Month: February 2012

Who needs to be armed in a National Park?

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Who needs to be armed in a National Park?

Well, it was a good thing this 6-year-old’s father was. (h/t sshbiker)

A family was walking in Big Bend National Park when a mountain lion snuck up and pounced on the 6-year-old boy. Clamped down on his face. The father stabbed the mountain lion in the chest with his pocket knife and that caused the predator to break off the attack and run.

It’s rare that a mountain lion attacks a human, but a 6-year-old looks like food that won’t put up much of a fight (vs. a large man). With the drought and rough conditions here in Texas, critters are going further and taking more chances in their quest for food. The coyotes have been coming much closer to my house lately, and yes that concerns me.

Wild animals are just that: wild animals. To them, you are not a person, you are either something to be left alone, or prey. In fact, it really doesn’t matter if the predator has 2 legs or 4 legs, you are either something to be left alone, or prey. Being attacked may be rare, but when it happens what are you going to do to respond? Are you going to just panic and scream? Or are you going to be able to fight and win?

Good job, Dad.

2012-02-08 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 6, Press 2

/ hsoi

Holy crap! I can do chin-ups! 🙂

“Week “

  • 3 reps – Press (working max: 150#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x60
    • 1x5x75
    • 1x3x90
    • 1x3x105 (work)
    • 1x3x120
    • 1x7x135
  • Asst. #1 – Press
    • 5 x 10 x 75
    • Supersetted with chin-ups, 5x1xbw
  • Asst. #2 – Supinated Close-grip Pulldowns
    • 4 x 10 x 140
    • 1 x 10/3/3 x 140 (rest-pause set)

Holy crap, Beavis! I did chin-ups today. 🙂

I just haven’t been able to do chin-ups (supinated grip, palms facing you). I’m not strong enough, I’m heavy. The (Wendler) recommended thing is to do chin/pull-ups in between each set of pressing movements. Well, lacking the ability to do them I haven’t worked them in, and much of my work has been towards being able to do them. I started doing this supersetting last cycle but then forgot to keep doing it. When I did it then, the goal was to do at least 1 chin after each set of assistance pressing, and if I couldn’t do a chin then make it a negative. Last time I did it I got 2×1 then had to do 3×1-negatives.

Well today… it was pretty simple straight 5×1 across. My bodyweight hasn’t changed much, so I’ve apparently gotten stronger. 🙂

I was quite thrilled. The first chin I did was so easy. And this isn’t some sort of “chin-over” where you stick your chin into the air and attempt to throw it just barely over the top of the bar. No, I want to go full, all the way up, bar coming to the chest/clavicle area. No swinging nor kipping (the debate about kipping pull-ups will rage elsewhere). I didn’t go 100% full range of motion tho, because a true dead-hang causes too much stress on my shoulder socket, so I need to keep tension and I’m probably 5-10 degrees already pulling into the motion… so it’s almost all the way, as close as I can get to all the way without removing tension. Maybe that contributed to my success today, I don’t know. But I was thrilled. The chins came easy, and only had a slight effect on the pulldowns. Next workout I’ll start going for 5×2 across and see how it goes. Slow but sure. 🙂 This has been a long time in coming, and I’m happy to finally be here.

In other news….

I actually didn’t feel all that with it today. Mentally I just did not feel strong. My warm-up press sets felt heavy. But once I started hitting the work set, while my mind may not have been there my body sure was. Cranking out 7 reps with 135 is good progress. That may have kicked me in the pants, because I sure felt strong the rest of the workout, as you can read above.

I did forget to do the last set of assistance pressing rest-pause. Oh well.

I didn’t do any GPP or rolling today. I had to get home because a Time-Warner Cable tech is supposedly coming “between 8 AM and noon” to finally fix my broken Internet connection. I knew if I didn’t hustle to be home by 8, he’d show up at 8; if I actually am ready for him at 8, he’ll show up at 1. Of course. 😉

But today was good. I’m still smiling about the chin-ups.

It rubbed me the wrong way.

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Last night I read this article in the LA Times (h/t The Gun Wire) regarding Virginia working to repeal their “1 gun a month” restriction.

Some statements in it just rubbed me the wrong way.

