I’m finally on the mend, after four days of the whole one-watery-eye, one-drippy-nostril routine, plus a sore throat, throbbing sinuses and sneezes violent enough to loosen my shoelaces. Fortunately, getting through the cold now means that I should be healthy for my Spring Break trip down to Squeaky’s place in Memphis!

There’s precious little else to report; I’ve been too doped-up on cold medicine to do anything noteworthy this week. I did discover that a local computer shop sells a lot of old Sun gear dirt-cheap; I’m thinking very seriously about buying some Ultra 5s or 10s on Friday afternoon, just so I can play around with SPARC hardware for 1/100th of its original cost.

Yeah, I’m a geek; I’ll cop to it.

I made it all the way to the end of February before catching my first winter cold; I think that’s a new record.

pdb, who’s supposed to be ordering gun goodies for me under his FFL discount with Brownells, decided that he’d rather have a baby today instead.

Good luck, my friend. Try to sober up by the time the kid actually arrives.

Oh, and today’s xkcd is perfectly timed:

Blogging’s been light due to the usual confluence of work, school and side projects.

Last night I spent WAY too much time wrangling with a profoundly broken Linux framebuffer driver which could not be brought to heel even with custom mode tables. I eventually gave up and used the old vesafb, which works just fine despite having been originally written for the flight computers in the Apollo spacecraft.

That kind of brokenness drives me right up the goddamn wall, though. It’s 2008. We have 3D desktops so sophisticated they’re on the edge of self-parody, and yet a simple framebuffer driver can’t handle an entirely reasonable request to serve up a 640×480, 60Hz, 8-bit display; it just shits its pants and spews garbage all over the screen on the RARE occasions when it actually snycs up to the monitor. And this isn’t a reverse-engineered driver for undocumented hardware; the driver was WRITTEN BY the people who made the hardware!

On the bright side, I had ample opportunities to confirm that the “video out of range” damage-protection circuitry in my monitor does its job.

Oh, and apologies to those of you who (A) aren’t Dr. Strangegun or ExistingThing or Sebastian and (B) actually slogged through the technobabble above; I’m sure it meant nothing to you.

It’s only a mini report because my range session was limited to a half-hour and 100 rounds of Remington UMC FMJ, but the initial impression is strongly positive.

In short: perfect reliability, excellent handling characteristics, and impressive accuracy.

The gun ran without a hitch throughout the (admittedly brief) session. Feeding, extraction, and ejection were consistent, with empties landing behind me and to my right. Magazines are easy to load to capacity and reliably lock back the slide when empty.

As you’d expect from an all-steel 9mm, recoil was negligible and easily controlled. The adjustable sights were perfectly dialed in, right out of the box. Thanks to the wide trigger, the trigger pull feels lighter than it actually is. Trigger reset is longer than a 1911 but shorter than a Glock, with tactile and audible feedback that make “riding the reset” easy.

Accuracy was limited by the loose nut behind the trigger. I’ll sit down and fire the gun over sandbags one day to get a better idea of its mechanical accuracy, but offhand I was able to hold groups of ~4″ at 25 yards. Suffice it to say, the gun is more accurate than I am and it’s easy to shoot well.

Complaints? Well, there’s a trigger job in the gun’s future. The trigger isn’t bad, but it could be better, and I’m a trigger snob. I’d estimate the weight at about 5 lbs, which is entirely reasonable, but there’s a lot of creep. This is due to the hammer/sear interface; there’s a LOT of sear engagement and a strongly positive angle on the hammer hooks, which makes for a safe but very creepy pull. The sear engagement is also a bit uneven, with more contact on the left side. Dr. Strangegun informs me that this is par for the course with CZs. I’ll probably have a trigger job done on one of Jim Miossi’s hard sears.

Overall, I’m impressed. There’s more shooting on the agenda for this week; check back for updates.

… and a thousand pigeons fall around her feet.

The scene: TD sits in his SQL class, quickly finishing off next week’s assignments in his efficient, slightly Aspie way. To his right is Dumb As Hell But Improbably Voluptuous Girl. DAHBIVG is the sort who can’t find her own ass with both hands and a map, but TD often helps her because (A) she’s always polite and thankful, (B) TD is a nice guy, and (C) hey, big boobs!

DAHBIVG never quite got the hang of joins. For those who aren’t SQL people, trying to do anything useful without a reasonable understanding of joins is kind of like building a birdhouse without any nails. Or glue. Or tools. Or wood. Basically, you can’t do a goddamn thing if you can’t do joins.

So TD has come to expect frequent queries from DAHBIVG about writing joins. TD did not expect the question he was asked today:

DAHBIVG: Can I ask you something?

TD: Sure.

DAHBIVG: Birds fly south in the winter, right?

Time passes. TD formulates his response carefully.

TD: Yes, birds fly south for the winter. At least in this hemisphere.

DAHBIVG: Thanks. Wait, what?

TD: Nevermind. Yes. Birds fly south.

:sigh:

Forbes names Detroit “America’s Most Miserable City.”

I must protest in the strongest possible terms. Yes, Detroit has a few rough edges, but we also have rampant unemployment, serious pollution, abundant crime, potholes where the roads used to be, weather that’s always either too hot or too cold…

You can’t handle the cute!