| Range report, AKA 'a brief history of fail' |
[05 Nov 2009|07:08pm] |
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Today, for the first time, I went to the "local" outdoor range to properly sight in my hunting rifle's scope.
Last year I did it at The Shooting Edge, which is nice in that it's closer and indoors, but limited in that it only has a 50 yard range. Last year I zeroed at half an inch high at 50 yards, called it done, and went hunting. As luck would have it, a deer happened to jump out 50 yards or so in front of me, so it all worked out.
Not expecting to be so lucky this year, I figured I should do it right. so off I go to the Homestead public range. I have no idea what to expect; I've never even seen pics of the place. I show up with targets, guns, and ammo and find out that there's nothing to attach the targets to, nor any way of attaching them. Luckily I'm one of those nutters who always carries duct tape (you never know when a car's going to break down on you) so between that and some plywood and 2x4s laying around I was able to rig up what seemed like a passable target stand.
Then the wind kicked in. And then stopped, and then blew just as hard in the other direction, then resumed at double strength in the first direction, etc. By the time I trudged the 100 yards through 2 inch mud back to the benches and turned around, my target stand had blown over. Pieces of plywood were floating around at the 100 yard line like balloons at a kid's party. My target stand was face down, fresh targets in the mud.
That was most of the afternoon... walking back and forth, putting my targets back up, against the wind. I got a few shots off in between, but again the wind was affecting those, too. I couldn't even compensate for the wind, because it was so unpredictable. By the time I estimated the wind speed, counted clicks, and regained my sight picture, the wind had shifted. So I set back to zero windage and hoped for the best, figuring I'd concentrate on vertical only. Of my first 3 shots, only one even clipped the paper. My next few were slightly better. A couple more times my targets were gone before I got back to the bench, so I shot at leftover targets or debris on the ground on the berm. My spotting scope blew off the bench and landed in the mud... twice.
My "shooting vise" is probably the most useless gadget I have ever purchased, and those who know me well will know that that's a pretty damning review. Its purpose seems to be to hold the rifle in such a way that it cannot physically be aimed at any target without 5 minutes of fiddling, by which time, in those conditions, the target had moved if it was still upright at all. I gave up on the POS and just went with bench position, both elbows on the table, with the sling around my support arm. Scope zeroing should be done with the rifle pretty secure and stable, so that one's own wobbling or inaccuracy doesn't result in erroneous adjustments, but sometimes ya do what ya gotta do.
My last shots of the day, before I swallowed my pride and gave up, resulted in a 4.5 inch 3 shot group. Considering the conditions, and that the center of the group was roughly bullseye, that's not too bad I suppose. Deer-scale accuracy, at least. Sadly, those 3 shots were part of a 5 round salvo, and the other two were nowhere to be found.
So, I drove for roughly 2.5 hours to fire maybe a dozen and a half misses. Awesome. >:(
Next time:
A: proper target stand
B: bipod
c: heavy thing to tie my spotting scope to
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| Skinny Puppy |
[04 Nov 2009|05:12pm] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) nimonic and I went out to Vancouver for just under 24 hours to take in Skinny Puppy's live show. I'd never seen then before.
The first song started with Cevin Key on keyboards/random machines and Justin Bennet on traditional drums. As the music started, Ogre slowly hobbled into view from between stacks of gear and a tarp-covered, man-sized glass box, wearing a 3 foot dunce cap, a skull mask, a long, flowing beard, a straightjacket, and using a walker. ( After that, things got strange... )
So, now I'm home from a rather whirlwind journey in a number of respects. I think tomorrow I'll go make sure my rifle is still zeroed :)
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[23 Oct 2009|03:32am] |
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possting this from a browser on my pc via a vnc client on my iphone in bed in a different room. this is the kind of crap that seems like an amazing idea when i cant sleep :p
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| It appears my earlier optimism was premature |
[18 Oct 2009|12:18am] |
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#ls lost+found|wc -l
473
That means that in the course of my fscking around earlier, 473 scraps of data were recovered and placed in the lost+found directory with names like #172560. I just spent 4 hours going through each one of them,figuring what they were by looking at the contents, and then putting them back where I think they probably came from.
Oh yeah plus a full re-install of the most up to date version of qmail on a command-line only operating system that was released in 2003. That part went smoother than expected, with only minor applications of duct tape and crossed fingers.
Followed by recreating what I could recall of whatever hackery I had to employ to get my web stats package working in a chrooted environment.
