And then changing my career from “IT Consultant” to “farmer” also upended my life a bit, but I’m still here, and I’m having fun, I just don’t blog about it much.

It’s a weird life. On Tuesday I’m talking with a guy about pumpkin seeds for a new field, varieties, genetic resistance to disease, and the next day I’m virtualizing a 7 year old server that’s on its last legs. Most of what I’m doing is still IT type work as I dig us out of a hole. We’ve always been pretty good about being high-tech at our place but I’m replacing stuff that I originally put in as a kid back in 1997. Other stuff was put in by my youngest brother when he worked there part time while in college. So, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s not bad, for a greenhouse, but it could be better. Honestly we were probably leaps and bounds beyond 98% of other shops before I even signed on. I’m just upping it to the next level.

New Point of Sale system (customizing an open source product), new network, new servers, database fail over, new labeling software, new method for processing payroll, enhancements to our time clock system, system status monitoring software, etc. Some big things, some little things, but it’s a lot of work.

But, it’s fun.

No idea how long the deal lasts.

1. What was your first car? Model, year, color, condition?

The year was 1996 and I purchased a black 1977 Chevy Blazer. Its condition? It was over 200,000 miles, on its second engine, the guy I bought it from was no mechanic but he had remounted the gas tank after it fell off in a rear-end collision, it had no back seat left, and the driver’s side wheel well had rusted completely out. The previous owner laid a piece of plywood over the wheel to keep from getting hit in the head with mud and gravel as he drove. It got about 4 miles to the gallon and the automatic transmission’s linkage was so far off P was reverse, R was drive, and you couldn’t actually get it into ‘Park’ so I used a split log to chock the wheels if I had to park on any sort of incline for a long period of time. For short periods I just wedged a heavy-duty cardboard tube between the driver’s seat and the brake pedal. Oh, and the seatbelt mount had rusted completely out on the driver’s side. In fact the whole door frame was in dire need of repair.

It was a “fixer-upper” I guess.

2. What adventures did you have in it, good or bad?

Cripes, I could write a small book on this one, but the best story is that I acquired my 2nd vehicle after smashing into it with my 1st vehicle while exiting the student parking lot of our high school. I was in the wrong, I smashed into the car when somebody honked and I smacked the gas trying to get out of their way. My fault, I’ll pay for it. They gave me a repair bill for $1500. They only paid $500 for the car so I offered $500 to buy it. The father said the car was actually worth $1000 so I offered that up, went to the bank a few days later, got a cashier’s check, and showed up at their house. Suddenly the car was worth $1500. So I went back to the bank and got another $500 cashier’s check.

Not the smartest financial move in the world, seeing as how my legal liability was $0, but it only cost me a month’s worth the wages. Never lost any sleep over it and I can look myself in the mirror. Ya gotta wonder about the other guy though. Getting a 16 year old kid to pay you 3x what a car cost? Classy.

3. What happened to it, what’s the end of the story?

After about a year of service I drove it to the junkyard. During inspection the junkyard fellow asked how the heck I got it there. “I drove it here” was not the answer he was expecting seeing as how the driver’s side door wasn’t even closing anymore. I had to hold it in the whole way there. I got $50 for the heap. I paid $700 for it, but I got a lot of learning out of that thing with with all the repairs I learned how to do on it.

Here’s his Wikipedia page.

Basically, co-creator of the C programming language and key designer in the early days of Unix which puts him at ground zero when it comes to modern operating systems. Sure, they’re not all written in C these days, but at the core they are. BSD, Linux, OS X, and the Windows NT kernel are all C based for the most part.

Yep, they’re going to have to redesign that range. Honestly, I can’t tell what they’ve got right now. I’ve never been there and the online satellite images aren’t showing much.

Let’s see, we’ve got either BB or a mix of #2 and #4 bird shot, both in 1.25oz loads, pushing 1250fps. Awesome. That’ll produce some crushing recoil (by my standards) on the user end, and produce some devastating results on darned near anything on the business end. Well, except for things like ballistic gelatin or medium sized (human sized) mammals more than 10 yards away.

I’m sure it feels powerful, the recoil will be marvelous, and it looks powerful, but you’re going to be getting somewhere around 8″ penetration even with the “big” BB shot in this stuff. The FBI wants 12″ penetration of out of pistol rounds for a reason. That’s 12″ into bare gel. Once you add in things like clothing (which might include heavy leather jackets) or ribs, which do a decent job of keeping incoming objects away from important things, that 12″ (which would blow right through me) ends up being less than 12″ in the real world.

Just pick a something in the buck shot range that works for you. Bird shot is for birds. A 1oz BB load, on the other hand, might be pretty handy for woodchucks.

What got me thinking about this is I went though Ron Paul’s book End The Fed which got me to finally reading some stuff from Ludwig von Mises. Somewhere in the book he starts calling the Swiss monetary system “bad” (by our government’s standards, not his) because they have incredibly low inflation and that’s not what governments really want. So I went to digging around Wikipedia while I put my daughter to bed tonight on my phone.

Yep, the Swiss Franc was the last currency to get off the gold standard. Their inflation rate is something like 0.7% a year right now, and that’s after they dumped gold and threatened the EU with buying “unlimited” numbers of Euros to keep themselves tracking with their currency.

Now, I’m not a Big-L Libertarian, I’m a libertarian minded yahoo. There’s a difference. At a glance here’s Switzerland from my perspective:
- Low corporate tax rate
- Nearly every home has an assault rifle in it, with a good shooting culture to go along with all that
- Sound money policy (hardly any inflation)
- Mandatory health insurance

Works for me. Why aren’t we trying to mirror those folks?

About time. Glad to see them finally doing something about the problem.

I’ve been working really hard the last 4 years to dismiss every federal government SNAFU as just them being inept, rather than malicious, but now we’re seeing emails from the ATF regarding their “Fast & Furious” Operation, where they instructed gun shops to knowingly sell to suspected Mexican and Honduras drug cartel buyers, and then they get giddy about being able to use that anecdotal data to support more detailed, and illegal, gun purchase reporting measures.

Look, if the director of the ATF has webcams in his freaking office to watch known drug cartel suppliers purchase weapons, and the ATF still manages to lose track of them, only later to find them at US crime scenes, including the killing of US Border Patrol agent, I don’t see what in the heck they’re going to be able to help out with if they get a form indicating that John T. Cletus picked up a couple of BARs in .270.

As of right now I’ll be nice to the ATF. I’ll just assume you wanted to generate more paperwork for yourselves, to justify your existence, and if you had to assist in arming a few drug cartels that was no big whoop.

Heck, even when I put on my “nice” blinders that’s still extremely messed up.