THE MAN IN BLACK HIS MACHINE GUN WAS STRONGER THAN ARMOR, NOTHING COULD BEAT HIS MACHINE GUN, NOT EVEN ANOTHER MACHINE GUN, HE WAS IMPOSSIBLE TO BEAT UNTIL A GUY WANTED TO STOP HIM AND THEN HE GOT ALL HIS FRIENDS TO HELP HIM AND THEN THEY STILL COULDN’T BEAT THEM AND THEN THEY GOT THEIR MOMS
AND DADS AND THEY STILL COULDN’T BEAT THEM
by Declan Chase-Salerno, age 7

A guy in black with another guy gave the man in black some dynamite in a bush, but he didn’t blow anything up with it yet, and then one of the good guys said, We have to take the man in black to the statue factory, (“His name isn’t important!”).  None of the other guys knew what that would do.  When you move, he disappears.  Then we stood still, and he shot wooden carts with weapons at us, and my mom grabbed on to me and jumped over all the carts.  And then we dodged the carts, which led us to our barn, and then we hid in there for a while.  And then we found the guys that gave the man in black some dynamite, and we asked if it was fake dynamite, and he said no, and we said why did you give him real dynamite, and the man in black hypnotized him to do it, because he owns a dynamite factory.  Then, he wanted to help us get the man in black, but we still couldn’t catch him, we didn’t have enough guys, And then we got our dog, Casey, to help us find him.  She barks a lot when she sees someone.  And then we found him, but he disappeared when we even moved a step.  So we went to upstairs in my house, and we got some guns to get him to surrender, but they still didn’t work.  He had a machine gun.  And then they got the police to help them, and the police got the sheriff’s department, the army, and that still wasn’t enough, until the army invented a new weapon, the disintegrator, but that still didn’t work, because his armor was stronger than anything.  Then we got him to a statue factory, but that didn’t stop him because he broke out of the steel case.  Because he was so strong, he broke out, and he also had fists made of pointy steel.  Then the army got the military that invented a new gun called the Hypnotizer but he had hypnotizing-proof glasses, that still didn’t stop him, so they had to set off the dynamite while he was still holding it, like in cartoons.  Until a good ghost came to help us and called all of his ghost friends, and they wanted to help, and the military called a weapons specialist, Agent G, and he invented a gadget that could read people’s minds and we could know his plan and stop it, and we would know where his base is.  And the ghosts called a ninja force, and they helped them, until they met the Super Penguin.  Which could peck people’s heads off.  But he had an indestructible helmet that the Super Penguin couldn’t peck.  Until they chased him to Canada and his armor fell off while he was running, all his armor, it turned out he was very skinny and weak, and they destroyed his base, and then they had a campfire and roasted weenies.
The End.

Quinny also wrote one, but hers was deemed OK:

Last Night There Was 3 Girls And 2 Puppies Who Woke Up
by Quinn Chase-Salerno, age 4

Last night, three little girls woke up, and then the serious one said, “What happened?”  And then the three little puppies woke up, and one barked at someone, and then they saw a little spooky thing, then they turned into spies, then killed him, and then they all went in the dark and brought a flashlight and then the 3 little girls weren’t scared except the serious girl wasn’t scared, and the 2 little puppies weren’t scared either, then they saw something that was creeping slow and had a shell on top and it was a turtle.  And then they put their flashlight in their pocket then it was daytime then they weren’t scared again.  Then they went back home and saw a little black thing it was their brother.  And then there was a kitty that went back.  And the kitty wasn’t scared either.
The End.

Great stories Guys!

Since Montana appears to have The Constitution on their side, 10th ammendment state’s rights issues and all that, it will be very telling to see what the federal government does here.

I’ll be making popcorn, and packing all my stuff.

I began using F-Spot to manage the photo uploads from the camera, and from our previous archive, and to do all the tagging. Then F-Spot can directly upload to Smugmug. Everything works pretty well except for the tagging. F-spot stores the tags in the “Subject” field of the EXIF data, while SmugMug looks for them in the “Keywords” field. As a result the photos on SmugMug had no tags. Sad Clown.

Once the problem was discovered, with some help from SmugMug’s forum, a little Googling revealed an almost fix in this blog entry. There was a slight problem where it was munging multiple tags into a single multi-word tag, but that was easily fixed via the -b flag, or -sep on newer versions of exiftool. The version in Ubuntu 8.10 still uses -b but try -sep if that doesn’t work on yours.