Now I think it's working. At the very least, it's passed a more rigorous test set than 'I can connect to the IMAP port and see my mail! Beertime!' :/
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| wtmffomfg *breathe* ok |
[17 Oct 2009|12:43pm] |
Woke up this morning and felt like going out for yummy breakfast with D... mounds of pancakes smothered in whipped cream and fruit, greasy sausages, eggs in hot sauce, the works. Went to check my email quick and... instead of yummy breakfast, spent the next two hours dealing with a massive drive failure in my primary web/mail server. Wheeee. Bye bye, website and email records of multiple side projects, including the shirt shop. Bye bye, pics of Australia trip. Ciao, customer quote requests and records of in-process transactions.
Disassembly, cleaning, replugging, reassembly, and multiple passes of the incredibly aptly-named fsck_ffs utility and all is well. Shaky, but well for now. I should probably replace this old fossil in the really, really near future. Ironically, I've spent much of the free time of the last week (so, like two hours) building a replacement for my main workhorse box and the old hardware is slated to become the next server anyways. Time to put the old salvage P2 to pasture; I can't say it hasn't served me well for the last twelve-odd years.
Currently taking backups heh.
In other news, went to Datalink last night. It was fun, got to see some good people and listen to good music. Lots of old school gen 2 stuff; Ministry, Revco, TKK, Skinny Puppy etc. Interesting to see the punk and industrial scenes converging again. Door girl had no idea what to do with the firearms license I presented as ID, and then I walk in to see another customer with a backpatch that said "I don't relax, I reload" :D Good times.
And now... less computers, more beer. Yes.
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| Find new music |
[10 Oct 2009|06:12pm] |
http://www.gnoosic.com
Enter 3 bands you like and it will recommend more. It's cool and very accurate, from its recommendations that I was familiar with - do it!
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| In other news... tomorrow is awesome |
[18 Sep 2009|07:02pm] |
8am: Estate sale. Hopefully with cheap shop equipment.
10am: Gun Show. Nothing will be cheap, I imagine, but much of it will be interesting.
4pm: Demolition Derby. Smashy smashy.
7pm: Reunion with old friends I don't get to see enough; drinking.
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| Grmbl brbl snrk huh? |
[08 Sep 2009|09:57am] |
Weird dreams again. Stuck on a ledge of a lowrise, starving and cold. Eventually figured out I could jump to a tree and climb down. People on the ground laughing at me.
I think the longest uninterrupted sleep I got last night was from 6:30 to 7:00 am.
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| Today on LifeHacker |
[29 Aug 2009|05:35pm] |
LifeHacker is this neat little community that is kind of a clearinghouse for interesting ideas about... well... living. If you've ever wondered how geeks do laundry, or how math can be used to optimize ordering books on a shelf, etc, it's a great site. One of today's topics.... knife throwing!
So, one, it's cool that they covered knife throwing, because well, KNIFE THROWING.
Two... why does the graphic involve throwing one at R2D2???
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[10 Aug 2009|11:25am] |
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mood |
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mean, apparently |
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(11:08:12 AM) buddy_who_shall_remain_anonymous: Help! I have a Mac virus!
(11:23:08 AM) subdermal: oh no that's not possible
(11:23:12 AM) subdermal: macs cant get viruses
(11:23:20 AM) subdermal: steve jobs is maaaaaagic
Harhar, if schadenfreude is the lowest emotion, sarcasm is the lowest form of humor and "i told you so" is the lowest response to bad news, I'm pretty damn low right now :D
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| Clutch! |
[01 Aug 2009|01:10pm] |
nimonic, myself, and several friends all went to see Clutch's live show last night. D isn't what you'd call a Clutch fan, but she enjoyed the show and it was a privilege to share the experience with her for the first time.
A note about "the experience". I think that being at a live show of this nature is the closest thing to religious enlightenment a hardcore atheist can hope to experience. At the very least, it's the closest I've ever felt to what I imagine theists are referring to when they discuss such things. There is something primal, ritualistic, and reinforcing about being in a room with 500 people all screaming the same words in unison. The nature of Clutch lyrics specifically only adds to the experience. I expect that that sounds terribly cheesy, but the fact is that they do explore some fairly serious themes in a an acerbic manner that I can especially relate to. Neil Fallon himself resembles nothing so much as an irate and half-mad street preacher lecturing a congregation of the fallen (in between rants about monster trucks, Cthulu, storming the Canadian border, alien conspiracies, D&D references, the inherent brutality of the natural world, alternate histories of the American civil war, muscle cars in space, hillbilly folklore, and... well, a lot of things :D )
It's odd that I would wax so relatively verbose about a band that falls so far outside my usual musical interests, but really, they're just that good :D
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| Oh right, and this... |
[28 Jul 2009|04:57pm] |
While at the bike shop yesterday I picked up some tail and signal lights for the other project. Now, being in a rush this morning to get back to work I didn't put them in the garage, but didn't want to leave the wires exposed in the kitchen where the cats could chew on them.
