Another Day.....Another.....

Thursday, September 15, 2011

Jedi Kittens

This wins the Interwebz today in my book!

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

So I went to northern Virginia to ToddG's "Aim Fast Hit Fast" class last weekend. I have very little experience with the "high speed low drag" crowd. In fact this was the forth Firearm class I have attended and NRA nor the NCDOJ CCH Instructor class was anything like this!

Unpack (click to enbiggen as usual)!

ToddG is an excellent instructor. He does not chant "Tacticool" buzz phrases. He is a thinking persons instructor. He tells you WHY he does it this way and then demonstrates it. He is a consummate operator and more importantly to me instructor with a Handgun.

Lord knows I must have burned up a lot of his patience! He was always there to offer tips, critiques, and "hey don't do that again, OK"? He DOES want all of his students to do well and it showed. Range safety was paramount and the range facility rivaled USTC.

I had zero practice at presentation from concealment at speed with a timer on me. I had plenty when I left!

Simply put if you want to be better with all aspects of running a Handgun, Todd's class is worth the time, effort and energy. I was firmly pushed out of my comfort zone and that is what I need to continue to learn. I was so frustrated with my performance after the first day I thought briefly about not even showing up the next day. I'm not IDPA or IPSEC, everyone is younger than me, just pack it in and go home.

Instead of going to class dinner on the first night I went back to the room to practice the pressout and other techniques. It probably did not help my standing with other classmates to not attend. No matter. I did have words of encouragement that night from several people. That meant a lot. The most important came from B. I went back!

Sunday I was somewhat redeemed. When shooting the steel plates head to head with other students with three targets strong hand only and three weak hand I prevailed. Old dudes can keep up!

After the end of class Todd asked if anyone wanted to stay and shoot more. I stayed. Even after class, he had competitions already devised to keep up shooting, still offering pointers to students. It is very obvious this man has a passion for what he does. I will show back up to vex him again like a moth to the flame.

On another note the S&W M&P Pro Series with my reloads had no malfunctions. Good on me and good on S&W! We did have a Glock throw up on a reload during class but it was the reload, not the pistol.

We shot until dark and again he asked if anyone wanted to go to dinner. I had to decline as I was headed to "Banjo Country" to meet someone the next day.

After a little ride I arrived in lagniappe's lair country. Hole up and meet Murphy's Law over breakfast. I jump in his ride for a trip to a gunsmith and the range. WARNING! If you are a ~~victim~~ passenger in a motor vehicle with him, use the "Oh Jesus" handrail on the passenger side. You will need it! We arrive at the range. I would not have been able to make it there in my ride. So we go at it. ML details the events from there here.

So I am careening around Banjo Country. I am out manned and out gunned. My Blackberry is going "wait, what?" trying to get location updates. This is the first Blogger I have met in meat space. NO banjo music in the background and the conversation is great. ML took a great deal of time and effort for us to go shoot. I relax. Here he is on his M-60:

ML is a class act all around. It was a pleasure to meet him and I will return to Lagniappe's lair as soon as I can. The "secret weapon" was covered in awesome sauce! The other hardware was just as impressive as the man owning it. I cannot say enough about ending my weekend with ML. IT was a perfect ending.

Monday, September 12, 2011

I'm Back!

And I am toast. Off to work tomorrow. More later on the weekend's activities!

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Books!

This is a repost from January. I have added this to it. You know the drill, click to enbiggen!

Garage:

If you are going to putz with these things you have to have the knowledge. Shop manuals for everything from a 1967 Cadillac to a 2004 F-150. The binders are the records for automobiles I get my hands on occasionally.

Here is one of the oldest books I have yet one I consider a treasure:

First edition in 1947, the second 1955. I enjoy this book and consider it one of the best if you decide to work on "old school" stuff.

Next up overflow parking for mostly fiction:

Then the current queue:

And now the post from January!

Several Bloggers of late have posted about books. B. has a picture or two here. Tam laments the fluid nature of the Internet here. The Retrotechnologist shows even more dead tree media and made accommodations for them.

Books have always been an important part of my life and in every room in this house you will for better or worse find printed media.

Here is the current shot of the dining room table. You may infer that I am not all about fine dining and you would be correct unless I have guests:

Here is an end table in my living room with two books from my home town:

Here is the coffee table:

The right hand side is a "Today in History" book. I find it enjoyable.

Here is a shot from the office bookshelf:

And another:

These are textbooks I have used as both student and teacher. If anyone notes the age of some of these I would be impressed!

Finally another bookshelf picture.

Many thanks to those that have commented on books and there will be more of them here I fear based on their recommendations!

They do have a permanence to them that the Internet will never have! The oldest one here I acquired when I was 13. If you have not read it, get 2001. It does explain much after watching the movie! It was not HAL's fault, but the folly of man in my opinion!

Wednesday, September 7, 2011

UPDATE! Feature or Bug?

ZombieRush brought it. DUH! RTFM! Right there on page 16 it says it will do just this:

WARNING: DO NOT USE EXCESSIVE UPWARD FORCE
WHEN INSERTING A LOADED MAGAZINE INTO THE
PISTOL. EXCESSIVE UPWARD FORCE COULD CAUSE
THE SLIDE TO MOVE FORWARD, CHAMBERING A ROUND AND
MAKING THE PISTOL READY TO FIRE.

Power is back on! So you decide. S&W M&P Pro Series. 9mm in slide lock. Attempting a reload (with dummy rounds of course!) Here is what we get.

I DID NOT engage the slide stop lever. It does it all the time unless you carefully hit the magazine buttplate at a 90 degree angle or do not use as much force. This is the primary Firearm going with me next weekend. It DOES load a cartridge when this occurs.

I will have my trusted M1911 as backup. So is it a bug or feature for timed competition?

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

HMI and engineering

I received a call tonight. Not just a pedestrian call, but one that in retrospect made me think. One I was not expecting was a plus!

I will save this for a much longer post, but the topic is this. Humans design control systems and humans must interpret them and act upon them. They (engineers and end users) nowadays seem to come at it with competing viewpoints. The fact relayed to me today is that engineering can be used to try to reconstruct what went wrong between the humans and the machine. That is wonderful, but I fear that the human training element is lacking nowadays. On both ends.

When I get back I will post about how humans could do nothing to change what was going to happen due to bad engineering. I will then tell how humans overcame a human error that threw the technology in the ditch, but not because of the technology. It worked fine given its constraints.

I fear that we are lacking the training for humans to master what other humans create. More importantly the will to decide the machine is lying and take control without assistance from the algorithms and programming others have made seems to be lacking. The skill to DO that successfully also seems to be lacking if it becomes needed.