Category: Side Notes

High Speed, Low Drag

You know what’s cute? Fanboys of expensive equipment. These are the people who will spend an exorbitant amount of money on something and explain to you what it’s so much better than the cheap version you purchased. I’m sure we’re all a little guilty of that. Myself for instance run Mac computers which are more expensive than standard PC rigs. Personally I like OS X and the fact that it runs out of the box without any hassle to me so it’s worth it. Of course I can explain why I prefer it and find the additional cost worth it to me.

Today I’m going to talk to you about the other group of people who spend lots of money, the ones who buy marketing terms without knowing what they are. There have been a couple of threads over a MNGunTalk recently dealing with the AR-15. As with any thread dealing with AR-15 rifles you will have one or two fanboys/trolls pop in and explain how the only real AR-15 fit for battler is a Noveske, Spike Tactical, etc.

What I find hilarious is the reasons spouted by these super operators. This is where we get into marketing terms. Every company will give you a list of terms and exclaim them to be reasons why their product is superior to their competitor’s. Here is where the problem comes in, what the fuck do those terms mean? My favorite example is the debate between the Melonite finish on Springfield XDs and the Tenifer treating on Glocks.

A Glock fanboy will exclaim to you that the Tenifer treating is far superior to “cheap Czech rip off.” Of course anybody who’s researched to subject knows that Melonite is just another marketing name for Tenifer. They’re the same process by the same company.

AR-15 fanboys like to bring up all sorts of high-speed and low-drag terms. For instance they’ll talk about the tests that are done by the high end AR-15 manufacturers. Tests are great… so long as you know the tolerance for error. Making a perfect and flawless product is practically impossible, you will always have some form of defect. Due to this fact you must know the tolerance for error before you can consider any test legitimate. You also need to know the exact test performed and how it was performed. An example of this is manufacturers who do high pressure testing on their barrels. What exactly does this test entail? How high is the pressure? What does this test prove? All these must be answered before you can proclaim it as a reason to purchase one product over another.

Another classic example in the gun community are metal injection molded (MIM) parts in 1911s. Many operators will proclaim any gun containing MIM parts is automatically junk. Of course MIM parts are used in a great number of 1911s (almost any 1911 under $1,000) without issue. If you’re going to proclaim MIM parts junk you must know the rate of failure for MIM parts versus, say, forged parts. Most operators know that MIM parts are cheaper and therefore believe they are inferior without any other reasoning.

In the computer development field we have a game called buzzword bingo. Buzzwords are the marketing term for software. Companies will boast about how their software package uses an “open XML format for data storage in the cloud.” What this generally means is your data is stuck on one of their servers (“the cloud”) and what format it’s in is irrelevant. If you don’t continue to pay your monthly subscription fee you can’t get at your data and thus you’re locked into that vendor. The other thing is XML can be human readable… once in a great while. Open up a Microsoft Word XML file in a standard XML editor sometime and tell me if you can read anything contained within. You won’t. There will be an excessive number of tags and references to external document type definition (DTD) files (among external XML files, style sheets, etc.). It’s all a buzzword that ultimately means absolutely nothing for you, the customer.

Basically what I’m saying is don’t buy into marketing terms. If a company is trying to sell you a product and have a bunch of marketing speak thrown in as reasoning find out what that marketing speak means. Sure the bolt on that rifle may be made out of totallyawesomanium but if you don’t know what that alloy actually is you may be paying extra for the marketing term used by that company to describe 4150 steel.

Reading Comprehension and Me

I pride myself on my ability to comprehend what I read and filter out bull shit. Sadly my filter seemed to have lapsed a bit today and I made a pretty glaring mistake. I read the following article about Gun Owners of America (GOA). The mistake came from the following piece:

Stallard told me that the “Pink Pistols has good relations with national gun rights groups.” Larry Pratt did not think so. His views can be summarized thusly: they should not have any rights; but, they do not deserve to be stoned to death.

