The Day the Earth Stood Still

In the old movie "The Day the Earth Stood Still" (1951) the Klaatu is shot just about as soon as he gets out of his spaceship by a nervous soldier.

What, might someone ask, do you use to shoot an alien?

Why, the M1911A1 of course.

Accept nothing less!



The movie was pretty good, go and watch the old one. I haven't seen the new one.



On a side note, we stopped in Kentucky on the way up north for food, and I saw a store with a sign saying "Deer Processing and Scrapbooking".

Obama puts Putin in his place

Vacationing in Hawaii during the Holiday season, Obama puts Putin in his place.



Let the battle of the shirtless leaders begin!

The nature of repair

I was also repairing a broken hard drive (well, attempting to) yesterday. An idea came to me as I was driving to have lunch, you don't need to understand how to fix most computer related things.

Most computer things you just follow directions for a tool. You don't need to know how the tool works, how the hardware/software works, or anything. If it is a software issue, you replace the software. If it is a hardware issue, you replace the hardware. If it only a slight failure, you use advanced software to fix it.

The big skills for those kinds of repairs are reading comprehension and fast forum browsing. Well, and a lack of fear about what you are doing so that you can attempt stuff that is sure to break it if it fails.

SpaceDev RIP

SpaceDev was recently sold to a privately held company. As a really really small shareholder, they didn't bother to ask me what I thought about it. (I didn't want to sell).

I am basically back where I started with SPDV, I made a bunch off of the SpaceShipOne launch, then lost all of the gains during a spring break (I was in Mexico and didn't know that the price tanked until mid-week, and then couldn't do a thing about it (moral of the story? don't have open positions when you go to Cancun!)).

Bye SPDV (or SPDV.OB as Yahoo calls you).

Repair work

I was making an adapter to fit together two threaded things. I discovered two very useful tips.

1. Use superglue to hold together items that you are going to JB Weld together. This helps alot if you do not have clamps or a helpful friend.

2. An electric drill chuck makes an excellent vice/holder for small objects that you want to sand/grind/superglue/JB weld.

Blog posts

I have found myself writing blog posts in my head.

Then I don't write them down.

So, in my mind, I had tons of new content on here. It was really good content (trust me!)

but its gone now. I'll work on getting them from head->interwebs.

Outing in the woods

We had a great time out in the woods.

I got to test the M-44. We tied it to a tree with the stock against the trunk. I used some rope that I rescued from Yajeev's scissors (rather than untie knots, he was going to cut it off, not thinking of the future potential of using the rope to tie a gun to a tree). It fired no problem. The case did look a bit bulged on the tapered portion of the case. We fired at a 6-8 inch log about 40-45 m away. I hit it the first try. I was pleasantly surprized to see that windage seemed to be perfect with the bayonet in (I had the sights set at 200 m, with the ammo I had, -1inch -> +4 inch drop over 0-200m). As I fired more rounds, the cases kept looking better and better. I'll take it to a range with some paper to figure out how accurate the M-44 is with the ammo I have.

If you ever let go of a helium birthday ballon, it ends up in the woods in north georgia. We saw two balloons in the woods. One was used for target practice at about 100 yards (not really sure how far it was, there is debate).