On 24

Yesterday  around evening time  Matt Winckler

Mystie and I finished the first season of 24 last night. I have thoughts upon the matter, presented to you here in a convenient bulleted list for your reading pleasure. (And, since I figure everyone except for me has seen season 1 by now, I am not holding back any spoilers. Don’t read this if you don’t want to be spoiled.)

1. Hammerless handguns do not make clicky noises when pointed at people. Neither do handguns that do have a hammer unless the user pulls the hammer back while pointing in. I’ve already remarked at length on this topic, and so I let it rest at that. My only other comment is that the bullet fairy is evidently very real, she doesn’t discriminate between good and bad guys, and as far as I can tell she doesn’t even leave you a quarter for taking your bullet.

2. Wear your dang ballistic vest! At least half of CTU’s gunshot-inflicted fatalities in this 24-hour period could have been prevented if the victims wore body armor. It is nothing short of mind-boggling that none of them do.

3. It was a very pleasant change to have an incorruptible protagonist in Senator Palmer. I love incorruptible protagonists. He did, however, present some difficulty in the suspension of disbelief by the fact that he was a major party candidate for president and incorruptible. Being a fan of fantasy, however, I did manage to get past this.

4. By the end of the series, I found myself rather annoyed with the character of Terri Bauer–to the point that I was relieved that she was fatally shot and wouldn’t be returning next season. It doesn’t seem like things should have been this way, so either I’m socially maladjusted or the screenwriters didn’t do a very good job.

5. Jack spent a lot of the first twelve hours changing his shirt but no time putting on deodorant. Not sure why exactly.

6. There were a surprising number of technical gaffes. At least three times I saw filming personnel in the shot, and I don’t usually notice these things at all–they were pretty egregious errors.

That’s about it for now. Overall I thought it was okay but not outstanding. I got tired of watching so many episodes back to back. They were interesting, but it got to the point that I felt like there had to be better things I could be spending a few hours on and I found myself wishing they’d just wrap the story up already. Not sure I’ll continue watching season 2.

Social?

Tuesday  in the early evening  Matt Winckler

The whole social networking craze passed me by like a Greyhound bus on a long stretch of desert. I never MySpaced, I never Facebooked, I never got hip. (I blame this shortcoming the fact that I don’t own an iPod.) Until now. No, I still don’t own an iPod, but I do own a Facebook account. I set it up mainly to explore the possibility of writing Facebook applications that will become immensely popular, thereby allowing me to somehow monetize them and earn a million dollars or so. This being the goal, I haven’t yet gone on a friend-searching craze, but to remind me how relatively un-hip I am my wife did go on such a craze and subsequently added about two bazillion people in the first twenty minutes or so.

Whatever.

Occupations

Monday  in the early afternoon  Matt Winckler

This is a typical catch-up post: aimless, meandering, and long. There is a slightly funny part near the end where I posit the existence of the bullet fairy, but apart from that it’s a pretty bland read. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

To get this piece of news out of the way, I’ll say that I took a job last week as a software developer with a small company here in Richland. I chose not to return to Battelle for a few reasons which are probably not relevant here, but my new position entails an office (with a window) that’s just four blocks from home, a reasonable pay raise (a massive pay raise if we’re comparing it to police work), and a very small team where I’ll have more responsibility and discretion in how to implement the software we develop. All in all, I think it will be a good fit. I’ll be starting this week.

In my other spare time, I’ve been working more on the house, finally getting around to working on my final major remodeling project, the upstairs bathroom. I’m now at the point of putting the finishing touches on the drywall and will be painting soon. In a spur-of-the-moment decision while standing in Home Depot, I chose an orange as the new color. It was supposed to be a somewhat deeper orange (”spiced pumpkin”), but on the wall it turned out to be something close to “Home Depot orange”. I went back and had them add more red to try to shift it into more of a terra cotta, but I’ve yet to put any on the wall. It might take a few iterations to get the shade right; fortunately it’s a small area.

We’ve also been rearranging the basement in an effort to make the room more useful. Previously, half of it was taken up by a large computer desk and miscellaneous “doesn’t fit anywhere else” items. Last week I took advantage of a small walk-in closet off the room and built a small desk in it, which is now serving as a handy little computer nook. In the process, I discovered that our basement (which was finished sometime in the last 5-10 years, I’m guessing) was wired by monkeys. When I plugged in the surge protector, instead of the friendly green “protected” light, it displayed the red “wiring fault” light. I plugged in my outlet tester to the wall and discovered that the outlet had an open ground. I then recalled that our home inspector had pointed this out before we purchased the house–about half the downstairs outlets had an open ground. This hadn’t mattered to us before because we never used them. However, I was not pleased with the idea of plugging in a bunch of computer hardware into such an outlet, so I began digging to diagnose and repair the problem. On removing the outlet, the problem became apparent: the ground wire was not hooked up. But not only was it not hooked up, it was clipped off back at the point where the outer cable sheathing ended. Baffled as to why anyone would possibly want to do this, I got some more copper and spliced it together so that I could wire up the ground. I then reinstalled the outlet and flipped the breaker back on, only to discover that the outlet still had an open ground.

