Don Keydick was parking the car

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Im a lot of things, some good, some not good, but no one has ever said I don’t have a sense of humour. Usually inappropriate. Case in point – yesterdays trip to pickup some pizza.

Well, it’s not like I was gonna use my real name, right? (And, yes, once in a while it’s Commander Zero’s name up on the board.) It’s just good clean fun, guys….no need to get worked up over it.

I suspect that has the world continues it’s spiral into whatever madness awaits, having a sense of humour (which usually correlates to a heightened sense of irony as well) is gonna come in real handy.

Article – Texas power companies remotely raise temperatures on people using their smart thermostats

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Give the power company access to your smart house and….

Power companies in Texas are remotely raising temperatures inside of some customers’ homes amid the state’s ongoing energy shortage.

…….

English appears to have enrolled the thermostat, operated by the company EnergyHub, an a program known as “Smart Savers Texas,” KHOU 11 notes. The program, which customers have to opt-into, allows power companies to remotely adjust thermostats when energy demands are high.

Upon realizing the details of the program, English says he immediately unenrolled: “I wouldn’t want anybody else controlling my things for me.”

I love the idea of just saying “Shields up!” or “Activate Barn Door Protocol” and have all my locks, shutters, and access points suddenly armoured up. But, as Scotty said in Star Trek, the more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to jam up the pipes. Anytime you give someone access to your personal server, your personal phone, your personal security system, your personal life….you create a possibility of risk. Sometimes the risks are minimal and are outweighed by the rewards. But…it never seems that way when the risk actually catches up. Moral of the story: don’t give the rest of the world freakin’ access to your critical systems.

Gas can fail

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I think it was about ten or so years ago that, of all places, Century International (the home of the drunken gunplumbing monkeys) was selling used military NATO gas cans. I bought a bunch of them and they turned out to be quite good. However, they were used. That means some had dings or small dents, and they may have seen some pretty harsh use. But, they never failed….until:

Apparently that particular area had taken a bit of damage at some point in its life and after a decade of constant contraction/expansion episodes as the seasonal temperatures fluctuated…it just split. The seepage of fuel over time is what ate he paint away.

The good news is, of course, that this was far from my only can of gasoline and the loss of it doesn’t really make any difference. The bad news, naturally, is that not only do i need to replace this can but it probably is time to replace all those surplus cans I bought since, clearly, their pedigree is uncertain and may include some things that might become issues further down the line. Really, at the time I purchased those cans they were a good value and of far better quality than any plastic can that was available. But, nowadays, I have the room to pick up some brand new ones to guarantee (as much as you can guarantee anything, I guess) that I have some fuel on hand for when I need it.

So several hundred bucks go out the door, and a half dozen high-end NATO cans come in the door. Seems legit.

Adventures in shelf life

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Today’s adventure in Will-It-Kill-Me*. Today’s challenger: a can of Costco Kirkland-brand roast beef with a ‘Best By’ date of four years ago. And the defending champion: my constitution.

First thing’s first… check for bulging can. Check. Check for explosive outgassing when can opener pierces lid. Check. Check for odd smell. IT’S CANNED MEAT…IT ALL SMELLS LIKE CAT FOOD.

Drop it into a frying pan and hit with the BTU’s:

The meat is soooo tender. I mushed it with a fork to flake it out into, basically, ‘shredded’ beef. Added some kung pao sauce, threw it over a bowl of rice, add a little soy sauce and..yum. So, there you have it, kids. Four years after the Best By date and I’m still here to talk about it.

Whats the point of this sort gastronomical double-dog dare? Well, for my own confirmation that on many (but not all!) canned food products you can get a little bit of margin off the ‘Use By’ or ‘Best By’ date. I mean, we’ve heard that, and we’ve read that, and ‘experts’ tell us that but….here’s the actual proof.

The Kirkland roast beef, by the way, disappeared from my local CostCo shelves several years ago. It was only recently that another canned beef product took its place. I find it to be about as good as the Kirkland and have stocked up accordingly.

+ = Spoiler alert: turns out the only thing that can kill me is me

Patting self on back

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In real life, I’m actually a fairly humble guy on pretty much everything. In fact, an outside observer would, probably accurately, say I even have low self-esteem issues. So it should be understood that this post isn’t bragging. I usually don’t brag because if I did something worth bragging about it’s probably something I should have done years sooner or with better results than I actually achieved. Anyway….

I was rolling through some old posts and noticed that several posts where I described changes in my life or courses of action I was taking have realized their potential. I thought it would be interesting to point them out.

