Me

You really need to play it out — beforehand

/ hsoi / 5 Comments

This past Saturday was one of the tougher days at KR Training. A couple of times a year, AT-1A Low Light Shooting is offered. It can only happen a couple of times a year because we need the sun to seat early (e.g. 6-7 PM). And since we offer two other classes prior to the low-light class, in this case Defensive Pistol Skills 2 started the day and the afternoon was AT-2: Force-on-Force Scenarios, which is a bit more physically involved for the instructors and well… I’m still recovering from the weekend. 🙂

While long — and many of the students came for all 3 classes — I think days such as this offer some of the most important training blocks. Not only are you getting some higher-level skills, but you’re starting to really move beyond the mechanical skills of self-defense to the more mental and mindset skills — which I’d argue are more important.

OK, so you just shot someone in self-defense. Now what do you do? Now what will you deal with?

Or how about we back up to 5 minutes before the shooting. Could you have avoided the need to shoot in the first place? Did you make the right choices leading up to and going through the situation?

If you’ve never actually role-played out some serious situations, I guarantee you will make mistakes — perhaps critical mistakes. Why? Because we’re human. The way humans work, we don’t “just know” how to do things: we have to be taught. Pick any sort of pressure situation that can exist in life, be it playing the big game, being on a game show, the big presentation at work, whatever. Did you just drop cold into that situation? Or did you prepare? Did your coach run you and the team through plays and drills and exercises to prepare you? Did you rewrite your presentation and rehearse it in front of the mirror a few times before the meeting? We set up and prepare ourselves before “the big moment” so when the moment arrives we can do it “just like we rehearsed” and it goes off without a hitch and a problem. If we drop in cold with no prep well… maybe we’ll make it through unscathed, maybe not. Is your life worth “winging it”?

The trouble is, we don’t know what we don’t know. Most people don’t realize the advantage of this sort of training — I know I didn’t. But I can still clearly remember how I felt after my first FoF scenario… and how horrible I felt. How sobering it was. How I didn’t know what to do, how I picked the wrong thing. Because all too often, we think that because we have a gun, we can and perhaps should use it… that we’ve got the hammer, and we’re looking for that nail. But you find out that most of the time the problems can and should be solved by some other means.

I was so happy to see students going through the AT-2 class and having their awakenings. There was one student in particular that I know got a good dose. During one of the restaurant scenarios, he was the CHL holder. He found himself wanting to just slip out of the situation, but as he got to the door he found himself turning around and struggling with an internal dilemma to get involved or not. We asked him why he did what he did, and it was just that internal struggle. We know we can do something, can we live with ourselves if we could have stopped it but didn’t? but should we get involved because I could get hurt and then who is going to pay my medical bills, my lawyer bills, take care of my family if I die, etc.? It’s a HUGE issue, and if you have not thought about such things before, you’re going to have trouble when the flag flies. We must draw our lines now, beforehand. We must sort out our feelings, beforehand.

Force-on-force sounds so scary, so intimidating. And yes, some levels can be (a SouthNarc ECQC may not be the best way to ease into the notion of FoF training). But KR Training AT-2 is a great way to start. It’s not physical — no contact, no wrestling, no striking. At most you might just be moving around, but I think the only reason people broke a sweat was from wearing long sleeve clothing and some extra gear out in the near-90 degree heat. 🙂  Your heart will get pumping tho, especially if everyone plays their roles well. You will get a mental and a bit of an emotional workout. But this is the place to get that workout. This is the place to make your inevitable mistakes. This is the place to start to figure out how to actually apply those hard skills of sight alignment and trigger control — and that you may be able to avoid applying those skills entirely.

If you’ve never done FoF, please do. It’s one of the more useful educational experiences you can have.

In other news about the day….

It was great to see some women taking these higher-level courses. In fact, Mrs. Groundhog was there for AT-2 and AT-1A, which was awesome. Great to see her and Mr. Groundhog too, who by the way is looking great (if you don’t know what I’m talking about, just go catch up on their blog). For a reason that still alludes me (tho I have some guesses), women tend to not take higher-level training. It makes me happy to see this, because need for these skills aren’t gender-based — everyone needs them.

Skill take home: slow down.

Monster Magnet lyrics are a perfect thing to recite when you need to play the part of a mentally unstable person thinking the aliens are coming. Hey… I had to play off the weekend’s meteor shower. 🙂

My ankle is most unhappy with me again… too much time on it.

