Month: December 2008

Attention New Jersey Readers

The New Jersey Senate is having a floor vote today on S-1774, which will ration folks in New Jersey to no more than one handgun purchase permit per month.  Given New Jersey’s gun laws already require you to obtain permission from the police to purchase a handgun, a process that can often take more than a year, this is pretty ridiculous.

If you live in New Jersey, you should call your State Stenator now.  Bryan Miller has graciously provided instruction on how to contact their office.  Of course, you’ll want to tell him or to vote NO on S-1774, not yes.

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Cabela’s Sends Competence and Selection Out the Door

Tonight we went to Cabela’s for a bit of random shopping and just to get out of the house. Sebastian wanted to look at a few miscellaneous shooting-related items, and I was happy to learn that I could exchange the shotgun shell Christmas lights in for a set that actually works. (We ordered two strings online, and one didn’t function at all. I was not pleased.) So yay for a Cabela’s trip, right? Uhhh…no. It’s not looking good for shooters who want somewhere to shop in person. Sadly, I think the non-hunting among us can look forward to mostly shopping online at other stores.

  1. Missing: Shooting Sports. Sebastian wants to try shooting jackets. Rather than having us wander all around, I always go find a salesperson and ask them because it’s typically faster. However, I made the mistake of assuming that a salesman in the shooting department actually knew there were more shooting sports than just trap. He didn’t even point us to the vests, he took us to the shell pouches and asked if that’s what we wanted. I reminded him a) shooting jacket, b) for competitive shooting. Deer in headlights with a suggestion to look near the back of the camo.
  2. Looking for a clue. I asked other salespeople hoping that he was just incompetent. One guy said they didn’t have anything remotely like that which, it turns out was partially true. However, I don’t exactly have full faith in their customer service at this point. A woman I spoke with said they don’t carry much of that type of stuff anymore. She actually gave me the most information, even noting that shooting pads and many of the other supplies for non-shotgun shooting sports were mostly catalog and online items now. They apparently weren’t very profitable in the stores. (Sebastian is instead going to take a nicer quality shooting vest that I had from a shotgun shoot and see if he can make that work for now.)
  3. Christmas lights. I wanted to return the Christmas lights that didn’t work. This is great. Remember to have about 10-30 minutes to spare if you need to go to the customer service desk. Every time we go, they are understaffed and the front line staff have managers interrupting them every few minutes so that they can’t get customers out quickly. (Hint: When more people are getting in line, it may not be the best time to start shutting down registers.) But good luck finding the holiday decor. Normally, it would be easily found along the major aisles, but not this time. Instead it was scattered into various little corners. And the lights? Not anywhere that I could find. That’s because the Christmas lights were in their own little corner. But then it gets better because it turns out that the shotgun shell Christmas lights are not 50% like all of the other holiday home decor. Our cashier informs us that since we could use them for things like camping, they are clearly not Christmas lights. Continue reading “Cabela’s Sends Competence and Selection Out the Door”

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A Good Day to be a Sooner

I just have to brag…

Oklahoma quarterback Sam Bradford arrived in Norman three years ago with modest hype and low expectations. The Sooners’ coaches acknowledged that they had recruited him for depth behind Rhett Bomar, who had been the country’s top quarterback prospect.

But Bradford’s rise from relative obscurity to national pre-eminence was sealed Saturday night when he won the Heisman Trophy, which is given annually to the country’s most outstanding college football player. …

In leading No. 2 Oklahoma (12-1) to the Bowl Championship Series title game against Tebow and the Gators, Bradford orchestrated the most prolific season in the modern era of college football. The Sooners scored 702 points, the first modern team to break the 700 mark. They finished with a flourish, scoring more than 60 points in each of their final five games.

Bradford led the nation with 48 touchdown passes and threw only 6 interceptions. He finished with an average of 14.78 yards a completion.

I’ll be looking forward to OU kicking Florida’s ass in the Championship.

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Facebooking

So after much harassment from more than a few people, I’m doing the whole Facebook thing.  The fear of losing my job this week, and having to network again, was what prompted my conversion.  But I will admit, Facebook is fascinating, and also kind of creepy.  Consider this picture I found of my mother (upper far right side), who has been dead for 14 years, on the Facebook of someone I probably haven’t seen for 16 years.  Found someone else on Facebook I hadn’t talked to since high school, and is in the same industry as I am.

If you’re on Facebook, feel free to add me as a friend, though I am under my real name and not my pseudonym.  Most of you who are regular readers should probably have figured my real name out by this point.

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A Celebrity Worth Supporting

If you have never heard of Nigella Lawson before, you’ll start to fall in love with her right now.  If she didn’t live in London, some of you might volunteer to go protect her since she recently pissed off ALF and PETA.

When asked on BBC1’s The One show if she thought the fashion industry should outlaw fur, Nigella replied that she would wear it if she could kill the animal herself. …

Then she made a stabbing motion and added, “Going into a shop and buying a fur coat would be an act of weakness. But if I could go into the woods and kill a bear myself, I would wear it proudly as a trophy.’’

ALF just named her a “legitimate target” according to one outfit.  PETA seems more sane by simply saying her comments make her unattractive.  I’ll let you guys decide if they are right.

I knew a woman who trapped the foxes that made up her vest.  I admit, I think it would be pretty cool to have a fur jacket that I caught myself.

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Grave Detail

Getting 1/3rd of the folks removed from your company’s IT systems is always quite a bit of work, especially when one of those folks had admin rights to your company network.  I was fortunate that IT only lost one person.  Every certificate and key the company had must be considered to be compromised, so there’s much re-keying and re-provisioning of certificates that needs to be done.  Not to mention cleaning everyone who got the axe out of all the groups.  The folks who got the chop often want personal files, contacts, and calendar information.  All that stuff has to be gone through to make sure it’s not company secrets.  This essentially means my projects are all on hold, and my schedule has just been shot up.

I’ve survived probably a dozen layoffs over my 11 year career, and I’ve always ended up wondering who really was on the wrong end of the deal.  But in this economy I’m happy to still have a job.  The key to surviving layoffs is to be indispensable.  One reason I’ve resisted taking paper pushing management jobs is because in my experience, those people tend to be expendible.  While I am at a management level on paper, I still get my hands dirty, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  The company I work for is still a listing vessel with a leaky hull trying to right herself in the Biotech Sea.  Now we’re operating with a skeleton crew.  We’re either going to get to port with the crew we have remaining, or the ship is going to sink.  The next few months will be critical.

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Ed Rendell Says Obama Thinks We’re Stupid

Of course, we gun owners already know what Obama really thinks of us.

While doing an interview this morning, Ed Rendell said that Obama’s handling of the Blagojevich scandal indicates that he thinks the American people aren’t so bright as to understand why Obama’s people would need to talk to Rod’s people.

“They have never been in an executive position before,” Rendell said on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “The rule of thumb is whatever you did, say it and get it over with and make it a one-day story as opposed to a three-day story. Politicians are always misjudging the intelligence of the American people.”

He doesn’t stop there because Fast Eddie never does. Instead, he actually makes the very good point that the public would understand why he had an interest in who took the seat and talking to the Governor’s office would be a natural step in the transition. Of course, then he implies that Blagojevich “was the craziest S.O.B. in the world.” Gotta love our Governor.

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Fire a Gun, Go to Jail

Firearms & Freedom points out some absurdity with the proposed model legislation for bullet serialization.  The ammo serialization bill also demands that non-serialized ammunition be destroyed before 2011, so under this model legislation, you can forget reloading.  As others have said, ammunition restrictions might be a new model for the gun control proponents.

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