Author: hsoi

The Year in Ammo (2013)

/ hsoi / 1 Comment

Anthony over at LuckyGunner sent me an email to mention their Ammo in 2013: A Look Behind the Scenes at Lucky Gunner.

I don’t always post stuff like this (i.e. solicted stuff), but I thought this was interesting and useful. Besides, Anthony didn’t just send out a blanket spam email. I don’t know if Anthony actually reads my stuff normally (or even abnormally), but it was evident in his email that he at least checked my blog first, and in his email to me commented in a relevant manner. Personal touches always make a positive difference. 🙂

From looking at the stats…

I’m not surprised at the popular calibers, both the contents of the list and the ordering of the list. Seems about what you’d expect.

Interesting that California is one of their top traffic spots. Really, I’m not too surprised because outside of a few cities, California is actually populated with a lot of “good ol’ folk”. It’s just that unfortunately those few cities dominate the political and cultural impact of California.

As a geek, I did enjoy seeing the growth of not just iPhone use but the visits from mobile platforms. Just shows how our habits are shifting. Desktop isn’t going away any time soon, but mobile is getting big.

Neat info, Anthony. Thank you for sharing with us!

 

Snagmag

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

I learned about the Snagmag at the SDS Conference.

One of the attendees showed it to me, as it was his way of carrying a spare magazine.

Now, I haven’t tried it and cannot vouch for how well it works, but the design did intrigue me.

First, it’s a way of carrying a spare magazine, which is important. Maybe you won’t have to reload or deal with malfunctions, but maybe you will. One of those “better to have it and not need it, than need it and not have it” sorts of things.

Second, it’s probably a more comfortable way of carrying it. Some people can do the IWB spare mag thing, but lots of people report on it being uncomfortable. Plus, if the gun is IWB and the mag is IWB, that means you need a lot more waist size in your pants, which isn’t always practical. Plus, when you get into clothing with such a larger differential, other parts of the pants are going to be made larger as well, which can just make fit and comfort difficult.

In addition to comfort, it just gets things off your belt. Even if you carry the mag OWB, it’s still another thing on the belt, bulk, etc.. If those issues keep you from carrying a spare mag at all, this may provide you with a solution.

Third, it hides well. It’s not uncommon to see clips on pant pockets for pocket knives, so it just blends in. Granted, one downside is if you do the Insights Training Center practice of having 2 folders (one in each pocket), well… you lose one here. But not everyone follows that approach.

But the big thing about it is it may solve a lot of the problems with pocket carry of mags. I see many solutions for pocket carry of a spare mag, and while they tend to work, they tend to be predicated upon fit and friction. That is, they use fit of the pocket vs. fit/size/structure of the pouch in such a way that the pouch doesn’t fit well in the pocket, so the pouch intentionally hangs up when you “draw” leaving the pouch in the pocket but the magazine comes out. Friction is used as well, to aid in the pouch hanging up. Alas, this depends a great deal upon the pocket itself. Tighter pockets and it may not fit at all. Looser pockets, larger pockets, and there may be no hanging up. One solution is to have numerous pocket pouches, but that grows cumbersome and expensive. This Snagmag could help solve things because it doesn’t rely upon pocket construction to work in conjunction with the design. Granted there’s still some construction requirements (e.g. pocket needs to be deep enough, etc.), but it seems far less sensitive to such issues.

Again, I haven’t tried this product at all so I cannot vouch for it, recommend it, or anything. But I did think the approach was novel (and based upon known approaches, like the Emerson Wave), and could be useful for folks.

Improvised Weapons, and kids

/ hsoi

Of all the presentations at the 2nd annual SDS Conference, the 3 kiddos were unanimous in what their favorite presentation was.

Leslie Buck‘s presentation on improvised weapons. (yeah, it should have been Dad’s presentation, but I’ll let them slide). 😉

Not only was it just a fun presentation, with lots of good video. It was something that was really valuable to the kids.

Because I got to thinking.

The purpose of the presentation was primarily for us adults that probably carry a gun normally, but for some reason cannot. So what else could we have at our disposal.

But think about kids.