After having limited employment opportunities, I decided that rather than agitate that minimum wage needed to be raised to $15, I needed to become the kind of person who was worth more. So..I went back to school. While in school I needed to actually get some direction and stop wandering aimlessly. I needed to develop a principle to use as a yardstick for my activities. And I needed to set some actual, defined, quantifiable goals. I also moved the direction of my efforts slightly from heavy-on-the-materiel to heavy-on-the-financial. And…it largely paid off. I hit virtually every goal I set, once I actually had a goal. The life I have now is far from perfect, but it is leaps and bounds more resilient than it used to be, and more importantly, there is substantial groundwork laid for the future.

It’s all stuff I should have done years ago, yep. But…maybe better late than never

What made the difference? (Other than having no real other options, I mean.) Figuring out goals and setting them. And then sticking to working towards them. Consistently. Short terms goals were easy. Any idiot can stay on a diet, exercise plan, steps-a-day, or other goal for two weeks. Thats easy. Two months? Harder, but within most of us. But…years? Thats a challenge. But…it can be done. I’m the least disciplined person you’ll ever meet. I always look for the easy way out. But if I could get my act together enough to hit some of these important goals (pay off house, get out of debt, finish college, bang Jennifer Law…wait, still working on that last one) then I can pretty much guarantee any person can. Heck, probably be easier for them than for me.

I’m not going to say I did it all on my own. Or that I’m some sort of self-made-man. Nope. I had help. People stepped in and stepped up here and there. Sometimes it was with a check, sometimes it was with an ‘attaboy’, but it was never all just me. And I’m fine with that. The people who helped me were the people I wanted in my life and they added to it as I added to theirs…and they proved that they were worth having in my life.

In my opinion, my life still isn’t anything to jump up and down about. There are still smoldering hot spots that could flare up anytime and start the blaze again, but things are far better than they used to be.

I’m telling ya man….find goals, set them, and then go after them ruthlessly. Worked (up to this point) for me.

The Culling Fields

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So…the hordes are marching down the street towards your neighborhood. Sitting on the table before you is a brand new HiPoint 9mm and a box of Wolf ammo. Next to it is a brand new Glock 17 and a box of Federal ammo. You can only grab one ammo/gun combo. Which one do you grab?

Fairly confident most of you would eschew the HiPoint/Wolf combination. Yes? And why would you not choose them? Probably the most common answer would be something along the lines of “I don’t have confidence in the gun”, “The stakes are too high for me to risk relying on it”, or “I don’t trust the gun to perform as well as the other gun.” These are all perfectly valid concerns. I mean, think about it, when something as important as your safety and security is on the line don’t you want to have the most reliable, trustworthy, confidence inspiring gear on your side? of course you do. If you were jumping into the apocalypse you would judge every resource you have for it’s ability to be trusted for reliability and performance.

So…why do some folks keep people in their life who wouldn’t pass that same inspection? Do you really hold your handguns, flashlights, and pocket knives to a higher standard than you do the people you let into your life, your home, and your heart? Shouldn’t you hold the people in your life to at least the same standards as you do your pistol?

Years ago I thought about the people that I let into my life. I narrowed them down into three categories: people who made my life pleasant and added to my life, people who didnt make my life better but didnt make it worse, and people who made me unhappy and who subtracted rather than added to my life. The first two groups made the cut, the last group…not so much. And that wasn’t a terribly easy decision to make. There’s people I genuinely care about and love out there whom I just simply will not let into my life because having them involved in any facet of my life causes unhappiness. I trimmed out a bunch of ‘casual friends’, acquaintances, and even some family. What remains are people whom I actually care about, who take an interest in me and my life, I trust to varying degrees, and feel comfortable being myself around.

I’m not saying I have to ‘get something out of’ having a person involved in my life, rather I am saying if I don’t enjoy having someone in my life, or if its just a one-way street of intimacy and concern, then there’s no reason for me to let them in.

If you genuinely believe that the life we know is starting a slide into some difficult times, perhaps even really difficult times, does it make sense to expend time, emotion, privacy, trust, and concern on people who seem to only make you sorry when you talk to them? And does it make sense, in these times of…heightened concern… to have unreliable, untrustworthy, uncertain, or uncomfortable people around? No, it doesn’t. And, sadly, that means that some relationships, with people you may have known for years, need to be taken out and put down like a lame horse.

Only you know who in your circle of family and friends is adding to your life and who is taking away from it. Maybe its your cousin who wants to know everything about whats going on in your life but shuts you down when you ask about his. Or it’s the guy from work who you get along great with except for every other Friday when he calls you for a ride home because he’s drunk..again…and needs a ride. Maybe it’s your sister-in-law who seems to do nothing but tell your wife about how much of a loser you are and how she could have done better. Could be it’s even a brother or parent who, when their name shows up in your caller ID, ruins your day. Can you ‘ghost’ these people? Can you minimize their role in your life? Can you just cut them off?

