Justin Buist

Today Theresa and I are driving back from the grocery store when the following exchange occurs:

Theresa: Did you just fart?
Justin:Uhm, no.
T: Are you sure? It smells.
J: Yes, I’m sure! I’d tell you if I farted. You know that.
T: It smells like shit!
J: It wasn’t me! (I look left, I look right. We’re on a bridge.)
J: Honey, we’re driving over the Grand River.

We had the exact same exchange about 2 weeks ago which made it doubly funny for me.. Same bridge, just going the other direction.

For those of you not from the area: The Grand River gets polluted with human waste whenever the water levels get high enough. It’s spring here, so they’re kind of high, so the river smells like shit because it’s full of it.

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Thumbs up there!

I’ve had a Henry .22LR rifle for a couple of years now that I snagged out of a pawn shop in Mount Pleasant, MI. It’s fun, and it works, but I’ve had some feeding issues toward the end of the magazine, and it had the tendency to walk out on me every now and again.

I finally ordered up a new replacement magazine tube from them via phone on Thursday. It arrived in the mail today. It locks in much tighter, which is to be expected. My old follower stopped about 1.5″ shy of the end of the rod. I have no idea how old that magazine is*.

The new follower runs right flush to the end and it has an appendage sticking out:

Okay, that’s new. I haven’t seen anything like that before. Did the old one break off or is this something “new” that they started doing since my original was made?

*: If anybody knows how to date the rifle that’d be great. It has no model number on it that I can find and its serial number is 0810XX.

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There’s a rodent problem at the family farm and I offered up a .410 Saiga to my dad to help get rid of them. He said he’d rather have something quieter, like a .22LR rifle.

Hey, I know a guy that’s got a few of those!

So, the next day I used my lunch hour to hit Grand Valley Sporting Goods to see if they had any subsonic .22 ammo. They had some CCI CB Longs so I snagged 200 rounds and hit the range.

They advertise a velocity of 710fps and the bullet is a 29 grain Lead Round Nose. I got my Savage Mark-II FSS sighted in with them. Well, mostly. The elevation is still horribly off, but I’ll get to that later.

These rounds are exceptionally quiet. It sounds like a good pellet gun, really. The bullet impact on the chip-board target backing made more noise than the actual shot. There’s certainly no need to wear any hearing protection with these!

Of course, that shouldn’t come as any surprise. There’s no powder in the rounds. They rely entirely on the primer to get the job done if I’m not mistaken.

The problem I had with adjusting elevation is that with the rear sight as low as it’ll go rounds were impacting about 4.5″ high at 15 yards and around 5.5″ high at 25 yards. I ran those numbers through a ballistic chart calculator and that indicates that the rifle is zeroed for 100 yards. That seems rather odd… a 100 yard zero using subsonic ammunition out of a .22? Somebody, please, tell me that this is not normal. That means I’ll have a zero around 190 yards with standard velocity (around 1050fps) .22 ammo. That really doesn’t sound right, and yes, I verified that I’m still around 5.5″ high at 25 yards using some standard velocity Federal ammo while I was there.

In related news, I wouldn’t recommend a Savage Mark-II FSS. The trigger is horrible with a lot of play in it. It’s the only gun I’ve ever seen that has significant side-to-side wobble in the trigger. Oh, and it breaks around 12lbs. Yuck.

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Alternative Title: ATTN: AbjectDisappointment

The Debatable Land is running a poll on the 3 most over-rated and 3 most under-rated Presidents.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Lincoln won the spot for being the most over-rated President, that’s how I’d vote.

I’ll think about this and post my answers later.

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Midway USA is selling .308 (165 grain) and 7mm (140 grain) bullets for half price.

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Here’s the Slashdot link.

I must admit that I was never very interested in the case. I was really only ever wondering what would happen with ReisferFS. Back when I ran Linux as my primary computing system I used ReiserFS because it seemed to be the most promising. On my latest install I went with ext3 instead because, well, I knew the dude was up on murder charges and things didn’t look good.

When your wife goes missing it’s a bad idea to tear out the passenger seat of your car, hose it all down, and leave two books on how police prosecute murder cases in it. That looks a bit odd.

Oh, and don’t testify in your own defense when your lawyer tells you not to. That’s a bad idea.

