When I had the pickup this morning I picked up the last of the crates for storing explosives.  36 of them.  The magazine will hold 72 and I already had the rest. 

I received 1000 plastic disposable aprons via UPS yesterday.  I found two different sources for them.  One source had a minimum quantity of 1000.  The other source I could by in single quantity.  I wanted about 50 or so, but for the price of 100 from the single quantity source I could by 1000 from the other place.  I got the 1000.  When we are mixing the explosives I want to keep certain chemicals off of people's clothes.  The potassium chlorate in partcular is a very strong oxidizer.  If it were to get mixed in the fibers of someone's clothes and they could burn up like a match head, a fire extinguish would be almost useless against such a fire because the potassium chlorage supplies the oxygen.  And with lots of cheap aprons workers shouldn't be too hesitant to throw one away and put on a new one if it gets torn or something.

Boomershoot 2004.  A ton of explosives.  Fun beyond measure.  And most of all I want it to be safe for everyone.

http://www.boomershoot.org/2004/blast.htm

I managed to keep Kim at home long enough to use the pickup for a couple hours.  I drove it about 200 yards when I noticed the oil pressure was zero.  I stopped and checked the oil.  It didn't even touch the dipstick.  I found 1/2 quart under the seat and called Kim to bring the van so we could go get some more oil.  We filled it with oil and I showed her how to check the oil and add oil.  She claimed she didn't know how to read the guages and that she didn't know she needed to.  I'm sure she and I talked about it while she was in drivers ed but, in her mind, it wasn't her fault.  There was no obvious damage done so Kim has her wheels back with instructions to check the oil EVERY time she puts gas in it.

During spring break I will get into a shop to see if they can't get the oil leak fixed.

No surprise with the gun liability protection legislation being shot down today.  It was loaded up with an extension of the ugly gun ban and the gun-show ban legislation.  The sponsors of the gun liability protection bill dropped the whole thing.  It is a stalemate.

At least this is probably the end of the efforts to renew the ugly gun ban that expires in September.  And we have the anti-freedom Senators on record with their votes so they can be targeted for 'unelection' later.

Ry had done some very promising tests with a new explosive mix a week ago Sunday.  It looked like there was probably a way to eliminate the potassium chlorate from our mix.  We went to the range this last Sunday to tweak it a little and improve things just enough to meet our needs.  It was a failure.  We couldn't even reproduce his results from the previous week.  We are 8.5 weeks from the event and we are out of time to experiment.  I decided we needed to order all the materials for the stuff we knew would work and did so this morning.  Containers, chemicals, everything with a lead time associated with it is now on order.

The ATFE inspector is scheduled to come out before the end of March to “bless” the new magazine.  We will be able to store stuff in it immediately after the (successful) inspection. 

I talked to my brother Doug this evening who says a lot of the snow has melted off, so the grass we planted last fall could start growing almost anytime.  If we get some good warm weather between now and the boomershoot (May 6, 7, & 8) then the new grass on the new shooting positions might actually be useable.

Subject: Re: [#7423143] No more Google AdWords for my business.
From: AdWords Support 
Date: Thu, February 26, 2004 0:30  
To: Joe Huffman   
 

Hello Joe,

Thank you for your email. I am sorry to hear that you have decided to
delete your AdWords campaigns.

I understand that you are concerned about Google's policies regarding
sites that sell firearms.

Google believes strongly in freedom of expression and therefore offers
broad access to content across the web without censoring results. At the
same time, we reserve the right to exercise editorial discretion when it
comes to the advertising we accept on our site, as noted in our
advertising terms and conditions. At this time we do not allow ads for
websites that sell guns or related products, nor do we allow these
products as keywords.

You may be aware that a different set of laws and regulations apply to
commercial speech (advertising) than to the search results we show when
you do a Google search. As a business, Google must make decisions about
where we draw the line in regards to the advertising we accept, both from
a legal and company values perspective. Please note that the decisions we
make concerning advertising in no way affect the search results we
deliver. We will continue to show search results for guns and related
products.

