I already checked: Georgia does recognize Idaho’s concealed carry permit. I will be taking my Ruger SP101 .357 with me. I will also invest in pepper spray, the biggest knife I can legally carry, and I plan on getting back into shape… those thugs in Atlanta will be sorry if they ever mess with an Idaho girl.
Lisa
April 25, 2010
Tech it or leave it
[Lisa is my niece.–Joe]
Barron just put up his Boomershoot 2009 video.
I would attempt to make some snarky comment about procrastination but daughter Xenia is the Queen of Procrastination and she probably inherited that trait from me.
You are in Boomershoot mode. I can sense the energy.
Barbara Scott
April 18, 2010
[Yeah. Boomershoot has been consuming nearly all my cycles and actually Barb is being a more than a little bit generous in saying she can “sense the energy”. I tend to get grumpy with her.–Joe]
Barb called me tonight to tell me she saw a woman open carrying in the grocery store. It looked like “the woman in Moscow who reads your blog”.
I’m pretty sure there is more than one woman in Moscow that reads my blog–considering both of my daughters and Barb are women, live in Moscow, and make mention of the things I write on a fairly regular basis. But regardless, I was pretty sure I was able to disambiguate who she was talking about. It had to be Laurel.
Barb told me she approached her (Paul Helmke and friends are wrong, normal people don’t get scared, run away or call the cops at the sight of an openly carried firearm) and asked. It turns out the guess of Laurel was wrong. Close, but wrong. It was Laurel’s sister.
Further chatting revealed that sister and her husband own the local BBQ joint. Barb was absolutely thrilled. In addition to me now smiling when she spends money at Starbucks she is convinced I will spend more money on their delicious BBQ (we have been there before and found it quite good). Barb went on to say that she just wishes Michaels and Joann would do something to curry my favor such that she could spend as much money as she wanted without me developing a frown.
I really, really liked the book The Female Brain. So has everyone I have convinced to read (or listen to) it.
The same author now has published The Male Brain. Here is a story by the author on CNN regarding some of the results elaborated on in the book:
Perhaps the biggest difference between the male and female brain is that men have a sexual pursuit area that is 2.5 times larger than the one in the female brain. Not only that, but beginning in their teens, they produce 200 to 250 percent more testosterone than they did during pre-adolescence.
If testosterone were beer, a 9-year-old boy would be getting the equivalent of a cup a day. But a 15-year-old would be getting the equivalent of nearly two gallons a day. This fuels their sexual engines and makes it impossible for them to stop thinking about female body parts and sex.
…
All that testosterone drives the “Man Trance”– that glazed-eye look a man gets when he sees breasts. As a woman who was among the ranks of the early feminists, I wish I could say that men can stop themselves from entering this trance. But the truth is, they can’t. Their visual brain circuits are always on the lookout for fertile mates. Whether or not they intend to pursue a visual enticement, they have to check out the goods.
To a man, this is the most natural response in the world, so he’s dismayed by how betrayed his wife or girlfriend feels when she sees him eyeing another woman. Men look at attractive women the way we look at pretty butterflies. They catch the male brain’s attention for a second, but then they flit out of his mind. Five minutes later, while we’re still fuming, he’s deciding whether he wants ribs or chicken for dinner. He asks us, “What’s wrong?” We say, “Nothing.” He shrugs and turns on the TV. We smolder and fear that he’ll leave us for another woman.
I have put the book on my “Wish List” at Audible.com and will buy it the next time a good sale comes around.
[H/T to son James for the IM with the link to the article.]
Sebastian pulled the number six million concealed carry permit holders out of the MSNBC story on concealed carry.
I wonder if that number is the sum of all the permits currently issued or the number of people with permits. I doubt that anyone was able to get a complete list of all the people with permits from all the states and remove duplicates. But they might have made some estimates.
In any case, daughter Kim called me up today to tell me she received her Washington State Concealed Pistol License (CPL) today.
So depending on how the numbers were tallied it could be six million and one licenses are now issued.
A friend of mine and blogger is asking for donations.
Daughter Kim already has her Concealed Weapons License for Idaho. Yesterday she called me to verify how to get her State of Washington License to Carry Concealed Pistol.
She called back after applying and told me of their new electronic fingerprint scanner.
She should be legal to carry in Washington within 30 days.
Just a FYI.
My hidden, hardened, underground bunker lost it’s Internet connection yesterday afternoon and I haven’t bother to use alternate methods of checking my email. I did check the comments and add one here on the blog but generally don’t expect anything from me until I restablish normal communcations. This is expected to be sometime this evening after I get off work.
If something urgent comes up give me a call on my cell phone: 208-301-4254.