I mistook the section emphasized as a direct quote from Mr. Pratt. In fact it’s a very poorly paraphrasing of some comments Mr. Pratt made about homosexuality. Personally I don’t agree with what Mr. Pratt said and I find it curious that somebody would says they have more “libertarian” views but be OK with barring homosexuals from marriage (it would seem the best libertarian answer to the question of gay marriage would be to abolish government involvement in marriage all together).

Anyways I made this mistake and posted it on Facebook. That was a mistake and a good thing. It was a mistake in that I made my remark about GOA based on what I thought was a direct quote. It was a good thing because two of my friends, Jeff and Sam, pointed out that the article never said what I said it said (how’s that for a confusing sentence).

Needless to say I want to use this mistake an an opportunity to remind everybody to read every article very carefully. Words matter as does punctuation. A lack of quotation marks is always something to watch out for.

Comcast Business Service

I do a lot of bitching on this site but rarely am I able to give out compliments. Consider this post one of those rare changes. For those of you unaware the connection I have at my apartment is Comcast Business. I did this for several reasons include the desire to have a static IP address and the only other options being Comcast Residential (which his horrible from what I’ve heard) or Qwest (which is also horrible from what I’ve heard).

Yesterday afternoon my Internet connection died (I know it was in the afternoon because that’s when my VPN tunnel exited and I couldn’t reestablish it). When I got home I did the usual dance of rebooting the router and such which lead to no change. So I decided to call Comcast for the first time. The support line for their Residential and Business services are completely separate from what I can tell as it took me less than five minutes to talk to a living human being (who had no accent I might add).

Mind you this is around 6:30 at night. The support agent had me redo my dance of rebooting the router which I did just to humor him at this point (frankly it takes less time than arguing that it’s a pointless gesture as I’ve already tried it). Once the router rebooted the support agent was still unable to see it so he wrote up a trouble ticket and dispatched a field agent. Around 8:00 p.m. the field agent showed up, came up to my apartment, checked the line, and found there was no signal. At this point we went down to the electrical closet where we learned somebody had disconnected my line (again, this is the third time somebody mucking about in there has disconnected my service). Once it was reconnected I was good to go.

I have to say Comcast’s Residential service may suck major donkey balls but their Business service is pretty bad ass. I can get a support agent there 24/7 instead of having to take off of work and wait three hours for somebody to show up. Anyways I’m a happy customer at this point.

Three Gun Competition

Yesterday I partook in my first three gun competition. For my maiden voyage I accompanies a friend and a group of his friends down to Holmen, Wisconsin. First I must say the competition was a ton of fun. I shot heavy metal using my Glock 21SF, Springfield M1A SOCOM 16, and my friends bright yellow Remington 870.

The pistol potions gave me little trouble thanks to USPSA. Shotgun portions provided me some trouble as reloading an 870, like most shotguns, is tedious. I feel I did so-so on the rifle portions except for the last stage where a combination of a really fat front sight, small targets at 90 yards, and my lack of ability to shoot caused me some headaches. Most of the people there agree the stages were all design by a sadist but honestly I found them to be incredibly fun. It was certainly a challenge and I can’t wait for the next one. I’ve only found one downside to three gun and that is the price; it’s going to cost me a lot of money in the future.

I also learned a couple of lessons. First make sure you don’t place your body anywhere near those clay pigeon throwers activated by falling steel plates. If the plate falls and hits you in the shoulder it’s going to suck really hard for the rest of the day. The second lesson is the fact that the laws of thermodynamics haven’t changed so grabbing the top rail on the SOCOM after shooting a lot of rounds is going to lead to a burning sensation in your hand. Finally I learned that continuing to shoot a 7.62x51mm battle rifle when your shoulder is already very sore is not a sound tactical choice.