The people that you’re going to ride out Ragnarok with shouldn’t just be an approximation of the random strangers you share an elevator with. There should be purpose and design in who you let into your life. And that phrase, ‘let into your life’, means exactly that. If you have someone in your life that you wouldn’t feel comfortable with driving your truck, housesitting for you, or playing with your kids when you’re not around…..then you might wanna think about whether you have the room for them, emotionally and strategically, in your life.

I own a lot of guns. A lot. And there isn’t a single one that I have acquired that I feel is a junker or a Saturday night Special or just a plain ‘ol piece of crap. I expended resources acquiring each of those guns and keeping a clunker serves my interest in no way whatsoever. I have no problem holding the people in my life to that same standard. I can be friends with lotsa people, but the list of people I take into my house and heart is extremely small. But, those people are, to me, good people worth knowing for what they add to my life. When the end of the world comes (or the end of MY world) , I’ll have no problem having them ‘on my side’ because they’ve been on my side all along…otherwise I wouldn’t be having some sort of relationship with them.

So, my advice to you is that if you really are worried about where things are going perhaps it’s time to triage through your friends/family relationships with as critical an eye as you go through the display case at the gun counter of your local shop.

Just something to think about.

Video – G3 – HK91 – PTR91 to 500yds: Practical Accuracy

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Came across this video about the accuracy potential of the G3 clones and was pretty impressed. 500 yards with open sights is not a cakewalk under any circumstance.

The G3 platform has two things going for it: rugged, brute reliability and the complete lack of a gas system. What it has going against it is literally everything else. SO, why do I have so many of them? Well, the choices for a .308 ‘battle rifle’ are mighty limited – M1A, FAL, AR-10, and this thing. Yes, there’s all sorts of boutique and niche guns like a Galil or a Saiga but we’re talking about guns that are common enough that you can find them (and their logistics) fairly easy. I went with the G3 platform because mags were a buck each. Even used FAL mags were ten bucks, M1A mags (if you could find a reputable aftermarket maker) were twice that, and AR-10 mags weren’t standardized so it was anyone’s guess what your gun took.

If I had to do it all over again, now that Magpul makes AR-10 mags, I’d go with the AR-10 for it’s best-in-class ergonomics. Do I like it enough to sell my PTR’s? Nope. But I wouldn’t turn down a nice AR-10 if one came my way. And it’s nice to see that with the basic iron sights this thing will still ring the bell at 500 yards…at least, for that guy it did. But he shoots way more than I do.

Propane, and propane accessories

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Number one propane accessory: road flares.

It’s a staple of movies. Good guys need an explosion so the McGyver a barbecue bomb and a few road flares into…ah, you know what…its just easier to show you:

Here’s the thing. Propane canisters, like you and I, are under tremendous pressure. Poke a hole and they go off like a rocket. Any ignition source has to be already in place and at full heat or the sudden explosive force of the propane releasing will just shove the propane tank away. So you (usually) need an ignition source on the tank itself that will, if the tank rockets away, go with it.Tracer ammo? Maybe in the movies, but practically it doesn’t seem to go that way. But…let’s look at some folks who have tried:

I actually found several videos of people trying to blow stuff up with propane and tracers and the results are almost never what Hollywood would have you believe. It was a little harder finding videos with people using incendiary, though.

If your End Of The World plan for clearing out a Times Square on New Years Eve size crowd of zombies is to chuck a propane tack at ’em and light it up with tracer ammo. Well…it looks like you’re going to be in for a disappointment. But…securing road flares to your propane tank and shooting it? That seems to deliver…kinda:

What’s interesting is that the propane tanks don’t really explode like they do in the movies. There’s a huge fireball, no doubt…things are gonna get crispy..but there’s no real bowl-em-over concusive explosion. Holes aren’t blown in the ground and other than the tank itself there isn’t any explosive shrapnel a-flying.

This isn’t to say that propane, used creatively, can’t be used for purposes other than running your turkey fryer. Rather it means that if you think firing a round of tracer into a propane tank is some sort of poor mans remote claymore…well…you’re in for a disappointment.

This post brought to you by the five-dollar summer fill-up discount at the local RV place…where I saw way too many propane tanks of all sizes to not have these kinda thoughts.

 

ETA: ALthough it was a terrible, terrible movie, the gun fu in Sucker Punch was pretty great. Especially against the WW1 Nazi Zombies.