Irons in the Fire: Makarov tryout

Irons in the Fire: Makarov tryout: a nice range report on the Makarov. I got one of these Bulgarians myself about 4 years ago, and recently used it for my CHL qualification renewal. The place giving the class is a range where Glock is king: all the employees wear Glock t-shirts, there are Glock posters everywhere, and fully 50% of their retail shelves are stocked with Glocks. I hadn't practiced in a long time, so my score was significantly down from my first qualification back in 2001 (238 out of a possible 250), but I beat the pants off the guy next to me who was using a Glock. There was one other man there who had one of the original Russians with adjustable sights, and he was complaining about having a hard time finding ammo. He showed me the box he had purchased at a gun store, $21.99 for 50 rounds, to which I replied with a consternated "holy !@#$." I advised him to visit the monthly gun show and buy boxes of Sellier & Bellot or Wolf for $6 to $7 per box.

At my original qualification I used my Ruger P95 in 9mm, which is a great gun but doesn't function 100% with anything but 147-grain ammo (previously mentioned). The Makarov has been 100% with anything I can shove in the chamber. Also, being a lefty, I sometimes have to consider ejections. The Ruger will usually bonk me in the right shoulder with its empties (a minor annoyance), but the Mak throws the shells into a beautiful arc that drops them at about a 45-degree angle 3 feet behind me to my right. As I expected, I got every shot into the 5-ring at the first two lines, but due to lack of practice my pattern opened up considerably when I went back to the 15-yard marker. The S&B ammo functioned flawlessly, as always, and the Mak performed perfectly.

I don't like the original Mak grips, though. The thumbrest is impossible for a lefty, and the plastic non-thumbrest grips are very skinny and uncomfortable. I bought some padded grips for it that are great. I also advised my fellow Makarov shooter to visit Makarov.com and get himself a thumb-saver to help in loading the magazine.

The Makarov is utterly reliable, the only real drawback being its fairly low-powered ammo. This is why for the past few years, when I have carried, it has been a Ruger SP-101 loaded with 125-grain Remington Golden Sabres in .357 magnum.

First Things and First Principles @ AMERICAN DIGEST

Gerard at American Digest has been hitting the nail so squarely on the head lately that even if his blog weren't alphabetically at the top of my list, I would move it there anyway.

Odd weather

When I checked the thermometer at 7:00 AM today it was already 75. It is now 62, with only 64% humidity. I wish we'd had this kind of weather yesterday, when it was in the high 70's by midafternoon with a humidity around 90%. Beautiful spring day, indeed. According to the radar and the purpling sky outside, it is going to come a real thundering rain any minute now.

Blogroll revisited

Okay, forget about blogrolling.com. After many searches through the Bloglines help system, the tip-o-da-day finally showed me how to get the blogroll code from Bloglines. This makes it much easier. You may occasionally notice that blogs on this roll come and go with alarming rapidity. This is because, when I find a feed that I even remotely think is interesting, I will throw it into the list so I can check it out for a few days. I might delete it after a couple of days if I think it's not worth spending time on. I have seen some bloggers who display a blogroll of a couple hundred other blogs. Where do they find time to read all those things? If I find myself ignoring a blog for too long, I will delete it just to cut down on clutter. I don't have time to read everything.

and while I'm at it...

News from February 11, 2005:

This is the latest in a long string of cases at both the trial and appeals court levels holding that manufacturers of lawfully-sold, non-defective firearms are not legally at fault if these products are subsequently illegally acquired or misused by criminals.

Good news for law-abiding, gun-owning citizens, good news for law-abiding gun manufacturers. Bad news for the googooheads.

and speaking of which...

Here's some news from last December about an Army contract with Ruger. I have a P95D (blued slide). The only gripe I have about it is that it functions with 100% reliability only with 147-grain ammo. The 115-grain sometimes fails to feed or stovepipes. I haven't yet tried any in the 124-125 range, but I did recently purchase some so I can give them a shot.