Reddit Shoot

As I continue to live up here int he Twin Cities area I keep acquiring new people to hand out with. There is a sub-reddit called /r/twincitiessocial. We have beer meet ups ever Friday and it’s what you’d expect from an event populated mostly by Internet nerds such as myself. This weekend we decided to do something different in the form of a group shoot at a friend’s house. This shoot consisted of several first time shooters including a few people from other countries (Canada, which really isn’t a country but our secret 51st state, and India namely).

We had enough Mosin Nagant rifles there to arm a small malnutrition communist army. Beyond Mosins there was a various assortment of firepower include my M1A SOCOM 16, a couple of AR-15s, a couple of 1911s, a few Glocks, some Kahrs, and a partridge in a pear tree… which was shot down by the Mossberg 500.

The shoot went very well and I think we created some new shooters out of the event. The only hitch in the day was when a super mutant showed up. Thankfully the Canadian guy knew his V.A.T.S. system and scored a direct shot to the eyes for some critical damage:

V.A.T.S.

What’s My Excuse

I’m sure everybody who reads this site regularly is wondering what my excuse is for having no real updates for three days. My excuse is simple, my company sent me down to the ASIS International security trade who in Dallas, TX. Let me tell you there was some cool stuff there as well. I talked to representatives from Shot Spotter, Insight, Secure Shield, several bullet-resistant armor manufacturers, and a couple of firearms training companies.

I’m not going to go into detail on everything I learned but I will say the who is very interesting and certainly an authoritarian’s wet dream come true (I’d bet there were more cameras on display there than setup on the streets of London).

Since the Shot Spotter technology interested me most (as that system is setup in Minneapolis) I’ll post what I learned there. First and foremost all this talk about the system being able to tell the difference between a 9mm, .40, and .45 is malarkey. The system can tell the difference between a handgun and rifle but it can’t tell you what caliber was used.

The system also don’t work by detecting sound as I originally thought. The Shot Spotter system detects shock waves emanating from firearms and explosives. When a shock wave is detected the system used 16 criteria (which the company representative wouldn’t go into detail on) to determine what the source of the disturbance was. Shot Spotter also has an API which can be used to tie things such as cameras into. This was recently used in Minneapolis when the system picked up gunfire several cameras in the area were turned automatically towards the source via the Shot Spotter API.

I was surprised at how few sensors were needed to cover Minneapolis. Only 16 (seems to be a popular number with this system) sensors are spread throughout Minneapolis and seem to have good coverage. From what I’ve learned it seems firearms with a lesser shock wave would be more difficult to detect. I’m wondering about rounds that don’t surpass the sound barrier or firearms equipped with suppressors would be detected correctly.

Either way it was an interesting show.

Internet Debates

You know what I find hilarious and pathetic at the same time? People who try to argue or debate but end up losing and then try to save face by saying they were just trolling. The phenomenon occurs a lot online where people will get into forum arguments that will span ten pages and finally somebody will have their argument so thoroughly destroyed that they have no recourse besides admitting defeat or using personal insults. At this time the loser will generally claim they were just trolling and actually don’t care.

It’s the ultimate out and you know you’ve won once somebody uses it on you.

Why Owning a Car is a Good Thing

First let me shamelessly steam a status update from a friend of mine:

Apparently next week, all public transportation workers will be on strike. This means: a 45-minute walk to class every day, and perhaps no weekend trip to the Alps as was planned. >:(

On top of that my friend already purchased a pass for something like 60 euros. Although my friend is currently on vacation (thus can’t really have a car there) I thought this would still be a good time to bring up the fact that owning a vehicle just makes sense. I have several friends who don’t own a vehicle and seem Hell bent on never obtaining one.

This status update reflects why I’m such a fan of owning a vehicle. Relying on public transportation for everything means just that, you’re reliant on somebody else. If the public transportation system goes down you have no means of getting to work. Likewise if you need to go a distance away you’ll either have to find a friend who is going that way as well or sit tight and not go. Self reliance is a good thing and everybody should attempt to achieve a little bit in every major part of their life. Of course if you bring this up most people will just call you paranoid.