Standard Mischief

I finished bolting back together all the greasy thingys at about 9pm Christmas Eve. A quick drive confirmed that everything selling groceries just closed. Boy, I’m great at planning ahead.

Thank goodness for multiculturalism. My favorite Korean grocery store was probably the only place to buy raw shrimp on Christmas morning. I got cilantro and limes there too.

Don’t ask me how the cheese pizza pot stickers ended up in my shopping cart.

I found I can peel, devein, skewer, marinate, and wrap 2.5 pound of medium shrimp per hour, a new record.

Visited my brother’s, and visited a small fraction of the nieces and nephews, I’ll see the rest a bit later.

Got tempted by the dark side.

Had a great dinner, great visit, and got back home safe. I’m dead tired.

Best wishes this Holiday Seasoning.

I must say, one of the worst remove and replace jobs on Toyota Camry cars is the driveshaft (ugh, I mean “half shaft”, that’s apparently what everyone uses). I’ve only done three, and this one has been by far the worst.

I’ve done other makes, and they have been removed via some hex bolts, or roll pins or even just yanking hard, without even disassembly of the suspension. Toyota sux in this regard (though I think they get the rest of the car pretty much right).

Unless you have arrived here via a search engine, this is going to be a boring post. It’s also most unchristmas-like, despite the date, so you have been warned.

(more…)

Xavier has been doing his excellent “Idiots with Guns” series for quite some time, and in that spirit I thought I’d pass on my little gun safety story.

This happened about a decade or so ago, I’m not exactly sure when, but it’s sometime between the rash of criminal attacks on people with rental cars in Florida, and the rash of criminal attacks on people who rented cars in Virginia. I remember this because in both cases, the attacks on out-of-state tourists happened immediately after the respective states had adopted “shall issue” carry laws. Gee, people arriving from out-of-state usually don’t have carry permits. Our free and fair press never connected the dots, however.

I was over at my buddy’s farm, shooting on the back forty with another friend. He had brought a number of guns, including a S&W model 63 J-frame, in 22 long rifle. That little revolver was the last thing shot for that day. I remember he drew it form his holster, fired off the whole cylinder, and reholstered it, saying something about keeping the empty cases in the gun to act as a poor man’s “snap cap”. [1]

So anyway, later on we’re at his house, watching the idiot box. He’s drinking some kind of barley pop. I’m drinking my standard cerebral enhancing cocktail consisting of caffeine and yellow dye #5. Someone like Senator Dorothy Doxer comes on the screen. My buddy whips out the S&W, and “dry fires” six times towards the screen. Then, being the polite guy he is, he grasps it by the cylinder, muzzle downward, and offers it to me.

I’m a firearms newbie, and I’m trying to stick to all the rules. I grasp it by the handle, and then immediately swing open the cylinder and dump out the cartridges. In my hand are 5 spent rounds of brass, and one live round of ammo. The live round had gotten at least one primer strike on it (probably two, but in the same place) and just had not gone off. Y’all can just figure the odds of that round going off, had I also practiced my dry firing at his TV with his gun, without checking the cylinder first. I’m guessing it would be around 100%.

Not knowing a damn thing about “hang fire“, I picked up that round and took a good close look at the primer strike. I got to keep my eyeball that day. Should have kept that round as a souvenir too.

The Four Rules
1. All firearms are loaded
2. Never let the muzzle of a firearm point at anything you are not willing to destroy
3. Keep your finger off the trigger unless your sights are on the target
4. Be sure of your target and what is behind it

[1] A “snap cap” is a device that prevents damage to a firearm when it is “dry fired”, which means fired without a live round of ammo inside.

Patricia Konie, the New Orleans lady that had her gun stolen and was forcefully evacuated after being body slammed by the police is suing (via Ravenwood and SayUncle).

Good, I was afraid she had dropped off the face of the earth. I wrote about Patricia in this blog entry, which also has several video links.

It it seems neither SayUncle nor Ravenwood noticed the contact point in the quoted press release, Ashton R. O’Dwyer. He’s the “line in the sand” guy from another newscast that I linked to.

