Tag: blogging

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A Quick Update.

Sorry about the silence. I’m currently out of town working on a project, and it looks very much like this is going to be the norm for the foreseeable future (at least the next 6-10 weeks) give or take a few days here and there. These days tend to be long, and about all I have time for in the evenings is to check out other people’s blogs and maybe leave a comment or six. I haven’t even had time to play with my new RCBS Chargemaster other than to run some tests with it. If I ever get the chance, however, I should have an interesting range report coming up.

I have an 1896 Swedish Mauser (Carl Gustav, 1916) sporter rifle (I know, I know, somebody done bubba’d a classic – but bear with me…). I bought the rifle many years ago for $100. It had no finish left, and the bore wear indicator badge said that it was about half shot out, so I thought the price wasn’t so bad. It shot OK (iron sights and my eyes being what they are) but I’d bought it to build a Silhouette rifle out of. One year I plunked down some hard-earned money and had it rebarreled with a Shilen 1-in-8″ twist medium-weight barrel, had the bolt turned down, had the whole shebang polished & blued, and had two-piece Weaver-style scope bases installed. To this I added a Jewell Timney trigger and a Fajen thumbhole stock which I then glass bedded the action to. I added to this a 3-12x 6.5-20x Simmons adjustable objective scope in a set of Burris Zee rings. (500 meters is a LONG way out there.)

I then proceeded to spend the better part of three years testing different combinations of bullets, powders, and loads to find something the damned thing would shoot. Nothing worked. I changed scopes. No improvement. I shot factory ammo. Still wouldn’t group. Finally it settled into shooting vertical strings. Much research and study later, I tried preloading the barrel. I cut up an old used credit card and slipped a few pieces under the barrel near the forend of the stock, then tightened up the action screws, and off to the range we went. The first five shots out of the rifle gave me this at 100 yards:

If you can’ t read the caliper, that’s 1.016″ outside edge to outside edge. Subtract one bullet diameter and the group is 0.75″ including the “flyer.” I was stoked! (Note the orientation of the “10” – it still was stringing vertically just a tiny bit.)

Problem was, it would shoot like this all day – but on Saturday those groups were at 12 o’clock. On Sunday they were at 3 o’clock. On Tuesday they were at 10 o’clock – and each tight little group could be inches away from the point of aim.

This is not acceptable out of a target rifle.

So I let it sit in the locker for a while. The week before last I disassembled the rifle and shipped the stripped barreled receiver to 300 Below to have it cryo-treated. It should be back by the end of this week, so if I have a little time off this weekend, the Swede and I have a date with the range to see if cryogenic stress-relief really works.

I hope so. It’s too pretty to shoot crappy.

KevinLeave a comment

I Do This Very Seldom…

But I have banned a commenter. As many of you know, JadeGold is a serial troll of the highest order, banned at innumerable blogs for his (yes, it’s a he) complete avoidance of reality. So, if you’re reading from the Baltimore area via Comcast and cannot comment, my apologies. If you’re a user of the Navy Network Information Servers and cannot comment, again, my apologies.

It would appear that JadeGold came a-visitin’ just a few minutes ago:

But that IP is one that’s blocked.

I suspect he’s probably on his way to a Starbuck’s for a WiFi address that’s not blocked, veins throbbing at his temples right now.

God, I hope so!

As I said in a comment earlier this afternoon:

Actually I like toying with ole’ Guy Cabot before I ban him (again). That “Emerson is dicta” bit, for example, was fun!

The funny thing is, I’m certain that little Guy – living in Prince Georges County, Maryland – probably owns more than one firearm that the State of Maryland doesn’t approve of. He really strikes me as the “do as I say, not as I do” type. You see, for someone who directs so much hatred and paranoia at the current administration (not to mention gun owners), I really don’t believe a person like that would troll as he does without some sub-consciously Freudian psychological backup – which he then projects onto everyone else.

(Of course, there’s always the possibility that getting banned at another site has given him some weird sort of sexual gratification….)

UPDATE: According to Sitemeter, Guy was still on the site when I posted this. He spent twenty minutes, not two.

He ended up hopping over to SayUncle and…

Well, you’ve just got to read it. It’s classic projection.

