A Dixie Carpetbagger

The kids in JayG’s neighborhood are getting ready for the 4th.  I react to loud popping noises in my area the same way.  It’s just that in my woods, it’s more likely to be actual gunfire.  (chuckle)

I do want to point out a chuckle inducing part of the post, though (emphasis mine):

Last night was the first time this year I heard anything, and it was a pretty substantial volley – at least a dozen decent sized rockets if not more.

Last 4th, I fired off a dozen… dozen at the same time.  24 1″ tubes, 6 bottle rockets in each, tied together with fast burning (5 seconds a foot) cannon fuse.  Since each bottle rocket has a crappy fuse, the ignition times and burn rates vary slightly– this means the effect is somewhere between a Neberlwerfer and a Katyusha.

Of course, I live out in the sticks, so a barrage of bottle rockets screaming out of the tubes and exploding a few seconds later doesn’t bother anyone.  seeing as the Sheriff’s department is about a mile away, they probably enjoyed the show, too.  (chuckle)

… to attach my new lightsaber to my belt.

Now, the product does have some flaws– low power (less than a Watt), bad collimation and it burns through batteries… but it’s portable.  And decently cheap.

Of course, you could just buy a bunch of green lasers and figure out how to collimate their output and build your own laser cannon…

I was having problems with WordPress and the Journalist theme.  Not only the “phantom bubble,” but the fact that nested comments… weren’t.  Being fed up, I fired up Google and found out that it was the Journalist theme itself that was causing the problems.

Solution?  Activate the default theme, delete Journalist, download the newer version and install it… and now everything works– no phantom bubbles, comments nest, and I could swear that the load time went down a few tenths of a second.

You know that expression Foghorn Leghorn always did, laying on the ground and tapping his fingers on the earth?  Yeah, I’m doing a good impression right now.  Note to self: re-installation is almost always less effort intensive than repair.

But at least I can take some solace in not being the only one having some technical problems.

Okay, so everything should be rolled out and functional, including the tip jar (using GunPal/GPal), the gun death counter, an Amazon widget and a nice banner.

The blogroll has been updated, too… and it’s no longer on a side page, it’s on the sidebar to the right.  Some major additions include the IMFDB (Internet Movie Firearms Database), Where Angels Fear To Tread, Billy Beck’s Two–Four, Nikki Goeser’s blog*, and the Holster Site.

The majority of the work getting all these things to work has been the setup.  Getting all the accounts (GPal, Amazon, Site Meter, Project Wonderful, PayPal) going has taken a while.  For instance, Project Wonderful and Amazon have to approve your application– which takes time– and neither uses GPal, so I had to sign up for PayPal… which needs to be verified… which takes time.

Then there was the banner setup.  Turns out that the theme that I use (Journalist) has a “tagline” (the quote bubble that used to be in the header) that cannot be turned off.  This, of course, was conveniently not mentioned by the writer who gave a how-to about creating a banner for this theme.  So, if you delete the tagline text, it leaves a small one-character tagline bubble.  The workaround?  Replace the left and right halves of the bubble with a square JPEG that matches the background.  (Next time you load the page, if you look very closely, you’ll see the two small squares flash into existence a split instant before the main banner.)

So, now I can (hopefully) make a little coin, which will ease the pain in my wallet come site renewal time.

*For those of you don’t know who Mrs. Goeser, the basic outline of her story is here.  Highlights two things– one, why “gun free zones” make no sense, and two, why I dislike my information being out there.

Update: I’m still here, still writing, and working on doing some much-needed work to the blog.  Like a blogroll.  And a banner.  And some posts.  You know, minor stuff.

Status: Hating Florida heat.  When it was winter, I said “Lord, I won’t complain, just let it warm up.”  Big mistake– to paraphrase Chris Titus, “you gotta be a little more specific when you ask God for something.”

Do you know how you cool off when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity?  Poorly.  Sweat doesn’t evaporate, it just rolls off your body (which helps when you’re doing carpentry, but still), and you can quickly lose tremendous amounts of water and minerals through sweat.  Combine this with the shape I’m in (round), and it becomes obvious that– like Frankenstein’s monster– I do better in cold environments.  Anybody got a spare stillsuit?

So, between my home improvement work, getting everything lined up for the fall semester of classes, and trying to take care of side projects, coffee is becoming the base of my food pyramid.  “It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the beans of Java that thoughts acquire speed, the hands acquire shaking, the shaking becomes a warning. It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion.”

However, I do have something to help you waste the some time– an Air Traffic Control Simulator.  Trust me, about 30 minutes in, you learn why ATC personnel have mental breakdowns…

The cleanup and mapping of the disaster zone (a.k.a. the computer room) continues.  The problem is that I’ve begun to go so far in time that my memory is useless in understanding why the items I found have been retained.  In other words, the process is becoming less and less “cleaning” and more and more “archeology.”  I don’t need Tupperware and a duster, I need an SG team and Dr. Jackson.

The list of things to do is also growing.  Which is disturbing– did everything wait until I was solving problems to jump me?  The pocket universe problem is becoming more severe, too.  At this point, the only hope is if the Fringe Division seals the problem from their side…*

In short,not much for the next few days, but here’s something to help you waste your time.

*Why, yes, I watched the season finale.

Taking the day off, having to complete some projects.  Most notably, I’m trying to chart all of the pocket universes in my computer room.  They have to be here… because there is no way this room holds everything that I’ve put into it.

For an example-  I just cleaned out a container of old textbooks I never sold back to the university/college bookstore.  When I had put all of the books up on Amazon, I sealed the container and got ready to put it back under the spare bed… only to find that there was another container of books under the bed.  (If the ones I have listed so far–which is about 80% of them– sell, it’ll bring in almost a grand.  Which is about five times the bookstores would have bought them for.)

Heck, my big ammo can could double as a bag of holding!  I had one big “fat fifty” can and a fireproof locker full of ammo, and when I sorted all of my ammo I filled both of those containers, plus three more fifty cal cans.

Oh, and those are just the project’s that I’ve started.  The next 9 items on the list begin with “build bookcase” and end with “design firearm/ammo vendor database.”  In the middle is “sort/sell sports cards.”

Which has been on my to-do list since 2002.  (sigh)

Every other region has blog meets.  Why not the South/Southeast?

Too spread out, or what?  Not enough bloggers in the area?  (Heck, it seems like if you threw a rock in Indiana or the Midwest, you’d hit a gun blogger…)

Cops get all the nice goodies.  Class 3 firearms, souped-up cars, they can wear aviators and nobody minds, they get to drive chariots…

Wait, what?

What I just linked is possibly one of the funniest stories I’ve ever read.  What’s even funnier is that the chariots are real.

Hmm… I have an old Briggs & Stratton 16 HP mower engine… and wheels… and some cabling… (begins scribbling) hmm, put a captain’s chair in for safety and comfort…  some paint, some lights… a Dixie horn’s a must… maybe a sona si latine loqueris bumper sticker… (puts on mirrored aviators and rushes out, plans in hand, mumbling)

Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!  Cur rides? Ridiculum non sum!  Nitimur in vetitum semper cupimusque negata… homines, quo plura habent, eo ampliora cupiunt.

(H/T Gun Free Zone)

No more for today, it’s nice outside, and a chainsaw is calling a siren song to me.

Oh, it’s supposed to make that noise?  Even when the chain’s on right?  You sure?