Standard Mischief

Not here, over at New Jovian Thunderbolt’s place, his first.

My first was a yearling buck, and I nailed it with a projectile in the “over 35,000,000 grain” class, if you know what I mean. There I was, minding my own business when Bam! My first hunt ended on a successful note, with the meat already tenderized even.

A passer-by wanted it, but I parleyed a half steak^H^H^H stake into skinning lessons. After showing me where the scent glands were and removing the skin and guts, he quartered the meat with a sawzall. (This is not something I’d do nowadays because we cut right down the spine. Prions scare me, so avoiding brain and spine matter seems prudent.)

I took mine home and brined it in a few 5 gallon buckets in the fridge. That weekend, not knowing any better, I took a hunk of meat right from the tenderloin and ground it up in the Cuisinart. I mixed it about 5 to 1 with some pork sausage, and that made some pretty amazing bambi burgers.

Yea, it was taken out of season by accident, and possession of a member of the state’s herd of deer without a permit seems to somehow be illegal, but on the flip side, I’m pretty sure the state would balk at paying for the damage the deer that it asserts it owns caused against my personal property.

Besides, I already managed to take care of all the incriminating evidence.

Apparently there are shortages of the liquid version of Tamiflu, so the CDC has published a handy recipe for whipping up a batch for your kid that has issues swallowing pills.

I find this interesting because it already takes, starting from scratch, six years of study nowadays to become a pharmacist in the US. While they them may be able to technically compound at that point, I believe that many go on and take on additional training to specialize in that branch of practice.

In fact, if I had to wager, I’d bet that compounding without a licence was illegal, (but I don’t carry two lawyers around in my pocket along with the entire US and Maryland state code, so don’t take this as legal or medical advice)

The Brotherhood and Sisterhood of the Collective Compounding Pharmaceutics weigh in:

I originally got wind of this story via Lifehacker, where there’s this comment from a member of the Pharmacist Guild:

@idleuser: I completely agree. I’m a pre-pharm student that works part time as a pharm tech and there’s no way we would recommend patients make their own Tamiflu suspensions. Half the time they can’t even take the correct amount of pills. None of the chain pharmacies around our area compound though. Our store and maybe a couple other local pharmacies do regular compounding. I would urge people to find local pharmacies that can compound Tamiflu for them instead of taking risks with their health or the health of their kids.

here’s a more useful comment further on down the page:

Alot of the Tamiflu coming from pharmacies is in capsule form from the Strategic National Stockpile. These are 75mg capsules only. For most kids under age 10, 75mg is too much; so the above method doesn’t work for them.

For patients mixing Stockpile-supplied drug from home, my state’s Health Department recommends mixing the powder from a full bottle of ten 75mg Tamiflu capsules with 50mL fruit juice. This makes a 15mg/mL solution.

I’d say that if you can’t multiply 75 mg times 10 and then divide the results by 50 mL, if you were never any good at word problems and don’t have or can’t purchase something to measure liquid in cubic centimeters, then perhaps you should leave the math and mixing to a compounding Pharmacist.

Cranky Consumer

Also, someone at Consumerist is angry that a chain pharmacy didn’t volunteer information that they can actually do compounding inhouse right off the bat. I’d say the guy was lucky he was offered that as a solution at all. I once took a prescription that required compounding to a pharmacy on a Friday before a holiday weekend and was not only told they did not do the compounding there, but that the one store that they did do the that was already closed for the holiday. I was more upset at my physician that handed me a Rx that I could not read. Had I done so, I’d have asked her to allow the pharmacy to give me two tubes of ointment and a stir stick. I eventually got my ointment, and I was just charged my usual copay instead of an expected premium.

Additional link

N.J. pharmacists face shortage of liquid Tamiflu, offer alternative

How many safety violations can you spot? While this looks like a “here, hold my beer and watch this…” moment, there are no famous last words spoken. He’s either got stainless steel balls or has already drunk too much. The classic line here is “..they only blow up in Hollywood”.

I understand what he’s doing, you spray a huge amount of inert CO2 liquid into the gas tank that is both heaver than air and will displace all the oxygen. The MIG welder too, also sprays out CO2 as a gas (If, of course you haven’t forgotten to turn the gas on first). If there’s no oxygen, there can’t be a fire or explosion (as long as everything works out as expected). Dave also knows what he’s doing. Note the cardboard placed beside him to keep the wind from blowing away the shielding gas.

