Since I’ve now owned a Smith & Wesson 642 for a month and a half, I’m obviously qualified to dispense expert advice on the subject. Some observations:

• Regular dry-fire practice makes all the difference. I’m snapping in between 50 and 100 times a night with each hand. I can now lift small cars with my index fingers. Seriously though, between my fingers getting stronger and the action slicking up, I can now keep the front sight MUCH steadier.
• I’m happily carrying in a front pocket with a Galco Pocket Protector holster. While no one will ever mistake it for a Milt Sparks or a Del Fatti, the quality is reasonable for a $25 holster and it’s working fine so far.
• After looking at every ammo option on the market, I decided on either the classic 158-gr +P LSWCHP “FBI load” or Speer’s Gold Dot Short Barrel offering. Then I found a smokin’ deal on the standard 125-gr +P Gold Dots. They’ll do just fine.
• The gun snob in me wants to order a set of real Craig Spegel grips to replace the factory Uncle Mike’s grips (which are Spegel’s famous Boot Grip design executed in rubber), but Tam’s post on lasers has me considering a set of Crimson Trace LG-105s. Maybe Santa will bring them to me this year.

That’s all I have for the moment. Gotta finish a little C++ project and get some sleep.

Hmm, last post was #777, or, for you UNIX geeks out there, -rwxrwxrwx.

Drunkenly (and jokingly) arguing with unix_jedi that time is not a dimension (my logic went something like this: time only flows in one direction and cannot be stopped, so it must have inertia, and therefore mass, and therefore it’s an object):

[01:31am] TD: look, time is an object. they keep it in Switzerland along with the official kilogram
[01:31am] TD: why do you think all the best watches come from there?

Highlight from tonight’s session:

(the topic of discussion is Dr. Cuddy from House)

Atomic-Fungus: I’d be all over that in a hot minute.
Atomic-Fungus: …
Atomic-Fungus: that’s probably all the longer it’d take. :’(
TD: give her the best 12 seconds of your life
pdb: best 19 seconds of her life
pdb: fuck off
TD: pdb’s an optimist

So I’m sitting here tonight, diligently dry-firing my Smith & Wesson 642 when I notice, horror of horrors, GUN CANCER! The grip screw, which is inexplicably the only blued part of the gun, had a nice even coating of bright orange surface rust. Some vigorous scrubbing with CLP cleaned it right up, fortunately, but now I have to keep a close eye on it. THIS is why I buy stainless or chromed guns for carry.

Does anyone have any leads on a stainless screw? I checked both Brownells and Gun Parts Corp. but came up empty-handed. Maybe it’s a common size and I can find a replacement at the hardware store (yeah right)?

C’mon, anybody? Bueller? Bueller?

Really. Absolutely nothin’.

I’m disappointed that we have a VP nominee named Palin and it hasn’t led to a single decent Monty Python joke yet.

Right now I’m sitting here loading XP onto my laptop, since I need to use Visual Studio for a class. :grumble grumble: Back in my day we wrote our code in vi and compiled it with GCC, like Real Men. None of this fruity graphical IDE crap. Kids these days…

Alright, time to go back to the never-ending Windows Update “install-reboot-install some more” cycle…

The pdb went and set up an IRC channel for gunbloggers!

I can hear it now, all the n00bs and whippersnappers wondering, “what the hell is IRC?”

Well, n00bs and whippersnappers, go get educated, get a client and get in the channel!

I have a way with words, don’t I?

Seriously though, fuck ‘em. In the ass.

Every week they refuse to let me log in. Their “forgot your password?” tool does, as far as I can tell, absolutely NOTHING. It doesn’t email you your password. It doesn’t give you a challenge/response prompt. It literally. does. nothing.

So every week I create a new account, and it works exactly one time. The next time I try to log in, FAIL. I’ve tried different browsers and different OSes; it still fucks up with 100% reliability.

I can’t recall seeing a website fuck up so badly at such a basic task, and I’ve been on the Web since at least 1994. Is anyone else experiencing this?

How does an IT worker and CIS student spend a long weekend? Sitting in front of a computer, apparently…

I snagged a refurb Seagate hard drive for cheap, dropped it into the Sun Blade to replace the crappy old 5400-rpm drive that I’d initially put in it, and installed a fresh snapshot of OpenBSD 4.4-beta. While I was at it, I scrounged up a spare keyboard, monitor and mouse, then installed Fluxbox and a handful of other packages. The end result? I now have a nice graphical workstation on hand in case one of my other machines suddenly dies.

Right now I’m rsyncing over my most important files and making sure everything works as expected; no surprises so far. The more I use OpenBSD, the more I like it. It’s easy, in the odd way that a UNIX-ish operating system can be easy. Pretty much all the configuration is done through nicely formatted .conf files that live in /etc, the man pages are well-written and up-to-date, and there’s none of the ugly hackishness you see in some Linux distributions.

Still, I really should do something non-computer-related this weekend. Maybe tomorrow I’ll even go outside!

Kermit Bale, courtesy of unix_jedi.

I LOLed.