Since no one contacted me with any horror stories regarding the new version of Blogger, I went ahead and upgraded. It choked a bit on my amazingly sophisticated random tagline generator, but I was able to correct that PDQ.

Unfortunately, the new Blogger version requires that you link your Blogger account to a Google account. Since I keep a separate, “real life” Gmail address that I didn’t want tied to the blog, I created a new Google account for the blog. So now I have to sign out of my regular Gmail account when I want to sign in to Blogger, and vice versa. Annoying. You can now email me at unforgivingminute@gmail.com, though.

If you blogroll me, please point your link to www.unforgivingminute.com. For the time being, that address just automatically redirects you to my Blogger page, but I plan on switching to my own hosting pretty soon. If you link to www.unforgivingminute.com rather than unforgiving-minute.blogspot.com, your link will still work after I switch.

I awoke in an uncommonly good mood this morning. After turning off the TV, getting out of the La-Z-Boy and taking the mutt for his morning shit/walk, I decided to cook myself some breakfast. A quick search of the kitchen turned up the following list of potential ingredients:

- 1 doz. fresh quail eggs
- 1/2 of a large white onion
- 3 heads of garlic

Yes, that’s all there was. Yes, I am a bachelor who watches too much Food Network. No, I’m not gay.

Now, that list doesn’t give me a whole lot of options, recipe-wise. So if I were to ask you to guess what I had for breakfast, and you were to reply, “Bizarro-world mini-omelettes,” you would be correct. I washed it down with a couple big mugs of my favorite genmai-cha, and it was a damn good meal.

By way of contrast, my usual egg recipe calls for chicken eggs, jalapeno cheese, chorizo, onions, garlic, peppers, lots of Cholula hot sauce, and a shot of cheap mezcal. I call it “huevos del diablo.” It’s a great dish if you like drinking in the morning and having diarrhea by early afternoon.

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Latest blogrollee: Dr. Strangegun. Now post more often, dammit.

I’ve been blogging heavy on guns lately, so I’ll take a little break and write something on computers.

I’m not a fan of Microsoft Windows. My ThinkPad came with XP Pro; I burned a set of backup discs, then wiped the drive and installed Linux. After playing around with SUSE, Fedora and Debian, I finalized on Ubuntu.

In a word, it’s outstanding. While Linux has come a long way in terms of ease of installation and usability over the last few years, getting everything working right can still be a hassle (I’m glaring in your direction, Debian). That goes double, or maybe ten times over, for laptops, which tend to have more proprietary hardware bits than a desktop machine. Those hardware bits may not have any drivers available, or the drivers may need to be manually downloaded, installed and configured. Power management is also a concern with laptops. Automatic frequency scaling (in which the processor automagically slows itself down when it’s underemployed) and suspend/hibernation often take some research, tweaking and swearing before they work right. Or, if your laptop’s builders were sloppy, they may NEVER work right. I’ve played around with a few HP laptops which simply will not reliably enter the suspend state, even in Windows.

Remarkably, all of that stuff “just works” for me, thanks to the efforts of the Ubuntu team. Just running through the standard installation process gave me a perfectly configured, fully functional system. My ThinkPad’s processor lopes along at a leisurely 600 MHz most of the time, but instantly jumps up to full speed when needed. The system runs VERY cool. Unlike a lot of “laptops” today, you can actually use this one on your lap, for hours at a time, without any charred flesh. Suspend mode works perfectly, instantaneously, and repeatably. I even have working 3D acceleration, with open-source video card drivers, with no hassles.

Now, I cheated a bit by my choice of hardware. IBM/Lenovo ThinkPads tend to play very nicely with Linux, especially when they’re one generation removed from the cutting edge. If your machine is a reasonably common model from a major maker, you can probably expect very good results as well. If you have a brand that no one’s ever heard of, may the god of your choice be with you.

For a seriously lazy bastard (such as myself), having this level of refinement available takes away about 95% of the aggravation that used to go along with setting up and using Linux. Part 2 will cover that last 5% and why it’s unlikely to go away anytime soon.

New to the blogroll: Michael Bane. I felt bad for the poor guy’s obvious lack of readership, so I figured I’d add him to my page and throw him a few thousand hits, out of pity. <Jon Lovitz> Yeah, that’s the ticket! </Jon Lovitz>

Blogger is always nagging me to switch to the new format; I’m hesitating simply because there’s no going back. I’d appreciate any feedback from fellow Blogger bloggers.

This video will probably disappear once Google ruins takes control of YouTube, so check it out now. Shane MacGowan and the Popes’ “That Woman’s Got Me Drinking,” directed by and starring Johnny Depp.