If he wanted to score the safety violation hexfecta, however, I suppose he should forgo the welding mask altogether and just closed his eyes before pulling the trigger. I’ll confess to doing that before when I’ve only needed a quick tack weld or three. That welding mask is the only piece of equipment he isn’t misusing. Note how he carefully places the fire extinguisher completely out of reach.

I’ve got an urge to mail him some JB weld or a pair of jack-stands.

Weld fuel tank with gas in it 3:24 min.

Click here to view the video in a pop-up window | Direct link

Here I’m writing a big file full of zeros that I will, on my next step, mark as deleted. All the space that was taken up with that huge file will still exist, but as Gigabytes and Gigabytes of free space filled with zeros. It should all gzip down to a compact archive. I’m using the Linux command line to “Ghost” or “clone” an exact image of my laptop as a baseline for incremental backups. I had no idea I’d need to leave the thing all day though.

You can probably do almost any device I/O thing in the world with dd, but you have to be careful. Despite what anyone might tell you, dd stands for “destroy data”. Screw up the odd syntax and you’ll copy the factory fresh formatted partition all over top of your backup file.


root@StandardMischief:~# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/Preload/zerofile2 bs=1024 count=58970800
58970800+0 records in
58970800+0 records out
60386099200 bytes (60 GB) copied, 44091 s, 1.4 MB/s
.
real    734m51.051s
user    2m8.116s
sys    19m59.531s
root@StandardMischief:~#


Look at that speed! The SATA was running at a staggering 0.0109375 Gigabits/second, which is about 137 times slower than the max rate of 1.5 Gigabits/second for first generation SATA . Something is way wrong here.

So it took 12+ hours to create the file and only a second to erase it. I’m pretty sure at least part of the issue here is that I used a ridiculously small block size of 1 KB and did that 58,970,800 times in a row. We’ll see, as next run will use half of my RAM as a block size.

Update: Compression on the fly, with a larger block size


root@StandardMischief:~# time dd if=/dev/sdb1 conv=sync,noerror bs=512K | gzip -c > /home/backup/lappy486-20090905.img.gz
138767+1 records in
138768+0 records out
72754397184 bytes (73 GB) copied, 4765.18 s, 15.3 MB/s
.
real 79m25.198s
user 52m54.734s
sys 21m10.651s
root@StandardMischief:~#


So 15.3 (MB / s) = 0.11953125 Gb / s, which is both much faster and still a less than a tenth of advertised speeds. If this was my broadband connection I’d be on the phone to customer support by now.

I see I did have an error for the second run. I used a blocksize of half a MB instead of half a GB ( bs=512K instead of bs=512M). Well that’s something to try for next week.

If you’ve ever had to hand carry a package to the FedEx drop-off point and you have half a brain you’ll know that as soon as the staff scans the barcode on the label, the package becomes their responsibility. You would also assume that if someone dropped off an item and it somehow failed to be scanned, and that package dropped into a black hole, FedEx would assume that such a package never even existed. Therefore if the package is especially time-sensitive (like perhaps you are willing to spend a bit of scratch to get it there overnight), or valuable, you’d probably want to make sure that the staff actually scan the package before you let it out of your sight. Unfortunately at all the drop-off locations I frequent, this is harder than it looks. In fact, in my experience none of these work:

Hi. Could you scan my package?
Would you scan my package please?
Please scan my package. No, I don’t mind waiting my turn.
I need you to scan my package first before I leave.
No, don’t get up out of your chair. Just lift that wireless scanner that is by your right hand, point it in the general direction of this very important package that I’ve placed right here in front of you on the scale, and pull the trigger.

I’ve had a package that I insured for several thousand dollars that had to go out that night for an early AM delivery. Because of the hour, I drove the package right to the airport’s staffed FedEx point and got into a shouting match with fscking asshole behind the counter because he did not care to scan the package in front of me. Then a “manager” swung by and told an obvious lie to cover for his minion. By that time I was on the phone with FedEx. I asked if there was any special magic words I needed to say to get the hired help to do their jobs without making the whole deal a pain in the ass. They were no help.

On a different trip, I discovered the secret. Someone in front of me in line said the special magic words, which are as follows:

I need a receipt for this package.

That’s it. They need to scan the package to give you a receipt. Absolutely no stress, no issues, and no attitude.

While comments are open, I’d especially like to invite comments from those who work at FedEx, either as management/customer service/public relations employees, or front line workers. Maybe there’s another side to the story on the “i don’t wanna scan the packages in the presence of my customer” issue.