Ammo Dream

We were on our way to a shooting event of some kind, one of my brothers, I think it was Andy, and I. We came across a military ammunition facility and thinking this might be a good place to score some cheap ammo, we stopped in.

We came across three women taking apart pallet loads of ammo. I asked the one in charge if it might be possible to buy some ammo. She was aghast at the thought of buying it. Her attitude was something like "take a look around you, what do you think we're doing here? Take whatever you need." Wow, such an invitation. They've finished whatever they are doing, so I head into a warehouse.

I come across a stack of boxes of ammo. The boxes are like regular ammo boxes, olive drab metal with watertight lids, but these kind of an odd shape, like 6 inches wide by 2 feet long by 2 inches tall. I open it up. It's hand gun ammo, but not a type I need. It looks like 380 or something similar, though "one half" sticks in my mind. I can't use it, but maybe somebody else at the shoot can, so I start lugging it back to our truck. I meet my brother coming the other way and try to persuade him to take the box back to the truck, but he's having none of it, and goes on by me.

I put the box of ammo on the floor of the cab of our truck and go looking for something we can use. I go back in the warehouse. The warehouses are old dark brick with concrete floors and multiple large rooms. Pallets are stacked neatly one, two, three or more high as you expect to see in a warehouse.

I find stacks of pallets of ammo, but none of it is a caliber I need, so I decide to go back to my original plan and see if I can buy some, so I head for the office. On the way I come across one of the women who was unstacking pallets when I first arrived. She's driving some kind of little pusher, standing up, pushing a long row of carts. She looks absorbed in what she's doing, so I don't bother her. I stay away from this train of carts, and follow her along, as she is going in the same direction as I am.

We get to the "office", which is just a section of the warehouse floor near the back that is given over to desks. The train of carts goes in an aisle right through this office area. There are some people standing there talking so I approach them thinking I might get some answers. The are involved in their conversation and it takes a while to get anyone's attention. One middle aged manager type finally deigns to talk to me and says sure, he can sell me some ammo.

We are outside looking through pallets scattered on the lawn. We are looking for 50 caliber and thirty-ought-six ammo, but we aren't finding any. He has become distracted and is no longer focused on our mission (my mission). A semi-tractor towing a lowboy trailer arrives slightly uphill from us. Some army guys are unloading a pickup truck from the lowboy, but instead of rolling it off the back of the trailer, they tip it over the side. This startles me into moving away as the pickup is going to roll over and crush us. My companion is not concerned. He puts up a hand to stop the truck, which is enough as the hood of the truck has run into a pallet of stuff and stopped the truck from rolling any further. Hard to tell if this was realistic. I suspect in real life the rear end of the truck would have kept coming. But that would depend on the steepness of the hill.

Philz Coffee

Diligent daughter ran across this place last time she was here, so naturally we had to stop by and sample the wares. We were so busy goofing off that we didn't get around to stopping in till we were on the way to airport. We got a pretty amazing show. It's about 9AM and there are a lot of people standing around waiting for coffee. Once we get past them there is virtually no line at the register, but the cashier tells us to repeat our order to the barristas: they don't keep track of what you order. There are two guys making drinks and they are just flying. Right away one of them wants to know what we are drinking, which makes me think that our drinks will be ready soon.

They don't have an espresso machine, they are making drip coffee. They each have four funnels in front of them, a hot water dispenser between them, and a coffee grinder on the counter in back of them. Each drink involves putting in a paper filter in the funnel, pouring in the right amount of coffee and then the water. Slap, bam, boom, no hesitation, no fooling around and the drinks appear, one after another. But not our drinks. I think the guy we were waiting on must have made about 10 drinks before he got to ours and he made them all correctly. Just amazing.

P.S. While I was in San Francisco I stopped ordering regular coffee and started ordering lattes. Every regular coffee I got tasted like Starbucks coffee: way, way too strong. A latte is just coffee with milk, which is how I drink my coffee anyway. Kind of stupid to have to pay extra just for the fancy name, but at least it's drinkable.

San Francisco Crazies

We ran into several odd people while we were in San Francisco. Our first one was a woman working at the local Safeway collecting grocery carts. She's hustling carts, bagging groceries and carrying on conversations with customers left, right and center.

On Saturday we went downtown and a couple of women asked us for money in very polished and polite phrasing, not your typical requests for "spare change". We also saw a tap dancer and several musicians. The tap dancer was a black man about seven feet tall and a hundred and fifty pounds, no shirt and he's dancing on a steel plate about two feet in diameter. We saw guys playing trumpet, saxophone and drums. One mad drummer in front of the Ferry Building had a sign promoting his YouTube video. He also had a group of fans dancing. Then there was this pair of guys with the accordion and drum:
Click the pick to see the video.

On Sunday we went from a walk in the park out to Land's End. We saw this guy going the other way. He seemed a little off. He was looking at some plants by the side of the path and he pulled one up. He only has one sock and he has an empty id holder clipped to his shirt. On our way back we catch up with this same guy, and again he is looking at something on the ground by the side of the path. He picks it up and examines it. He notices us walking by and he turns to me and hands me a key telling me something about his "soistahs" and to take a few days for myself at Goth (Gough?) & Broadway. Then he walks off on another path, smiling and waving. Why did he pick me? Later on daughter tells me she could smell alcohol on him.

