Month: September 2010

Class AAR: AT-2A (My) Home Defense Tactics

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Last night KR Training hosted its AT-2A Home Defense Tactics class. While I attended this class a few months ago, this time I hosted the class.

After experiencing the class myself, I wanted to host the class for a couple of reasons. First, it’d be nice to see what Karl thinks of my house from a defense/tactical perspective. Second, I wanted Wife to be involved. Wife cares about defense, she’s very keen on awareness. What I wanted her to get what some “formal schooling” and also some other perspectives on how our house stacked up. Plus hey, it’d be nice to let her finally see what it is I do all of those Saturday’s away from her and the kiddos. 🙂

This class ran like most instances of the class, just different due to it being a different house. There are numerous things I have already thought about, addressed, and tended to, but certainly some new and useful things came out of the event. There are a few things I’m going to work on to improve in the house, and some ideas I’m going to reject. For instance, making ground-level windows undesirable to go through. A suggestion from Karl is to put painful plants at such windows, like grow a holly bush or a rose-bush (all those thorns hurt) to discourage entry. While the suggestion in and of itself is a good one, it will not specifically work in my case due to botanical reasons (e.g. too much shade, those things just won’t grow). However, the alternative is putting things on the inside by the windows to discourage entry, such as large heavy objects in front of the window, or having lots of things that if a window was breached would cause lots of noise (e.g. lots of cheap fragile knickknacks on the window sill that get knocked off). That’s covered.

One very useful thing was addressing some of the “downstairs” issues. I hadn’t thought about one particular area being a “hunker down” spot, but Karl’s examination of things raised a lot of good points. Wife and I are looking at how we can tweak that spot to make it even better. It’s certainly going to be part of our plan.

The main thing to note is that no house will be perfect, all situations are going to have problems (e.g. stairs are just a problem that’s tough to overcome). But the best thing you can do is plan ahead. Examine the home from the exterior and the interior, looking at it with a mindset of “OK, if I was a criminal, what would I do?”. Look for those vulnerabilities. What can I do to make my house less attractive? Do you have children? How could they play into the situation? If say I have to run from my bedroom to the children’s room, what is that path like and what do I have to concern myself with? Can I do things to help improve that (e.g. motion detecting light switches, use of light and darkness)? How are things in the daytime? How are things at night? Every house is different so there’s no one blanket solution, but so long as you take the time to figure it out (and having an expert like Karl Rehn is certainly useful), that’s the key. Plan ahead so when the flag flies you can just go.

This morning, Wife came up to me and suggested some things from her own thinking. It wasn’t stuff that came directly out of the Karl (i.e. direct suggestion from Karl), but rather just how some scenarios played out, some examination of things, some other suggestions… put them all together, and Wife had some good thoughts on other improvements we could do. I must admit, it just tickled me that the class went over so well with her. I know she wasn’t looking forward to the class (she was thinking it’d be akin to some other classes I did, like maybe force-on-force classes), so I was happy to see how engaged she was in the class and how much she took from it.

That Wife got a lot out of it pleased me. Plus it put her a little closer to my wavelength on a few things, or at least she could see where I was coming from. We both got something out of it, individually and as a couple. I think the goals I set for hosting the event were met.

And of course… my “honey-do” list just got longer. 😉

Another perspective on Open Carry

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

Today’s issue of The Shooting Wire contained an article from Tiger McKee with his take on open carry.

Tiger is against open carry, at least from a tactical perspective (he spoke in that regard, not a political or “rights” regard).

He mentioned one element that I haven’t heard many people bring up on the topic of open carry.

I also don’t want non-threats to know I’m armed. If something does break out these other people may expect me to save the day. When I use my weapon it’s because I decide based on the situation that’s it is necessary for me to use it. Others, especially those unfamiliar with conflict, may not be very objective when it comes to use of firearms. For example they may be counting on you using your weapon to keep the guy they’ve been mouthing off to from kicking their butt. They may think it’s worth risking your life to prevent a business from losing their money during a robbery. I only fight if it’s worth risking my life for, which is a very short list.

