Category Archives: Bloggers

Stuff about other bloggers and sometimes blogging in general.

Kim du Toit and Boomershoot 2021

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I have been meaning to send an email to Kim du Toit asking if he was going to make it to Boomershoot this year. He agree to be the dinner speaker last year and when we canceled it almost everyone, including Kim, agreed to just roll their entries over into next year.

I hadn’t gotten around to sending the email to verify his attendance and then, just today, he posted on his blog that he plans to attend and is in the process of preparing.

I think Kim attended Boomershoots in 2004 and 2005. I delete my registration lists after about a year for privacy reasons but I found this picture in my collection of Boomershoot pictures from 2004:

6725691-R1-015-6

And I found this blog post from 2005.

That was sixteen years ago. Wow! That’s a long time to go without a Boomershoot.

Very sad

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Say Uncle’s wife died. Cardiac arrest. Nothing to do with COVID-19 that I know.

I spent quite a bit of time with Say Uncle at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous, NRA annual meetings, and Gun Blogger Summer camp. I occasionally was in his area of the country and was hoping to stop in for a visit someday and get to meet his wife.

If I remember correctly they had two kids who I would guess are in their teens now.

This makes me very sad.

Stephanie, our new guest blogger

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Although Stephanie Sailor isn’t new to a lot of old-timers in the gun rights movement she hasn’t been all that active on gun blogs. Stephanie’s contribution to Boomershoot in the early 2000’s was a large part of why it became a success. And the things she did to counter the anti-gun people in Chicago just blew me away when I first heard her speak for the Second Amendment Sisters at the Gun Rights Policy Conference in Washington D.C. in 2000.

And last summer she made a number of images I posted on this blog. For example:

And now she has requested permission to make some blog posts here. I immediately agreed and gave her an account. Expect to hear from her soon.

See her also at on Gab as S2.

Charity request

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From the comments here:

Joe, I would not normally solicit help from strangers but this is an extraordinary and dire circumstance. I am a fellow blogger and would like to ask if you would pass a link on for me. If you poke around my site you will see that I am a real person with a real family. I don’t have facebook or anything and any posting of the link or her gofundme page would be greatly appreciated. Thank you,Jim https://eatgrueldog.wordpress.com/2016/01/27/funding-for-shaylyn-2/

The direct links are:

https://www.paypal.me/FundsforShay

Update: Here is a go fund me link if paypal doesn’t work: http://gofundme.com/p5kymvxe

I donated a minute ago.

Quote of the day—Tam

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Wow, Mark, that was nearly wrong in every particular! It bordered on fractally wrong, in that every little piece, taken by itself, was as wrong as the whole.

Tam
December 7, 2014
Sigh
[I read Mark Morford’s troll piece and briefly considered blogging about it. But I prefer to blog about things that either no one has noticed yet or that I have a quasi-unique viewpoint on. And this piece has been well covered by many others. This is just a small sample:

I had completely dismissed it as blog material. Morford is just too easy of a target and I have dealt with him at length before. Then I read the last sentence I quoted above of Tam’s. Wow!

I have seen this sort of thing many times before but didn’t have a name for it. Fractally wrong. I like it. I like it a lot.—Joe]

Website ranking

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A couple years ago the Brady Campaign created a website called wearebetterthanthis.org. As you might expect it was anti-gun and very misleading if not outright lying about the issue. I decided I would “compete” with them in that information space and I purchased wearebetterthanthis.info. I never did anything with it beyond linking to that category on this blog.

Today I was looking at the websites I was hosting and wondered if I should do something with that domain. My impression is the Brady Campaign has been neglecting it after that meme failed. But is there analytic data to support that?

Of course there is. Website popularity is an important part of ecommerce and there are many people trying to quantify this sort of information. Hence I used the free data available from pagerankchecker.com and alexa.com to get my answer. But then I wanted to know more. I ended up building tables of various pro and anti gun websites then sorting them by various measures.

Continue reading →

Al Capone reincarnated?

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Robb Allen recently tweeted:

This reminded me of something Al Capone once said:

You can get much further with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.

I’d suggest Capone had been reincarnated as Robb Allen but Capone was a syphilis infected, booze running, Chicago mobster and Robb lives in Florida*.

*Robb is also a really nice family guy who writes software for a living.

May you live in interesting times

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For quite a while Sebastian has been saying things like:

Been very quiet on the gun news front these days. Almost too quiet.

And:

Debate would actually make gun blogging interesting again.

This week it was:

Two weeks ago I was complaining to Bitter that it was difficult gun blogging these days because no one seems to give a shit about our issue anymore. Careful what you wish for, I guess.

I sometimes skip Markley’s Law Monday because I would have to spend a bunch of time looking for material. Currently I have posts scheduled into the middle of January.

I sometime go wandering through online quote databases looking for something to make a QOTD post. I now have posts in the queue for every day through Christmas with more in open browser tabs.

Sebastian, the next time you feel gun blogging isn’t interesting enough spend some time at your reloading bench, take a class, or maybe chase Bitter around the bedroom. Things are a little too interesting right now.