The solution ended up looking like electronic plastic flowers, so I had to take a pic.
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| I seen a python swallowing a Dobermann whole; Piranhas swimming in a mixing bowl |
[28 Jul 2009|10:03am] |
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music |
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Tom Waits - Buzz Fledderjohn |
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It's been a strange week for dreams... even more than usual. Twice in the last week I've dreamed that all the animals in the house got out (3 cats and a ferret). Once one of them got seriously injured :( Poor dream-kitty.
Yesterday I worked a 15 hour day with an hour off in the middle to go pick up my motorcycle. I went to bed fearful that I'd be dreaming about database structures and 8-way inner joins, but hopeful that I'd dream about motorcycles hehe. Nope - I had a dream that I got deployed to Vietnam in 1973 near Da Nang. After a week of not finding any enemy forces, we hotwired a late 60s VW Beetle we found in a shed on the berm around a rice paddy and swapped in a 200 hp 1.8T engine from a modern day Jetta (the dream wasn't clear on how we obtained this in '73) and then put the whole thing on airbags. Hey, gotta keep morale up, I guess. Then it snowed and I woke up cold because IRL it was raining :/
And now, back to database queries and waiting for results. Yesterday, while doing the same, I was listening to industrial speedcore, which I found is not terribly patience-inducing. Today, some Tom Waits may make the delays more bearable.
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| Ouch |
[23 Jul 2009|03:19pm] |
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Just found out that a guy I went to high school with has a grandson. We're not even 40 yet, people!
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[30 Jun 2009|11:26am] |
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Stabby dreams. Crooked painful neck. Sleep deprivation, visits to hospital and a ton of work to do. Damn, my vacations suck.
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| Dammit |
[27 Jun 2009|03:02am] |
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I was sooo tired. My eyelids felt like sandpaper and I could barely keep a train of thought going. Go to bed at 10:30... by 11:00 I'm just drifting off (highly unusual; usually it's at least an hour). The phone rings - wrong number. 4 hours later, I'm still up. At this rate, I will be the zombies I've been waiting for. FML
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[07 Jun 2009|01:39pm] |
It's been, as usual, a busy couple of weeks.
Work has me on one of those projects that I really get into. The short version is that I need to come up with repeatable, meaningful ways of measuring the accuracy of our sensor distribution, for various kinds of network sensors deployed globally, as compared to the locations and density of internet users in the surrounding area of each sensor. So, whether it's the spam sensors, virus sensors, attack sensors, or honeypot nodes, the same math has to be used to determine the effectiveness of the locations of each member of the system. Some systems have a thousand sensors; some have millions. This is an interesting challenge both logically and mathematically and I'm enjoying it. It's one of those projects that make an 11 hour day zoom by, and that I get into enough that if the phone rings I either don't even notice, or I answer and suddenly realize I've lost all ability to communicate with humans ;)
Last week I took 6 shooting newbies to the range in two trips. Their experience levels varied from 'had shot a few different types of guns on one or two occasions' to 'had never actually touched any kind of firearm'. Everyone seemed to have a very good time, everyone did quite well, and I enjoyed myself quite a bit too. The great thing about teaching is that if done right, the teacher learns too, and as I'm hardly an expert myself it was a valuable experience for me. As mentioned everyone did pretty well for their first or close-to-first time out, although arden_drake particularly seems to be a natural shot and was getting tighter groups than me at times.
Speaking of guns, yesterday I went to a one day seminar on accurizing and modifying an m14. I was mildly disappointed in that I was hoping we'd be shown a safe, relatively non-damaging method of removing the welded-on flash hiders. For the computer-geeky but not gun-geeky readers, that is the equivalent of having a peripheral (soundboard, NIC, etc) embedded in the motherboard with no ability to disable it or use another alongside it - ie design fail from a modification standpoint. I have brand new AKM stocks that I really want to try out, but they require removal of the flash hider. Now I'm torn between sending them off to a gunsmith, which is expensive and tastes like defeat, or taking the drill press to some perfectly good hardware. A lot was covered however, including some simple and free mods that I did that allowed me to, for the first time ever, put 5 shots through literally the same hole at 25 yards off the bipod. Center-to-center grouping of maybe 3/8" in a ragged little hole where an 'X' used to be :)
Today I just got back from the garage where I was working on the current bike project - ratfightering a wrecked 2008 Suzuki Hayabusa, aka a GSXR-1350...
( pics and details )
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