Four Years and Counting….

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Four years ago I pressed “PUBLISH” on my first post at The Smallest Minority. I was the Blogosphere’s newest member.

For about .0003 seconds.

I was not, however, completely new to the intarw3bz, as the current cyberpunk generation mangles it. I’d been online since 1995, first in the moshpit of UseNet, then the late lamented Themestream.com, then the message boards – AR15.com, followed by a concurrent six-month stint in the target-rich environment that is DemocraticUnderground.com. I read a lot. I wrote a lot. I learned a lot. Then I discovered blogs. I’m pretty sure (time fades my memory) that Instapundit was the first blog I ever read, but Insty has quite a blogroll, and as everyone knows is a prolific linker. Through him I found Gut Rumbles, the open, intimate, hilarious, filthy, sad, gut-wrenching – and above all else, exquisitely written – daily diary of Rob Smith, and I was hooked.

Not long after I discovered blogs, Rob excoriated a commenter on the topic of gun control. The commenter was an Irishman living in London, and suffice it to say, he was supportive of the idea. Rob was not. His “Acidman” moniker was well earned. Well, I had at that point some seven years of concentrated study and discussion on the topic, so I offered to debate Rob’s commenter. Thinking that we would do it at a neutral site, I took advantage of Blogger’s free offer and created TSM. It seems he had the same idea, as he (already a blogger) created The Commentary. I became not only the proprietor of my own blog, but debate partner at another on almost the same day.

The debate at The Commentary ran for four months. I did not convert my opponent, Jack, but we did conclude the exchange on this note:

So, what has been achieved? Well,

  1. I’ve accepted the lack of a link between the right to keep and bear arms and membership of a militia,
  2. I’ve been enlightened about the ‘shall-issue’ concept and it’s superiority, compared with normal licencing.
  3. I’ve learnt a great deal about the whole issue, ranging from the origin of the right enumerated in the Second Amendment through to some of the restrictions placed on gun ownership by various US states.

So, for me, at any rate, the process has been useful and enlightening.

I think that my position now is actually more liberal (in terms of my approach to gun control) than when we started.

Not quite a victory. Far from a defeat, though.

And here I’ve been ever since. Blogger informs me that this is my 2,429th post. HaloScan tells me that it has archived 13,946 comments. Sitemeter tells me that it has recorded 797,726 visits and 964,923 page views since I added it to TSM in early June 2003, and at the present time I average 1048 visits a day. Technorati tells me that 180 unique blogs have linked to TSM in the last six months, and it is the 22,944th ranked blog out of the 71 million it tracks. I am a “Marauding Marsupial’ in the Truth Laid Bear’s recently repaired Blogosphere Ecosystem, ranked #1,731 out of the nearly 70,000 it monitors.

And none of those numbers mean all that much, really, when you think about it. Not in a nation of 300 million in a world of six and a half billion. For some people a blog is just a diary, a place to write their thoughts and log their daily lives. To some, it’s a bulletin board for the others in their lives to catch up on. For others their blog is a newspaper or a magazine directed at their particular interest. For still others like me, it’s a soapbox and a megaphone. But out of 71 million blogs, most do it poorly – the majority for only a few days or weeks before abandoning the effort. There is a large grain of truth in Theodore Sturgeon’s 90% Law. When it comes to blogs, I’d say that percentage approaches 99%.

But 1% of 71,000,000 is 710,000. That’s a lot of good stuff out there – for free.

I greatly appreciate my loyal readership, which I estimate is realistically about 2-300 regular (daily/weekly/monthly) readers. I cherish (most of) my commenters. Y’all are highly intelligent, erudite, and passionate. You other bloggers who have me on your blogrolls? I’m eternally grateful. I find very rewarding all the links this blog receives from other web sites – blogs, message boards, LiveJournals – where someone says “Hey, go read this. It’s got information you won’t find anywhere else,” or “You’re wrong. Go check this out, and the sources linked there.” But what I find most rewarding of all are the emails or the comments (few and far between, I must admit) where someone says “you changed my mind,” or “you taught me something,” or at least “you made me think.”

