As Stephanie has explained to me if you want the media to cover your event you need to write the story for them. Compare this article to our news release.
Keep this in mind when you are complaining about the bias against guns in the media. Don’t hide in the closet. Give the media something positive to say about gun owners and make it really easy for them. Then you can gloat as the anti-gun people whine about the bias in the media.
As Jason pointed out to me with this link the proper phrase should be “Veni, vidi, BOOM!”. Not Vini. Vidi. BOOM! as in the quote of the day from last week. Unfortunately this wasn’t pointed out to me until after there was one order for a shirt already “in production” before I got the image corrected and back up in the Boomershoot 2006 merchandise shop. I don’t know if that means the image will actually make it onto the shirt or not. So… it’s possible there will be just one shirt on the whole planet that has the wrong slogan on it. It will be a collectors item.
That wasn’t the only change I made either. Here is the before and after:
Vini. Vidi. BOOM!
[I came. I saw. I blew stuff up!]
After:
Veni, vidi, BOOM!
[I came, I saw, I BLEW STUFF UP!]
Order soon if you want to have your stuff in time for the event. There won’t be shirt sales at the event.
Vini. Vidi. Boom.
[I came. I saw. I blew stuff up.]
Bruce at mAss Backwards
The winning Boomershoot 2006 slogan entry.
Congratulations Bruce.
I managed to get Barb’s Jeep clean before she saw it:
Yesterday I got a call from some reporter at a Boston area newspaper, The Enterprise. She was looking at the title to this web page: Want Some Help Building a Bomb? In a very hesitant voice she ask, “Why would anyone put up a web page like that?” I asked if she had read the web page. “No.” Okay, so I have to start at the beginning with her… I was tempted to ask her if she knew how to read but figured that would make a poor first impression and I generally try to stay on the good side of people that buy their ink by the barrel. So I explained how I make explosives for recreational purposes and I get email from people wanting to build bombs and I tell them no and if appropriate forward the email on to the appropriate law enforcement agency. She seemed particularly interested in this story about the 13 year old kid waiting in the headteacher’s office for his parents to arrive.
After telling a few stories about how stupid some of these people are–I put all this email on my website telling about how I turned in everyone yet I still get email (and calls from reporters) from people thinking I actually provide help on illegal activities. She then got a lot more friendly and enthusiastic about what I’m doing. It turns out that some kid in her area got caught with pipe bomb materials in his car at high school. Talk turned to “It’s so easy to find bomb building instructions on the Internet” and she was tasked with writing a story about it. The librarian did the research and the reporter was calling the people with the web pages to ask “Why?” She asked a bunch of questions about have I helped catch any other kids with bombs or bomb building intentions. I told her I didn’t really know because it’s rare the police will get back to me with that sort of information. I told her I did get one kid arrested but it wasn’t related to my web page.
She then went on to ask about “this hobby”. I explained Boomershoot to her and she keep asking “Why haven’t I heard of this before?” Again I refrained from pointing out the obvious about this question. She works in Massachusetts, guns are very restricted there. Boomershoot is near Orofino Idaho. We are separated by about 2200 miles and totally alien cultures. I told her, “It’s been in Newsweek, Outside Magazine, and this year we have a magazine coming from the U.K.” Anyway she started seemed quite interested in Boomershoot and people coming from all over the continent to this event and generally seemed quite enthusiastic. I’ll be checking out their website everyday for a while to see if she actually publishes a story on what we talked about.
Ry and I were out the door of my house in Moscow by 7:30 AM then traveled the hour to the Boomershoot range and made about 45 pounds of reactive targets by 11:00. We tested them with .223 and .50 BMG ball ammo. With the .223 we got detonation 50% of the time at 460 yards which figures out to about 1700 fps. On the .50 BMG there have been problems in the past. Smaller calibers were popping them off just fine but the .50 in ball wouldn’t. No problem today — at least at 460 yards. We also tested some steel targets with the .223 (no damage at 460 yards with VMAX bullets). Targets six weeks old detonated from 20 yards away with a .223 (last year targets just a four weeks old wouldn’t detonated with a .223). Just as we were leaving some guy drives up, walks up to the driver side of the Jeep as we are pulling out on the road and asks, “Are you going to be doing that next weekend?” “No.” “Good!” and he walked off.
