REI Passage 2 Tent – 2.2 kg

REI Passage 2 Footprint – 250 g

Thermarest Z-Lite Sleeping Pad – 400 g

Mountain Hardware Pinole +20 Sleeping Bag – 1.4 kg

Snowpeak Trek 900 Cook Set – 170 g

Vargo Hexagon Wood Stove – 120 g

Strikeforce Ultimate Fire Starter – 100 g

(2) Platypus softBottle 34 – 70 g

Sawyer Complete 2l Filter System – 450 g

Ontario ASEK – 550 g

Chinese WJQ-308 – 900 g

120’ 4mm Paracord – 20g

Leatherman Surge Multitool – 340 g

(2) Solar Lite Hybrid 120 Flashlight – 400 g

(2) MSR Ultralite Packtowel – 180 g

SOL Scout Survival Kit – 150 g

Adventure Mountain Fundamentals Medical Kit – 1 kg

Henry Repeating US Survival AR-7 – 1.1 kg

(200) .22 LR Hollowpoint – 730 g

Asolo TPS 520 GV Boots – 1.7 kg

(4) Boxer Briefs – 320 g

(4) Socks – 320 g

(4) OXT Tech Long Sleeve Shirt – 480 g

(2) Lightweight BDU Pants – 370 g

Mont-Bell Dry Light Tec Jacket – 310 g

Vented Explorer Hat – 120 g

Glacier Sunglasses – 100 g

(4) Bandana – 120 g

Water [2 liters] – 2kg

Dry Food [rice, beans, etc] – 1 kg

Total weight – 19.7 kg (43.4 lbs)

So, you want to build an object from a much-loved Nintendo 64 game?

First, fire up your game in the 1964 emulator with the Nemu plugin for VRML extraction.  Proceed through the game until your desired object is rendered on screen (it doesn’t need to be super clear – you’ll see why in a minute) and then use the plugin to dump the graphics RAM to VRML.

Fire up Meshlab and import the VRML file produced by the emulator:

Oh man!  It’s the whole damn Temple of Time!  That’s why the quality of the on-screen render wasn’t super important when we exported.  Time to start deleting geometry:

Keep going until all that’s left is the object you want!

Export your model as a PLY file.  Use ‘binvox’ to voxelize the model.  the -d parameter sets the dimension of the cube inside of which the model will be rendered.  The number you supply will constrain the object in “minecraft block units” on its largest axis to that number.  In this case, we used 64 because I had 64 blocks of height between sea level and the build height limit.

Now use ‘viewvox’ to open up the resulting binvox file.  We’re almost there!

Orient the camera to look down from above and then restrict the view to a single slice at a time:

Build that slice in minecraft, then increment the slice index and build the next slice.  Continue through all 64 height layers.  Build the object.  Pretty soon, you have this:

Colt Anaconda

Both are chambered for .44 magnum and .44 special, so I could keep both fed with one big pile of ammunition.  Specials for cheap range shooting, and magnums for hog hunting and playing Dirty Harry with drunk douchebags in my front yard.

The Marlin could take a Burris Scout scope or maybe even a Trijicon Reflex sight and would be pretty tight even shooting pistol magnums out to a few hundred yards at least.

1 tbsp softened butter
1 tsp salt
1 tsp black pepper
1 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp J&D’s Cheddar Bacon Salt
1/8 c minced white onion
1/4 c shredded cheddar cheese
2 strips original cut bacon, pulverized and minced into a paste
1 tbsp minced garlic
1 tsp liquid smoke

Hand-work all the ingredients into the meat, make into burgers, and grill (I guess that part is obvious)

They have been raved about by various folks who are into the burger scene, so I think it’s coming along well. Anyone have any ideas for future innovations? I’m thinking chopped mild peppers of some sort…

Game theory is bollocks.

That’s all.

Imagine you’re at a restaurant you’ve never been to before.  You order a steak, medium.  The waiter brings you a medium steak.  You eat it, pay the bill, and leave.  Unless that steak was phenomenal, you just ate a steak at a restaurant and that’s the end of that.

Imagine, now, you’re at another restaurant.  You order a steak, medium.  The waiter brings you a well-done steak.  You tell the waiter your steak is overcooked, and to please replace it.  The waiter goes into damage-control mode and rushes the offending meat back to the kitchen.  Within seconds, the house manager is at your table apologizing.  Maybe he gives you a bottle of wine on the house, maybe he comps your steak, something.  A new steak is brought to you.  This time it is cooked as you ordered it, and the chef is delivering it personally.  He apologizes as well.  He’s got an off-menu amuse-bouche plate for you to try, too.  It’s all to assuage you, to make you feel special.   Unless you are made of stone, it probably works.  You eat, pay the bill, and leave.

What happens next, however, is different.  You have a story.  It has conflict and drama, rising and falling action.  You tell your friends the saga of this restaurant and how they so effortlessly made things right, and how pleasant it all ended up being.  You would definitely eat there again, and encourage your acquaintances to check it out.

