Author: hsoi

DR Performance Practice Deck for iOS Now Available

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DR PERFORMANCE PRACTICE DECK FOR iOS NOW AVAILABLE

The New Digital Way to Practice for Practical Shooting Sports

DR Performance Practice Deck for iOS iconAUSTIN, TX (October 4, 2011) — To help answer the question “What should I practice?”, DR Performance Shooting andHsoi Enterprises LLC announce the availability of the DR Performance Practice Deck for iOS™. Consisting of 52 basic shooting drills superimposed on a normal deck of playing cards, the deck allows you to have a thorough, fun, and effective practice session, now conveniently available on your Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad.

For complete information, visit the Hsoi Enterprises blog.

This is what I’ve been working on for the past some months and it’s finally here.

Please share and spread the word! Thank you!

This John Daub would have handled things differently

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My name is John Daub.

If you search for “John Daub” online, you’re most likely to encounter me or John Daub, President of Weblish, a Japanese company that started as an online school but has become a media company. John and I don’t know each other, but we’ve crossed paths before for obvious reasons. 🙂  One thing that I also find amusing is we’re both of similar ethnic background, being part Asian then this rather “white German” name.

I follow John on Twitter and the other day he tweeted about this video: Jason gets mugged!

Go watch.

Now note, this is a lesson on causative verbs, like “make”, “have”, “let”, and “get”. So don’t put much stock into what I’m about to say. I found the video fun and silly, and certainly a good storyline for such a language lesson.

But as I watched, I couldn’t help but think about the mugging scenario. How it unfolded, how Jason handled the mugging, especially when it came to the defense of Olga. How would THIS John Daub — living in Texas, not Japan — would have handled things much differently.

Can you guess what I would have done differently in this video?

 

 

 

I wouldn’t have worn panty hose on my head.  🙂

Violence in Church

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The Highlander and Kurgan may have respected holy ground, but criminals do not.

Recently, Rangemaster instructors Tom Givens, Cecil Booker, and Steve Palmer attended a full day seminar for church security teams from around the country. There were some very interesting blocks of instruction from various law enforcement and church organizations.

One of the points that really stood out was how little public awareness exists of this problem. As one of the pastors of a large church stated, many churches refuse to report crimes against them, or try hard to keep them quiet for fear of scaring the members from attending services and other church functions. Despite this, reported serious incidents at churches have increased by 200% in just the past five years.

According to a spokesman from the Sheriff’s Department’s Homeland Security office, since January 1999 there have been 473 major incidents in US churches, resulting in over 200 fatalities. These range from mentally ill persons assaulting or killing pastors to religion-based hate crimes. Robbery accounted for 27% of the serious incidents, since churches are known to have cash on hand, especially during services. In those 473 incidents, 596 people were killed or seriously injured.

This serves as a reminder that violence can occur wherever there are people. Thinking one is “safe” just because one is in a house of worship is naïve. You are safe where you make yourself safe, and nowhere else. Discretely conceal your personal emergency safety equipment and have it on you at all times. That is really the only way to actually have it when the need suddenly arises.

From the October 2011 Rangemaster Newsletter.

2011-10-03 workout

/ hsoi

No PR today, but improvement (and a realization).

“Week 3” 5/3/1

  • 5/3/1 – Squat (working max: 230#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x95
    • 1x5x115
    • 1x3x140
    • 1x5x175 (work)
    • 1x3x200
    • 1x4x220
  • Asst. #1 – Squat
    • 5 x 10 x 95
  • Asst. #2 – Leg curls
    • 5 x 10 x 50
  • Metcon – jump rope
    • 1 Tabata set – all single hop

No PR today, but that’s expected given the reset I did back on PPNP Novice. And I didn’t do as well as I wanted to, only getting 4 reps. I will say, my form is improving and that was really the big issue that’s been hitting me all along in the squats is my form. I even re-watched Rippetoe’s “Starting Strength” DVD last night, the squat section, to put some cues back in my head. Watching it was useful because I picked up on things that I missed the last time around. It’s also interesting to work to reconcile what he talks about vs. what guys like Wendler, Tate, and Wenning talk about with squats.