Pictures of Barb’s Jeep later. I got a comment of “Been four-wheeling, huh?” when we stopped for a bathroom break in Ellensburg. I didn’t know mud covered Jeeps attracted the attention of pretty college-age girls… I’ll have to keep that in mind for the next time Barb is out of town.
Update: Ry has a couple posts up here and here about our adventures this weekend. And here is the picture of Barb’s Jeep after we got back from the Boomershoot range:
On February 15 I posted about some tests I did with the new Boomerite mix. At 630 yards the targets didn’t detonate with with .223 ammo I was using. I was using muzzle velocity numbers from several years ago for the same brand of ammo in the same gun but I didn’t trust the numbers because the point of impact was lower than I expected. I measured the muzzle velocity again and found the MV was 135 slower than my previous numbers.
Using the new MV I recalculated the target velocities of my tests in February. My best estimate is the target velocity was 1182 fps. Too slow to expect detonation.
Assuming the weather holds Ry and I will redo the tests tomorrow to find out if 1500 fps .223 bullets will detonate the targets. 1500 fps is the expected velocity of my .223 bullets at about 550 yards under Boomershoot conditions.
I got an email from someone that works at the Hanford site for an organization other than Pacific Northwest National Laboratory which has close ties to Hanford as well. He said Boomershoot.org is blocked from his work. Interesting…. I must have quite a reputation. Or else I just flatter myself. I’m not sure which.
I know it is blocked from Xenia’s school. I don’t know the reason there.
A friend who works at Cingular told me, “The website was blocked because of relating to Violence…” I’m insulted by that.
Although I forget who it was someone told me it was blocked from their work access because of related to criminal activities or some such thing. Now that I am really insulted about.
I like to think these things are, as I suggest in the FAQ, because some Puritan is afraid that someone, someplace, is having fun.
I normally would have waited another week or so to mention more Boomershoot blog posts but this is a special occasion. I forgot one posting last time and today I noticed the first ever negative posting.
The second one is the negative one. And Boomershoot is just a extra brain fart from a barking moonbat that can’t stay on topic. Here is the most of the relevent text:
IT’S APPARENTLY CALLED BOOMERSHOOT AND AS FAR AS I CAN SEE IT IS ONLY FOR THE TOTALLY BRAIN DEAD. NOT THAT ANYONE WHO STOPS BY HERE FITS THAT CATEGORY OF COURSE. NOLA IS STILL A RUIN AND WE HAVE TWATS SPENDING LARGE CHUNKS OF CASH ON SHIT LIKE THIS. THE WORLD IS A SAD PLACE INDEED.
[shrug] I left a comment thanking him for the free advertising. It probably won’t be approved but it was worth a try.
I checked with Cingular, Inland Cellular, Qwest, T-Mobile, and Verizon. Only Inland Cellular and Verizon have coverage at the Boomershoot site. Inland Cellular is analog only. Last year I had coverage with my AT&T phone. I switched over to Cingular and now have nothing. I will get a cell phone just for the event and give the number out to all attendees.
I just noticed an interesting search hit on my blog. Someone in the Texas Attorney General is researching Tannerite. It doesn’t look like it was a casual search either. They looked as deep as the first 60 Google hits.
I’m not a lawyer but from my reading of the law in some states the use of Tannerite is illegal without special licensing. The Tannerite web site appears to claim this is not true. If you use Tannerite please get a legal opinion you can trust before using it in your political jurisdiction.
Domain Name state.tx.us ? (United States)
IP Address 204.64.42.# (Texas Attorney General)
ISP STATE OF TEXAS GENERAL SERVICES COMMISSION
Location
Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts)
State : Texas City : Austin Lat/Long : 30.2779, -97.7379 (Map) Language English (United States)en-us
Operating System Microsoft WinXP
Browser Internet Explorer 6.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Javascript version 1.3
Monitor
Resolution : 800 x 600 Color Depth : 32 bits Time of Visit Mar 29 2006 6:42:35 am
Last Page View Mar 29 2006 6:44:43 am
Visit Length 2 minutes 8 seconds
Page Views 1
Referring URL http://www.google.co…en&lr=&start=50&sa=N
Search Engine google.com
Search Words tannerite
Visit Entry Page http://blog.joehuffm…08-89f4fcb3a234.aspx
Visit Exit Page http://blog.joehuffm…08-89f4fcb3a234.aspx
Out Click
Time Zone UTC-6:00
Visitor’s Time Mar 29 2006 8:42:35 am
Visit Number 70,181
As pointed out to me by Ry in this post about plagiarism, a hot topic around these parts lately, apparently the AP has a policy of not citing bloggers as a source:
the AP apparatchiks admitting to taking our work and using it without attribution, stating “we do not credit blogs”.