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I started driving in 1996 back when you could get gasoline for around $1 a gallon. Back then there was a 10¢ surcharge for mid-grade gas and another 10¢ increase above that for premium grade gas.

Now that we’re paying $3.70ish a gallon that’s still the same.

How does that work? Regular goes up 375%, mid-grade goes up 350% and premium goes up 330%.

I don’t get it.

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The topic has been covered by a slew of other gun bloggers, but Sebastian uses it to bring up a good question:

If I can’t have it, because it’s not useful for self-defense, then it’s not useful for police self-defense either, right?

I find myself in agreement with him there. If some SWAT team needs machine guns to raid my neighbors house, where they have the advantage of numbers, certainly I should be entitled to the same weapons when I’m the sole person defending my home against an unknown number of attackers.

Then again, we’re not talking about SWAT teams here, we’re talking about patrol officers. All they’re doing is driving around in the same neighborhoods that we live in. What about the people that live in those areas that are surrounded by the very same criminal element that would visit violence on a police officer?

I say they should be armed equally.

Not that I’d actually want an M4 for my home defense rifle. I tend to favor the Make-Big-Holes school of thought so I either keep an 870 with 00 Buck handy or a Marlin 1894C stoked with some .357 loads from Buffalo Bore.

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I’m stoked. I’ve redone the little area of my home that I work from and it a) works well so far and b) looks super-freaking sweet.

I moved a desktop that’s sole purpose was development for one client out of here because they haven’t asked me to do anything in 2 months. So, off to a random bedroom with that. I also picked up a 19″ LCD from work. We had a guy resign and I was next in line for a new monitor. Since I already used my own personal 17″ LCD as a 2nd monitor on my laptop I decided to haul a slightly used AMD Athlon 3000 based media-center-ish PC out of a closet and fired that baby up.

New monitor on the old laptop, old monitor onto the new machine.

I’ll be finishing the Windows 2003 Server/SQL Server 2005/PerformancePoint 2007 install once I get the proper CD keys, but I’ve also put on a small Ubuntu Desktop 8 installation. It’s been about 3 years since I sat down and actually fiddled with a Linux based desktop machine. For years it was my primary computing environment at home but that all went away when I moved to OS X.

And ya know what? Things are improving. I like that. Oh, I was skeptical at first.

See, I clicked the wrong download link the first time around so I got the ISO for 64 bit Ubuntu Server instead of the Desktop version. I installed it while I waited for the 64 bit desktop version to download just for fun. I then installed the desktop version. No problems there,and in both cases the installer figured out how to correctly install GRUB and permit the existing Win2k3 system. Nice! Progress.

Then I tried to get the network working. Since I didn’t have an IP after the first boot obviously this thing didn’t support my wireless USB adapter. I’ve run Linux for years. That used to happen to me a lot, so I hit the interwebs and fought with it. I saw that it should work, but mine didn’t. I thought maybe it was just broken in the 64 bit version so I went and installed th 32 bit version Saturday morning. Still broken. Hours later I figure I’ll try and bridge the wireless connection from my laptop to the media-center-ish PC and see if I can download a kernel, patch it, and finally get this thing working. While doing that I noticed something in the upper right corner of the Ubuntu desktop.

It was the little applet that lets you select which network card you want to use.

I click it, select my wireless network and it’s working. I’m such an idiot sometimes. Okay, reinstall the 64 bit version of the system and it still works. Wonderful!

After that it was smooth sailing. Fix a few UI things that I’m partial to, grab a few packages from the Ubuntu servers and I’ve got a fully functional desktop at this point.

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So, I’m playing Halo 3 tonight online and I get paired up with a group and one guy’s name is MACHINEGEWER42. Huh, looks familiar.

A minute or two into the game I hit my mic and ask:

JB: Hey, Machine Gever 42, is that a reference to the German MG42?
MG42: Dude! You’re the first person to get that! Awesome! I bet my cousin would love talking to you.
JB: Ever get to shoot one?
MG42: No.
JB: They’re a blast.
MG42: You’ve shot one?
JB: Yeah, a local range had a machine gun rental day so I put 100 rounds thorugh one once.
MG42: Hey, here’s my cousin.
Cousin: You’ve shot an MG42?!
JB: Yeah, and an M60, an MP5, a Glock 18….

I just spent about an hour and a half playing with those guys. That was fun.

Oh, FYI: My gamertag is GigaBuist if any of you want to team up sometime.

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