We appreciate your comments on this issue, which will help inform our
future policy discussions. Thank you for taking the time to write us.

Please feel free to email us at adwords-support@google.com if you have
additional questions or concerns.

We look forward to providing you with the most effective advertising
available. 

Sincerely,

Loretta
The Google AdWords Team

I listened to part of President Bush's speech this morning.  Interesting stuff.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,112326,00.html

I'm glad he brought up the full faith and credit issue. He probably realizes that at least parts of the "Defensive of Marriage Act" could (should in my opinion) be struck down because of the "full faith and credit" clause in the U.S. Constitution (see the text of the speech for a little bit more on this).

I can't see getting enough support (2/3 of both houses of congress and 3/4 of the state legislatures) to pass the amendment. So... my guess is that we will soon have a bunch of same sex people holding a marriage license and demanding the "full faith and credit" clause be enforced. In the case of the California licenses there may be some problems, at least for a while if not permanent, because of the law the voters passed against gay marriage. But in Massachusetts it's inevitable it will happen.  While it's possible almost anything can happen in any court, include the U.S. Supreme Court, it seems to me that the full faith and credit clause will most likely be upheld.  This will then give us people with concealed weapons licenses a lot of leverage in being able carry in all states and cities in this country and with “our bucket of water“ being carried by some of the anti-gun bigots that are actively trying to restrict our civil rights.

I know... a long chain of events each dependent on all the previous events but it's a pleasant thought - a bunch of bigots having to face their own hypocrisy.

No need to give bigots my money when there are better alternatives available.  Here is what I told them:

It is with great reluctance that I do this. I have been very impressed with Google in almost every endeavor they have undertaken.

I just deleted my ad campaign and won't be creating any new ones as long as Google continues it's policy on the restriction of certain civil rights. I will also be contacting other Google advertisers whom I would normally purchase from to inform them of your policies and to tell them I will be finding different suppliers if this policy is continued and they continue to advertise with Google.

Please see the following links for more details if desired.

http://blog.joehuffman.org/archive/2004/02/09/177.aspx

http://blog.joehuffman.org/archive/2004/02/11/179.aspx

http://blog.joehuffman.org/archive/2004/02/12/180.aspx

Regards,

 

Joe Huffman

I had a big flood of entries in Boomershoot 2004 last week.  Probably a record in terms of dollars, but not in number of entries.  I'm past the breakeven point for the actual event expenses now and can start paying off some of the loan for the Taj Mahal (http://www.boomershoot.org/TajMahal/Magazine.htm).

Yesterday Ry tested out a new mix someone emailed to me.  It comes close to meeting our needs and has some big advantages.  We probably can tweak it enough to work for us and still retain the advantages.

Ralph Nader threw his hat into the presidental ring.  The Republicians are rejoicing and the Democrats are whining:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A64417-2004Feb23.html

This election is going to boring.  And with a Bush sweep he will probably feel he has a mandate to implement a police state should he want it.  Heavy sigh.  At least he probably won't make much, if any, effort to take our guns away in the near future -- at least that is a partial deterrent against a police state.

After having Google tell me they don't allow people to advertise product related to the exercise of certain civil rights I started looking at alternatives.  It turns out you can place an ad on Overture.com and get advertising to show up on http://search.yahoo.com, http://www.Search.MSN.com, http://altavista.com, and http://www.cnn.com/SEARCH/.  There are some downsides:

• The minimum rate is $0.10/click - twice that of Google.
• Minimum of $50 up front instead of $5.00 from Google.
• It can take a few days before they will approve your ads compared to minutes for Google.