Update: After wasting about two hours of my life I have an Internet connection at my bunker again. I wish I could bill Comcast for my time.
Kelsey says, “Comcast is a Dick!” James had a longer explaination which is not worth repeating here.
And a word of advice to $@#!%^& people at Comcast from security professional…
Do not insist I turn off my firewall and connect my computer directly to the cable modem!
My inclination after doing this is to wipe the hard disk and reinstall the O/S.
Xenia and her husband John bought a new car today. Since John is several thousand miles away at the moment I gave her a ride to the dealership and provided “moral support”. It is the first car she has ever owned.
Since the salesman who sold them the car was at his grandmother’s funeral it was the dealership owner that did the paperwork and gave us a mug (for Xenia) and two hats (one for John, one for me). He was very nice and gave Xenia his card which had his home phone number on it in case she had trouble with the car that wasn’t resolved with the normal staff. He asked Xenia to thank John for his service (U.S. Army). So far, I highly recommend Jess Ford in Pullman.
On the way back she called me (using the integrated Bluetooth cellphone connection) and talked about how cool it was that she could call people with her car. It even has voice recognition, she pushed a number, said, “Dial”, spoke the number and said, “Dial” again. Very cool and the car is definitely shiny.
Last night (this morning actually) I left work sometime after 3:00 AM. I woke up at 7:00 and couldn’t get back to sleep so I was back at work by 9:30 AM. I got back back to my hardened underground bunker about 8:20 tonight and nursing a troublesome build from work on a remote desktop screen. But I am down to nine bugs now. Down from 23 this time last week. And I have two more that I think are fixed if I could just get the tests to run so I could verify that.
I’m running on empty and unable to do another chapter in Henigan Lethal Logic book like I had planned to the last several days. Maybe this weekend I’ll be able to spend some time on it.
I have one more post I just have to make tonight then it will be lights out.
Wow! The things daughter Xenia does and posts about.
As I have reported before some people think other people’s children are nice but we have interesting children.
If you read my blog directly you probably noticed a few cosmetic changes today. Mostly it was a side effect of me fixing the comment text entry box which was all messed up. I had to learn a bunch about Cascading Style Sheets to fix the problem and tweaked a few things along the way.
I moved the “Bloggers I Have Met” list to a different page because it took up so much real estate on the sidebar. I also updated the list. If I have overlooked someone please let me know. It wasn’t intentional to ignore anyone–except for wife Barbara.
Yes, she has a blog–with three posts since it was created on September 13, 2009. I refuse to link to it until she posts a little more frequently. Currently she has had a total of 13 visits. I think all of those visits were by me.
Even though I haven’t gotten out of bed yet (aren’t laptops great!) and have already made a couple of blog posts I have a very busy day ahead of me. In addition to the usual things like attending to hygiene, food, and clothing I need to make up a couple hundred rounds of .40 S&W and head out to the range for a USPSA action pistol match. After that I have to return to Redmond to help The Borg conquer the galaxy.
I turned off Captcha on the comments to help some people that were having problems with it. If you see a bunch of spam comments start showing up don’t worry about it. I’ll take care of them by tomorrow morning.
Update: The pistol match went fairly well. I messed up a reload on one stage or else I might have actually won. I came in second instead:
| Place | Name | USPSA | Class | Division | PF | Age | Points | Stg % |
| 1 | H., KW | L2847 | B | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 313.6755 | 100.00% |
| 2 | H., JOE | TY29386 | B | Limited | Major | 288.3225 | 91.92% | |
| 3 | P., TY | A56401 | B | Limited | Major | 278.8331 | 88.89% | |
| 4 | M., ADAM | A42720 | M | Limited | Major | 275.2926 | 87.76% | |
| 5 | B., MIKE | A39993 | A | Limited 10 | Major | 262.8004 | 83.78% | |
| 6 | I., KEVIN | L2544 | B | Limited | Major | 235.1292 | 74.96% | |
| 7 | W., DON | TY25213 | A | Limited | Major | Senior | 211.9319 | 67.56% |
| 8 | W., ROGER | U | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 196.7338 | 62.72% | |
| 9 | Revo, Roger | U | Revolver | Major | Senior | 187.4962 | 59.77% | |
| 10 | R., NICHOLAS | A57321 | D | Production | Minor | Junior | 169.0668 | 53.90% |
| 11 | Gr., John | A65903 | U | Limited | Major | 147.6443 | 47.07% | |
| 12 | D., Jerry | U | Limited 10 | Major | Senior | 99.7761 | 31.81% | |
| 13 | M., Bill | U | Limited | Major | 87.8599 | 28.01% |
We started sitting in the chair and had to stay within the box. There is a Pepper Popper on the left in the shadow of a no shoot which activates a swinging target coming out from behind the stack of barrels on the right (simulates a hijacker come out of the bathroom).
