Via Thumper.

I'll bet that was a real rush. But when someone prone on a few roller skate wheels passes a motorcycle you know it's got to be a case of insufficient mylenation (another example can be found in the third paragraph here). Notice how he bleeds off speed by swerving side-to-side when coming up behind the motorcycle? I'll bet he doesn't have real brakes. It's still awesome:

Rollersuit in the Swiss Alps

Update: A friend of mine owns a roller skating rink. I asked him if he had ever done anything like this. He replied:

Joe, Back in the "GOOD'OL" days when all my knees worked I skated down 3 of the then MAJOR hills in Lewiston which were Fifth St. Grade, Eighth St. Grade and Twenty-first St. Grade, in Clarkston the biggie was Beachview Park Grade, the trouble with it was it ended in a parking lot with curbs a strip of grass, and the Snake River. It's a bitch to swim with roller skates on...............!  I passed a car on the Eighth ST. Grade deal he was doing 25 or 30 and he said I was still accelerating, but  I sure the first thing he did was let off so it seemed faster then he thought. We did clock the Twenty-first St deal and top was about 42 MPH-.......,use REALLY good Bearings

IIRC the way his knees stopped working was when he and his motorcycle parted company while they were both traveling at about 50 MPH. He tried running to avoid getting a road rash. His knees got messed up in addition to receiving numerous other injuries you might expect from a separation of man and machine of this type.

Someone apparently believes they can read my mind from reading part of my blog. And she thinks I have problems:

By Sheryl, 10-07-07
I checked that guys site out, very disturbing. I found the home life thread especially very disturbing. Any grown man that likes to brag about intimate relations with his wife on a public blog has some real personal problems. Using sexual terms to generate more search engine hits in conjunction with posts about his children saddens me. What an awful environment they must have grown up in. It frankly disturbs me even more that such a person has access to assault weapons and explosives.

Such a dark world we live in.

I left the following comment but was told "Akismet thinks your comment is spam, so it will be moderated first."

Sheryl, I regret to inform you that you are unable to read my mind or my motives. The only thing truthful about your comment is that which you shared about yourself--you are disturbed.

Update: Interesting... someone else's comment, again very negative, showed up but my comment and that of Miss C don't. Does the moderator have an agenda?

Put this helmet on and get a connection to your god(s).

There is something very different about this one. It was a police office that went nuts:

A sheriff's deputy shot and killed six young people in the northern Wisconsin town of Crandon before being killed himself after a manhunt, according to media reports on Sunday, quoting police and witnesses.

The Forest County Sheriff's Department said seven people were dead, including the shooter, Tyler Peterson, 20, according to media reports.

Five of the victims ranged in age from 14 to 20, and the age was not available on a sixth, the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported on its Web site.

Another victim was in critical condition, the newspaper reported.

Peterson, who was accused of storming into his ex-girlfriend's house, was shot by the Crandon SWAT team, the newspaper said. Peterson's former long-time girlfriend was among the dead, it said.

If we are not allowed to have guns then how are we to protect ourselves from the cops with guns that go nuts?

That's mostly snark on my part.

It's a terrible tragedy and it makes me sad to hear of it. It's a small town of about 2000 people. Everyone in that town will know at least one of the victims. Barb and I went to high school in a town of about 3000 (Orofino Idaho). The degree of separation between any two people in a town that small is at most one or two. That whole town will morn.

You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.

Mohandas Gandhi
[I thought of this after reading of the tragic shooting of all the people in Wisconsin yesterday. Just because one cop goes nuts and starts shooting innocent people doesn't mean all cops should have their guns taken away from them.--Joe]

I noticed it was a little cold when I came home Friday night and the furnace wasn't putting out warm air even after I turned up the thermostat. In fact there wasn't much air at all coming out even though we have the fan on continuously. Great. Another chore to do this weekend. Scratch the IPSC match on Sunday because Saturday was committed to visiting my parents and doing some construction and the final fall prep for the Taj Mahal.

Last night, hoping I could get the furnace going and have time for other things today I pulled the dirty air filter out, washed it, and put it back in and got decent air flow but there was still no heat.

