“Well that was dumb. You should be resistant to change like the rest of us.”
A trainer to a student, after the student relayed a conversation he had with a manager where the student said, “I love learning new things.” Student is now going to be learning so many products that there’s no way he’s going to be good at any of them.
It’s barely October!
The other night I was on my way home from work and I saw a Volvo station wagon jump a curb at 40mph. The car pulled in to a parking lot and I followed to offer assistance.
The driver was a 17 year old high school senior heading home after a Lacrosse match. He had completely destroyed his right front tire and rim, but luckily there was no other obvious damage. I asked him if he’d ever changed a tire before, and he said he hadn’t. “Well,” I said, “you’re going to learn how now.”
I showed him how to operate the lug wrench and the jack, after first showing him where his spare tire was stored (he didn’t know). Volvos have a jack setup I had not seen before, so we had to break out the owners’ manual–also a good skill for a young driver to have.
As I was showing him the proper pattern for tightening lug nuts, his parents showed up. He had called them after pulling in to the parking lot and they came to inspect the car. I explained to them that a quick check showed no obvious signs of damage, but that they would need to go to a dealership to get a new rim and suggested they have the dealer check for further damage.
I did have a curious exchange with the father. After I told him that I showed his son how to change the tire since he’d never done it before, he incredulously wondered aloud why the high school Driver’s Ed course had not taught his son this basic skill. It just struck me as odd that he knew changing a tire was something that every driver should know how to do, but yet he felt it was someone else’s job to pass that skill on. It’s not like it takes a great deal of time and effort to teach this. My memory is a bit fuzzy, but I do think that my parents made me change a tire before allowing me to get my learner’s permit, and my parents rarely taught me anything.
I just thought it was an interesting reaction.
Steve Jobs died a little bit ago.
On Saturday, September 24, me and a couple of friends put on our annual “New Shooter Day.” Every year, Oddball and I like to take newbies out and let them get some good exposure to the awesomeness that is shooting. This year I think we had two that had never fired a gun before and three who had extremely limited experience. In total we had ten people, including my last new shooter.
Our goal with these events is to teach proper handling and safety with little emphasis on accuracy. We just want them to have fun without getting frustrated. We also want them to get trigger time on lots of different kinds of guns.
We started off with a safety briefing that went over the basic rules and the range rules. After we moved the group onto the firing line, I demonstrated a few of the firearms so the newbies could get an idea of the amount of noise and recoil they should expect. I learned a very valuable lesson here: try out your new guns before taking new shooters. Both the M&P15-22 and the Stevens 95 had embarrassing problems. The Stevens either has a problem with the extractor or a problem with the operator. The M&P15-22 was having an issue where sometimes the trigger didn’t reset properly–I had to physically push the trigger forward for it to reset. After about 15 rounds and a generous helping of lubricant that problem was resolved. I suspect that after a few hundred rounds the trigger will smooth out.
After the demonstration, we let the newbies start off shooting .22 pistols. I have a Walther P-22 that was having slight issues with the Remington High Velocity Golden Bullets but after we figured out the ammo was the culprit it worked pretty well.
I met Chase a week before New Shooter Day. I stopped by The Hacker Consortium for a bit and started talking to him. He mentioned that he’d never shot a gun before, so I invited him along. He’s from Illinois and was pretty disappointed when I told him about what his state would require if he wanted to buy a firearm.
Our friend Critch came along and brought his Ruger .22 to play with.
Oddball calls Cassondra his greatest success. She went from terrified of guns to gun owner in one range session a while ago. She now owns a .22 rifle but wanted to learn about pistols, so that’s what she worked on.
After everyone got a chance to shoot the .22’s, we moved on to carbines. I broke out the M4gery and gave a recoil demonstration where I put the butt of the stock in my crotch and fired a few rounds. I saw this done when I was in basic training and it always stuck with me, so I figured I’d use it to show the newbies that .223 is nothing to be scared of. I got a lot of laughs 😀
Here I am showing Sarah how the EOTech works:
People love the EOTech.
Here she is shooting it. Notice the brass in the air:
While I was teaching Sarah about the AR15 system, Oddball was on the 50 yard range letting Chase and his girlfriend Kim play with the .40cal Beretta carbine:
All in all, it was a good day. The newbies also got to shoot some battle rifles like the AK, Nagant, M1 Carbine, and an Enfield in .308. Sorry, no pictures for that. I would like to thank Patrick for having the foresight to actually bring a camera since I was too busy teaching to break out my phone. He did a lot better than I would have.
Oh, and we didn’t have to use the target stands.
“Look at all these cool ideas we stole from Google!”
That’s how long since I ordered my suppressor from Gemtech. Just got a voice mail from my dealer saying that it has been delivered to their shop.
Now I get to fill out the paperwork. Saturday will be the earliest that I can get there with my trust paperwork, and it will be 4-12 weeks after that before I can take it home with me.