I got 50 points (out of 55 possible–an 11 round stage) in 8.31 seconds for a hit factor of 6.0168. Pretty good, I figure, for almost all head shots except for the mover. Especially with all the hostages to avoid.
That white stuff on the ground? That is snow. SOME wimps stop shooting outdoors in the winter–but not at our range in North Central Idaho.
Even though I’m an atheist wearing my new “Bah Humbug” shirt from daughter Kim I think it is a poor reason to celebrate (CNN headline):
Woman knocks down pope at Mass; Christmas celebrations begin
I’m not a big fan of holidays and Christmas is particularly annoying. Barb and the girls on the other hand put quite bit of effort into Christmas and enjoy it a great deal. I contain myself and help out as best I can and not spoil it for others. But sometimes people pick up on my attitude anyway (it couldn’t be the “Bah Humbug!” sweatshirt I wear every Christmas).
Daughter Xenia has been posting one Christmas picture per day this month starting here. All of them are good. Some of them are great.
My favorite so far is this one:
I suspect that picture was just for me.
On Friday I was in the local Safeway store when from across the produce department someone caught my eye and called out, “You’re Joe Huffman, right?”
I sort of recognized him. I had bumped into him numerous times at the Seattle airport back in the late 90s when I was flying back and forth to/from Redmond/Moscow (ID). Tim lived in San Francisco then but had gone to college at the University of Idaho and his girlfriend was still there. So he frequently spent a weekend in Moscow with her and would take the same flight on the same small plane from Seattle to Moscow that I did. We had another common connection in that his buddy Seth that he went to high school and college with was then his roommate in San Francisco had worked for me when he was in college at the U of I.
Tim told me he would love to do some Boomershoot stuff sometime and if I ever wanted some help to let him know. I told him that I was thinking about going out on Saturday to do some tests and he would be welcome to come along. He sounded very interested.
Later in the day I was hitting up all the places that sold ammo in town looking for some CCI Stinger ammo. I use that for testing of the sensitivity of Boomerite. By moving closer or farther away I can adjust the impact velocity at the target and determine if the mixture is more or less sensitive that other mixtures I have used. At one of the stores I was asked what I was looking for and I told him. He said he was sorry but they didn’t have any. Would one of the other products they had work instead? I told him no, I needed some very high velocity stuff. “What are you trying to kill?”, he asked.
[heavy sigh]
Do I tell him the truth or avoid the question? This has happened so many times. Buying 15 boxes of zip locked bags, or a 50 pound sack of stuff at Costco can make people curious and I always worry they won’t want to sell to me or they will call the cops and I’ll spend an hour or five explaining to them.
I told him the truth and his eyes got big and instead of backing away he said, “Are you the Boomershoot guy?” I confirmed it and he introduced himself, shook my hand, and told me how pleased he was to meet me.
I went home and told Barb that two people in one day recognized me. With a big smile on her face she said, “I’m married to a rock star.”
Somehow I was under the impression rock stars had more groupies. I’d put some effort into increasing the number but I’m afraid the number would drop from one to zero at the first indication I was making the attempt.
I made a sarcastic comment at Snowflakes in Hell and Bitter came back with this comment:
Joe, you’ve hit upon the next biggest factor making me question kids. Seriously, I don’t know that I want to bring kids into the picture if they are going to live in a mostly government-controlled world. I realize that this country has survived many other changes in the past, and many other generations have survived well enough. But if we’re headed toward the government taking over even larger chunks of the economy, I’m not sure I’d be bringing kids into a better life than I enjoyed. And that just doesn’t seem right.
I understand her point but there is more than one way to view the problem.
Another way to view it is that sort of attitude is creating the problem. See the movie Idiocracy (wonderful premise, good start, but a poor movie overall) for an extreme view of this type of thing taken to the limit.
By tweaking the premise in Idiocracy just a bit one can hypothesis that high reproduction rates by those that believe government should provide “everything for free” will likely result in a cultural, if not genetic, disposition toward more dependency on and expectation of government control of the economy and personal lives. Low reproduction rates by those that believe in and desire freedom will exacerbate the problem. A slightly modified version of this argument is what Barb successfully used on me to convince me to have a third child. That is why we sometimes call Xenia our gift to the world.
But what of the individual? If freedom loving people are but a small minority of the population won’t their lives be miserable? Not necessarily.
