Justin Buist

Now that I’m working from home most of the time it’s become necessary to get a phone besides my cell.

Vonage got the nod.

So, I picked up a Vonage package at the local Meijer last week. The physical setup took about 5 minutes, nothing complicated there. I signed up online and activated the phone in another 5, and perhaps 10 minutes later the thing was live.

I don’t see the package I bought being offered online, but it was $80 and here’s how it works: There’s a “base station” of sorts that you connect to your network via Ethernet. That communicates with a wireless 5.8Ghz handset that has its own charging station. It rocks. I hook up a little 2.5mm headset that I got for an older cell phone to it for longer calls and I’m quite happy with it.

The voice mail system is awesome. It emails them to me as .WAV file attachments immediately after the message is left. It also puts them online so I can check them from anywhere I have access to a web browser. I tested it a bit and if I clear out a message online my handset knows I’ve cleared it out in like 30 seconds. So, if I’m out and about and clear a message via the web I wont’ come home to a false alert of having a message sitting there for me. Little details like that are what impress me.

The whole system is pretty portable too. Tomorrow I’ll unhook it all and haul it down to my office for the day. Reason: My clients know to contact me at this number. This number can go anywhere I have an ethernet connection. Bonus: Vonage offers the ability to forward to a different number if the base unit is ever disconnected. So, as soon as I unplug it from the local network all calls to that number get transfered to my cell phone. That’s awesome.

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Well some fuck nut took out 8 people with a rifle in Ohmaha today before he offed himself.

“Now I’ll be famous,” he wrote in his suicide note. Yeah, famous for being a failure. Hardly anybody knew about this guy before today, but now we know:

Hawkins was fired from his job at a nearby McDonald’s this week and had recently broken up with a girlfriend, Maruca said.

Wow. Way to go champ. Now you’re going to be famous as the guy that flipped out after he got fired from fucking MCDONALD’S!

You see, because you took the lives of innocents before you did this we’re going to push it out of our minds as fast as possible. I can’t remember exactly what the clock tower shooter in Texas was named, nor what he did in any detail. The same goes for the Columbine Killers and pretty much every other rampaging nutjob.

If I wasn’t addicted to the news I probably wouldn’t even know about this. Nobody is going to email this story to me. Why? There’s no entertainment value in it. It’s a sad story.

Now, the Darwin Awards on the other hand… those get emailed around. And boy, do I remember them. Remember the crook that stole a 1911 from a WWII vet’s house along with an old box of ammo? That one’s classic. He loaded the gun up and attempted an armed robbery with it. When the gun failed to fire he looked down the barrel to investigate the problem. Diagnosis: Hangfire. Result: 230 grains of lead in the perps head. HILARIOUS! See, no loss of innocent life = hilarious.

When something like that happens the local news crews don’t set out to find every detail of the perps life. They just report what happened and move on while the population forwards the news story on. On the other hand, when you drop 8 innocent people in your final moments everybody wonders “what went wrong” and they set out to find every fucked up thing that was going on in your life. You will be remembered as a failure. You will be remembered as the guy that flipped out because he lost his job at MCDONALD’S! Your girlfriend will probably be interviewed and we’ll find out if you had any “performance” problems. We’re going to learn about every single mental health defect you were ever even suspected of having.

If you really want to go out in a way that will be remembered you’ve gotta make it FUNNY. Darwin Award style. Play with some explosives in a remote field until you figure out how you’re going to do it. Maybe you could try spelling our your name with the charges so it’ll get reported in the story. That would be good. Just make sure you’ve got a BAC around 0.08 when you do it so everybody chalks it up to an accident. Accidents that hurt people are funny as evidenced by America’s Funniest Home Videos. If you can get national air time for getting whacked in the balls with a whiffle bat surely you’ll get air time when you blow your own drunk ass up.

Hopefully future nutburgers will take this advice to heart and come up with a more creative way of offing themselves while still gathering the media attention that they want.

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Read the THR post for full details.

Summary: They fucking rock compared to aluminum USGI mags.

Some quotes:

Marine 7-Ton test. Having seen the youtube.com test with the truck running over the mag, I was interested in seeing how far we could go. We took a fully loaded magazine in OD with window, placed it under the front wheel of the 7ton and put the wheel on top of the magazine and then turned the wheel back and forth several times. This was on gravel and resulted in severe road rash, but the magazine then fired all 30 rounds without a problem. One note, the rounds will become deformed inside the magazine, but it did function just fine. We did note that subsequent tests with 20rds or less in the magazine resulted in the failure of the magazine. All in all, this is a pretty tough test for a plastic magazine. The Marine 7 ton is rated at 7 tons off road capacity and 15 tons on road. I’m not sure how much weight is over those front wheels, but its got to be significant. Oh, and for those wondering, the USGI mag flattened, broke at the welds and shot its guts all over.

I can’t say for certain, but I’m pretty sure he’s talking about this truck:

I’d say such treatment is far more abusive than anything I’d submit my PMAGs to in regular use.

The PMAGs I tested survived 7 drops before developing cracks down the spine. They were black windowed and non-windowed. If you continue to drop them after they crack, the crack will just grow down and out to the side of the 29th round.

Now, the good news. The mags that eventually split, still could retain the majority of the rounds. One or two would spit out. The benifit of the PMAG is that when it does crack, it doesn’t break completely off. The magazines that where dropped after cracking, where able to be loaded into the weapon with no additional effort from a normal magazine. Once inside the weapon, the magzine functioned normally. So, even if you somehow get a split magazine, you can still use it. Now, the USGI didn’t even compare. After four drops it could not even be inserted into the mag well, let alone feed anymore because the feed lips where totally jacked up.

Emphasis mine there.

Magpul might be onto something here. Perhaps there’s a DOD contract in their future?

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Read it aloud if you have issues with the post title.

Well, this just takes the cake.:

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

“The campaign calls for Jews around the world to save the last candle and save the planet, so we won’t need another miracle,” said Liad Ortar, the campaign’s cofounder, who runs the Arkada environmental consulting firm and the Ynet Web site’s environmental forum.

Math time!

Ok, 15 grams multipled by 1 million homes is 15,000,000 grams of CO₂ or 15,000 kilograms.

So, what does it take to make 15,000kg of CO₂ by other means? Let’s look.

According to this reference humans output 0.02 cubic meters per hour of CO₂ while at rest but only 0.013 cubic meters while asleep. Now when we look over here we find that CO₂ has a mass of 1.98kg per cubic meter, so:

Asleep: 0.02574 kg/hour
Awake: 0.0396 kg/hour
Difference: 0.01386 kg/hour

So, the difference, in grams of CO₂ produced by a human while asleep versus being awake and at rest is 13.86.

15 / 13.86 = 1.08 and change.

So, to save the environment from 15,000 kg of CO₂ 1 million Jewish households would do just as much good by sleeping in for an extra 65 minutes over Hanukka. If you figure there are 4 people for every household that brings us to 16 minutes and 15 seconds of extra sleep per person.

So, sleep in a little bit this Hanukka season. It’s for the environment!

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