Supporters of the bill, who included most of the Legislature’s Republicans as well as some Democrats from rural areas,

Some implied stereotyping?

“Virginia has had more than its share of horrific tragedies perpetrated by criminals with easy access to firearms,” said Lori Haas, whose daughter Emily was one of 25 people injured in the 2007 Virginia Tech shootings, which killed 35. “It’s a sad day when our legislators purposely make it easier for gun traffickers to do their dirty business.”

They aren’t making it easier for criminals to be criminals. They’re making it easier for law-abiding citizens. For you see, criminals, by definition, don’t obey the law. They’re already trafficking high numbers of guns and the change of this law doesn’t affect them. It does change things for the law-abiding, and allows them to buy more freely.

We don’t restrict people to buying one car a month, one knife a month, one bottle of alcohol a month. Heck, we have giant warehouse stores dedicated to people who wish to buy in huge quantities. What with drunk driving, what with obesity, why don’t we start limiting what else people can buy? Because these things can kill people too. The logic doesn’t stand.

I am convinced that this law had a significant impact in reducing gunrunning,” [Richard Cullen, a Republican and a former U.S. attorney in Virginia] said

Data please.

But the choice quote was the last one… and of course, positioning it as the last one was intentional on the part of the LA Times writer, so it’s the tone and impression the reader leaves the article with:

Sen. Richard L. Saslaw, a Democrat who opposes the bill, said allowing people to buy more than one handgun a month wouldn’t make Virginia any safer. Anyone who had bought a handgun a month under the current law would have amassed 240 guns during the law’s 20-year span.

If you need more than 240 handguns, then I would submit something’s wrong with you,” he said. “Something’s gone wrong in your life.”

It may not make Virginia any safer, but where will it make Virginia any more dangerous?

Just because someone CAN buy more than 1 a month doesn’t mean someone HAS to or will buy more than one a month, every month. Perhaps I win an elk hunting trip in Colorado but I don’t have a rifle suitable. I might want to buy 2 at one time so I can have a rifle and a backup. I’ve had a rifle fail on me in the field (well, the scope did) and I was happy to have a backup rifle. Why should it take me 2 months to make these purchases?

And if I want more than 240 handguns, why does that equate to a problem in my life? People have hobbies and collect large amounts of things all the time. Someone with less than 240 stamps or baseball cards or comic books doesn’t have much of a collection. But hey, thank you for your assumptions… I guess we can’t all be like you. Even if something has gone wrong in your life, is that any reason to deny a person?

Guns thwart crime, save lives — and we have data

/ hsoi

In fact… the data we have, refutes many commonly held misconceptions (that never had any data behind them anyways) about guns and their use.

In a new Cato Institute paper, Clayton Cramer and David Burnett review the controversy over how often Americans use guns in self-defense each year.

[…]

The most common situation, accounting for 1,227 of 4,669 incidents, was a “home invasion,” where intruders try to force their way into a home they know to be occupied. Burglaries were also common, accounting for 488 incidents. In 285 cases, the defender had a concealed carry permit, and most of those incidents occurred in public. There were very few cases where a permit holder became involved in an avoidable dispute that turned deadly because he had a gun—a scenario that figures prominently in arguments against nondiscretionary permit laws. Also contrary to the warnings of gun controllers, victims in this sample were rarely disarmed by their attackers; the reverse happened more than 20 times as often. Criminals took away defenders’ guns in 11 out of 4,669 incidents, and the defender ended up dead despite being armed in 36 incidents, less than 1 percent of the time. Cramer and Burnett describe many specific cases (mapped by Cato here) in which a gun prevented robbery, rape, serious injury, or death, illustrating their general point that policy makers need to take these benefits into account instead of focusing exclusively on criminal uses.

Full article at Reason

The Cato paper. Yes, you can download it for free.

And a nifty interactive map at Cato mapping out defensive gun use.

Remember, I wasn’t always a gun owner. I didn’t see the point of “assault rifles” because it wasn’t like Bambi wore a bullet-proof vest. I thought the police were there to “protect and serve” and they’d always be there to prevent my wife from being sexually assaulted….

But when you finally decide to look at facts, evidence, data, listen to reasoned arguments, well… it’s hard to refute Truth. You can keep your fingers in your ears and your hands over your eyes if you wish, but that only serves to keep you from realizing Truth. Your choice, I suppose.