So the following command successfully copies the Subject fields contents over top of the (empty) Keywords field. Since the path restricts it to a single month, it doesn’t take too long, and everything is peachy afterwards.

exiftool -overwrite_original -r -P -b -”IPTC:Keywords<XMP:subject”  ~/Photos/2009/02/

Incidentally if you decide to sign up for SmugMug, you can get a $5 discount with my referral code: Wo6AztZyF7W7I

Yes, I get a kickback too.

Well at this year’s Shot Show, PSE introduced something that really breaks the paradigm of what the AR can do. They’ve announced the TAC-15 AR crossbow upper. Yes you read that right, and here’s a pic to prove it.

Much like the spray pancake batter, I’m not sure if this is incredibly awesome or incredibly stupid. It seems to be quite long compared to a normal crossbow, though with the limb design, it’s narrower. I’m just not sure there’s  much advantage to slapping a crossbow on top of an AR lower. A crossbow isn’t considered a firearm, so it’s not like you have to go through the 4473 dance to get one and given it’s relative size, it just doesn’t seem that much smaller than just having a whole crossbow ready to go. At $1299 it’s no cheaper than a standard crossbow either.

Still, it’s neat and I want one.

Oh and the kicker? Yes, you read the label correctly, it’s organic!

Enter the Xlink-BT.

This little gem wires into your existing phone system. You can either hook it up to the wiring, or just plug a multi-handset cordless phone into it, which is what we did. It then connects to your phone via bluetooth, just like your Borg headset. Just like that, you can use your home phones with your cell. It can connect to 3 cell phones at once, and each gets a distinctive ring, so you know whose phone it is. Once paired with your cell, it will automatically bond when you get in range. The cell phone handset is still enabled when it’s connected to the Xlink, so it won’t steal your calls like the headsets do.

I did have a few issues initially getting things working, but I downloaded new firmware from the Xlink site and updated the device and everything cleared up. The firmware application is Windows based, but it worked fine in a VMware image. As hard as it is to resist hooking up everything right away, I’d recommend getting the latest firmware first thing.

This is really a wonderful little piece of kit. It never causes any problems and just works transparently. You can leave your cell plugged into the charger and never have to worry about running out the door with a depleted battery and never have to go looking for the cell when a call comes in.

There is one complaint I can make. The name portion of the caller id is lost somewhere in the chain. So on your house phone you’ll see the proper number that is calling, but the name will always be “Xlink-BT”. It really is only a minor annoyance though, and I imagine there’s a good reason why they can’t make it work.

If you’re not familiar with the AR rifle platform, the traditional lower receiver is forged aluminum. The action parts, grip and stock are added to this stripped receiver to form a complete lower receiver.

The Cavarms lowers differ from the traditional in 2 major ways. Most obviously, they are 1 monolithic piece incorporating the lower receiver, grip and stock. The other way is not so obvious until you pick it up. They are molded from an advance polymer, (ok, plastic). This results in a significant weight savings over the traditional lower, a full pound lighter. Another benefit is the ability to mold them in any color imaginable. They have done the obvious blacks, greens and tans, but also yellow, pink, blue, neon green, and even glow in the dark!

Even with this radically different construction, the Cavarms lower uses standard AR action parts and assembly is mostly the same. There are a few minor differences, but anyone who has assembled a lower will have no problem with the Cavarms assembly. It took less than 30 minutes to completely finish each one.

I won’t bore you with the step by step assembly process, but just a couple of pics to illustrate. Here is everything before assembly, lower on the, uh, lower. The parts kit is above:

And here we have the parts from the normal lower parts kit that are leftover due to the Cavarms construction. Trigger guard, pistol grip, and some assorted pins, fasteners, detents, and springs.

And, finally, here’s a shot of the 2 completed rifles. The one on the bottom is my “ultralight” and I know it has no sights, it’s a work in progress.

Sorry for the less than stellar pics, it’s actually pretty hard to take a decent photo of something that’s all flat black.

Took a little while to get everything working smoothly, but once I had the rhythm worked out, I was cranking out shells pretty quickly. I only dropped shot on the floor twice

Considering that a weekly trap shoot can burn through 4 boxes of shells, this should pay itself off rather quickly. Reloaded shells are about half the cost of factory loads, and the reloader came with enough components (powder, primer, shot, wads and hulls) to recoup what I paid for it.

it’s a plane…

it’s a … Civic?

So apparently Honda is branching out into the aviation industry. They’ve got a pretty neat looking little jet.

Finally, something to trade the CR-V in on.

Check out more at HondaJet.