Six hours later, I had opened up some dozen fixtures or outlets to discover the exact same story everywhere–ground wire clipped off back at the end of the cable sheathing. After fixing everything I could find, still none of them had ground. My surmise is that there is a junction box somewhere behind the wall, between the mains panel and all these fixtures, where the erstwhile electrician pulled this same little “ground is for sissies” stunt. Now, I’m no electrician, but I can’t think of any rational reason for intentionally leaving an open ground. The thing that floored me was the blatant intentionality–nigh maliciousness!–displayed in the fact that the fellow bothered to cut off all these ground wires. The other baffling thing is the fact that a bunch of other outlets on the same circuit, in the same room, are all wired correctly. Anyway, in the end I took advantage of one open-ground outlet that was placed right next to the mains panel and I piggybacked onto an existing ground going into it. Problem solved, in a hacked sort of way, and day wasted. Come to think of it, that describes pretty much all of my home improvement projects.

Mystie and I have been keeping ourselves occupied by doing a two-week trial of Blockbuster’s online rental thing and watching as much “24″ as we can manage.

Two things are universal in cinema; three things annoy me consistently: the computer that makes noise for everything it does, the gun that makes noise every time it is raised, and the cellular phone that makes a dial tone every time the person on the other end hangs up.

The poetry is lacking, but the point remains. The gun thing in particular has really started to bother me. What exactly do Hollywood sound technicians think is happening when somebody points a gun at somebody else? Something must be happening, because the gun always makes the sound of somebody racking the slide. Of course, in the third of the time that the actor actually does rack the slide, a live round is never ejected from the chamber. This in turn means that all this time during the tense sneaking-around scene, they’ve been sneaking around pointing their gun at things without a round in the chamber. Sometimes the actor racks the slide more than once–he might do it in one tense scene, then repeat the action a minute later. Again, the live round in the chamber–the one we just saw them load–is never ejected. What happens to these rounds? All I can figure out is that the bullet fairy must come along every thirty seconds or so to take a live round out of actors’ guns. If this is true, then one day I hope to meet up with the bullet fairy and get some discount ammunition.

On Saturday I had the opportunity to play StarCraft (the board game) with the usual Twilight Imperium crew. It was rather long, but good fun. The board game does a surprisingly good job at replicating the computer game experience, except that it takes five times as long to play. TI3 is still a better game overall, but StarCraft is just a touch simpler and also scratches a slightly different gaming itch, tending to focus more on tactics rather than much broad strategy.

This is the end of the post. Since it didn’t have a thesis and its body was aimless, I maintain that it doesn’t need a conclusion. Stating so, however, strikes me as a self-defeating end. Curses!

“Well, I’m back.”

03 Nov 2008  in mid-morning  Matt Winckler

Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life;
he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin.

– Proverbs 13:3

When words are many, transgression is not lacking,
but whoever restrains his lips is prudent.

– Proverbs 10:19

And just like that, I’m back to being a normal person. On Friday, Kennewick terminated me from the police academy.

This was a rather startling turn of events, and even now that I know the whole story I’m somewhat surprised about it. On Friday just after lunch I was called to the academy commander’s office and informed that both KPD and they were aware of my blog (this one). This came as no surprise to me, being that anyone who’s Googled my name in the past four years knows that I have a blog. I had always presumed that they knew, so the next sentence, telling me that I’d been terminated for it, came as a fairly rude shock. They wouldn’t tell me anything more on Friday, but escorted me out and took back all my issued equipment. They then escorted me to the apartment where I packed up all my stuff and was gone for good.

This morning I had a meeting with the chief of police and I learned some additional details. Apparently someone took issue with some disparaging comments I’d made here concerning the maturity of some of my anonymous classmates, and the result of an investigation was what we have today. As I went back and read them, I recognized that I had made the comments partly in truth and partly in jest, but I also recognized how they might be interpreted and used by someone (such as a defense attorney down the road) who lacked my context or sense of humor. On top of that, some of my words were simply unprofessional and shouldn’t have been written in the first place, no matter how true they might have been. For that, I do humbly apologize to whomever happens to have read and remembers them.