It depends on what the outcome is during their lifetime. If it is George Orwell’s 1984 then I would agree with that point. But governments have a history of collapsing. Especially socialist and totalitarian governments. Food shortages, riots, and the break down of infrastructure favor intelligent and freedom loving people. My model of the world is that, ultimately, stupidity is self-correcting. And massive government intervention in the free market and free society is self correcting because it is so stupid. Those people demanding that government supply their every need and want will have higher death rates than those that are self-motivated and value freedom. It may be that within our or our children’s lifetimes the freedom loving minority will become the majority essentially overnight because of the much higher death rates among the anti-freedom people as society collapses. Even if they do not become the majority in actual numbers they may have the majority of power. This is analogous to the U.S. being the world’s sole super-power with just a small minority of the planets population. And that power came about for the same reason that I hypothesize it could happen again in a different context–because freedom creates prosperity and prosperity enables power.
If that comes about then those freedom loving people will be in a position to take over the world. It will be with an anti-freedom lesson extremely fresh in their minds that they form the next governments and economic systems.
I don’t know what will happen. We have never had a situation like this before. In the past there was always someplace new to live. The east coast of North America then migration to California and “The Oregon Territories” provided freedom for millions in the last 300 years. But the “New World” is now occupied by parasites that crave security more than freedom and ensure everyone will receive neither. Where can we move next and escape our oppressors? Antarctica, the ocean floor, and space all appear to be such harsh environments that economic prosperity would be difficult or impossible. This may mean we can do no more than wait for the parasites to starve, riot, and burn themselves out.
I don’t know if freedom has a chance of surviving and rising from the ashes and mankind will finally learn the lesson of why freedom is essential. But I do know that if we do not have children and raise them to value freedom then freedom will most likely be extinguished.
It boils down to “Are you an optimist or a pessimist?” The pessimist is more often right because they can easily fulfill their expectations. The optimist may be wrong more often but progress, prosperity, and happiness are always the products of optimists and never that of pessimists.
Which are you?
That is to say, they’re inside the heated space in my home and it’s heating season. I can therefore use them all I want, or leave them on when I’m not using them, and it costs me nothing in energy use. I wrote about this a while back, and Say Uncle has a post that touches on the subject.
There are some qualifiers though. A dishwasher dumps warm water outside the heated space, as does a clothes washer. A dryer dumps hot air outside the heated space too, but you can leave your television or oven on all day and it costs you no extra energy useage. If the appliances or the incandescent lights aren’t heating your home, the furnace takes over and uses that same amount of energy anyway. I submit that using the appliances more may actually save energy. Here’s how I got there; at least in my case, the furnace ducts are under the house, outside the heated space. Some of the losses from that extra-hot air running through the ducts under the house might be avoided by keeping the heat generation all inside the house. There was also a chapter in my college physics book that explained how inductive loads may be getting you some free energy, because of the way the metering works. I forget how that happens, but if it’s true then over-use of motors and transformers (florescent lights or anything that uses a power supply transformer) as opposed to relying more on the resistive loads in your electric furnace may be saving on your energy bill. Though that particular difference would be very small for a single home, IIRC the physics book says that this difference, this un-billed energy, is significant on a large scale.
If you want to save energy this heating season, using CF bulbs, turning off your lights, and using super efficient appliances (with the above caveats) isn’t the way to do it. Not during the heating season. Tightening up the house, adding insulation, using a heat recovery system on your dryer vent, etc., using less hot water (assuming that water’s being dumped outside the heated space) or turning down the thermostat, will save energy. Otherwise, don’t let ignorance and simplistic thinking influence your lifestyle.
Someone mentioned last time that some of the light from your evil incandescents (or any other lights) is being lost through your windows. True, but the visible light is a small fraction of the total output unless you’re using LEDs. In any case it’s the energy you don’t see that’s being lost in far greater quantity through your windows, and that loss takes place whether or not your lights are on. Use double or triple panes, and close your blinds at night. We use opaque (to visible and IR) venetian blinds. My friend, who I helped build a house on the Yukon/Kuskokwim delta, had a large, triple pane picture window with an insulated door that swung down from the ceiling and had magnetic seals like a refrigerator door. The house also has 18″ to 24″ of insulation in the walls and floor (double framed) and more in the ceiling. We had to insulate the house from the tundra underneath too, to keep the tundra from thawing in summer. That was an interesting project, but now I have digressed.
If you would not be forgotten
As soon as you are dead and rotten,
Either write things worthy reading,
Or do things worth the writing.
Ben Franklin
[Or both.
Boomershoot, this blog, the software I have written (some used by 100s of millions), the hardware I have designed (10s of thousands of units shipped), and my children are my attempts.–Joe]