Old Friend

/ hsoi

Apart from being a fantastic time-waster, I must admit one thing I like about Facebook is reconnecting with old friends.

Case in point. An old high school friend “friended” me on Facebook some time ago. While he lives on the east coast, he just took a job with Dell thus had to come down here for some training. He dropped me a line saying he’d be in town and wondered if we could get together. I haven’t seen the guy in perhaps 20 years… wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass.

We went to Threadgill’s last night, had some food, listened to some live music, and just talked for hours catching up on what’s been going on the past 20 years. Oh sure, over the years we heard little things here and there from mutual friends, but there’s nothing that can compare to sitting down with someone and just talking with them.

One thing I didn’t like? I found out that he’s now living almost in the country (foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains) on 3 acres, can hunt there, and the deer are so heavily populated there that he finally got himself a Savage .308 bolt-action and is going to harvest a few this year. I’m most envious. 🙂

The other thing I didn’t like? Being able to say “it’s been 20 years since we saw each other”. Two decades. Face it Daub… you’re getting old. 🙂

But with that getting old, you realize more and more what’s important. Lots of people can come and go in your life, but it’s good to keep in touch with those that meant something. Yeah, Facebook may have a lot of evil things about it from a corporate standpoint, but it’s hard to deny how it and other modern communication technology is changing how social relationships work. Don’t really have to go another 20 years before we see each other again.

Simplicity

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

I am an engineer by trade, and Wife points out that I have an engineer mind.

While I spend much of my time working with complex systems, I understand that simplicity is king. Simplicity is actually quite difficult to achieve because it takes work. You start off doing what you need to do, over time things grow and it will become more complex and kinda messy. You must take the time to stop, step back, and reengineer and rearchitect things to regain that simplicity. Typically this will mean you must discard and cast off.

Antoine de Saint-Exupery said:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Tao Te Ching #48:

In the practice of the Tao,
every day something is dropped.
Less and less do you need to force things,
until finally you arrive at non-action.

Simple is not easy, but it is best.

I’ve seen a few things in the past couple days that reinforce this.

I stumbled across this blog posting on “What is good code?”

Good code is simple. Even complex good code is comprised of simple building blocks. Good code hides or cuts through the complexity in the problem, to provide a simple solution – the sign of a true coding genius is that he makes hard problems look easy, and solves them in such a way that anyone can understand how it was done (after the fact). Simplicity is not really a goal in its own right, though; it’s just that by means of being simple, code is more readable, discoverable, testable, and maintainable, as well as being more likely to be robust, secure and correct! So if you keep your code simple (as simple as possible, but no simpler), it is more likely to be good code – but that is by no means sufficient in and of itself.

And all of this talk of simplicity isn’t just something for the world of engineering…. I think it applies to all things in life, and I think it’d do well to be applied to government.

Witness the mess there is in classifying sensitive information: (h/t Slashdot)

Protecting and classifying sensitive information such as social security numbers shouldn’t be that hard, but perhaps not surprisingly the US government has taken complicating that task to an art form.

It seems that designating, safeguarding, and disseminating such important information involves over 100 unique markings and at least 130 different labeling or handling routines, reflecting a disjointed, inconsistent, and unpredictable system for protecting, sharing, and disclosing sensitive information, according to the watchdogs at the Government Accountability Office.

Read the full article (it’s short) to see just how messy the problem is. This is not simplicity, this is about the furthest thing from simplicity. How does this make life easier?

Then I see this flowchart on Department of Defense acquisitions:

The Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System -- MY BRAIN HURTS!

Wow. Even the name (The Integrated Defense Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics Life Cycle Management System) is a complex beast.

I truly hope no one considers that to be a simple, streamlined process.

Have you ever noticed, any time the government talks about streamlining or improving their process, they always create some new group to do so? Nothing ever gets shut down or shed or cast off… it’s always grows.

If people are tired at how inefficient government is, at how bloated and slow it is, how complex, how confusing… why aren’t we working to truly simplify things? Why does no one believe in casting off? Why do we call them “law-makers”, as that seems to imply all they can do is make more laws instead of refining or repealing what we already have?