Emphasis in the original.
I can’t imagine why it is but for some reason I now have this image in my mind of an approach a friend of mine was inclined to implement in a different situation.
We had a former mutual friend (let’s just call him “Walter”) that we were in business together with. He sold out the company and walked away with several million dollars while my friend, my brother, and many other co-workers, and I got nothing–even our contracts for royalties on the products we owned and were being sold by the new company (lets call it “Symantec”) were worth nothing. Symantec and it’s slime ball president (lets just call him “Gordon Eubanks”) wouldn’t allow us to audit the books even though our contracts said we could. It was this event along with election of Bill Clinton (spit, spit), and the events of Ruby Ridge that inspired me to take up guns, and later explosives, as hobbies. Anyway I ran across a shirt at a gun show that I just had to buy. Not for me but for my friend that was still on speaking terms with “Walter”. I showed the shirt to him and asked him if he would like to have it. “YES!” was the immediate reply. I told him I would give the shirt to him on one condition. The next time he saw Walter he had to be wearing the shirt and he had to tell “Walter” that I had given him the shirt. “Deal.” It wasn’t long before he came up with an alternate delivery method for the “message”. My friend said the proper delivery would be to attach the shirt to the front door of “Walter’s” new multi-million dollar house on the lake with knife driven through the shirt like a large tack. To the best of my knowledge the message wasn’t delivered in that fashion although I derived a great deal of pleasure over just the thought of it.
For some reason that same message and the same delivery method are what comes to mind when I read what the AP apparatchiks policy is in regards to crediting blogs.
And what was the message on the shirt you ask?
The only reason some people are alive is because it’s against the law to kill them.
There are only six shooting positions left for Boomershoot 2006. Get your entries in really soon if you want to participate.
Here is the latest word from the bloggers that have mentioned Boomershoot 2006:
Barb and I had lunch with my parents on Sunday. We stopped by the Boomershoot site on our way home so I could measure the shooting line in both the .50 BMG and smaller caliber shooting areas.
I have plenty of room for all the .50 BMG shooters as well as the people with ‘normal’ guns. I currently have only 11 out of 60 slots left with at least one more entry “in the mail” so I expect Boomershoot 2006 will be completely filled. The shooting line will be over 250 yards long which reminds me that I need to get some handheld air horns for the range officers. The battery powered horn worked fine when the line was only a couple hundred feet long but it just can’t be heard well enough 100 yards away.
The site is still very wet with ducks swimming in the standing water in the field, and the grass is still brown from the winter. But for the middle of March it’s doing fine. But with the clouds it made for a nice picture from the shooting area:
I have a minor glitch with the ATF regarding the locks I’m using on the Taj Mahal (my explosives storage magazine for Boomershoot). I was pretty annoyed with things but I tried not to let it show in my email to Crystal–my contact at the Spokane office. It wasn’t her fault and from my vantage point it appeared she was doing everything right. My email was polite but she was smart enough to read between the lines and gave me a call about two minutes after I pressed send. We had a nice chat and I think we are on the path to getting things all straightened out. She gave me suggestion on a “last resort” means to make do with what I have if I can’t get through all the bureaucracy in time. It was something I had pretty much planned on doing anyway with a minor twist. And I didn’t know that it would be officially sanctioned as a means to get around my problems.
If you have differences to work out with the “jack-booted thugs” it’s best to get things straightened out over the phone rather than having their SWAT team explain things to you at 3:00 AM. Crystal has done a good job of keeping me from getting a visit from her friends on the other side of the hallway and I’m grateful for that.
46 positions have been filled. There are 14 positions remaining. But I also know of several entries that are “in the mail”. If I have not acknowledged your entry yet and you sent it before March 10th please let me know. I think I am all caught up now but it’s possible I have an entry laying around someplace that I didn’t find on my first pass through the stack of papers on my desk.