So I think I’ll hang around for a while longer. And yes, I’m going to stay with Blogger unless they kick me off. There are a lot of links to the stuff in the archives, not to mention the 13k-plus comments, and I don’t want those going anywhere.

KevinLeave a comment

OK, I Lied.

I added one more blogger that I’ve been meaning to, but forgot: Skywritings. Written by a female ex-professional pilot, she’s been blogging since December 2005, and posts two or three times a month – but they’re good posts! Samples:

I remember offering a ride in my airplane to two French tourists who had come up for their idea of adventure, paying probably $10,000 for the privilege of camping out alone for a week, then a carefully orchestrated raft or hunting trip they could go home and brag about. Their flight out to their camp area canceled. Since I was taking my plane up that way to check out an eagles nest I’d seen from the air, I told them I’d drop them off on the sandbar. I couldn’t accept any money for it, but since I was going there anyway, they were welcome to a lift. I’d like to say that they were gracious, joyous people and we had a wonderful experience, but they were the rudest, nastiest people I’d ever met in my life. It got to the point I gave up being polite and started to burp and pretend to nod off at the controls muttering the phrase “boy I wish I hadn’t drunk that bottle of cough syrup”. – Saturday, 5/20/06

—

As the door opened, the next candidate came in – 6′ 3″ and wearing a pink tuxedo. . the ruffly, kind that epitomized what was wrong with 80’s fashion. We could only look and stare. He held himself up straight, and sat down with pride. Then he opened his mouth, and out came a pronounced Oklahoma accent. He said

“Bet you’re wondering about the suit?’

We could only stare, and nod, silently.

“Well, it took me all day to get here, my flight from Tulsa canceled and I was re-booked, and when I finally got here late last evening, you’all had lost all my luggage, all I had was the jeans and t- shirt I was wearing. I raced over to the mall, just as the department store closed, The only thing open was the tux shop. . and this was all they had in my size”.

And he finished, head held up with pride, smiled, and just looked me in the eye.

All I could say was “that took one hell of a lot of balls to walk in here like this. . . . .
you’ve got yourself a job – welcome aboard. Now get out of here, put those jeans back on and have a cold one by the pool to celebrate”

That was the whole interview. He ended up being one of our best pilots. – 5/27/06

—

I’ve felt fear in an airplane, shooting an approach to minimums in the mountains, snowflakes the size of postage stamps slamming into the window, my right hand on the throttle and sweat trickling down my cheek. I had never felt more present, more myself, more in the moment than at that time. The fear was right on the edge of either paralyzing me or propelling me into this place of being utterly engaged, that magic moment when I know I am honing years of practice into precision flying, and I’m suddenly out of the fear, into the light. I could manage the fear because I have faith. Faith in my training, faith in my mechanic, my copilot, my airplane. And faith that with needles centered, the runway should soon be straight ahead. For as it says in Hebrews 11:1 faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. – 7/7/2006.

Her name is Linda, yes, she’s a shooter, and she’s partial to Sigs.

Go spend some time over there. It’s worth it.

KevinLeave a comment

Blogroll Updated.

Finally.

As I’ve noted before, I’m coming up on the fourth anniversary of TSM, and I thought it was about time I updated my blogroll. First I went through and pulled any site that hadn’t updated in the last six months, or any site I had as a reciprocal blog where a link to me no longer existed. Any site that came back as something commercial or “404 Not Found” was pruned, so if your site disappeared due to a temporary server problem, let me know.

For a medium in which so many people start out, but then peter off, I was quite surprised how many of my links are still active and healthy.

Then I went back and added some bloggers that I’ve admired but just not taken the time to include: LawDog, Ambulance Driver, and The Munchkin Wrangler. I then checked my Technorati links to add blogs that had put me on their blogrolls in the interim – so long as they were at least six months old and still posting.

Finally, I added a category: “Bloggers I’ve Met.” There’s a lot of redundancy in that list, but I don’t care.

Believe it or not, this took about three hours. See why I’ve been putting it off?

This should be the only post for today. Überpost tomorrow (I hope.) Title: To be civilized is to restrain the ability to commit mayhem. It’s about the war in Iraq.

KevinLeave a comment

“…self-immolating neolithic goatherds….”