All for a safety device.
Last week I covered the Debt Snowball and mentioned that you needed to have a budget, so this week I’ll cover how to do that.
Bah! Why are you covering this? I know how to do a budget!
Really? Off the top of your head, what’s your monthly budget for clothing? Groceries? What’s your budget for gas? Not, “Oh, I usually spend about…”–that’s not a budget.
A budget is where you declare “I have $300 to spend on gas this month, and I will not spend any more than that.”
What we do, and what Dave Ramsey teaches, is called a zero based budget. Basically what that means is we know where every single dollar we make is going to go before we get paid. So you “spend” your entire paycheck the day you get it. Using this method, if you go over budget in one category, you have to take that money from another category because by now you’ve stopped using credit cards.
So if you had $300 budgeted for gas, but with 5 days left in the month you have 1/8 of a tank, you’ve got to take money from somewhere else. Perhaps clothing or “blow money.” And next month, plan better :D.
Here are the basic categories I used when I was single and doing this plan all by myself:
That’s a pretty simple list. It is a good starting point, but if you want something a little more detailed, check out this budget form from Dave Ramsey.
A note about Blow Money: This is your walking around money. This is where you pay for renting movies, going out to dinner, and hitting the range. I discovered that I could get by with $60 a week in blow money and that has been my amount for several years. My wife gets the same amount even though she doesn’t make as much as I do. (That suppressor I bought recently was bought with blow money I had been saving since January)
A major component to the budget is the envelope system. What that means is that for certain categories you take cash out of the bank and put it in envelopes. When I started, I used cash for groceries, fuel, and blow money. Pretty quickly I learned that paying cash for fuel totally sucks so I stopped doing that. Now I use a debit card at the pump.
I did kind of a weird thing with regards to bills. I opened a second checking account and paid all my bills using that account. I signed up for auto-payment wherever possible and used online bill pay. The only check I had to write was to my landlady. I knew how much my monthly bills were going to be so I divided that by two and deposited that amount into the bills account every payday. It worked out really well for me and we still use that system today.
So this is how it looks on payday. Let’s say you get paid twice a month, and your paycheck is $1670 (speaking of which, you have stopped your retirement contributions, right? That’s not until step 4). Here is what it looks like:
You now have $120 in your pocket and $150 in your primary checking account for fuel. In an envelope you have $100 to buy the next two weeks’ worth of groceries. The rest of your paycheck has been spent.
Now, I don’t know what your situation looks like, but this is the basic idea. To get your numbers, go through your bank and credit card statements for the last six months and see where you spend your money. You might be surprised, as I was, at where all your money has gone!
When I did this, I discovered that while I thought I was spending $80 a week on groceries, I was actually spending almost $300 a week–because while at the grocery store (which was Wal-Mart because that’s your choice when you live in Mississippi) I was picking up things like DVDs and the occasional digital camera. The other thing that really surprised me was how much less I spent if I used cash. There’s something psychological about it.
Ignorance is bliss.
If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention.
Both of these are true statements.
For the month of October, I’m going to avoid social media, mainstream media, IRC, and political blogs/podcasts. I’m going to try to see what my blood pressure and mood do if I just stick my head in the sand for a little bit.
I’m a little too angry-due-to-paying-attention some times and that causes me to make passionate arguments in ways that make complete sense to me, but are very off-putting to normal people. As an example, I recently attended an event where one of the lawyers who got the first iteration of Restaurant Carry declared unconstitutional. I asked him why they didn’t also challenge the new law allowing restaurant carry for off duty officers, and he said that police are (paraphrasing) “trained for that sort of thing.” I questioned him pretty harshly on what specific training police receive that pertains to that issue, and whether or not he would be okay with permit holders having that training. He basically responded that the only way he would ever be comfortable with someone carrying in a restaurant is if they are a current LEO, regardless of training. It was a similar line of reasoning I’d used before with other people.
I thought my arguments pointed out that the guy was just biased against citizens, since his base criteria was ultimately only who someone’s employer is. I was informed later by John Lott (yes, that John Lott) that my arguments came off as anti-police, suggesting police officers are not well-trained. That was absolutely not my intention.
When John Lott tells you your argument is a bad one, you listen.
So I’m going to try to be a “regular” person for a little bit. I’ll still be doing the debt-free blogging (those posts are already queued) and some tech news stuff, but I’m going to try to stay out of the politics for a little bit.
I imagine that–like Kevin Baker–I’ll be back to it quicker than I plan.
When officers repeatedly electrocute suspects until the suspects die, it’s not the officers’ fault: It’s “Excited Delirium”
If a suspect struggles with an officer and then later that officer has a fatal reaction to painkillers prescribed by a licensed physician, compounded by emphysema and obesity, it’s “reckless homicide”
Because, you know, the suspect should have known that the doctor was going to kill the officer.