“If someone has a gun and is trying to kill you, it would be reasonable to shoot back with your own gun.”

— The Dalai Lama, The Seattle Times, May 15, 2001

Clues for the candidates, part 1


While browsing the list of potential California governors, I decided to take a quick peek at their web sites, and since they’re in alphabetical order, one of the first ones I hit was Brooke Adams.

Summary: she’s young, pretty, not a socialist, not a member of the Religious Right, and seems to grasp the major tax-and-spend problems in California. If she weren’t clueless on the subject of gun control, I’d be willing to back her.

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Generating random colors


My web color scheme generator is currently set up to reflect my own biases. The results are almost always readable, even for people with various forms of color-blindness, but who’s to say that my way is best?

Well, me, of course, but once or twice a year I’m willing to admit that I might be wrong about something. In recognition of that possibility, I’ll explain the syntax for the mini-language I created for the generator.

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An accidental "arsenal"


Every once in a while, after some poor schmuck has been arrested (maybe for a good reason, maybe not), some official will announce breathlessly that a search of his home turned up “thousands of rounds of ammunition.” This sounds impressive, until you realize that a box of 500 rounds of .22 Long Rifle — by far the most popular ammo in the country — is about the size and weight of a brick, and costs less than $25.

A few days ago, anticipating the release of my new Buck Mark, I picked up a brick of .22 so I’d have something to feed it. Tonight, I went through some boxes that had remained sealed through my last two moves. Imagine my surprise when I found four bricks inside. I think two of them were an impulse buy at a 24-hour grocery in Ohio, which makes them at least ten years old.

Obviously I’ll need to invite some friends along when I go to the range.

Interior decorating


I’m not in the market for a mail-order bride, but if I were, this is the gal for me. I took two years of German around the time she was born; we could work through the language barrier.

Post-Coulter Bliss


I just spent two hours reading articles by Ann Coulter. It’s an odd experience. On the one hand, she flames like a veteran Usenetter cherry-picking her facts, which is always fun to read, and she has excellent taste in enemies. On the other hand, she has a screw loose.

No, that understates it; she has a lot of screws loose.

For a long time, I was convinced that she was outrageous for the same reason anyone in the entertainment business is: it sells. After a concentrated dose of the stuff, though, I think she’s dead serious. About everything. Disturbing, that.

The worst part was realizing, round about the twelfth rant, that I was starting to understand her thought processes. Must shower now.

"Almost fair and balanced"


I was all set to participate in Fair and Balanced Day, until I reached the site that’s collecting contributions and saw this:

before you know it, the entire left side of the blog world is gonna be fair & balanced

Since I’m no more a leftist than I am a right-winger, I immediately lost all enthusiasm for the game. Sorry, kids, but you don’t have to be on the Left to poke fun at an obviously frivolous lawsuit, even if it happens to be coming from the Right.

A perfectly reasonable panic


Once every three months, we sent the whole company home while we tore the computer room apart and did all sorts of maintenance work. During my first quarterly downtime, the top item on my list was installing a new BOSS controller into the Solbourne that was our primary Oracle database server. Like any good database, it needed an occasional disk infusion to keep it happy, and there was no room on the existing SCSI controllers.

So I had a disk tray, a bunch of shiny new disks, a controller card, and media to upgrade the OS with. The BOSS was only supported in the latest version, and this being the server that kept the books, it was upgraded only when necessary.

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A lifetime supply


Just finished adjusting the trigger on my Remington 700. It now has a crisp 2.5-pound trigger pull, a vast improvement over the creepy 6-pounder it came with. It’s an easy, safe procedure, but the final step involved something I don’t keep around the house: nail polish.

After a leisurely walk to the grocery store in the middle of the night, I am the proud owner of a half-ounce bottle of Maybelline Infinite Shine Clear Extended Wear Base And Topcoat. Sealing the threads on the trigger-adjustment screws required approximately a third of a drop of the stuff, suggesting that I have enough left over to fix about a thousand rifles. Which is about a thousand more than I own.

I suppose I could always use the rest to seal the quick-and-dirty paint job I do for my D&D miniatures (prime gray, paint black, drybrush metallic, done!).

“Need a clue, take a clue,
 got a clue, leave a clue”