Month: July 2010

I Wonder if I Can Check a Firearm

Snowflakes in Hell informs us that the Brady Campaign is trying to find a solution to their slump in donations. They’ve setup a travel site in the hopes you’ll give them some money by booking to fly the unfriendly skies. Absolutely hilarious!

If you go to their travel site (linked in the Snowflakes in Hell article because I won’t like to those anti-gunner pieces of trash) you’ll see it redirects to another site (and you know how much I love shady redirects). Apparently the people who run the redirected travel site have also come upon financial trouble so they should be best buddies with the Brady Bunch.

What I’m really curious about is if you book your flight with Brady Air are you still allowed to check a firearm in your luggage?

GSSF Match

So the Glock Sports Shooting Foundation (GSSF) match was this weekend. Although I was planning on attending Sunday I ended up going on Saturday instead. That proved to be a mistake honestly. I ended up sitting around way too much because of the number of people in attendance. I literally sat at one stage for over an hour which is well beyond my attention span (Wait is that something shiny!). The bottom line is if you plan on attending this event next year go on Saturday. That way there will be less people on Sunday so people showing up that day can just speed on through.

Now on to what I thought of the match itself. I started USPSA this year and have found it a lot of fun. I like the running and gunning aspect of the sport. Compared to that the GSSF match was very subdued. Of course the goal of GSSF is to setup a competition where everybody can compete on fairly equal ground. The only way to accomplish this is to remove aspects that most people don’t practice a lot such as reloads and movement. There is nothing wrong with that as it fits the goal of the sport. Basically I can compare GSSF to Bulls eye competition with Glocks. Accuracy is far more important in GSSF than time is (which really screwed me because I didn’t take the time for good accuracy and instead went for speed).

I got pretty bored due to the long waits (once again that was probably self-inflicted for not going Sunday). In USPSA while you’re waiting your turn to shoot you watch the other competitors run through the course. It’s fun to watch because each person can run the course in a completely different manner. Everything can change such as how fast they move, the order they take out the targets, when they will reload, when they will fall flat on their face, when their gun will jam up causing them to either perform a clearance drill or curse Loki for his trickery, etc. GSSF is much more subdued and I have a hard time watching people standing still and shooting targets. Almost all the variables are removed except how well the targets are hit.

The bottom line is I thought the competition was so-so. But I’m also a very impatient man who needs a lot of things happening to be entertained. I need sports with a lot going on to keep me interested. If you’re more into bulls eye competitions I think you’d love a GSSF match. Likewise if you like target shooting at the range but really want sometime more interesting than a single paper target I highly recommend GSSF. On the other hand if you’re into sports such as USPSA, IDPA, and three gun you may find GSSF a bit slow moving. Also there isn’t going to be a whole lot of conversation about different guns there because everybody has a Glock on them (yeah I like seeing all sorts of different guns at competitions, it’s interesting to see what people are using).

Now there is a good case to say I’m bitter because I did poorly in the event. I counter that by pointing out I do poorly in USPSA as well but thoroughly enjoy it. Yeah I did pretty bad at GSSF. Part of that can be attributed to my head simply not being in the game. As I said I got bored due to the long wait times. When I become bored an event becomes more about getting it done as quickly as humanly possible without regard to score. It’s not a good state of mind to be in to shoot a match.

So yeah GSSF wasn’t really my cup of tea but I recommend if you haven’t shot a match you should do it. You may absolutely love it, most people there did. And it is time on the range which can never be a bad thing.

Righthaven LLC Going to Town on Lawsuits

Yesterday I posted about Righthaven suing The Armed Citizen blog. Well that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Apparently the lefties are talking about legal actions against Righthaven because they appear to be unfairly targeting left leaning website. Of course it doesn’t appear to be a left-right issue as Righthaven is suing everybody.

These assholes are going crazy.

Why I Chose Android

Long time readers here know I was quite the Palm fan for a while. Now you hear my touting my Evo 4G and hear nothing more of Palm. So why did I jump ship? Well the answer is pretty simple. I still believe WebOS is the best of the current mobile operating systems hand down. But Palm itself was in a financial quagmire until recently when they were bought by HP. I didn’t want to purchase a phone that could face irrelevancy due to the manufacturer going bankrupt and hence I decided to go with an Android phone. Now that Palm is in the hands of HP I’m even more glad I went with Android as HP doesn’t have the greatest track record of using acquisitions well.

Let’s look at HP’s biggest fiasco, the Compaq acquisition. This is what I label as the beginning of the end for quality HP products. I had an old HP Vectra buisness computer which to this day is bullet proof (it still runs perfectly even though it’s old enough that it game with EDO RAM and Windows 3.11). We have some of their diagnostics equipment here at work that functions flawlessly even though some of it is from the early ’90’s. The problem is shortly after the Compaq merger the only PCs HP put out were shit. And the only decent thing Compaq was making at the time, the iPaq (Their PDA), was bastardized into oblivion. Likewise it was around this time that their calculator division went into life support (I still love HP calculators, RPN is a great system in my opinion). In the past HP calculators were heavy and well constructed. Now they’re plastic and the buttons have a habit of breaking over time. The bottom line is HP isn’t a company I can trust to do anything well these days.