I swear, one of these days I’m going to take some vacation just so I can go through Tam’s archives and glean it for her outstanding quotable lines, which I’m then going to publish as a post of my own. One of today’s posts is a perfect example, Dear God, I actually miss the commies…. The thing is, the whole post is quotable, not just a pithy line or two. Excerpt:

(The Soviets have) been replaced by our new foes, as depressing a lot as one could imagine: self-immolating neolithic goatherds drunk on a theology that makes the most ignorant snake handler in the backwaters of the Ozarks look like a regular Thomas Aquinas by comparison.

Hie thee hence.

KevinLeave a comment

Yaaaay! Rachel Lucas Will Be Posting Again!.

Amazingly, Bill Whittle has posted twice since his last essay, and in the most recent he informs us that:

I’ll close this small update with a little tease: We need all the help we can get. To this end, I have called upon Miss Rachel Lucas — a voice of clarity and humor long and deeply missed around here — to be the first of many guest writers here, and she agreed.

For those of you unfamiliar, Rachel is the blogger who first got Bill to blog, and she has a dry, wicked wit all her own. She has been sorely missed.

In the post immediately previous to that one, I think Bill might have been referring to me:

Just after the “publication” of SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2, I saw a comment somewhere that mentioned I was back and that we could all expect Part 3 sometime in December.

It’s funny because it’s true.

Heh. 😉

It’s a Bad Time for One, but: Hiatus!

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Wednesday, March 28, 2007 will be my last day at the job I’ve had for twenty-one years and a month (to the day). I’m moving on to what I believe is a better opportunity. After twenty-one years of bitching and complaining about consulting/specifying engineers, I’m about to become one.

Consequently, these last three days at my old job, and the first few weeks at my new one promise to be a little hectic, so feel free to check in from time to time and leave a comment, but don’t expect to see much new content here for a bit.

Death and the Internet

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Cathy Seipp has died. I don’t know how many of my readers followed Cathy’s battle with lung cancer on her blog Cathy’s World. I didn’t have her linked on the blogroll because I only read her on occasion, usually when Instapundit linked to her, but I enjoyed her writing and I took vicarious pleasure when she wrote about an arbitration board overruling her insurance company’s decision to not pay for an experimental drug that appeared to be helping her.

I remember reading about her daugher Maia’s (then pseudonymously “Cecile”) conflict with the teaching staff at her high school, and writing a piece on it. I wrote a later piece linking to one of Cathy’s NRO columns. That’s been the the total linkage on this blog, but I’ve read a lot of Cathy’s stuff.

I am affected by her passing.

This is odd. I’ve lost a few relatives in the past few years; a grandmother, an uncle and an aunt, a great-uncle. I wasn’t particularly close to any of these people. Their deaths did not particularly affect me. But I’ve also lost other people I’ve known only (or primarily) through the ‘net. Airboss, the wry and intelligent commenter at many blogs whom I met at Kim du Toit’s house. Eric the (profuse) Hun, the irrepressible Texas lawyer and hugely prolific poster at AR15.com. Rob “Acidman” Smith, the outspoken self-described Georgia cracker who never held anything back.

I’ve read these people’s words. In some small way I have gotten to know them before their passing and that knowledge has affected me, more than the deaths of blood relatives that I never really knew.

Rest in peace, Cathy. My condolences, Maia. Know that your mother had a life well-lived, and left many people behind who thought well of her.

UPDATE: And I’d like to take this opportunty to apologize to Susan Estrich. I took a cheap shot at Ms. Estrich a while back, but she has written a truly excellent eulogy for her friend, Cathy. As she put it:

Lung cancer was one of the few subjects we agreed on; I lost my best friend seven years ago, and watched in horror as the money from the tobacco settlements got spent building highways. We also agreed about things like mothering, kids and friendship. As for the rest, we had to agree to disagree. But I was always interested in how Cathy put it, where she came down and how she got there, because I knew she’d be as tough on herself as any critic would be. So I checked in every day to see what she was thinking, until the end. Ours was an old-fashioned relationship, the kind people used to have with people they disagree with, the kind that is too often under attack these days.

Thank you, Susan, for being the kind of person it is an honor to disagree with.