On Monday we spent some time walking around the Fisherman's Wharf area, which is mega-tourist land. We're walking down the sidewalk. The edge of sidewalk along the street has stuff on it like parking meters, plants, signs, trash cans, etc. Up ahead we see a couple walking and just as they pass by a bush, the bush leans out and roars at them. Gave them a start and gave everyone else a good laugh. 30 seconds later the performance repeats itself. I howled. I gave the guy running this ruse a buck. Funniest thing I've seen in a while.

Tuesday we went to Haight-Ashbury just to see what it looked like. There was one black man sitting on a box on a corner yelling his head off. It was mostly unintelligible, but occasionally I thought I could hear him say "Get A Room".

On Wednesday, on our way to the airport we were stopped at a light and we saw a woman stop in the middle of crosswalk and put on some kind of performance. She might have talking to someone in another car, or someone we couldn't see, or someone who wasn't there. She was gesturing and, for want of a better word, posing. It was quite a show.

The Parable of the Two Programmers

While I was in San Francisco I found an apparently simple number puzzle on the comics page of the local paper called Challenger. I spent a few minutes trying to figure it out, but when the answer didn't jump out at me it began to look like work and I bagged it. Still it was intriguing, and since it involved numbers and simple rules of arithmetic, I should be able to write a simple program to solve it when I got home, which I did. The program is simple, but it is not elegant. It uses the brute force technique of simply trying one possible solution after another until it happens upon one that works. It took me about a half hour to write it, and five hours to run to completion. Seems there was a bug in my code. I fixed the bug and sent it off again, and five hours later it had again run through all the possible answers without finding a solution. Found and fixed the (apparently) last remaining bug. This time it found a solution in just under 20 minutes. So it works. It is not elegant, or quick. A different problem could take hours to solve.

Now I want to store it someplace on the web, mostly for practice. This particular piece of code is not particularly useful, but I might have other stuff I want to post, and someplace that programmers visit might be good. I came across a site one time that purported to store snippets of code, and that kind of seemed like a good thing as well. I was sure I bookmarked it, but now I cannot find it, so I go Googling and I find a bunch. Looking around I find one site with a blurb promoting

The Parable of the Two Programmers

which is a very fine story of life in the programming lane.

I tried Dream-In-Code, but after I posted my program, I couldn't find it. Not only that, their list of snippets does not appear to be in any logical order, nor is there a sorting ability. They have a search capability, but it didn't help. Worst of all though, is it is slow. I have no more time to spend on this right now, so I posted the program as a Google document. Not the best solution, but it will have to do for now.

I'm Back

Just got back from a week in San Francisco with my daughter visiting my brother Dan, his wife and new baby (!!!). Baby is only two months old. It's been a long time since I've been around a kid this small. It was fun. I'm so much older than her it's like she's my granddaughter.

We hiked around town, went out to eat, did a little shopping (I bought a battery for my watch). I finished reading The Omnivore's Dilemma. It is an amazing book. He covers more ground in one volume than you could get out of a dozen lesser books. It will take me some time to digest it.

I wanted another book for the flight home, but I was pretty beat, so I picked up something light at the airport bookstore: Fearless Fourteen by Janet Evanovich. Funny murder mystery. I get a kick out of it every time I open it.

Paranoia (or common sense?) kept me from putting up a note explaining my absence here. I could have put up a few post-dated posts before leaving, but that would have required planning ahead. I had access to a computer, so I could have posted while I was there, but it was nice not to be slaving away at the computer for a while.

Anyway, I was away, I had a good time, and now I'm back.

It's 6:23 AM

It's 6:23 AM. It's been that time for the last four days, at least according to my watch. I think I need a new battery. Target doesn't do watch batteries. That's the only place I've been lately that one might think would have a watch battery. Oh, well. Today's another day. Maybe I'll find one today.

Slowest Movies In The World

Claudia Cardinale & Henry Fonda

We watched Down By Law yesterday evening and Once Upon A Time In The West tonight. Boy, they were slow. The Sergio Leone (made famous by Clint Eastwood's spaghetti Westerns) Western, with all the great actors was two and a half hours long. Lots of long, slow-moving scenes punctuated with gunfire. And then we have Claudia Cardinale's bosom. That was a pleasant diversion. Henry Fonda (1905-1982) plays a bad guy.


Down By Law was shot in black and white and is some sort of art house film. It's got Tom Waits in it, for Pete sake. He and another guy get set up and end up in jail with Roberto Benigni of Life Is Beautiful fame. Time drags for them and for us. The only break is the "I scream for ice cream" scene. It is pretty good.

Eventually though Roberto figures a way out and the three of them escape. After days (weeks? months?) lost in the swamp they stumble upon a road, and eventually, a roadside cafe. Roberto goes inside to check it out and leaves the other two stumble bums outside. He's supposed to give them the all clear, but he doesn't. Eventually (again!) our two stumble bums go to find out what's happened to their Italian buddy. What's happened is that he has fallen in love with the lovely, single, Italian proprietoress of this fine institution, and forgotten all about them.