Here’s the thing: I have a mental block. I make no bones about not liking to squat, and I think it’s due in part to years of baggage that squats are going to hurt or kill me. The reality is bench pressing is far more dangerous and a failed bench is going to hurt you a lot more than a failed squat. Nevertheless, the mental block remains. I’m getting over it, but like anythin with years of mental baggage it’s going to take a while. I think I could have gotten 5 reps, maybe 6, if I was attacking the weights and didn’t have that shred of mental doubt. I felt my form start to falter, and I should have just went for working the movement, push the weight up even if the form slipped a bit. But I didn’t want to risk hurting myself or dumping the bar (I should care about hurting myself, I shouldn’t care about dumping the bar), and so my brain bailed and that was that… 4 reps, uncertainty killed me. *sigh*

I’m getting better, but I know I’ve got a long ways to go to get over it. One thing I’ll watch to see is how the next cycle goes. I’ll bump to 230 and 230 was where I stopped last time because while I was moving it, my form was horrible so I backed off, then switched to 5/3/1, so it’s been slow to get back. But the slow progress was good because my form, while still improving, has improved. I don’t feel my quads doing all the work, I do feel my hams and glutes and other parts of my posterior chain getting worked hard, so that’s good. I’m slowly finding my groove, where to position my body, how everything should come together. So, slow but sure I’m getting there.

The assistance squatting actually helps a great deal here. I’m glad I went to 95# because it’s working me hard, but not so hard that I slip up on form…. it hurt today at the end of it all, and I appreciated that. Getting more reps, more time under the bar on squats, it’s helping me really track my form.

On curls, 50# finally felt like it was pushing me. I’ll go to 55# next workout, even tho it’s a deload week.

And yes, deload starts. I don’t like deloading, but I know it’s critical so I do it. Just like squatting. 🙂

Drove through Bastrop today

/ hsoi

I drove through Bastrop today, on my way to teach @ KR Training.

It’s the first time I’ve been to the area since the massive wildfires.

It was… shocking. The devastation was vast. What was once thick, dense, lush, evergreen… it’s now just lots of charred black sticks and scorched earth.

It’d be odd too. You’d see one building burned to the ground, all the trees and ground burned, then another building seemingly totally unharmed. Just the way things happened, the way the wind blew, whatever. Can’t explain it, but that’s how it was.

At the south end of TX-21 just past the entrance to Bastrop State Park, I saw stacks of fenceposts on the side of the road? Huh? But then I kept driving… and saw all the guardrails lying on the ground… their posts were wood, burned by the fire. Work crews everywhere, clearing burned trees, trying to repair the guardrails.

I got to speak to someone who lost their home. She told me how her whole neighborhood is gone. Think about that. Consider your neighborhood… now think about all of it being gone. Just… like… that.

 

It’s going to take years, decades perhaps, for Bastrop to “return to normal”. Will it even? Who knows what it will become. But the funny thing about fire… if you set aside the devastation, you have to remember that fire does bring rebirth… it’s the Earth’s way of clearing and starting anew. You could see people coming together, people helping, people doing whatever it takes to start over. The land will be reborn, the people will too.

 

New belt

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

I’m not Batman, but I do carry a lot of things on my belt. Every day.

When you carry a lot of gear, a lot of heavy gear, you need a belt that can hold up to it. Little flimsy dress/cosmetic apparel belts from most department stores will not cut it. I’ve been wearing belts from The Belt Man for some years now. 1.5″ wide, the horsehide one is my favorite because it doesn’t cost much more than bullhide but has held up fairly strong… even after years of daily wear and some softening up, it’s still stiff enough and holding form enough to do what I need to do.

Except….

