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Another Revolution around the Glowing Orb

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So we close out another year here at the windy castle on the plateau.  It’s been a big year for the blog.

Last January I switched hosting providers and finished up the rest of the transitions last November.  In June probably the biggest change occurred, I moved from Drupal to WordPress.

Here’s some quick stats though on this year:

I haven’t done a lot of planning for how I want to expand the blog in this next year.   I have a few ideas and I want to grow the video side of the blog as well. 

Some of you have probably noticed I have ads on the blog now.  My goal is to subsidize the cost of the hosting and possibly buy me a lunch from time to time.  I’m trying to make sure that they are where they will generate revenue but also stay out of the way.  Up until last month the blog has been running at a loss for me since I ran it ad free.  There is a nice part of being ad free, but at the same time it’s burning a hole in my pocket and I would rather buy toys and review them or have extra ammo to  train with.

This next year I’ve got a pile of stuff on the plate, including a possible/probable trip to visit a friend.  Neither the wife or I want to deal with the TSA and we need to chat with a travel agent about prices as well for what we’re thinking about doing.

So since it’s New Year’s eve, here’s Auld Lange in probably one of the best versions I’ve heard:

h/t To Caleb on that one.  And you thought I was all rock and violin didn’t you?

I know a couple people who this would fit nicely….

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IMG_0001

If you’re note sure who I could possibly want to give a couple of these to, you haven’t been following me that long.  Kurt has another design that you’ll have to run over to his place to see.

I will say it’s helping light a fire under my ass.  The wife and I came up with another idea recently to do a snake other than the classic Gadsden snake.  It’s a matter of getting the base image and running it through Photoshop.  God I have too many projects and ideas.

Now CSGV hasn’t called me an insurrectionist, but they have said I was most offensive.  Does that count?

Another Mini Meet…

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Last night I met A Girl and TSM.  We had organized a plan which almost appeared to fall apart, but alas luck won out.  My meeting ended on time and the TSM finally got out of work as well.

The drove up and we went out to dinner and since I was on the opposite coast I had some Atlantic Salmon.

A Girl and TSM had Trout.  I didn’t get any pics of that though.  We had a nice long dinner, as in we finally split up after about 3 hours of chatting about kids, life, adventures, and other general shenanigans.

Eventually I got dessert, took me trying 3 choices, but eventually that had something.  I also convinced A Girl to add another thing to her EDC tools, a Crème brûlée torch.

It was great fun and then as an added bonus I got back to the hotel just in time to catch Pale Rider in time for my favorite line, “Nothing like a good piece of hickory.”

Time to relax and get ready for another day of fun tomorrow.  Though the real fun will be Thursday with the TSA.

The Truth About…

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First up, beware, drama llama within, some of you wont really care about the following post.  Anyone just coming into the gun rights community and anyone interested in gun rights should be at least be aware of what follows.

So earlier this week I had a quote of the day from Oleg and the subject of his quote was left intentionally vague.  I left it vague because honestly I would rather people not drive traffic to this person or his website.  The list of reasons I would rather people not visit this person or provide him traffic is long and distinguished.

If you’re unaware of exactly who I am talking about, Linoge has done a nice and detailed post explaining exactly why this person should not be accepted or welcomed within the community.  Now I warned you, the list is extremely long and the post is quite easily labeled an uber-post.  The sad thing is, you will notice it is long mainly because the number of transgressions is quite large.

While this person has not personally slighted me, he has slighted people I know, and not just know but some I have a very deep respect for.  His solution to polite and civil requests is to just claim what he did is legal, with no accounts for morals or mutual respect.  He claims to be a supporter of the Second Amendment but runs his website in the same manner as Joan Peterson.

I do know he has upset a few folks that honestly I would never want to be on the bad side of.    Even more importantly, one individual that was upset has done more than any other person to help reclaim and reestablish gun rights in this country.  This also doesn’t even touch on his treatment of Emily Miller.

It should be noted that the reason Linoge named both the individual and the blog is to hopefully help with search traffic.  The individual in question is quite good at search engine optimization so it is quite difficult to actually dig up information on the grievances he has caused.

Also it should be noted that like Jennifer I have no issue with making money from blogging.  Notice I now have an ad on the right again.  While there is no way I will ever get rich from this, I would at least like to make it self-sustaining.  What I do have a serious problem with though, is taking other people’s work and then attempting to profit off of it.

So please, ignore the troll, shun him like you should, and if he steals your content, blog about it, email him, and contact Linoge to be added to the list.  If you’re feeling really frisky, pursue legal action, it is well known he’s making money from the blog, thus off of your work.

It was a long day…

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So Joe and I got up yesterday morning and we got the AN quickly and were out of dodge by about 0710.

Notice how the bags fade off into the distance, yeah, there’s long row of them.  We stopped for breakfast and hit the road.  I must say Oregon is the most boring of the bunch, doubly so since they have a 55 MPH speed limit where 85 would actually make considerably more sense.  How dully is it?  I think I found a location where they could have staged the moon landings.

Yeah there’s a bit of stubble up close, but here’s another picture so you know I’m not kidding.

How’s that for lively scenery!  We stopped for gas twice and got into Reno about 2000 last night.  Chatted for a bit before we all decided we wanted to go comatose from traveling.  Later today we get a guided tour of Cabela’s.  So far only a few of us have showed up, more should be arriving today.

Some Testing from the Laptop

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Well, it appears my laptop is up and running.  The one thing I love about Linux is that I don’t have to waste time setting up all the little crap.

This post actually is me giving one of the built in blog writers a spin.  It’s no Windows Live Writer, but it so far appears to meet the minimum requirement of functional.
Not quite as clean on the picture entry though.

Goodbye Disqus

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I got an email tonight from a reader.  He’s been trying to post comments and it has been failing.  This is not something that inspires me to happiness.

I spent a lot of time during the migration fiddling with Disqus.  Even now I’m sure not all the comments were imported successfully but I’m just tired of it after this last screw up.

So I did another sync between Disqus and WordPress tonight and then switched it back over to the internal commenting system.  If anyone has trouble please let me know.

It Is Done…

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Looks like I’ll be meeting and hanging out with a bunch of you the beginning of September. Joe mentioned the Gun Blogger Rendezvous last May and I was planning on going.  I saw this and really started itching.

Then I had some unexpected expenses and well the wife an I live in a budget.  We’ve stopped using our credit cards and are paying down our debt as quickly as possible so when I dipped into the savings fund I said, “Well there’s always next year.”

I saw Joe last weekend and we ended up talking about it and his travel plans have changed.  Initially it still seemed like it wouldn’t work and it was going to kill a bunch of extra time since the point of departure wouldn’t equal the point of return.  On the way home from the Boomershoot site I had an idea on how to make that work.  I told Joe I’d let him know this week yea or nay.

Then earlier this week I got an email at work, the company calendar uses photos taken by employees.  I didn’t get a submission in this year because I didn’t have time to prep the photos I was going to submit.  They did however look at my submissions from last year and they want to use some of them.  They pay the employees for the use of the pictures.  It’s not set it in stone, it’s a risk we can take it though because even without it we could do it, it would just be tight.  I suspect it’s one of the following though:

So this morning I dropped my check to Mr. Completely into my mail box along with the GBR-VII form.  My leave request has been approved so at this point I will be at GBR!  So it looks like I’ll be seeing David, Kevin (for the first time since 2009) and Derek (again since 2009) again.  If you’re going, find me and say hi.  Seriously I’m kind of hard to miss.