So today I verified the pilot light (gas furnace) was on and the thermostat was set to "heat" rather than "cool" and the thermostat setting was for several degrees warmer than the room temperature. Still no flames in the burner. I then used a couple of small screw drivers to short across the terminal block for the thermostat, to simulate a thermostat closure, directly on the furnace controller. After a few seconds it was "flame on" with a puff of flame that came back out of the furnace--toward my hands:

Photo by Xenia

My back of my right hand now has stubble on it (the hair on my palm is just fine).

[Side note: Xenia thought it was gross and it took me a while to convince her to take a picture. I don't understand her concept of "gross". She intentionally got a hole punched in her face and a little singed hair is too gross to take a picture of?]

I removed the thermostat from the wall and did a similar trick from there and also got the furnace burner to start working. It must be the thermostat or the connection. I finally examined the batteries to the thermostat and discovered on of them had leaked and corroded the battery contacts. I removed the old batteries, cleaned the contacts, put in fresh batteries, and now the furnace works again. Now I can head back to the Seattle area tonight, then to Reno on Thursday and not worry too much about the Huffman-Scott compound (guarded by Caleb, Kim, and Xenia) freezing while I'm out of town.

Grumble... There are just too many things getting in the way of the things I want to do.

Kim, Caleb, and I went to the Boomershoot site yesterday. We put in a simple stairway from the water pump to the shed where we make and store the explosives for the reactive targets.

When we got back home Xenia asked what we did and I told her we made a stairway. "To where?", she asked. And I told her, "A stairway to heaven."

This captures a couple of different concepts in addition to the song with that title. I always worry some about blowing up myself and others when we are working on the explosives. Hence a literal use of the word heaven if you believe in such things. And also it's a very happy, pleasant place for me--gun, explosives, and the serenity of being out in the middle of the farm with no people or their sounds nearby.

It turns out that for an out-of-hospital "witnessed cardiac arrest" you probably shouldn't do the mouth-to-mouth portion of CPR.

Uncle says see-through frogs are creepy. I say you better get used to it. People are now creating completely new species. Future Shock is here and now.

I read Future Shock in about '75 and my opinion hasn't changed with 30+ years of evidence--Toffler just likes to blather about things no one can or has any need to measure.

Do you think we can gain any traction with the environmentalists who whine about the loss of species if we started creating new species faster than we made old ones extinct? No? I didn't think so either. There's just no making some people happy.

Advertisement: The most truthful part of a newspaper.

Thomas Jefferson
[Apparently problems with the mainstream media are nothing new. One might conclude that the problem will never be solved. Perhaps the best that can be done is to provide alternate outlets exposing the problems. The great thing about the Internet is that the barrier to entry is so low.--Joe]

Update: What Kevin said.

A loaded handgun was found in an airport men's room. 

[Yawn.]

No big surprise. It's an impossible "problem" to solve.

This weekend I'll be doing Boomershoot 2008 prep and other chores but some people will be here (San Francisco--of course):

The latest adult industry "'pr0nnovations" will be on display in San Francisco this weekend at Arse Elektronika, a three-day expo featuring sex machines, brainy talks and weird performances (including the Electric Orifice Orchestra, in which "extravagantly dressed performers use live biofeedback from muscular interior walls of their bodies to create a multimedia interactive show").

De inimico non loquaris sed cogites

Do not wish ill for your enemy ... plan it.

Jack L. Patterson
Baltimore, MD
June 20, 2007
[There are others that have used this as their .sig line but Patterson has used it more than any other that I can find. I have been unable to find the originator. 

I'm thinking of the anti-gun bigots at the moment...--Joe]

I said it would make them squirm. And both the Gun Guys and Josh Sugarman are doing just that.

Kim's last name isn't Huffman but I'll send an email to get that fixed. Check out our pictures with the other People of the Gun.

Ry has four Halo 3 video ads posted. Microsoft puts an amazing amount of money into marketing (and nearly everything they do).