I’m asking everyone that will be shooting a .50 BMG to let me know in the next few days. Even if you have already told me before I would like another email. I need to allocate spaces much more carefully this year and I need to make sure there is enough room for the .50 Caliber guys.
You probably haven’t noticed but the Boomershoot website is now on a very high bandwidth ‘pipe’. Videos, sound, and pictures should load much faster than before. Downloading Boomershoot History 2004 (~140 MBytes) is almost reasonable under certain circumstances.
Things still on my list of things to do:
More Boomershoot blogging:
…this is something we’ve got over the Europeans: the ability to organize a friendly outing of shooting rifles at targets packed with home-made explosives out in rural Idaho is our birthright.
On the other hand, in Cambodia, for the right fee, you can shoot an RPG at a live cow. So there’s that to consider.
Outlandish Josh
March 13, 2006
In his blog posting AMERICA!
Another post from someone I used to work with at Microsoft. Craig was my lead when I first started at Microsoft. Here he gives the early history of DirectX. I started in May of ’95 and was responsible for the Cirrus chips for DirectX 1. I took the summer off to be with my wife and kids for the summer of ’96 and just barely had contact with DirectX 3. But I was involved with 2 and 5.
The “military coat” Craig talks about is a black M-65 field jacket. I still have my DirectX jacket in my closet with the patches. Ry and I now wear black M-65 jackets with Boomershoot embroidered on them.
Some of the patches for the various versions of DirectX had the project names on them. Some of the project names were Manhattan (DirectX 1 was to “compete” with the Japanese game machines), Orion (reference to nuclear explosion powered space travel), and Orange (as in Agent Orange used in Vietnam to defoliate the jungle). I think it was DirectX 6 that had the project name of “Diesel”. This was a veiled reference to ammonium nitrate/diesel mixture which was believed (nitromethane was the actual fuel) to be used in the then recent bombing of the Federal building in Oklahoma City. Another time I will tell you of the mementos I made of ammonium nitrate for people on the project and shipped to Raymond to distribute.
See also Renegades of the Empire for DirectX history and lots of stories about Alex, Craig, and Eric.
Update: Fixed the broken link to Craigs post on DirectX history.
Congratulations to Mr. Completely for winning the title of Biggest and Best Gun Blog 2005. For this he, and his lovely wife KeeWee, will be receiving a free entry into Boomershoot 2006. I’m not sure what he is going to be using at the event as his particular area of gun dominance is with .22LR handguns, but I’m sure we can figure something out. I’ll be having dinner, again, with he and his wife on March 1 so maybe we can work out some details then.
The potassium chlorate was delivered this week. I just need to order the boxes used as containers for the explosives and I will have all but the most trivial items needed for Boomershoot 2006 in stock.
Last Saturday I tested out a flour mill as a tool for getting all the lumps out of the potassium chlorate just prior to mixing it with the other ingredients. It works but requires constant human attention. Dad had an idea that I will try at the next opportunity. In any case I think I can get rid of the blenders which are the biggest power drain and another drain on labor as when they are used they require constant attention as well.
The main reason for the Saturday excursion to Boomershoot country was to test target detonation with .223 at the greater ranges. I made some new targets and shot at them from 630 yards with a .223. I made a number of errors and didn’t realize until after I got home that because of the cold (30F) and the exceptionally high air pressure (30.5″ of Hg) the target velocity was probably under 1200 fps. This velocity is below what I would have expected the targets to detonate and that in fact is exactly what happened. I had nearly a dozen solid hits without them detonating. I fired one round of CCI Stinger (high velocity .22LR) from about 15 yards away (probably about 1500 fps target velocity) and a target with three .223 holes detonated. I really want to test the .223 with a target velocity of 1400 to 1500 fps.
Below is the target array I made to make it easier to assure a hit on a target while not having all of them detonate at once causing the neighbors to have things fall off the walls. I had something else in mind, Ry suggested this but figured I would need someone at the shooting line to help get things lined up. While driving home from the Seattle area I figured out a way I could line it up myself. I keep telling him that between the two of us we have a complete brain. Lots of ideas from one or the other of us will be half baked and the other turns it into something quite clever.
From the shooters viewpoint
Side view