Does it matter if the steak was identical in quality to the one at the place that got it right the first time?

Working in network security, I can definitely say there is truth to this.  My most loyal customers are ones who have been the victim of some sort of malware infection, data breach, intrusion, or other nightmare.  In those scenarios, my products and services have – in a technical sense – failed.  Where I succeed, however, is in the fact that the way my team handles these incidents is off-the-charts five-star excellence.  A company paying for security that never has an incident isn’t thinking about their security.  All anti-virus vendors are equal if you never encounter anything bad.  When you slip – and everyone slips eventually – the eyes are on you.  If you wake up a bunch of engineers at three in the morning, do forensics and analysis, and hand-walk malware samples through the virus lab so you can get an engine update pushed out in less than an hour, people remember that.  They know that even though their security provider slipped – everything was taken care of beyond satisfaction.  They know that they don’t need to fret about the next time, because they know how it will go down.  Even feeling the sting of the incident, switching to a new vendor seems like madness.  They’ll be an unknown, and when they slip you’ll judge their response against what just happened.  It’s all too risky, and network security is all about risk – avoidance, reduction, and management.

Montgomery Scott said to always multiply your repair time estimates by 2.  Say it’s going to take two hours, then do it in one.

Underpromise, Overdeliver.

There are lessons, and then there are unintended consequences.

Let’s go back to the restaurant.

Your close friend goes in and orders a steak.  It comes out exactly as ordered.  Near the end of the meal, your friend calls the waiter over and is visibly agitated.

“I heard you give out free appetizers here, and wine.  I’ve been told the service here really goes to extreme lengths to make sure everyone is happy – and while the meal is certainly fine, I really don’t feel like anyone’s gone out of their way to take care of me.”

What should the waiter say?  At this point, he’s trapped.  What can he do?  Encourage and exacerbate the situation by folding to this customer, perhaps.  He could get offended, he could push back some.  He’s in an untenable situation.  The manager and chef are complicit, too; calling them out will be no panacea.  Everyone showed up and did their job the best that they could, and someone is disappointed.

How do you recover from that?

Let’s move this narrative along.

Your friend tells you about how wrong you were, about how poorly he was treated at this restaurant you so highly recommended.  Neither of you are likely to go back, because one unmitigated failure – however perceptual – overcomes any number of soaring successes.  The story of the cock-sucking bridge builder comes to mind.  What went wrong?

You went in with moderate expectations of the restaurant, and those expectations were likely quite similar to what the restaurant staff expected of themselves.  They actually failed, but then in recovery the raised the bar.  Your anecdote gave your friend a very high bar, a level of expectation that the restaurant was not prepared for.  Everyone was doomed to disappointment from the beginning.

Objectively, the restaurant has made three steaks.  Two of them were correct.  66.7% accuracy.  That doesn’t sound too great, but it’s all about perception.  In your eyes, you don’t see the first one.  They’re 1 for 1, 100%.  For your friend, 0 for 1 – 0%.  The big killer here is the person who seems them as having failed isn’t the person that got served the bad steak at all!

How can an organization – or even an individual – manage expectations at any kind of scale?

Thankfully, and damningly, scale is irrelevant.  At the smallest quantum of interaction – the personal relationship – expectations are constantly recalculated based on a decaying average algorithm that is inscrutably unique to every person.

How many of you have had a teacher or parent tell you, with a look of sadness, that they had expected much more of you?  It’s the “you” in that statement that burns the most.  Other kids may have performed even worse than you – but this is about expectations.

When you disappoint someone important to you, you make a note of it.  If they’re important enough, you intend to give extra effort to avoid that particular failure in the future.  When a relationship is an incalculable series of triumphs and failures, you cannot know where the bar is at any point in time.  When confronted with the awkwardness of a misstep, if communication fails, it will either be a race to the top or a race to the bottom.  If both people are simultaneously disappointed in each other, which do you think it’s going to be?

It’s the answer to that question that I believe is the measure of us, and have yet to be happy with the answer.

* Finally listen to his old answering machine tape

* Let it all out after however many years it’s been

Everything I’ve ever accomplished adds up to nothing.  All that I touch turns to ash.  There is no future in a world where the rules are unpredictable, where people’s decisions and actions abide by no algorithm.

We’re all faking it, trying to make sense of chaos viewed through a tiny window.  I spend so much time and effort arranging and classifying, only to step outside and realize I’ve seen only a minuscule fraction of the tempest.  Nobody is a person.  No person is alive.

I’ve explored so much, looking for meaning, even at times for happiness.  Those things exist but only as noise.  There is no signal.  I have fully come to comprehend the questions I’ve been facing.  Unfortunately, I do not like the answers.  I had hoped for better.

I’ve been a part of my life for about three decades now, and empirically have found the experience to be highly overrated and unseemly.  I don’t want to do it anymore.