I’ve already removed the comments, so save yourself the trouble of looking, but I want to make one thing very clear: I did not remove them to save face and cover up what I said. To do so for that reason would be an abhorrent display of cowardice and deceit and a deplorable unwillingness to take responsibility. The opinions I expressed and the manner in which I expressed them was sin. Public sin demands public repentance, and if I thought I could do so without causing any further damage I would trumpet my words in a large headline and ask forgiveness in that context. However, as it is, I removed the words because of their propensity to be misinterpreted and misapplied, potentially harming other people down the road. And that would be a propagation of my first sin, which is exactly what I want to avoid. I therefore repent to those who remember what I said and ask you to forget that I said it.

In all, I don’t see any particular injustice in what has happened. To the contrary, I see strict justice. I made a mistake, one to which I have been prone before (and therefore should have known better about), and I received my just due for that mistake. Hidden here are vast lessons in grace and mercy. Sometimes strict justice is exactly what we want from God–but not for us, of course; it should be reserved for those who deserve it. The newsflash is that we all deserve it, and it is only by the grace of God that not all of us get it.

So what now? On the one extreme, I could (and perhaps should) dismantle my blog altogether to remove any possibility of shooting myself in the foot ever again. However, this would not address the real issue, which is one of the heart. If the heart is fixed, then works will not be a problem. Likewise, if the heart is not fixed, not even the lack of works will save it.

As for vocation, my grand adventure is over. I don’t plan on pursuing law enforcement any further, not because I didn’t like it or don’t think I could excel at it, but rather because I have no intention of putting my family through an extra three months of being away from home by having to start academy over from the beginning again. No, I will return to the relatively mundane lifestyle of software development in some fashion, unless I manage to think of my million-dollar idea before I land a new job. (I’ve been working on it over the weekend, but so far the idea has been as elusive as ever.) The consolation, of course, is that software development pays better, has better hours, and involves getting shot at less frequently than law enforcement. Always look on the bright side! What is plainly certain is that all of this is part of God’s plan, and with that knowledge I can be sublimely content. Some lessons are more difficult to bear than others, but all of them are good and necessary. Nothing ever happens to no purpose, and I am confident that this experience will make me wiser and better suited to whatever task lies around this next bend in the road.

As always, soli Deo gloria.

Feeling frisky

28 Oct 2008  around evening time  Matt Winckler

When conducting a Terry stop, in order to frisk a subject for weapons the officer must articulate a reasonable suspicion that the subject is in fact armed–the frisk is not automatically justified. Just how hard is it to come up with this articulable reason? A few weeks ago I thought maybe it would be somewhat challenging sometimes. I don’t think so anymore.

(And most of those are big weapons! It only gets easier when you realize that pens, keys, wallets, and credit cards are all potential weapons.)

Today we practiced performing searches incident to arrest (which means a full and complete search, as opposed to a frisk for weapons, which only includes outer garments). With the class split in half, the suspects were given a variety of weapons to conceal upon our persons which the officers then had to find. Initially we only had relatively large weapons–knives, guns, spoons (yes, a spoon can be a weapon), and the like. Several officers missed even those large items, but by the end of the day the instructors had us work down to smaller and smaller items until we were finding hidden .40 caliber shell casings on each other. (My partner, when searching me, managed to find all three casings–one in the elastic band of my hat, one strapped into the Velcro on my body armor, and one inside my sock in between the toes of my right foot.) Needless to say, it was a very personal day.

We also learned some clever tricks for persuading suspects to exit their vehicle when ordered to do so. What do you do when you run into the guy who refuses to let go of the steering wheel? Turns out that appropriate amounts of pressure applied in the right places does remarkable things to change the mind of all but the most hardened criminal. Likewise we learned tricks for convincing arrested suspects to get into the back of a patrol car. Some of them are funny for their pure simplicity and boldness–for example, when the suspect is standing with his back to the open car door and refuses to sit down, give him a distractionary tap to the groin area and it’s nigh guaranteed that he’ll bend right over into a convenient sitting position. Doesn’t have to be much of a tap, or even contact at all–most of the time if you’re anywhere in the vicinity, the doubling-over reflex kicks in and you’ve got him. Of course, if that doesn’t work, you can always apply some healthy thumb pressure into the soft cavity in the throat area just above the collarbone. (I can personally attest to the effectiveness of this technique at changing my mind about getting into the car.)

Today we took our defensive tactics “mat test”, performing techniques in a sterile environment. (I passed with a score of 99%, which I probably didn’t earn, but I’ll flout it anyway.) Tomorrow is our defensive tactics “house test”. There’s a passive aspect and an active aspect to the house test. Details have been kept intentionally vague, but the passive side probably involves successfully controlling multiple subjects and containing a situation. The active side almost certainly involves beating the crap out ofapplying the appropriate level of force to control and arrest an assaultive subject. I understand that initial fail rates on the passive side are around 50%, with around 20% failing the active side first time around. A report of my performance shall be forthcoming.