The upsides are:

• They didn't have a problem with my guns and explosives product.
• They did disallow a few words and phrases but they gave rational reasons and I respect their conclusions.
• They have better tools for determining the phrases and key words that are being used by people doing the searches.
• I'm getting a lot more hits!
• Their tracking is better.  They have a cookie system set up that will report whenever someone clicks on an ad ultimately, even days later, clicks on my entry form.  I can see what key words are actually generating people interested in entering the event versus just looking at pictures and watching the videos.
• I can see in the log file exactly what the raw query was and how it was morphed into a key phrase of mine to generate a hit.  This means I can figure out the keywords people are using and put those on my pages if it's a good match.  Key words that aren't a good match but are still morphed into a hit I can tweak to avoid the hit.
• No requirement for minimum click rates, Google has been dropping words and phrases if they don't meet their minimum number of clicks per impression.  My friends and I have probably provided a dozen clicks or so just to keep me from losing the keywords.

Kim du Toit is by far better than anything else, but he is doing this as a favor and I don't have any control over being able do this on a regular basis.

Here is the break down on people that have clicked on banners, ads, and links from various places so far this month:

KimduToit.com 402
Shotgunnews.com 144
Overture Ads 36 (started on February 14th)
Google Adwords 23 (running all month and probably 12 of those were my own and friends)
JoeHuffman.org (all personal sites): 23
RyJones.org/com Gawth.com EveryoneEveryWhereAlways 17
Xeniahs.org (and other banner ads place by her) 2

So... comparing Overture to Google I get hits at a rate of about 7 a day versus about 0.6/day.  Over ten times as good.  I'm going to tell Google to get lost.  No point paying bigots your money when there are better alternatives available.

Not only has MA said it will be issuing marriage licenses to same sex couples in May, but San Francisco has married thousands in the last week and Chicago might start soon:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4251510/

My take on this is that there is a good chance this issue will dominate in this year's elections. Although I think marriage for same sex couples is the correct way to go I don't think the population at large will stand for it yet. I think it will polarize people so much that people that would have normally not voted will register to vote and then vote against those pushing for it -- Democrats. If the Republicans can find some way to appear sympathetic to same sex couples while still prohibiting their marriage they will win big.

Another coffin nail ready to be pounded into place is the illusion of the Democrats as understanding the little guy and protecting them from the rich people. Both Kerry and Edwards are multi-millionaires and don't really have a clue of what it's like to work at a real job for a living.

You could be seeing the final death throes of the party. I'm not at all thrilled about having a single dominate party. Lots of risk there but the destruction of the Democrats is not entirely unwelcome either. The die-hard Democrats that I know are all blatant socialists or communists -- more proven deadly and failed political systems have not been invented.

Maybe the Libertarian party can fill the power vacuum that occurs if the Democrats implode. One can only hope and push a little bit here and there...

Every once in a while I hear someone, either in person or on some news outlet, claim something to the effect that we need to learn how to life in peace with the Islamic fundamentalists that wish to do us harm. Basically what they are saying is that we must be doing something that pisses them off and we should stop doing whatever that is and then we could get along. Putting this as gently as I can - people that believe that are delusional. Read Osama bin Laden's letter to America (http://observer.guardian.co.uk/worldview/story/0,11581,845725,00.html) carefully. Here are some excerpts:

Another data point, if that wasn't clear enough, was a comment from a guy I know at the CIA who works with psychologists there (no, I can't prove I actually talked to someone at the CIA, those guys don't hand out business cards). He told me, "Very few people in the U.S. understand, or can understand, how different these people think from us. Their thought processes are completely foreign to us."

What are you going to say to someone that says you must give up "trading with interest", our constitutional form of government and accept a government based on the Quran or prepare to fight? My response is, expressed with a great deal of sadness, our resolve is just as great as yours and until you can respect our way of life we will take this fight to you and we will kill as many of your warriors as we have to before they ever set foot on our soil. We will do our best to make sure this fight is on your soil with your homes and with your families in harms way. Our homes and families will continue our way of life in as much peace as we can give them. You can respect us or you can fear us, but you will not harm us, prepare to harm us, or conspire to harm us, or you will imprisoned and/or killed.  I realize you are willing to die for your cause but there is a certain amount of symmetry in that -- we are willing to kill for ours.