While I was at the church working, Tracie went to a machine gun shoot down in South Jackson, where she didn’t get to partake in any full-auto goodness, but did manage a little range time with her Kahr PM9. The picture was taken by a coworker of hers.

Edited to add: The front of her shirt says “Trust me… I’m a reporter.”

In December 2002, I founded The High Road forum dedicated to the advancement of responsible gun ownership. Recently, it was discovered that in 2006, the volunteer forum systems administrator, Derek Zeanah of Statesboro, Georgia, changed domain registration to himself. After he was confronted, Derek locked out all other staff from accessing the Web server administration and would not share even backup copies of its content. After failed attempts to peacefully resolve the dispute, it has become necessary for me to initiate a lawsuit against Derek Zeanah for the return of thehighroad.org domain name and the forum database.

I am seeking and would greatly appreciate donations to help with the cost of litigation. You can use Paypal (olegvolk@gmail.com) or send a check to:
Oleg Volk 3112 Chambley Ct Hermitage, TN 37076

All donations shall be returned if the lawsuit is ultimately avoided. You can also aid me by re-posting this appeal on your blog, forum or web site. My legal position is already endorsed by almost all of The High Road staff as well as Rich Lucibella, the founder of The Firing Line forum.

Those lights were not there two days ago. The entire shopping center is decked out in them.

It’s not even October.

(I went to OfficeMax to get a chair mat for my desk. I came back with a chairmat and a chair. Stupid salespeople and their stupid cheerful helpfulness.)

Now all I need is an equivalent that is scriptable, and I will be able to rule the world through my bluetooth headset.

It started last night. I was looking for a piece of Windows Mobile software I had been telling my uncle about, and along the way found a bunch of shiny new freeware playthings for my AT&T Tilt. One of them locked up my phone. Hard. So hard that I had to do a wipe of the system memory. Normally this is not a big deal since you’d have a backup of your contacts, etc on Outlook where you last synced the PDA. But I don’t have Outlook. I also never got around to getting one of those nice programs that backs up your contacts to your flash card.

So I uh, guess now’s as good a time as ever to do those firmware upgrades, huh?

Long story short, I found a program that tricks your phone into playing an MP3 over a bluetooth headset. I’m not planning to listen to the White Stripes over a mono bluetooth audio signal, but it seems like a dang handy thing for listening to audiobooks while doing housework or (maybe?) sitting at my desk at work. When a phone call comes in, it reads the name of the caller, and I press the button on my ear to pause the audio file and pick up the phone.

That’s a neat capability, but it’s not worth buying the $35 headset on its own. So why did I swallow my pride and get one? I suppose that the best way of putting it is that I have a certain technology fetish: a pipe dream that nobody is likely to make happen for me any time soon, but which I’ll still spend unhealthy amounts of time fantasizing about.

My tech fetish started way back in middle school when I read the Ender’s Game series (by the way, the first book is great, don’t ruin it by reading the rest unless you’re a diehard fan with low expectations). In the mostly bland sequels to the first fantastic book, an accidentally created artificial sentience named Jane communicates with Ender via a small device in his ear:

Jane is first introduced in Speaker for the Dead as an advanced computer program. She is extremely complex, capable of performing trillions of tasks simultaneously, and has millions of levels of attention, even her most unaware one being much more alert than a human. Jane is hesitant to reveal herself to humanity, because she knows that she is the epitome of humanity’s fear: an intelligent, thinking, computer program that cannot be controlled. She decided to reveal herself to Ender after she found out he wrote The Hive Queen and The Hegemon. She also “remembered” he was the only student to pass the Giant’s Drink, one of the many Fantasy Game situations.

A jewel in Ender’s ear allows both of them to communicate and for her to see and hear everything from Ender’s vantage point. She helps Ender with many things. For example, in the very beginning, she contacts an orbiting ship and pays $40 billion for it and the cargo. Ender’s reliance on Jane becomes obvious when she no longer helps him; he must ask Olhado to help him with his finances but Ender doesn’t even know what his own password is.

It continued when I recently read Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which featured a logistics computer that became self-aware and was nicknamed Mike:

In Robert A. Heinlein’s novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the character Mycroft Holmes is a self-aware computer system entrusted with running the life-support systems, communications, payroll and many other things, in a penal colony underground in the Moon or “Luna”. Mycroft eventually sides with characters inciting a revolution to free Luna, and is instrumental in their victory against the Lunar Authority on Earth.

In both these books the friendly omniscient computer helped the protagonists by being their eyes and ears, handling things for them and allowing them to effectively be in several places at once. The computer was awake and alert when its human friends were asleep or distracted, it had a perfect memory, and access to a vast network of rapidly available public knowledge.

Why can’t we have something like that now? I mean, yeah, we’re not quite ready for sentient computers. But surely some clever scripting, some speech recognition, and some synthetic voice work could be combined to give a human being quick answers to specific queries, driving directions, email/SMS notifications, and access to news and weather. Maybe one could click one’s earpiece, say “What’s Jena Six?” and have the computer retrieve and read the first paragraph of the Wikipedia entry. Then one could choose to have the computer continue reading the info, or tag it for later listening, or tag it for later browsing in front of a proper terminal, or have it brought up on the screen of the PDA so it can be read without messing with navigating to the proper page.

So I’ll continue to listen to my podcasts between answering calls on the silly button attached to my ear. You can mock me, but I’m afraid that this is the price of progress. We got used to people flying through the air and being able to call up information about the War of 1812 in under five seconds and being able to propel a multi-ton hunk of steel and dead dinosaurs just to go get ice cream. So come on, tell me that a small headset in public is all that crazy.