It’s always fun shooting at night. Muzzle blast is so fun to watch. It just doesn’t get old with me. And yes, I really need to bump finding a new EDC flashlight up my priority ladder (more on that some other day).

And I’ll end with a little love for the guys I work with: Karl, John (TXGunGeek, with his weekend writeup), and Tom. I’ve had the privilege of learning and working with these guys for a number of years now. I am thankful for their encouragement, the opportunity they give me to teach, and the ways they still teach and educate me. Thank you, guys. It’s always a pleasure, and I consider myself fortunate to be able to hang, run, and work with you.

We don’t need no stinkin’ comments – yes you do

/ hsoi / 2 Comments

If you haven’t guessed, I like to write.

Some think I like to talk. No, not necessarily. But get me on the right topic, and I can go on.

Programmers are a funny bunch. They’ll write pages and pages of code, but they won’t say a whole lot. It tends to happen frequently with regards to comments.

Comments are blubs of text within code that don’t have much to do directly with the code, but tell us something about the code.

Comments help us understand.

Comments are also the subject of religious wars.

Some believe comments are evil and shouldn’t exist. I’ve seen a lot of course code that is devoid of comments. I generally assume the programmer is lazy or in a hurry when this happens. They might come back to say code should be self-documenting, but then I see the quality of their code is such that it doesn’t document much of anything.

To me, the trouble with self-documenting code is… what if the code is wrong? Comments (and perhaps design or API documentation written prior to the writing of code) provide a level of redundancy, because they provide the general overview, the abstract notion, the description of the promise of what is to happen. If the code jives, great. If it doesn’t, then we know there’s a problem. Can comments be wrong? Sure. But we tend to grok wrong comments better than wrong code, because it might be possible the code is right even if it looks wrong to us. What helps us determine that? You guessed it, comments.

See, comments are about the “why” of the code. We cannot tell WHY the code from the code; we cannot derive the reasons for the way the code is from the code itself. Once you write code, it will forever have to be maintained, so you need to think of the future maintainers — likely yourself 6 months from now, and yes you will have forgotten more than you expected. Do yourself a favor and comment your code.

I worked on a large software project many years ago. It was a huge beast of a mess of code. One day I went digging around after a memory problem and found a complete mess. See, every bit of memory you allocate, every resource you create, it must have a distinct owner. We have to know who made this mess so it can be cleaned up when we’re done. As I dug through the code, it became evident whomever wrote the original code played fast and loose with the ownership and numerous people assumed ownership over the memory but never rightly transferred that ownership. It created a massive mess, and in the end I determined there was no real safe way to properly clean things up. It was horrible.

Consequently, I wrote a lengthy diatribe in the code (comments) explaining the mess. It was pages long, because it was that ugly of a mess. I figured after all the crazy I went through, future folks ought to know about it so they could beware.  Well… I left the company some months later, and then later on the product was sold to another company. I was at Apple’s WWDC (back in the old days) and came across a representative of the new company. When he saw my name his eyes got really wide and he said “YOU!!”. He started laughing. Seems they had come across my epic comment block and had a great laugh reading it, calling over everyone in the office to see it. He said I was a legend in their office for having written it. It was most amusing. 🙂

What spurred this walk down memory lane?

Over at AltDev is an article The Elements of Comment Style. It talks about the value of comments and the different types of comments. I never gave much thought to the types of comments — it’s just comments, there to explain what code itself cannot explain. But the article provides good reason for comments, and links to writings of others, like Knuth and Raskin, as to why comments are good (and wouldn’t those guys know).

In all my years of programming I’ve gone back and forth and refined my approach to comments. Do I think we need to have copious levels of documentation? Well, sure that’d be nice and ideal, but it’s tough to do that because comments and documentation also have to be maintained. There isn’t always time. And that, depends upon the scope of the project. I’m sure if I was writing some system for the .gov I’d be documenting everything to the Nth degree. But working in the mobile app space, sometimes you have to move faster than is healthy and there isn’t always time for formal comments. Maybe the best I can do is a couple lines at the start of a function to give the basics of what it does then “self-document” what are legal parameters by having a lot of asserts of the parameters at the start of the function, which do provide documentation and also a level of code robustness. But that approach only works when we have full access to the code; writing an opaque library/SDK would require a different approach. So there’s always trade-offs and balances to be found, depending upon context.

I haven’t written a multi-page comment since that one.

And if nothing else?

A little humor buried in code can always brighten your day. 🙂

2012-10-18 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, Cycle 14, Bench Press 2

/ hsoi

I might be getting weaker, but I’m finding this time to improve technique.