Kids are vulnerable. They are generally physically smaller, weaker. When it comes to force disparity, usually kids are going to get the short end of the stick. Weapons are tools designed to help us overcome force disparity.

However, look at how our legal structure denies children the ability to use and possess these tools.

Look at how schools and other groups and places kids go will deny them.

If the mantras are “won’t someone think of the children” and “if it saves just one life, then it’s worth it”, then why are we doing things to make our children even more vulnerable?

And while it wasn’t necessarily a new topic to the kids (given their father), sometimes things make more impact when it comes from another teacher (especially one that isn’t Dad), or due to the presentation. From talking with kiddos afterwards, it sounds like Leslie’s presentation made a lot of positive impact on them and really opened up their minds to the possibilities. Even Wife took something from it.

So, when it comes to your kids, think about how they could use improvised weapons to help them defend themselves. Temper it of course (it’s not license to bash the bully upside the head with hammer), but help them realize there are things they can do when the situation arises and they may need it.

2014-01-08 training log

/ hsoi

Once you reset (lower) your expectations, it’s not too bad…. I guess. 🙂

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 27, week 2

  • Work Set – Squat
    • 45 x 5
    • 45 x 5
    • 115 x 5
    • 140 x 5
    • 170 x 3
    • 200 x 3
    • 225 x 3
    • 255 x 5
  • Moar Skwats
    • 140 x 10 x 5
  • Crunches
    • BW x 12 x 3
  • Foam Rolling

I have to remind myself — it’s about body weight not bar weight.

Going into today accepting the massive loss of strength, made things go a lot better. I expected to just get prescribed reps, but managed to get a couple more. Really lowered the 5×10 squat weight, and geez if 140# isn’t kicking my carb-depleated butt. But overall, things went as well as I could expect them to.

If nothing else, it affords me the opportunity to do more technique work. Really working on breaking at the hips first, sticking the butt out and going with that first, then on the way back up when I get to maybe like 85% upright ensuring to push the hips through. Don’t make it a purely quad thing, ensure the hips and glutes get pulled into the mix. Lighter weights but more reps? great… means more technique time.

Gotta find the positive. 🙂

Hello Amazon

/ hsoi / 11 Comments

Saying goodbye to Sprouts is tough. You know the saying, “don’t you what you’ve got, ’til it’s gone”? Well, now that Sprouts is gone, I realize it was a larger part of our groceries than I realized (I knew it was a primary, but it’s even more than I knew). I didn’t realize how many Sprouts-branded things Wife bought. Everywhere I look in the fridge, in the pantry, I see Sprouts, Sprouts, Sprouts.

But in time, our stock will dwindle. And in the meantime, I can hope Sprouts will reconsider their decision, basing upon facts and not emotion.

The hardest part was thinking what to do as an alternative. There’s a lot of things we bought that we can’t find at other stores in town, or to do so would become difficult, with Wife running all over town to collect all the things we use. That’s a big sink of gas money, and most of all… time.

You know the saying about closing a door and opening a window? Well… I think in this case, what was opened was a laptop computer lid. 🙂

I’ve shopped at Amazon for many years. I mean, what CAN’T you find there? Very few things. And Amazon works at expanding its offerings all the time.

I’ve never bought Amazon Prime tho, because I never felt like I ordered enough in a year to have Prime offset the shipping costs. I mean, most things I order from Amazon I can wait a week or two for, so I’ll always pick the cheapest slowest option, which often yielded free shipping anyways. So it was just difficult to justify Prime. And things like Kindle and movies? Meh.

But I thought about it. Yeah, what can’t you get? Often the prices are competitive or better. So Wife and I sat and searched Amazon for many of the foodstuffs and other products we bought at Sprouts. And gee if we couldn’t find most everything there. In fact, there’s probably a lot of non-Sprouts things too that we could get. I tried to convince Wife to consider Amazon for things like toilet paper, paper towels, etc. (things you know you’ll use and use a lot of, eventually in time), but the idea never really took off with either of us because again, shipping.