Way back in the long-long-ago of last month, I wrote an introductory post that listed a few potential topics I had in mind for future posts. I rounded out the list with, “Oh, and boobs. Gotta have boobs.” Now, I threw that in there since pdb was, at the time, doing a regular series of posts featuring some truly spectacular cleavage from the likes of Salma Hayek and Patricia Arquette. He’s since stopped; maybe Mrs. pdb wasn’t a fan, or maybe his marketing department told him it was hurting him with the “women 18 to 34″ demographic. I don’t know. Since his wife’s out of town right now and I share the late Bill Hicks’ sentiments on marketeers, I say it’s high time for him to resume the tradition.

Anyways, it occurred to me today that I hadn’t written anything about women, which is highly unusual for a 25-year-old heterosexual male. Truth be told, I’m taking a break from women. With two failed relationships in my recent past and a cross-country move looming in the near future, I made a conscious decision to take some time off. Besides, I’m job-hunting at the moment and women, as a rule, don’t see unemployment as a huge turn-on.

So, I’m afraid I don’t have a whole lot to say about women right now. I will instead link to a piece written by my late friend and fellow firearms enthusiast Mark Penman. Mark was a gun blogger back before anyone called it blogging. We never met in the flesh, but we swapped emails pretty regularly and I remain a big fan of his writing. Now, I don’t agree with every single word, and I haven’t quite reached the level of bitterness and cynicism Mark showed in this essay, but he did have about 15 years on me. Give me time.

Why I Will Never, Ever, Get Laid Again, by Mark Penman

Requiescat in pace.

Look at that new banner up there. Hot damn, that’s one seriously handsome banner. I GIMPed it together last night when I couldn’t sleep. I’m also kicking around a few ideas for a more colorful logo, but none of ‘em are quite what I want them to be. Only the best for me and mine.

SiteMeter says a lot of folks are coming my way to find out about Ruger’s new trigger mechanism, and I wish I had something to tell them. The company seems to be following tradition and doing a seriously poor job of communicating with their customers.

I have very mixed feelings about Ruger. The Bisley revolvers and No. 1 rifles are favorites of mine, and the Model 77 Magnum rifles are drool-worthy, especially with the integral quarter rib on the barrel. From a technical point of view, that barrel is seriously impressive. And Bill Ruger did us a big favor back when he introduced the Model 77 by putting a REAL stock on it. That simple, elegant Len Brownell-designed stock helped kill off the grotesque, cartoonish California-style stocks with their too-shiny finishes, white line spacers, flared pistol grips, rosewood forend tips mounted on an angle, and psychedelic checkering patterns. Amazingly, Weatherby still makes stocks like that, but the rest of the industry has seen the light.

On the other hand, the folks at Ruger severely half-assed their implementation of the Scout Rifle concept, despite having all the proper parts already available. They never have satisfactorily addressed the wandering zero problem with the Mini-14 (the new competition model shows that they understand the problem but don’t want to fix it on the standard guns). High-cap magazines for the Mini are still being needlessly restricted in the name of political correctness. They’re also following in Smith & Wesson’s footsteps by going safety-crazy on their new models (take the hint: a whole lot of consumers hate integral locks). And let’s not forget the late Bill Ruger’s dirty little secret.

Anyways, I still haven’t gotten any concrete info on the new LC6 trigger. If you have, drop me a line.

I dropped off Bwana Ben’s stack of books this afternoon. He’s insistent that he’ll return them once he’s done, even though I’m equally insistent that I don’t need them back.

If you’re a helpless, pitiful sushi addict (and I freely admit that I am), a good itamae (sushi chef) is worth his weight in gold. And when that itamae has 30-odd years of experience, and knows you by name, and orders exotica like fresh abalone for you, and slips you orders of belly tuna when the owner’s not looking, well… such a man is truly invaluable.

So, for as long as I’m still in Michigan, I’ll tip heavy and buy him a beer now and then. I might even try talking him into moving to Vegas with me.

I did some tweaking on my template tonight. Comment and let me know how it looks for you.

While gorging myself at the sushi bar tonight, I got to talking with Ben, the itamae, about deer hunting (Michigan’s firearm deer season opens on November 15). Turns out Ben, having grown up in Japan, has never touched, let alone fired, a real gun. Nor has he ever gone hunting. He’d really like to, though.

Well. We can do something about that.

Tonight I pulled together a big pile of reading material for him. Last year’s Shooter’s Bible, NRA’s book on personal protection in the home, pamphlets on basic gun safety and range etiquette, and Craig Boddington’s Hunter’s Handbook will all be given to him tomorrow. I also gave him directions to my favorite local range (friendly, helpful staff there; they’ll treat him well) and told him I’d be happy to let him try out any of my personal artillery.

It’s been too long since I helped out a new shooter. I’m glad to have the chance to do it again.