“Week 2”

  • 3 reps – Bench Press (working max: 235#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x95
    • 1x5x120
    • 1x3x145
    • 1x3x165 (work)
    • 1x3x190
    • 1x3x215
  • Asst. #1 – Bench Press
    • 5 x 10/10/10/10/8 x 135
  • Asst. #2 – 1-Arm Dumbbell Rows
    • 5 x 10 x 65/65/65/60/55

I also worked on chin-ups: 1 rep immediately after each bench press working set and assistance set (8×1). Totally still, dead hang, all the way up, chin clears the bar, then SLOW negative back down. And so, I just can’t do what I did in the DB rows before. But whatever… weight is relative.

The big thing is, I know I’m losing strength… which sucks but I’m finding it a good time to really work on form. I really noticed that my bar path on bench press is sucking. So I just slowed down, really controlled myself. Made things tougher, but of course a lot better… and my shoulders thank me. But I did notice that with my better body placement I didn’t quite have the foot placement. Basically I put my feet where I normally do, but with the better arch and placement there, I just didn’t get the hip drive I needed. That’s OK. Refinement is a process.

And really… while I can be bummed about the loss of absolute weight/strength, I will focus on form improvements and of course the fat loss. That’s plateaued a bit so I’m revisiting my eating. I know one thing that has hurt as well is the loss of some additional exercise. Things like an injured ankle really don’t help. 😦 So, squat more and faster, I guess. 😉

When coyotes attack… in my front yard

/ hsoi / 16 Comments

5:30 AM. Saturday morning.

Kissing Wife goodbye before I head out the door to KR Training. We hear a cat yowl outside, but didn’t think too much of it because we’ve been hearing cat fights in the early mornings for the past some whiles.

But Sasha thought something of it. She got amped… in a different way. Something wasn’t right, as far as she perceived.

I stepped out the front door and in a matter of seconds realized what was wrong.

10 yards in front of me — in the grass of my front yard — I saw the shape of a dog, turning to stare back at me.

“Crap… dog… what’s this dog? a problem dog? friendly dog? don’t let MY dog out, don’t let my dog see this!”

“Oh… there are TWO dogs… there’s something dangling from the second dog’s mouth… it’s… a cat… OH SHIT. COYOTES!” They obviously had just killed the cat.

It all flashed and processed in a couple seconds. Dropped my stuff back in the house and the 2 yotes took off. I booked it after the yotes as they took off down the street. I chased for a number of reasons: to try to better identify the animal taken (so the neighbor that lost the cat could know; closure), to see what I could see about the yotes themselves; to chase them off. No… I wasn’t going to get all Rick Perry on them.

I was able to get a fair idea of the cat… tho we’re not sure who it belonged to. Wife and Kiddos found a cat collar in the yard; no tags.

Really, none of this surprises me.

We may live in Austin, but wildlife abounds. Deer are common, with our landscape being munched and deer poop throughout the neighborhood yards. We probably hear coyotes howl at least once or twice a month. I remember a few years ago there was a mountain lion spotted at the Wildflower Center (matter of miles from my house).

And coyotes have to eat too. As far as I could tell, they were just hungry.

Food hasn’t been scarce… but then, when there are lots of cats wandering the neighborhood, that equates to food not being scarce.

No it wasn’t what I expected to see when I stepped out of my house, but it’s not really a surprise.

It’s a reality of living in this area. Be aware of it. And if you don’t want such a result to befall your beloved pets, keep them indoors.

2012-10-15 workout – Wender 5/3/1 program, cycle 14, squat 2

/ hsoi

My ankles suck, but it led to better things.

“Week 3”

  • 3 reps – Squat (working max: 280#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x115
    • 1x5x140
    • 1x3x170
    • 1x3x200 (work)
    • 1x3x225
    • 1x3x255
  • Asst. #2 – Pulldown Abs
    • 5 x 12 x 120
  • Foam Rolling

Over the weekend I (re)aggravated my left ankle. It hurts…. bad.

Still, I wanted to squat. I drove to the gym to avoid the extra pounding on the ankle. I did my work set, but it was evident that was all I was going to get, so I skipped the 5×10 squats and just went to the ab work and moved along. Oh well.

One cool thing tho is I really set up for each lift. I wanted to be mindful of the ankle so I was really on with technique and making each rep solid. I was VERY happy with my performance. I will chalk up today to being one full of quality, not quantity. I can live with that.

Class was good

/ hsoi / 6 Comments

This past Saturday was another round of classes at KR Training. We had one of our good combo days: Basic Pistol 2 and Defensive Pistol Skills 1.