But now? Well, we’ve been pushed to try it. 🙂

I signed up for Amazon Prime. When it comes to things like groceries yeah, I’d rather have it in 2 days than 2 weeks. If I can get 2-day shipping “for free”, and we can buy a huge bulk of stuff via Amazon (regardless of container size and weight), well gee… I suspect we could do alright with this. That local grocery shopping could be reduced to things like fruit, eggs, milk, etc.. I mean, we get our veggies delivered once a week….

The biggest win that Wife sees? Time. It’s a big time sink to do all that grocery shopping. But now? She can shop and build her cart in her own time. While she’s homeschooling the kids, they’re doing some work and she can search and click to get shopping done. Kids need attention? she can stop, tend to them, then resume shopping as time permits. She can shop at 5 AM before the kids get up, or whatever. There’s more flexibility, there’s better use of time.

I also think it could be a win because impulse buying might be curbed.

So… this will be an experiment. We haven’t bought anything yet and I don’t know how it will go. But, this should be fun to explore.

2014-01-06 training log

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

Frustrated. Feeling dejected.

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 27, week 1

  • Work Set – Press
    • 45 x 5
    • 45 x 5
    • 60 x 5
    • 75 x 5
    • 90 x 3
    • 100 x 5
    • 115 x 5
    • 130 x 7
  • Close-grip pulldowns (neutral grip, superset with warm-up pressing sets)
    • 80 x 15 x 5
  • Press
    • 90 x 10
    • 90 x 8
    • 85 x 8
    • 75 x 8
    • 65 x 10
  • Wide, pronated grip pulldowns (superset with additional pressing sets)
    • 110 x 10 x 5
  • Cable pressdowns (pin the elbows to the side)
    • 50 x 10 x 4
  • Hammer curls (superset with pressdowns)
    • 30 x 10
    • 30 x 10
    • 30 x 8
    • 25 x 10

I’m feeling dejected.

Everything is going down, except that which should be going down. My weights are going down, my reps are going down, my strength is going down… but my bodyweight isn’t.

*sigh*

Yes I know. It’s only been 3 weeks on CarbNite, but I expected to see better results than this. I’m down around 5#, but I lost that at about the first week and have been hovering there ever since. Something is not right. I don’t know what it is yet, but it’s driving me crazy. I have some thoughts, and I just need to do some researching and reading. If nothing else, since I bought the CBL and CNS books, I have access to their forums and will post my questions there to seek input.

I mean, today was fine for what it was, but it’s evident I have no gas. I accept that, but I figured the trade-off would be seeing the fat loss. *sigh*

Just feeling dejected, but you keep going… who knows… maybe this is some greater cosmic test of will for me that I first must overcome.

Sunday Metal – Top Metal Albums 1990-2000 – #30 Iron Maiden

/ hsoi

When Metal-Rules.com posted their Top 30 Metal Albums 1990-2000, I thought it’d make a fun list for Sunday Metal.

#30 – Iron Maiden – Brave New World

“The Wicker Man”

 

2nd Annual SDS Conference – AAR

/ hsoi / 7 Comments

Wow! What an awesome day!

I just returned from a day at Cabela’s. Yes, that’s cool in and of itself, but I was there not to shop but to present and learn. Paul Martin, the Suburban Dad Survivalist, was holding his 2nd Annual Preparedness Conference. If you weren’t there, you miss out on a lot of learning.

I know. You’re seeing the word “survivalist” and “preparedness” and conjuring up images of paranoid loonies stockpiling food and ammo in their compounds because the great Obama devil is destroying ‘murica, right?

Pul-leez.

There is nothing bad about being prepared. Ask any Boy Scout. Ask anyone that realizes the speech they have to present goes over better if they research and rehearse ahead of time. Same for the musician that practices and nails their performance. You have insurance, right? What are you afraid of? You wear a seat belt in the car, right? Are you paranoid? You have smoke detectors and fire extinguishers in your house, so that means you’re afraid of fire, right? Well, yeah… to some extent sure. But instead of just being afraid of what could happen, you acknowledge it, accept it, and prepare for it. Thus if it does happen, you can do something better than panic and freeze.

Being prepared is a good thing.

Today’s topics reflected that. We had presenters talking about risk assessment, how to start a backyard garden, how to can the food you grow in that garden, minimum standards for defensive handgun, improvised weapons, and bug-out bags and preparations. Quite a range of topics for a single day, and it could only scratch the surface. And while I was a presenter, I was more happy to have attended the day — I learned a LOT. It was simply fantastic.