The other reason I didn’t get a Palm Pre was the hardware. By the time I was ready to get a new phone the Pre was long in the tooth and I was expecting a new model to be released soon. That soon never came and the Pre has been out over a year now without any major upgrades (and since I’m on Sprint I can’t even get those meager upgrades).

Android on the other had has several things going for it. First it’s open source and thus not dependent on a single company for continue existence. The main company developing for Android, Google, isn’t looking to go away anytime soon. Android is also a pretty fucking awesome operating system with good developer support (there are actually third-party applications to purchase for example). The hacker scene is lively as well with custom ROMs being released for most of the popular Android devices. Finally the released hardware is pretty amazing (seriously this Evo 4G is just amazing).

So that’s why I ended up with Android instead of WebOS.

So Much for Apple Being the Most Secure

Apple zealots always tout the “inherit security” of Mac OS 10. These mindless drones claim Apple’s operating system is the most secure in the world because it’s built on UNIX (even though they don’t actually know what UNIX is, nor FreeBSD which OS X is built upon). Well Secunia has released a report of the top 10 most vulnerable software vendors [PDF]. Guess who’s on top… Apple!

Of course this is not in regards to their operating system but software they release for Windows. Yup their Safari browser and iTunes media player really raped their rating because frankly it’s got enough holes to fly a squadron of fighter jets through. This is why I don’t use Safari (and why I use extensions in Firefox like NoScript and Certificate Patrol) on either Windows or Mac OS (Safari is a popular favorite at the Pwn2Own contest when attacking the Mac platform).

I want to note I’m surprised Adobe wasn’t higher on the list with all the recent problems they’ve had with Flash and Reader.

Ah, Arrogance and Stupidity All in the Same Package

How efficient of North Korea:

North Korea has promised a “physical response” to joint US-South Korean military exercises this weekend.

Yes that’s certainly a good idea. I’m sure the United States, who have been looking for practically any excuse to go to war with North Korea, and really shaking in their boots over this threat. Yup. No seriously can’t you tell how scared America is of the big and powerful North Korea?

Minneapolis’s New Push on Guns

So far this year there have been 29 homicides in Minneapolis. Unlike Chicago when the murder rate starts exceeding 20 in a Minnesota city we start asking what the fuck? Well apparently the answer to lower the homicide rate in Minneapolis is to get tougher on “illegal possession” of guns.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you know my stance on “illegal possession.” In my book you can not be stripped of your rights. Once you’re out of prison your rights should be fully restored regardless of the crimes you’ve committed and that includes your second amendment rights.

With that said I’m also for a system where dangerous criminals are not returned to the streets so long as they’re still a possible danger. If you’ve committed a violent crime I believe part of the sentencing should include a psychological review by a jury of medical professionals (who are selected with jury-like care and randomness). This jury would have to give a criminal the OK before he’s released back into society. I must stipulate that this is only for violent crimes because if you haven’t caused harm to another person or their property I don’t feel any crime has been committed.

So I don’t find legitimacy in Minneapolis’s new policy of enforcing “illegal possession.” But I do like the idea of being tougher on repeat offenders and criminals with violent histories. Alas I find it stupid that they police are targeting guns instead of actual crimes. If I had been the person writing out the plan I’d have said the city is going to get tougher on repeat offenders and violent criminals. Gun have nothing to do with crime rate, criminals do. Target the.

Oh and if we really want to fix the homicide rate in Minneapolis all we need to do is carpet bomb North Minneapolis with napalm. Lots and lots of fiery napalm.

Send Out the Lawyers

So apparently Professor John Abraham of St. Thomas college put up some kind of online rebuttal to a person who I’ve mentioned previously, Christopher Monckton. The rebuttal is over Mr. Monckton’s presentation on Al Gore’s Apocalypse, which is actually very interesting to watch (I have a video of it embedded in the previously linked page). Well being British and still being willing to sling insults (however childish it may be but alas I haven’t watched either Professor Abraham or Monckton’s rebuttal to that video). Apparently according to the Red Star (which means you need to take it with a grain of salt) Monckton said the following:

For his part, Monckton has fired back in a YouTube interview clip, calling Abraham “a wretched little man,” the University of St. Thomas “a half-assed Catholic bible college,” and its president, the Rev. Dennis Dease, “a creep.”

The one thing I really do like about the British are their insults. So what is the rebuttal to that onslaught? Well St. Thomas is calling in the lawyers:

St. Thomas officials have defended Abraham’s efforts, and the school’s lawyers have gone beyond that. In a letter to Monckton, St. Thomas attorney Phyllis Karasov threatened legal action if Monckton does not “immediately cease and desist making any further disparaging or defamatory comments about the University of St. Thomas, President Father Dease, Professor Abraham, the Archdioceses of Saint Paul and Minneapolis, or anyone else associated with the University.”

This is the reason I’m so skeptical about this whole Al Gore’s Apocalypse thing. If somebody criticizes the “science” (and I use that term very lightly) behind global warming climate change lawyers are called out. Also it appears as thought St. Thomas University doesn’t understand the first amendment and the freedom of speech. For instance I can call St. Thomas University a shitty Hell hold that would be better off turned into a crater in the ground that continue to be used as a college. I can also say all their administrative staff are total assholes and can go sodomize themselves with retractable batons. It’s called the freedom of speech and insults are covered under it.