighters whilst mumbling to myself as they walk past my house.

Smoking ban side effect

2006-08-23T11:19:00.000+01:00

I've been reading stories lately how the oldest form of tobacco use is making a comeback due to the current smoking bans. Snuff, more specifically nasal snuff is growing in popularity because it is an easy way to use tobacco in places that prohibit smoking. Nasal snuff is tobacco ground to a powder which may then be flavoured/scented. A small pinch of snuff can then be gently drawn up into the nose with a light sniff. Until recently I didn't realize snuff was tobacco, I had asked about it as a child after seeing antique snuff boxes at my old barbers but no-one ever said it was tobacco, I'm not sure if they ever knew. It used to be used my miners who were unable to smoke down in the mines so they didn't cause an explosion, now it seems people are using it in pubs where they cannot smoke to stop non-smokers from exploding, which I believe many of them think they will do if they catch a mere whiff of the fowl weed.

There is an amazing variety of nasal snuff available. There are different levels of moisture, medicated (these contain menthol and/or camphor), flavours ranging from coffee or aniseed to fruit flavoured and plain. I've given it a try and find I quite like it, much to the disgust of my wife. My current favourite is McChrystals Apricot. A lot of the manufacturers of snuff have been around for a very long time, such as Samuel Gawith, Gawith Hoggarth, McChrystals and Wilsons & Co. Sharrow.

Remember, if you decide to try nasal snuff, sniff very lightly, as if sniffing a flower and don't sniff too deeply. Snuff isn't meant to be snorted, it is not meant to be drawn into the lungs, throat or sinuses. Try a small amount at first (such as a light dusting on a finger tip). You may feel the need to sneeze, this is normal, so don't leave the open tin with the lid off close by where you might blow it everywhere.

Snuff has the effect of causing the nasal passages to moisten which leads me to one of the main reasons I like snuff. Ever since trying snuff I have hardly been affected by hay fever, they say the increase in moisture helps stop pollen attacking. I have not taken a single Claritin so far this year by now my allergies are rampant and I'm popping pills like crazy. I also thoroughly enjoy the scent, but have not yet felt a buzz of any sort, probably because I use very little.

Ban's don't work, prohibition in the US didn't work. Ban's will only force a change in use or drive things underground, something history has shown us but is ignored.

Intro

2006-08-22T10:56:00.000+01:00

So I've created a blog, and the inevitable question is 'What should I post here?' I've given it a bit of thought, not nearly enough though so ideas a little sketchy and like most things in my mind,.. unorganised.

Since you are probably wondering WTF?!? with respect to the title of this place I shall explain. Contrary to popular opinion I like smoking, and I chose to smoke a pipe. I can't stand those nasty cigarette things that are made mostly of garbage tobacco, mixed with unknown chemicals and used purely for the efficient delivery nicotine into the bloodstream. I chose the pipe and smoke it because I like to, it affords me the time and chance to relax, think about events and my like and the world, to ponder things that need pondering. I do not chain smoke, I am not hooked on nicotine, I am not a slave to it, I can, and do refrain from smoking for long periods of time. I smoke when I feel like it. Governments and people who believe they know best for other other people have forced their opinion and values upon an untold number of smokers all over the world, telling them when and where they can and can not exercise their personal will to smoke. I believe in personal choice, I believe that pubs and clubs should be able to choose whether they allow smoking, or ventilated separate smoking areas within their premises. Let the market decide, if people don't like a pub because they allow smoking the pub will either go out of business or change it's policy. It exemplifies the current controlling, all seeing nanny state mentality that is prevalent in the current populace. It is wrong, it stinks, and it stinks far worse than any pipe tobacco.

So, now that I'm off of my soapbox, and those who disagree with my opinions have vacated the area I'll get on with what I was going to say. I will be posting about things that interest me, gadgets, technology, music, pipes and tobaccos, cool shit, funny shit, stupid shit and downright weird shit. Do you see the trend?