Just in case...

...you get jumped by a 10-foot tall, 1500-pound, fur-bearing mugger. I'm a big fan of Ruger firearms, especially their revolvers. I guess somebody has a practical use for this gun. I think this is one of those things that they built because they could, and people will buy it because they can: the new Super Redhawk Alaskan snubby in .454 Casull.

Blogroll

I'm working on building a blogroll using blogrolling.com. I don't know why blogspot can't just provide their own blogrolling gadget--probably some techy reason beyond my comprehension. Anyhoo, the Twyllyp Blogroll is not every blog I read, at least not yet. I use Bloglines for my aggregator.

Email just received...

Just received the email about the stupid criminal who tried to rob a gunstore. I knew this was a lot older than the email said (I sort of keep up with this kind of thing) so I had to check Snopes. I suppose his ".38 caliber semi-automatic" was a .380. The only other gun I can think of to fit the bill would be a .38 Super. As for the store owner, he grabbed the right gun. I'm surprised the crook lasted 4 hours if he was hit by a .50AE.

File under what are you going to do with that?!

One last post for the day. A few days ago, while standing in the check-out line at Walmart, I noticed the guy in front of me was purchasing six cases of matchbooks. I am a compulsive reader (have I mentioned that?). So it only took me a few seconds to read the fine print on the cases and do the numbers in my head. Six cases, five boxes per case, 50 matchbooks per box, 20 matches per matchbook. The guy was buying 30,000 paper matches.

At least he wasn't like the guy in front of me at H.E.B. one time who was buying 16 boxes of the store brand of sudaphed. After he was gone and I told the checker what was probably going to happen to the stuff, she paled a little and wondered if she should have called the manager.

One answer...

I don't usually make these kinds of comments because I don't consider myself knowledgable enough on most issues. I am a habitual listner who rarely speaks. But...I have heard some people ask, "Why are Terri Schiavo's parents so desperate to keep her alive?" My question has always been, "Why is her (ahem) 'husband' so desperate to see her dead?" Gerard Van Der Leun at American Digest has an idea.

How not to handle a Glock...

...or any other semi-automatic handgun, for that matter. Keep your finger off the trigger when releasing the slide. Snopes has the scoop.

Dragons

The folks at Animal Planet seem mighty proud of themselves to have come up with "scientific" reasons why and how dragons could breathe fire and fly. Only problem is, the problem was already solved by Peter Dickinson in The Flight of Dragons 24 years ago.

The Blog is back, more or less

Back to the original url and site name, with another change in direction. It's hard to believe I've began this blog more than a year ago and have been updating it off and on (more off than on) since December 2003. However, I think I will try to add something at least once per week, knowing that it may be some time before anyone reads it. I am a regular reader of several other blogs, but I have to pick and choose and limit the blogroll because I just don't have the time. Soon I hope to purchase a notebook computer which will allow me to read and post more conveniently and more frequently. Don't expect anything controversial or mind-shattering from this blog, it's just not that kind of blog. You shouldn't expect much of anything really, except observations of the behavior of humans that I encounter.

Eureka!

I have definitely eliminated one problem: a bad solder job (er, my own, actually) on a PL-259. This was on the stretch of coax that I had previously used for mobile ops, which may be why I was always having so much trouble getting anyone to hear me when I went mobile. I'm feeling a lot better now. This should mean my problem will be solved by a new piece of coax. Also a new PL-259 to fix the coax for future mobile operations.

I think I finally figured out a way to mount the HTX-100 in my truck. Yeah, yeah, 10 meters is dead, but this is when it's the most fun. You never can tell when a band opening will happen, and when it does, it's lots of fun.

Get your Desktop UTC clock here!

Here's another ham radio aid I found recently. Just tuck this AlphaClock - miniature digital desktop clock down into the corner of your screen and you'll have a UTC clock right where you can see it easily above your regular clock. This has been very useful for me.

And by the way, in case you don't know about these little programs, you should also get Atomic Clock Sync, so you and your computer will really know what time it is.