Technology failures

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

Too much computer fail right now.

Time-Warner Cable’s RoadRunner Internet has been horrible for me lately. It’ll be up for a while, then go down for a few minutes, then back up, then back down, and just repeat this for too long. That’s been going on for some weeks but I tried to do my best to ignore it. But then yesterday she gave up the ghost. I’m guessing the modem has failed, or something bigger. It’s not an outage, it’s local. Tech won’t come until Wednesday.

This doesn’t bode well for someone who works from home and relies upon Internet connectivity.

It’s good that my day job has me writing connection manager software, so I have lots of 3G/4G USB dongles around. I set up an old iMac with one of the 4G dongles and turned on Internet Sharing to share the 4G connection through the Ethernet port. Then hooked my router up to that iMac. And viola… the household is back online, every device. It’s a lot slower, but at least we can limp along for now.

And then on my server… one of the hard drives is making a funny noise. It’s failing. The bad part is, as I powered everything off to remove the failing drive, when I tried to power it back up it wouldn’t power up. So is the drive failing or the power supply? And a couple other drives in similar enclosures also made the same noise upon turning them back on, but they aren’t repeatedly making the noise. This doesn’t bode well. I’ll be calling Other World Computing this morning to talk about it and figure out a solution.

What with the flooding in Asia and how it’s affected the hard drive market, I was so hoping to avoid buying a hard drive for the next couple years until things recovered. Alas…

Oh what fun.

 

2012-02-06 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 6, squat 1

/ hsoi

Had to cut today short. Too many things on the agenda.

“Week 1”

  • 5 reps – Squat (working max: 260#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x105
    • 1x5x135
    • 1x3x160
    • 1x5x170 (work)
    • 1x5x195
    • 1x7x225
  • Asst. #1 – Leg Press
    • 3 x 10 x 315
  • Asst. #2 – Leg Curls
    • 3 x 10 x 85

I’m tight on time today. Thought about doing a “jack shit” but couldn’t bring myself to it. So I just did 3 (instead of 5) sets of assistance work and supersetted them. Good enough.

In out done.

Squats felt good tho. I found myself doing something with unracking the bar that seemed to help. Get fully prepped under the bar, normal breathing, no tensing. As soon as I know everything is in place, deep breath and hold, fully tense up, unrack the bar. As soon as I unrack, maintain tension but exhale and inhale… allow myself to breathe. Back up into position, settle, then squat. The key? To keep tension AND to keep breathing. I just can’t hold my breath so much else it doesn’t bode well for me. That really helped. Every set felt really good, tho I started thinking about things too much on the last set and only got 7 reps… would have been happier with 8, but good enough.

I’m 3 years old

/ hsoi / 8 Comments

So I’ve been blogging for 3 years now.

All this drivel and I still haven’t reproduced all the works of Shakespeare. 😉

I am pleased that even after 3 years I’ve been able to keep to my rule of writing (or at least ensuring a post) every day.

Stats? Whatever. I’m happy they’re growing. I’m not sure why you all like to read what I have to write, but thank you for caring. 🙂

What helps manage risk?

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

What helps manage risk?

Donʼt go to stupid places; donʼt associate with stupid people; donʼt do stupid things. We will add to that, be in bed by 10 oʼclock.

[…]

Have a “normal” appearance. Just look normal. If you have a flashy personality, you are going to attract attention.

[…]

Nothing good happens out after midnight. If you made no other lifestyle change other than being in bed by 10 oʼclock, you would avoid 99% of the bad things that would ever happen to you. Nothing good is going to happen to people who stay out late at night, particularly when you are carrying a gun.

– John Farnam, from the Feb. 2012 newsletter of the Armed Citizens Legal Defense Network

Best Fight Scenes

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Want to see some of Asian cinema’s best fight scenes?

Some awesome stuff. Anything with Jackie Chan is always awesome because not just his performance, but he always stages some awesome elements into the scenes to make them more than just punching and kicking.

I’ll also say that #15, the knife fight from “The Man From Nowhere” (2010) is brutal. I mean, not for the weak stomached. But it does make you realize that if you have to fight, you must be swift and brutal and do whatever it takes to win (or at least, not die).