Now, I know that many of you will disagree with my objections to homosexuality. That’s not the point of this post. I don’t approve of his lifestyle, and I think it’s disgusting that he left his wife and four kids because he suddenly decided he couldn’t pretend anymore, but that has very little personal impact on me.

What is personally significant about this for me is that I will no longer have to play Thank You for every. single. missionary. It must have been some unwritten rule among missionaries that they either sing or play this stupid song for every fund-raising presentation to a church.

Knowing that many churches still won’t play Disney movies at their daycares, I can only hope that folks will think “Oh yeah, isn’t the guy who sang that song gay now?” and never play it ever again.

Then it was announced that we were getting a civics lesson to accompany our self-defense training. Turns out Scandinavia had a much lower crime rate that its neighbors up until the advent of satelite TV. Apparently their terrain was so rugged that terrestrial television didn’t work. When television came to Scandinavia via satellite, so did higher crime rates. The point of this was that perception is reality. When you see things done incorrectly, whether those things are social interactions or firearms use, you’ll tend to emulate. So to put some “positive reinforcement” into our heads, we were shown a training video from Gunsite.

Kind of a stretch? I thought so as well.

The video was long. I should have timed it, but didn’t. It was easily 30 minutes to an hour. It covered things that were covered in Level II at Rangemaster. It covered malfunctions and the drills to correct them, which was interesting. It covered non-standing shooting positions and how to transition in and out of them. I thought that was informative, but without live demonstration and practice, it was pretty useless. The video gave all of 90 seconds to “Pivots and turns”, which I’ll note is one of the bullet points in the course description. Did we *learn* these movements? No, we saw a police officer execute them. Once.

By this time I was pretty frustrated, and I fear that my negative attitude about the evening up to that point impacted my performance in the range portion of the class. We did another scored course, and I probably scored lowest of all the participants. The instructors were understanding and helpful, but the problem was that I understood my errors but wasn’t able to correct them. It’s not the fault of anyone at Rangemaster, but mine for not getting in enough serious range time. Even Givens commented, “At least you know what you’re doing wrong, so you can fix it.” I was slightly shamed, but having been through the scored course that emphasized the differences between close and distant targets, I have a good idea of how I can set up my range time to get productive use from it.

I need to slow down and focus on getting good, consistent, slow hits instead of poor, scattered, fast hits. I even heard one of the instructors comment to another behind me: “I think he wants to be a gunslinger.” Don’t try to talk behind the back of a student wearing electronic hearing protection, guys! Still, it’s a valid criticism, and I’ll work on it.

In the last hour we had our “simulated gunfights” which were 1-on-1 IDPA-style scenarios. The course involved running up to the booth, knocking off an ammo box with your dominant hand (to ensure that nobody is drawing early), scoring 2-3 solid hits on a cardboard BG 6 feet away, then engaging a reactive target about 25 feet away which will only fall on good COM hits. We didn’t have time to do the entire ladder, but I went up twice and survived both times. Each round requires two points to win, and during my second round I lost my first one (my target started falling as my opponent’s hit the ground), tied the second one, won the first one (by a hair) and won the last one. It was pretty neat to hear folks laughing behind me when I missed the pop-up a few times, and grunt in approval as I slowed down and downed it. The competitive portion of the range time was a blast!

(Side note: If you’re going to be a purist and carry a 1911, please be proficient with it. At least if I screw up I’ve got a 15-round magazine, but more than one 1911 guy had to reload in the middle of the match, which was almost certain death.)

We closed the class by stepping in front out the booths and getting just a little instruction in movement. Nothing fancy, but it was neat to see Givens demonstrate some general principles for how to react in the opening stages of a fight.

It’s hard to summarize my feelings about this course. I guess my fear is that someone who was present will remember how poorly I performed on the range and think that I’m putting the rest of the course down in an effort to make it look like I don’t suck so terribly. But I can admit it, I did much worse on the shooting portions than I had any excuse for.

The range portion was good validation of practiced skills for some (and a humbling reminder that more practice is needed for me) but few new skills or techniques were presented. The classroom portion on the first evening was packed full of good information related to lessons learned from famous shootouts, but on the second night I felt like an elementary school kid on the last day of school, with the teacher showing video to the class to pass the time until everybody went home. The Gunsite video, for instance, was a good video, but I came under the impression that we would be taught in person by Rangemaster instructors in an interactive setting. If I wanted to watch a video from another school, I would order a DVD from their website.

I feel bad being so critical, because I like Givens and the other instructors. I learned a ton from them in Level II, and so I can’t help but feel like I’m not being fair to Rangemaster in this review. Still, came away from the course feeling like I didn’t quite get my money’s worth this time around.

I’m still planning to take more courses from Rangemaster. In particular, I’m looking at the Back-Up Gun course, Defensive Shotgun, Vehicle Defense, and Urban Defense Carbine. But maybe it’s time that for pistol instruction I take a look at other schools and instructors, as well as spending more time on my own getting my proficiency with a handgun up to an acceptable level.

I did have a great time in the competitive portion of the class, however. I’m going to give some thought to going once or twice a month to the Friday night shooting league they host.

I picked up a copy of their Defensive Shotgun DVD. I’m eager to watch it, but wanted to get this review out of my head first so I had a clean slate. Expect a review soon.