Deal with my weight fluctuation. 🙂

With all my weight lifting and the associated food shoveling, of course I’m gaining weight. This requires adjustment of the belt. 🙂 Depending where my weight is and how I’m fiddling with my diet, the belt might hook into hole #2 or maybe hole #3, but most of the times I wish it could hook into hole #2.5. It’s either just a little too loose or a little too tight. I try my belt with the 1″-spaced holes, then the one with the 0.75″-spaced holes and just can’t get things right to both feel comfortable and properly support the gear I wear.

So I gave in.

A couple of days ago I was at GT Distributors and bought a Wilderness Tactical Original Instructor Belt. Appears to be the 1.5″ 5-stitch model, black of course. Why do I not want something like this? Because I don’t like wearing nylon. I like leather belts, leather shoes, cotton, and other natural materials. Sure I can’t be 100% that way, but I prefer it when I can. I mean, wearing a nylon belt with a Brooks Brothers suit just doesn’t seem right, does it? But the advantage here is it buckles anywhere you want it, almost infinitely adjustable, and right now that’s something I need.

I wore it for the first time yesterday and found it quite nice that I could get the tightness just where I wanted. Tight enough to hold things, loose enough to be comfortable. The interesting thing? I’ve been wondering if I needed to adjust my holster or perhaps consider a replacement. But now with the new belt? Things felt a lot better, nothing shifting around or feeling uncomfortable. I’m not sure if it’s the belt tension or perhaps… the belt. Being leather and worn constantly, my main Beltman belt has of course stretched and conformed somewhat to my body, so it’s not exactly a flat, even belt any more. Could it have changed shape enough that it doesn’t work for me any more? Or maybe conforms to the shape of my pre-weightlifting body? Hard to say… would be interesting to have a brand new belt for comparison. Who knows… the lack of stretching and changing may wind me up with using a nylon “tactical” belt for EDC saving the leather for occasions where I need it (e.g. dressing up).

I’m going to spend today out at KR Training and I’ll be wearing the new belt. We’ll see how it goes.

Why aren’t you outraged?

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Set your anti-gun bias aside. You should be outraged about the “Fast And Furious” scandal. This is not how our government and so-called “leaders” should behave. Because if they’re doing this evil, what else are they doing?

Given all the politics and the cover up that even the former ATF director says has occurred, could operation Fast and Furious have been about anything other than pushing for new gun-control laws? And given all of this obfuscation from the Obama administration, isn’t this scandal comparable to the cover up that surrounded Watergate? After all, both administrations forgot that America is a country that reveres its freedom of the press and that in America officers speak out when misguided policies get cops killed. Here mothers testify before Congress when they find out a secret government program, and a stupid one at that, got their son killed.

Not that morality ends at the American border. To stress this point, Rep. Issa held a conference call with journalists on September 21 in which he said Marisela Morales, Mexico’s attorney general, is reporting that at least 200 Mexican deaths can now be traced to weapons from the Fast and Furious program.

And so the investigation and the bloody aftermath continue….

Forbes has this excellent write up.

The NY Post has an article as well.

Let that sink in: After months of pretending that “Fast and Furious” was a botched surveillance operation of illegal gun-running spearheaded by the ATF and the US attorney’s office in Phoenix, it turns out that the government itself was selling guns to the bad guys.

[…]

People were killed with Fast and Furious weapons, including at least two American agents and hundreds of Mexicans. And the taxpayers picked up the bill.

So where’s the outrage?

There’s none from the feds. Attorney General Eric Holder has consistently stonewalled Rep. Darrell Issa, Sen. Chuck Grassley and other congressional investigators.

In a constantly evolving set of lies, Holder has denied knowing anything about Fast and Furious while at the same time withholding documents from the House and Senate committees looking into the mess while muzzling some witnesses and transferring others.

Makes you wonder what the agenda was….

There are two possible explanations. The first is that the anti-gun Obama administration deliberately wanted American guns planted in Mexico in order to demonize American firearms dealers and gun owners. The operation was manufacturing “evidence” for the president’s false claim that we’re to blame for the appalling levels of Mexican drug-war violence.