What good would it have been to know the names of Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber, or the DC snipers before they were arrested? Palestinian suicide bombers generally have no history of terrorism. The goal is here is to know someone's intentions, and their identity has very little to do with that.

And there are security benefits in having a variety of different ID documents. A single national ID is an exceedingly valuable document, and accordingly there's greater incentive to forge it. There is more security in alert guards paying attention to subtle social cues than bored minimum-wage guards blindly checking IDs.

That's why, when someone asks me to rate the security of a national ID card on a scale of one to 10, I can't give an answer. It doesn't even belong on a scale.

Bruce Schneier
April 1, 2004
A National ID Card Wouldn't Make Us Safer
[See also my web pages on National ID Card Flaws.--Joe]

Xenia made a video of John and her in the park. John is now headed back to the sandbox to guard convoys with his video game.

Good luck and thanks John. Please come back in one piece.

But it's no wonder we are concerned about privacy, because we are all "lawbreakers", We all break the law, but few of us are criminals.  The problem is that simply attracting the attention of the police is enough to put the best of us at risk, because we break the law all the time and it's set up to make that happen!

John Gilmore
March 28,1991
A transcript of remarks given at the First Conference on Computers, Freedom, and Privacy
[Remember what Ayn Rand said and Huffman's rule of firearms law.--Joe]

Goody Guns by JPFO.

[Heavy sigh] My youngest is in college now so this just wouldn't have the impact it would have 10 or 15 years ago. Maybe it would be a nice gift for some nephews and nieces.

This is the story I heard at Gun Blogger Rendezvous 2006 I most wanted to tell. I'm glad Uncle shared this in public so I could comment on it.

Basically, some people need to be shot. People that claim everyone is just like everyone else and predators just need to be "understood" or some such thing are ignorant. There are evil people that will never change and will be a threat to others as long as they are alive. Read the epiphany a former psychologist (Uncle) had when attempting to counsel one of these animals.

I don't advocate individuals hunting these animals unless you have a license and tag. The premeditate taking of even sub-human life should be carefully considered with the appropriate checks and balances. Defending against an imminent or in progress attack from one of them is another matter. Remember the following four rules and repeatedly apply them until the threat is eliminated or you can no longer acquire a sight picture:

1. Trigger prep
2. Sight alignment
3. Squeeze
4. Follow through

In case you haven't tested it out recently (as in the last day) Microsoft's search engine was just updated and for the first time has search results on par with Google. I know the test methodology for this claim but I'm not sure I'm at liberty to reveal it but I am of the opinion they did a good job measuring this and that the claim is accurate. "On par" is not good enough to win and I expect MS will pull ahead of Google in the near future.

Having an alternative to the anti-gun owner bigots at Google is important and now you don't have to compromise on search results. Now if I can just get the message to the right person to get MS to give us an alternative to AdSense so I can drop the Google ads in the right margin of this blog.

In winning our Independence, and to make certain that it could never happen again, the Founders wrote that the Citizen was to be SUPREME AUTHORITY, and that our authority was to be backed by force, forever. In their living this reality which they knew could occur in any age, any era, any administration, the reality of life today was that liberty must always be backed by citizen force.

John Longenecker
Original Intent--Citizen As Supreme Authority--Liberty -- How American Gun Control Is Adverse To The Public Interest In An Abuse Of Due Process
[There are lots of great quotes in this whitepaper.--Joe]

Syria is shamed and silent.  Iran is freaking out in panic.  Defenseless enemies are fun.

Dr. Jack Wheeler
Silence in Syria, Panic in Iran
September 25, 2007
[Via David.--Joe]

Yesterday we went to the east side of the park and again saw stunning beauty. Here is but one picture of mountains and a glacier:

I also took pictures of some animals. While still in the car we were able to get amazingly close. One of them, with a little coaxing got into the car with me and I took it back to the condo where it spent the night in bed with me. I know it will never be domesticated but even if it is wild it's fun to have in the bedroom. It's the last picture below. I call her Barbara.

Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

Edward R. Murrow
[Something to keep in mind as the candidates fire up their slogan machines for the next election.--Joe]