My feelings are hurt

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Josh Horwitz went on a rant about gun bloggers who might download and read a book on making explosives. He named a number of gun bloggers and there was no mention of me! And I probably have a dozen books on explosives on my shelf already.

What do I have to do to get some attention from him? I publish instructions, test results, and teach others how to make explosives on a fairly regular basis. I even describe how to take down an airplane with explosives made from common household materials. What more do I have to do to make the cut?

I think there is some sort of discrimination going on here and there should be a law against that. He shouldn’t be allowed to exercise his First Amendment privileges unless he can pass a competency test. If he is going to rant about gun bloggers and explosives then it is clear I should be number one on anyone’s list. He should forfeit his license to write or speak in public. It’s only common sense. We can do better than to allow people that incompetent to spout their lies of omission in public.

Update: As pointed out in the comment by fast richard, Horwitz has corrected his error. But he did not apologize for or acknowledge his lie of omission. I have not yet forgiven him. I still have a lot of crying to do before I’m going to feel better about this. And there ought to be a law to help prevent others from ever going through what I have gone through.

GRPC day 0

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I arrived in Orlando last night without incident and checked into the hotel which was conveniently at the airport. I just walked across the terminal and went up the escalator to the hotel lobby.

After checking in, loading, holstering my STI, and dumping my stuff in my room I started looking for the “Regency Ballroom”. I almost immediately came across Alan Gottlieb (founder of SAF) and his wife Juliann. Alan was headed to the ballroom so I chatted with him as we walked to the ballroom. When I got to the lobby in front of the ballroom almost immediately Robb Allen spotted me and came up to greet me. We hung out together most of the time when he wasn’t doing Florida Carry stuff.

Robb and I went to Chick-fil-A for a snack while waiting for registration to open. This was my first visit to a Chick-fil-A. I wasn’t impressed. I asked for the “eight nugget” package and got seven “nuggets” which were no bigger than the tip of my thumb. Plus, I’m pretty sure the clerk was rubbing her nose with the bottom of the plastic lid she put on my lemonade. I wondered if it was the Celebrate Diversity t-shirt I was wearing. Anti-gun people can be so uncivil.

I got in line for registration and realized Jeff Knox was in front of me. I introduced myself and he told me he wants the recipe for Boomerite (here). While talking to Jeff Alan Korwin came up to me and gave me a “Guns Save Lives” sticker. And then Juliann brought my badge to me without me having to wait in line. Wow!

I got some real food at the reception and wandered around looking at badges. I saw Emily Miller talking to Joe Tartaro of SAF. I saw Joe Waldron of CCRKBA. I talked to Bob Meier from JPFO about their new initiative (more details later). And I spent some time playing with the Laser Shot simulator which looks like an excellent training aid.

Robb spotted Miguel of Gun Free Zone and we talked to him for a bit. His day zero report is here.

John Richardson of No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money recognized Robb and/or me and introduced himself and chatted for a bit.

A longtime reader of my blog (who I don’t think has ever left a comment on my blog, [hint, hint]) came up and introduced himself.

It was a great start and that was just the reception. The real deal starts in a little over an hour.

I’ll be in my bunk

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I arrived back at my clock tower last night after being on the road for nearly 15 hours, got six hours sleep and went to work. Tonight I had the usual dinner and Sci-Fi video evening with son James and Kelsey.

I have lots of pictures and stories to share about Gun Blogger Rendezvous but I’m just too tired to do that tonight. Perhaps I’ll make some progress on that tomorrow night.

Quote of the day—Anonymous

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Now that you said “lubricant” I think I should shake your hand.

Anonymous
A woman at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous,
September 8, 2012
[No. It wasn’t me she was talking to. I was between her and the person she shook hands with.

In some ways this GBR was far more “interesting” than any previous one I have been to. There are stories from this event that will last a lifetime and will probably never be told involving a woman licking a stripper’s breast, whiskey to be licked off one another, 2 Women 1 Cup (DO NOT WATCH IT! I haven’t and neither should you), Jar Squatter (DO NOT WATCH IT! I haven’t and neither should you) and the hand on my thigh as a certain someone told me they were going to bed.

Being the guardian of morals that I am I took it upon myself to do something about this. I was able to get the two people I believe were most responsible for the decadence to agree to attend Boomershoot 2013.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Friedrich Nietzsche

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Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.

Friedrich Nietzsche
[After dinner last night at the Gun Blogger Rendezvous several of us stayed up late talking. One of the topics was the inability of the anti-gun people to think logically. In many cases they claim to simple “know” the truth. Nietzsche was a pretty sharp guy.

See also this quote from Nietzsche.—Joe]

GBR range report

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Today was the first range day for the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. I pretty much ignored everyone at the range today. I had a rifle that I needed to zero and test and Barron and I did little else.

At 200 yards I was disappointed:

WP_000174

My Spud Gun will yield a group about one third this size at this range.

I zeroed it and put the results in my ballistics app for my phone (still under development, not yet available).