Why don’t we have any politicians that run on a platform of repealing, stripping down, and simplifying? Why is a discussion of “loss of government jobs” considered a bad thing? closing of government agency a bad thing?

Consider how truly simple things are better in life (or at least, consider how those ugly complex things make life difficult). Work towards the ideal.

2009 FBI Crime Stats – an interesting tidbit

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

So the FBI released their crime statistics/summary for 2009.

Violent crime went down. Of course, everyone wants to come up with reasons for this. LA Times reports:

Crime experts have cited several possible explanations for the falling crime rate, including better policing, a swelling of the prison population, the decline of the crack cocaine epidemic and an aging population. But regardless of the reason, crime fell sharply during the 1990s and has declined gradually since then.

And you’ll have your pro-gun people attributing it to the fact that more law-abiding citizens are armed, and criminals don’t like getting shot either. I’m not going to hypothesize.

What I find more interesting is to look at the breakdown. Most of the breakdown is stressing “murder by firearm, especially handgun”. But look at the last column: “Hands, Fist, Feet, etc.” (which includes pushing). Almost 6% of the total murders used no weapon at all.

You ban guns, you ban knives, people are still going to find ways to commit evil acts. If someone really wants to hurt you or kill you, they will. Are we going to ban hands and feet? Violence is not an act of an implement — we don’t blame hands when someone pushes someone else off a cliff to their death, so why do we blame a gun when an evil person uses a gun to injure another?

(h/t Everyday No Days Off)

IKImageBrowserView pain

/ hsoi

IKImageBrowserView… oh, you are so neat, so full of power and potential.

And you can bite my shiny metal ass.

What a pain you are. How one moment rearranging works, then the next it doesn’t. That I mimic sample code and yet it still doesn’t work. I’m sure it’s something I’m doing, but when other developers also describe the ImageKit classes as “black magic” and curse you (and I’ve had pains with your brother, IKImageView), I know my journey into the abyss is not a solo one.

Onward through the fog….

New Powders… Barnes & 6.8 implications?

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

This morning I read on The Firearm Blog that Hornady Superformance and LEVERevolution powders are coming in 2011.

The ammunition brought to market is interesting because it brings 100-200 fps more but still within SAAMI pressure specs. TFB has some hard data and graphs.

So what I wonder is…

Barnes Bullets like velocity. Generally speaking, the faster you can push ’em, the more performance you’ll get out of them. So if these new powders can get 100-200 fps more, what tangible gains could we see in driving those Barnes bullets?

Now, the 6.8 SPC was designed to be used out of rifles with shorter barrels (e.g. 14.5″, 16″, even Bill Wilson typically uses an 11″ to take feral hogs). These powders are about efficient burn:

They achieve this by developing a set of new powders and blending these powders specifically for each cartridge so that all the powders burns completely inside the barrel. This allows maximum power transferred to the cartridge but also lower muzzle blast, thereby reducing recoil.

So these powders in short-barreled rifles… could use of these powders “negate” the velocity loss you see by taking a couple of inches off your barrel?

Then, Barnes Bullets that like velocity, easier to handle SBR’s, powder that gives you more velocity (and less muzzle blast and less recoil and more efficient burn) well…. could this be a fantastic combination?

I’m really curious.

Sunday Metal – The Atomic Bitchwax

/ hsoi

A side project of Monster Magnet’s Ed Mundell. Magnet was having issues. Ed did this band. So I checked it out.

“Last Of the V8 Interceptors”

Not much of a video, but a cool song.

No Doves (today)

/ hsoi

Just spoke with my buddy.

The guy that owns the property we’d be dove hunting at came down with something… he’s been in bed all day, conked out. 😦

So, the dove hunt has to be postponed until next week.

Kinda a bummer because I was all pumped up, but also a blessing because well… I’m just not that much of a shotgunner. I spent today working the shotgun dry with some snap-caps, and while I’m pretty sure I’d bring down a few birds, a little more time to get some more practice is a good thing.

Plus, this means I can join the family at the church’s annual fair! Time for gorditas and roasted corn! 🙂