If this is true, then Holder & Co. have got to go — and the trail needs to be followed no matter where it leads. For the federal government to seek to frame its own citizens is unconscionable.

A second notion is that the CIA was behind the whole thing, which accounts for all the desperate wagon-circling. Under this theory, the Agency feared the los Zetas drug cartel was becoming too powerful and might even mount a coup against the Mexican government. So some 2,000 weapons costing more than $1.25 million were deliberately channeled to the rival Sinaloa cartel, which operates along the American border, to keep the Zetas in check.

Of course, there’s a third explanation — that both scenarios are true, and that those in charge of Fast and Furious saw an opportunity to shoot two birds with one Romanian-made AK Draco pistol.

2011-09-30 workout

/ hsoi

This is why I love “week 3″… setting personal records is satisfying. 🙂

“Week 3”

  • 5/3/1 – Bench Press (working max: 195#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x80
    • 1x5x100
    • 1x3x120
    • 1x5x150 (work)
    • 1x3x170
    • 1x6x190 (PR)
  • Asst. #1 – Bench Press
    • 5 x 10 x 105
  • Asst. #2 – Dumbbell Rows
    • 5 x 10 x 40
  • Metcon – jump rope
    • 1 Tabata set – all single hop

It’s very satisfying to set goals then meet them. To see continued progress. To do more than you ever have before, more than you thought you ever could. Bench pressing 1x6x190 isn’t monumental (given the all time world record for a raw bench press for someone around my weight is 600 lbs. or so), but it’s good for me. It’s also kinda neat to think that in 2 cycles I’ll be breaking the 200# mark as a work weight (I could break 200 now if I wanted to, but not for work weight).

I continue to bump my bench assistance weight up by 5#, doing 105 this workout, and still that doesn’t feel like enough weight to really work me, so it’s up to 110# next week. I recently watched Dave Tate’s “So You Think You Can Bench” series again and really worked on some finer points. I’m thinking during next week’s deload week that I might fiddle with my grip width, as Dave talks about elbows going too far below the bench pad, and that a potentially wider grip could be nicer on my shoulder. I’ll experiment and see.

On the rows, last session I noticed I wasn’t caring about the negative that much, almost “dropping” the weight back down. Today I made sure to give as much thought to going down as I did going up. A cool side-effect is I found myself more focused on pulling the shoulder back, not just moving the weight…. ensuring the back muscles were doing the work, not the arm. Made a nice difference.

And what’s there to say about rope jumping… 🙂

I toy with jumping 10# for this next cycle, but I think that’s merely my ego wanting to get to 200# faster. Today’s work set of 6 reps was a hard push… on rep 4 I wasn’t sure I’d make rep 5, and on rep 5 I really wasn’t sure about making rep 6, and on rep 6 I felt like the bar in fact will be on my throat if I try for 7 so I did stop (form was failing, left arm peeding out). I perhaps could make a 10# jump, but I do think that’s driven more by ego and well… like Henry Rollins said, 200# is 200# and I don’t need her to teach me a harsh lesson. Better lesson learned to keep things in check and go for the long run.

OK old-school Mac programmers….

/ hsoi

Do you remember?

InitGraf(&qd.thePort);
InitFonts();
InitWindows();
InitMenus();
TEInit();
InitDialogs(NULL);
InitCursor();

Of course, I probably should really do it this way:

InitGraf(@qd.thePort);
InitFonts;
InitWindows;
InitMenus;
TEInit;
InitDialogs(nil);
MaxApplZone;

Maybe looping and calling MoreMasters as well….

I work with people who have never programmed a Mac prior to Mac OS X. They only know of Objective-C and Cocoa. They never had volumes of Inside Macintosh or “develop” magazine.

I’m not sure if this is a good thing or a bad thing. The way we had to do things back then was a lot of work. Today’s still a lot of work, but it’s all focused on your personal logic and desires, not infrastructure. Cocoa is one of the best libraries out there, so deep, so broad, so robust. I’m quite pleased I don’t have to initialize the Toolbox any more. 🙂