The wind was a bit of a problem but the elevation was good on the steel at 350, 435, 500, 600, and 700 yards. We could hit without much difficulty so we moved out to the 957 yard targets.

We first started shooting at the barrel. It seemed that we were hitting all around it. I finally moved to the plate. It was smaller but I wanted a hard target. CLANG! First shot hit. The next shot was a miss, then two more hits. Barron then took a few shots at the plate. He did well too.

We concluded that we were poking holes in the barrel and seeing the dust kick up behind the it. We probably had a lot of hits on the barrel but just couldn’t be sure.

Still, getting three out of four hits on the plate with this gun was confirmation it is a good enough for most social occasions.

The long range results are similar to my previous attempts at the same target.

Time Travel

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I gotta tell ya’, time travel is a thing of beauty.

A week or ten days ago, I clicked on a link and got a
Microsoft Security Essentials warning about an attack from that web site. I
closed the window, and ran a full check. It found something, appeared to clean
it off, and things looked cool. Then, a few days later, I started to get some
weird behavior, such as doing a search that had OK looking results, and then ANY result I clicked on sent
me so some overseas site selling various things. “Ah, shit!” I said, and closed
the browser and everything else, then ran another full cleaning. A couple more
things found and removed. The OhShit!Ometer seemed to fade back from yellow into
green.

Then, a couple days ago, I decided I should to do a manual
“check for updates on Windows and MSE”, and I got an odd error. Crud. OhShit!Ometer
was up into the yellow. Dig, dig, dig. Update not working at all. And now I
can’t scan for problems because it says I don’t have security services running.
I check. It’s not even listed as a service. “Ah, shiiiiit!” Just pegged the
OhShit!Ometer hard over in the red.

Dig, dig, dig. Several
things are not listed as services that Update needs. Uninstall MSE,
download and install it again which also puts in the latest updates, run it,
clean out a bunch of un-cool stuff. Too much stuff. NOT GOOD. Can’t get
updates, MSE can’t update any more, not sure everything is off the system, so
there’s a bunch of stuff I can’t do, or at least can’t be sure of.

Try using the Win7 built-in System Restore to go back to an
earlier restore point. No dice, they are all bad.

Download the free SuperAntiSpyWare sweeper, and the free
ESET virus checker. Clean out some MORE stuff. Enough evil bits to gag TRON.
Well, I think it’s all gone, now, but
security and updates are still shot. Save my recent work off to the server,
then… Well, time to pull out the big guns.

Time Travel. Go back and Don’t
click that link!

I get out the Windows Home Server “Recovery” disk, pop it
in, planning on having my problems solved. It can’t find the server… “Ah,
@#$)(*&%$***!@!#$%!!” OhShit!Ometer just broke the peg.

Dig, dig, dig. I have Win7, my old WHS is based on an old
version of Win NT, it needs an older 32bit NIC driver. Dig, dig, dig,
eventually I find the right one, boot on the Recovery disk, with the 32-bit NIC
drivers on a USB flash drive, FINALLY find my Home server from the recovery
program, and tell it “pave the C: drive FLAT, turn back the clock and make it like it was two Saturdays
ago.”

The platters on the drive go ‘round and ‘round, ‘round and
‘round, ‘round and ‘round… Grind, grind, grind. Go to dinner. When I come back,
my C: drive is like it was two Saturdays ago. Run Virus scans. Get updates.
Uninstall Java. Get more updates. Scan more. Clean a couple of things out that
apparently were there before Update broke. Restore recent work files, get
better malware protection installed. Scan again. Scan with something else,
again. The meter appears to be edging cautiously back in the green again.

And I will NOT be clicking on that interesting looking link
again, because it took me too long to go back in time and straighten it all out
again.

But that fact is, that is more or less what happened,
because I have a WHS backing up my stuff every night, for every machine in the
house. An old HP EX470, the first official WHS model. And yet MSFT is doing
everything they can (product management-wise) to kill Windows Home Server for
some reason…. And yet, it’s the only product they have that is GOOD at home computer
time travel. It is something that I think EVERY home should have, if they have
more than one computer and any data of any value. It’s the second time it’s
saved my butt. Worth every penny I’ve spent on it. MSFT has really blown the marketing campaign for
their home server product.

And… virus writers who make stuff like what I just ran into need
to spend some serious time in jail.

Quote of the day—Dorothy Parker

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The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.


Dorothy Parker
[I recently was talking to someone who herself is quite good with wisecracks and told her, “That reminds me of a Dorothy Parker quote” (the one about using horticulture in a sentence). She didn’t know who Parker was so I gave her a 1 minute biography. Parker’s complete biography, Dorothy Parker: What Fresh Hell Is This?, is quite good even if it is a slow motion tragedy.


The next day my friend sent me an email saying she had looked up information on Parker. So I did a quick search to see what she might have found and came across the quote above which was new to me.


Of course my first thought upon reading it was Parker was reincarnated as Tamara. I think there is a good chance the timeline even matches close enough.—Joe]