Presumably, the lawsuit will publicly identify the CHiP pig that did the body slam. I’m pretty interested in the disciplinary action that he received due to his performance. I also hope they publicly release the entire video that Ken Wayne shot, as I’m curious about the clip that got cut out.

The press report also claims that she also has not had her property promptly returned. So despite the NRA victory, who got there guns back? Was it only Buell Teel? How many guns were stolen? Has the NRA dropped the ball here too, being too busy beating their chest over the victory?

U.S. Newswire press release

Update 2005-12-18: Extra info on the case from Triggerfinger.

This is just some hints from a consumer to all you discount gas sellers, you know who you are, you self-serving, fuel loss-leaders, who also sell sodas, snacks and sandwiches.

Look, I’m no dummy, normally I like going to your stations. I like paying at the pump, but I’m not fooled for one second when your pumps run out of receipt paper.

Far too many times I’ve ended up swiping, filling, replacing the nozzle, and requesting a receipt, only to then be informed by the pump of a “printer error — please see attendant”. The station I stopped by today had the two people, besides myself, in front of me both needing a receipt handcraftly printed out by a busy sales-droid. While I was inside delayed, waiting for a receipt, I was also parked outside blocking a fuel pump.

I’m not asking you to change the message to something like “our attendant is too lazy to refill the printer paper, you are gonna have to go inside, sucka!”. I was just thinking perhaps you could inform your customer beforehand, instead of after step 4.

Here’s an idea that I’d like to pass on for free. How about adding a lamp, visible from inside the customers car, that shows the status of the pump? Green means go, yellow for out of paper, and flashing red for out-of-order. I’d like to assure you that most drivers are at least somewhat familiar with what these colors mean. Even if the message was lost on the driver, you could also use that status LCD panel to convey messages like “ready, press cash or credit” or “press cash or credit, receipt given inside” or “sorry, out of service”.

That’s an idea that, if you happen to be a mega-global petroleum refining, distributing, and retailing corporation, might even be worth patenting. Hey, I’ve seen sillier patents out there. (Too bad this little blog probably counts as prior art.)

Another idea: have one multicolor light for each flavor of fuel your pumps dispense. That way, your customers can see from the comfort of their vehicles that you happen to be all out (in all your pumps) of regular, and will have to either pick the medium or well done flavors. Just think, all the time your sales-droids save from not having to cobble up homemade out-of-order illegible signs could be productively used to clean the restrooms, or ring up that busy commuter that much faster, or even to refill the receipt printer on your gas pumps.

And speaking of fuel stations, here’s an idea that won’t fly if I have anything to say about it.

[RFID reader, found at (trying to keep this clean, here) Excrementz. Similar to the Speedpass system, but embedded in a credit card instead of a keyfob]

You guys call it a “contact-less smart card reader”. I call it a promiscuous tracking RFID tag. I’m more than willing to use the gold contact type of smart card, and that type is already an order of magnitude more reliable than the magnetic strip. The contact type smart card won’t betray itself until I’ve placed it in the card reader. The promiscuous tracking RFID smart card will sound off whenever asked, unbeknownst to me.

[contact type of smart card, from Wikipedia]

Look, I know you’re so interested in me, and you want to place my whole retail history away in some data center somewhere just in case you ever feel the need to find out exactly how many bottles of coca-corrosive I buy during the weeks of daylight saving time - whether or not I pay with cash, or how well that new flavor of sour cream and salsa pork rinds is doing in my particular demographic, but your (complete lack of any) data retention policy unnerves me.

Most of the time I totally trust the multi-national amoral corporation thingys with all my most personal data, especially if they have a multi-million dollar ad campaign where they pay actors to pretend that they are regular people just like me, only better looking, expressing their heartfelt opinion that their preferred brand of fuel depot is a good neighbor. That impresses me a lot.

But I tend to go with my gut feeling here, and my gut feeling is that I want you to sell gas on the open market as cheaply as possible, provide me with the types of amenities a person like me needs, like clean restrooms and tire air machines that actually work, get me in and out quickly, if that’s what I want, and leave me and the minutia of my daily life the hell alone.