Sigh...

deleted

60 Minutes is full of it.

TCS: Tech Central Station - Blogs v. 60 Minutes: Since you probably won't hear about this on the news, I'll have to post a link here, just to do my own little part.

"To hammer his point home Johnson superimposes the purported memo with his Microsoft Word, typed today version. Literally 1:1, not even fuzzy, not a letter out of place."

If Bush were more like Clinton, he might start saying, "It's the character, stupid." But he wouldn't say that. It's not in his character.

Technology, shmecknology.

I recently switched to a normal Internet service. By which I mean, no special proprietary software to access the Internet. Just plain ol' Windows, like back in the old days. Odd things happened, however. I tried out the newest version of Pegasus (Pegasus was the first email software I ever used, long ago) and it was working great, then suddenly it stopped. In my inexpert level of expertise, I can only figure that somehow it has stopped properly translating my IP address from winsock, and my email server thinks I'm not supposed to be there. I can still send emails to others within my domain (blazeisp.com), but not to anyone outside. Oh well. Eudora comes up with the same problem. Fortunately my old standby Agent works (I've been an Agent user for years). Unfortunately, even the new 2.x version of Agent is straight text only. From a security standpoint, this is the best way to go. However, I don't think anyone I receive email from has been using the Internet for more than 5 years (if that long), and they almost all use html-formatted email. It gets to be a drag to launch a web browser just to read email. So, it looks like I'm using Outlook Express. I really dislike this program, but so far only it and Agent are able to talk to my email server.

Although I don't remember the exact date, this year will mark my 10th anniversary of using the Internet. I suppose like many people back then, I had already spent some time logging on to local BBS's and had tried a few online services (for you newbies, AOL, Compuserve, et al, did not originally provide access to the Internet). The first Internet service I used was called Novalink. I have forgotten the monthly fee, although I think it was $14.95, and for this you got 5 hours of access per month. That's right, 5 hours. You could either log on to their in-house service using a simple terminal program, or you could fire up Windows (3.x), start up Trumpet Winsock, and access the Internet using NCSA Mosaic (but only if you had also installed Win32s). I remember one of the few websites I visited back then was a catalog of Rush lyrics. The front page was a collection of thumbnails of all their albums up to that point, and you could click on the thumbnail to see the lyrics for that album. I thought it was fantastic. The only problem was, it took a long time to load all those little pictures at 2400 baud. Yeah, 2400 baud. Oh yeah, and back then Mosaic couldn't display inline jpgs, only gifs, so the pictures tended to be somewhat larger than the norm now.

I bought that 2400 baud modem for $5 at a ham radio swapmeet. By that time, I think the cutting edge was 9600, so it was obsolete. But it worked. I thought I was really going blazingly fast when I jumped up to 14400.

The first search engine I encountered back than was called Infoseek. It's now called "Go.com" and pretty much stinks. It apparently is owned by Disney, and it no longer bothers even to use its own search engine. It uses Google.

So ten years have passed, and the Internet has been a big part of my life, providing me communications with family and friends, allowing me to make some new friends, and providing a source of knowledge and humor. I just hope that in another 10 years, high-speed technology will have advanced to a point where it's affordable.

A New Song

I have been sitting on this one for a while because I don't actually have rights to use the words. The words are a poem written by Katherine Artus Taylor, who is (or was) a woman who my late grandmother knew when they were girls. Mrs. Taylor wrote a small chapbook of poetry late in her life, which my grandmother had a copy of, and which she passed on to me before she passed away. The poem actually consists of three stanzas. I used the first two stanzas for the stanzas of this song, and the third stanza for the chorus. I don't know if Mrs. Taylor is still on this earth, and if she is, where she may be living, and I have been unable to get any contact information. So, I guess I have to say "lyrics used without permission." On the other hand, I think I did really well on the music.

So the new song is God Shall Keep Me Ever, and as usual, the midi file will be coming along later.