There isn’t much to say here that hasn’t been said before about these classes, because the things that students encounter, the enlightenment, it surprises, etc. is all pretty typical for those classes. Trigger control and sight alignment remain the order of the day. 🙂  Really tho, part of why there’s not much to say is because these two classes were pretty awesome. A fantastic group of students in both classes. One thing that we noticed in DPS1 was how little we taped the targets — students were really doing well! And apart from a little rain here and there, which was easy to work around, classes went smooooooth.

But I did see a few things worth mentioning.

M&P Shield – Saw a LOT of these during the classes. I should have counted, didn’t, but there were numerous and so quickly after introduction. Shows the explosion of this gun’s popularity. But I saw a couple of things that bothered me.

1. I’ve been seeing the Shield fail to go into battery more than enough times. It goes like 98% into battery, which isn’t enough, and the gun doesn’t work. And it happens over and over. I’m not sure why it’s happening, but I’ve seen it with my Shield, and I saw it happen to multiple students and their respective Shield’s. I have no idea what to call the culprit tho… but it’s just something that gives me pause.

2. One student had a brand new Shield with a magazine disconnect. Rumor has it that now every Shield is made this way because of Massachusetts? I don’t yet know if this is the case, but if in fact EVERY Shield is now made with a disconnect well…. since I can’t recommend a gun with a disconnect, then that means I can no longer recommend the Shield. That sucks. I’ll try to look into this more.

Demographics – This morning’s The Shooting Wire had this blurb about new shooters

Having said that, I admit some concerns when a new shooter is sporting body piercings, body art and a decidedly goth dress code. Today, however, that new shooter may be male or female. They’re just expressing themselves, albeit differently from anything I’d ever considered.

Instead of accenting differences, I’m increasingly trying to convince myself to take the things we agree on (like guns) and use them as the lubrication needed to get beyond my personal

We had a wide range of students in class: young to old, male and female, and while there were no goths, there were certainly some people who broke the stereotypical gun owner mold. And one of those guys was shooting pretty damn good.

I always point out demographics because I see the reality of what gun ownership is like, and who is shooting… and who is starting to learn to shoot. It’s growing, it’s widening, it’s diversifying. No pigeonholing here.

Personal note  – On a personal note, I need to remember to keep my voice relaxed… let the PA/bullhorn do its job. It’s hard to… you have ear muffs on, I’m deaf enough already, you start to speak louder… and that just kills the vocal chords. I did better… voice made it all the way through class. But still. 🙂

 

Coloring YOUR perceptions

/ hsoi / 4 Comments

The other morning in traffic I saw a truck with one of those “Keep honking — I’m reloading” bumper stickers.

I don’t remember where I saw this, but someone in the gun community postulated these stickers were bad and should be removed and never used because they reflected badly upon the rest of us gun owners.

Now, let’s ignore the irony of a gun-owner suggesting a ban on things that look bad, and step back to look at a greater issue.

We are becoming a society in which we let the actions of a few determine and set our perceptions of the whole. In this case, that one bumper sticker being extrapolated into all gun owners are violent road-raging jerks, or all truck drivers are also gun owners and thus also jerks, etc.. In part, it’s due to the fact that the few tend to get the most visibility. You get one guy that goes on a rampage with a gun and he gets all the media frenzy. But we don’t see nor hear about the millions of gun owners that didn’t kill anyone on that same day. One person’s actions somehow outweigh the actions of millions, and color the outside world’s perception of the greater group.

Think about that for a moment.

It doesn’t matter what grouping you talk about, what persuasion you have, or what group you belong to. If you’re Christian, atheist, Muslim, Jew, straight, gay, white, black, Asian, gun-owner, gun-banner, Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, Anarchist, or even just your family (because we all have that one weird relative), whatever…. Do you feel it’s right when some singular fringe member of YOUR grouping acts in a manner you don’t approve of and perhaps not indicative of the greater group, then the outside world extrapolate that one person’s ill-actions (stupidity?) to the rest of your group? to you yourself? I would reason you wouldn’t find that right nor just and fair.

So perhaps what we need to do is stop this extrapolation ourselves. That is, if you see one person acting in a “bad” way, don’t think their behavior is indicative of the group but rather, just this particular person. Don’t allow that bumper sticker to set your perceptions of all gun owners, just that particular person. I think this is a better approach, because it requires us to change ourselves and hopefully improve ourselves and how we perceive the world and the people within it.

2012-10-11 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 14, press 1

/ hsoi

Losing strength sucks.