Either you were there, or you missed out.

Stay tuned. I know Paul’s looking at doing a workshop this summer, and I’m willing to be there will be a 3rd conference. Don’t miss this stuff. It’s just too valuable. In fact, it’s so valuable, I brought the whole family. Everyone enjoyed the day.

Thank you, Paul. Great work!

The bullying experiment

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

There’s been a video going around about “the bullying experiment”.

The premise of the video is a couple guys act out a bullying scenario in front of random people, filming on hidden camera. They want to catch how people react, which ranges from ignoring it to walking away to getting involved.

I agree this is an interesting social experiment.

I agree it seems sad and terrible that people will not get involved to help someone that appears to be in danger.

I agree that bullying is a problem, but it’s not just a problem of this generation because bullying has been around forever — it’s nothing new. Still, that doesn’t make it right.

But I have to take issue with the video and the suggested advice.

What they are wanting is for people to intervene. I’m not sure that’s wise. All you are seeing is a slice of the greater picture, and is that slice enough to know what’s really going on? As I’ve discussed before, you cannot always know what the whole story is based upon the small slice you see.

It appears they are performing this experiment on a college campus. It’s a fairly homogeneous group of people, in a fairly contrived and “safe” environment. What if they tried this in other areas of town? like on the rich side of town? poor side of town? downtown? in the city’s violence hotspots? That might bring about some interesting different responses… one of which could end badly for the actors.

And that’s part of why people don’t want to get involved. They have their own lives to preserve. It goes back to things like “beer & tv time” and asking “is this worth dying for?” because your getting involved may well bring you unwanted harm.

It could also be that people don’t know what to do, how to react. They’ve never experienced this before so they freeze because that’s all they can do as they try to process what’s unfolding before them. Or perhaps they were raised to just always avoid trouble, so they flee. Shall we persecute them for their self-preservation?

So, I think it’s a bit naive for the video producers to suggest the solution to bullying is for people to get involved. Yes I understand their motive, and I do think that being silent about bullying is a way to allow it to perpetuate. Just realize that “fighting” bullying doesn’t necessarily have to involve physical intervention, and not everyone is willing to physically intervene.

But that’s also where I have a greater issue with this campaign.

It seems the suggestion is the solution is for you to get involved.

That bullying perpetuates because of your fault. That this is someone else’s fault, and it’s someone else’s responsibility to stop it.

What happened to teaching people to stand up for themselves? It used to be the way you handled a bully wasn’t to have someone else fight your battles, but for you to stand on your own two feet and stand up to the bully. And yes, that might mean you have to take them down a peg. Modern anti-bullying solutions seem to revolve around others making changes, with little focus on you improving yourself and your own condition.

If as the video producers say “change starts with the people”, the first person you can change is yourself. Start there.

 

2014-01-03 training log

/ hsoi / 3 Comments

Yeah… the gas tank has no gas.

Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 27, week 1

  • Work Set – Deadlift
    • 160 x 5
    • 200 x 5
    • 240 x 3
    • 255 x 5
    • 295 x 5
    • 335 x 7
    • 255 x 8
    • 255 x 8
    • 255 x 5
  • Foam Rolling

Even tho last night was my CarbNite, still, no gas. I am not totally surprised… takes some time to restore things. But no question… as I did my 335# set, I got to rep 5 and started to feel out of gas. When I hit 7 I couldn’t go any more. I felt like I had a few more in me in terms of my muscles fatiguing, but I just had no gas. That was it.

First-set-last-set’d it for 3 more sets, and that was good towards actually working my muscles more. But I’ve heard it said and it’s true… you just can’t get strong on a no-carb diet. Or if you can, give them carbs and they’ll get stronger.

Ah well. I know my technique was good. Really working on hone it. One thing was grip and ensuring to grip hard with my hands, but keep my arms “loose” so they remained straight with no attempt to “curl” the bar up or otherwise flex and put too much stress on my biceps.

I skipped the calf raises due to wanting to give my ankle more rest. It’s doing better with ice and Advil.