Outrageous Malfunction

Kirkland departure: 2300 Friday. Kirkland arrival: 0100 Monday. In the interim: five boomers taken with the 50 BMG (two at entertainingly close range); at least thirty people who had never shot a 50 BMG now have; I got to put an M16 lower on one of my AR15 uppers and try some full-auto precision shooting; my fireball containment contraption fell in flaming splinters on the crowd. Sorry about the last one, folks; the sandbags did too good a job. Pictures and a short video are available. Sorry; no video of the cleanup. If anyone has some and would be willing to share for promotional purposes, please contant me or Joe.

This is a CyberSabre knife made by the Christy company. I got it gratis in 1994-ish.

A Segway user with a full-on motorcycle helmet. At least it’s gold.

Cheytac 408 from Future Weapons. Requires passport authentication to watch, sorry; MSN Soapbox has decided to stop purely public viewing for now.

World-class violinist plays for 45 minutes in subway station, is roundly ignored. Lots of theories as to why; I’ll stick with “didn’t recognize it”.

If you need to manually rebuild the performance counters on a machine, here’s the how-to.

MSTSC (the remote desktop client) has a most annoying bug: the first backspace you hit selects the last character instead of deleting it; the second backspace deletes the last character of the hostname. If you previously used MSTSC to connect to WEBHOST11 and you start MSTSC anew to connect to WEBHOST21, you have to hit backspace three times to delete the last two characters. This annoys me to no end.

The Smoking Gun has an interesting video on dealing with people that don’t want to deal with you. I love the choice of vehicles.

How to Have a Business Conversation. Good pointers.

The Daily Mail reports on MOD efforts to increase the number of snipers:

To complete their transformation into super-snipers, they will be trained to use a devastating new weapon - the British-made L115A1 rifle which can bring down an enemy target nearly three-quarters of a mile away with remarkable accuracy. The weapon will replace the less powerful L96 sniper rifle, which has a shorter kill range of just over half a mile. Most frontline soldiers use the standard Army issue SA80 rifle, accurate only to about a quarter of a mile.

Paul Graham provides an excellent rubric (HT Volokh Conspiracy) titled, “Is it worth being wise?” In it, he outlines ways in which wisdom and intelligence may impair each other’s growth. He presents some older positions in new grounds. Certinly, a worthwhile think week paper.

I use words like in hope that you’ll think I’m wise. Also, in sense 1C.