“Week 1”

  • 5 reps – Press (working max: 160#)
    • 2x5x45 (warmup)
    • 1x5x65
    • 1x5x80
    • 1x3x95
    • 1x5x105 (work)
    • 1x5x120
    • 1x5x140
  • Asst. #1 – Press
    • 5 x 10/10/10/8/7 x 80
  • Asst. #1 – Wide, pronated grip lat pulldowns
    • 5 x 10 x 120/120/120/110/110

Yeah, it sucks to be losing strength. But I’m swinging back with the diet (I’ll write more on that later) and at least not feeling as drained. Just hit prescribed reps today.

I opted to get back to doing chins.

I did 1 chin-up between each work set and all assistance pressing. 1 isn’t much, but it’s getting back to it, so start somewhere. The difference now is full range. Before I wasn’t doing a full range of motion, not starting from a dead-hang. Reason? Shoulders, but also that there’s no bar where I can fully hang from — gotta bend at the knees. Well, screw that. I grab the bar a little less than shoulder width, slowly ease myself down so I’m at full dead-hang extension, then pull up. 1 was enough… and really focus on the negative. I forgot to add this in to bench press day, but will try to get back on that too.

Pulldowns then dropped weight a bit, makes sense. I do want to ensure every rep touches my chest.

But even tho my weights are going down, I find technique going up. So hey, that’s good.

Gas Grilling

/ hsoi / 12 Comments

I caved.

I have a gas grill.

It’s a Weber Genesis E-330. It’s pretty cool.

I’ve actually had it for a few months (it was a birthday present from my Mom. Thanx, Mom!). The thing is, I really don’t like nor want a gas grill. I prefer fire, charcoal, wood. But with all the droughts and burn bans we have in Central Texas (with no sign of it getting better), I just do not feel right about burning. Sure they say it’s legal and fine to do, but I see how embers escape. I see how they can easily drift through the air, carrying and landing far away. You can be all the careful you want, but shit happens. I just don’t want to risk it.

But gas? I can do that. It’ll work.

It took me a lot of looking and researching, and in the end I didn’t want the Weber because I thought it too costly for a first gas grill… but I realized that anything less just wouldn’t leave me satisfied. That they don’t get hot enough, that they burn out within a couple years, one shortcoming or another.

So far tho, it’s been a lot of fun.

I love the heavy cast-iron grates. I love how it gets wicked hot in there. I love searing venison steaks or beef steaks. A nice little technique of the hot “sear zone” side is cranked up but the right half of the grill is on medium. Then a simple routine of hot zone side 1, flip, then move to warm zone, flip. Each zone/flip for a couple minutes depending how thick the meat is. Works out quite nice.

I even did beer can chicken this past weekend. First time in my life for doing that. Yes I know, I’m horribly remiss. I’ve wanted to do it numerous times, but didn’t for some reason or other. Finally got to doing it, and it turned out great.

Yes, I love the steady heat. Yes I love how hot it gets. Yes I love how little waste of fuel there is. Yes I love the quick start up, and the easy clean up. Yes I love the steady and easily controllable heat. It’s really got a lot of pluses.

But I really hate the lack of smoke. Yes Hank Hill… taste the meat, not the heat. But damnit, I like the heat!

I’ve tried putting wood chips into the foil pouch and putting that onto the “favor-izer” bars… but it doesn’t work unless the burners are cranked up, which wasn’t possible if I wanted to get the right temperature for the chicken.

Maybe there’s a better way… maybe there’s another way. If you have suggestions, I’m all ears.

While a gas grill is not my first choice, I have to admit it’s growing on me.

2012-10-08 workout – Wendler 5/3/1 program, cycle 14, deadlift 1

/ hsoi

“Week 1”

  • 5 reps – Deadlift (working max: 335#)
    • 1x5x135 (warmup)
    • 1x5x170
    • 1x3x205
    • 1x5x225 (work)
    • 1x5x255
    • 1x5x290
  • Asst. #1 – Deadlift
    • 5 x 10/10/10/6/6 x 145
  • Asst. #2 – Pulldown Abs (kneeling)
    • 5 x 12 x 120
  • Foam Rolling

I don’t know what gives… everything felt HEAVY today. Really heavy. It could still be all this diet killing me…. but everything felt heavy.

I’ll also say that my deadlift feels like it’s taking a new bar path. The front of my shins really hurt now… but that’s good, how it should be. And so, that might be why things felt heavier… different muscle activation.

Just didn’t feel all that great today.