SHOT show has got nothing on this

I always thought that going to shot show would be kinda cool, but since it has devolved into an AR-15 circle jerk of mall ninjas, I've been a bit weary of just about any gun related trade show.  That is until I hear of this bad boy at the NRA meeting.  Behold the wonder of the MBUS Pro:

A wonderfully retro look for the plastic rifle age

Now this is my kinda gig:

do they come with the bus?

Wait a minute!  Who put this crap in here?  This thing should be exclusively stocked with M-14s, Thompsons, and M1 Carbines.

Well, looks like I'm renewing my NRA membership. 

Goofing off at the office

One thing about my job that I love is the fact that we basically get to play with high tech toys half the time. This time around we got our hands on some demo phones, and stumbled across an app that was left on one of them called Manga Camera, that turns any picture you take into something that looks like a cell from a manga comic/book.

Obviously this proved to be a serious distraction to real work getting accomplished on that day, as you can see:

I swear, I look like friggin Col Sanders in this pic.

Our intrepid teammate (pretending to be) hard at work.

Poor old roomie looks like a disheveled Soviet sailor in this pic

Remix reading

for your weekly music, something that sounded interesting:

Piano cover of Metallica's One

Adventures in not writing

I'm really feeling the need for more C: drive space recently.  There's just too many programs I like to keep handy on my primary drive to get by with only half a gig.  Also, I'm really wanting to switch to a solid state drive but those are still more than a little too pricey in the capacities I'm looking for, so I'm just kinda stuck managing disk space for the time being.

On an unrelated note, all this internet sleuthing I'm doing on military aircraft crash sites is tempting me to go steal some public property and subsequently restore it and put it on display or something....

There just aren't enough surviving Tomcats in this world.

An interesting philosophical question

In a conversation with a friend I mentioned in passing the result of the duel between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr; specifically how despite having been vice president, Burr fell into obscurity nearly overnight.  Contrast to Hamilton, who's name will be instantly recognizable to anyone with a shred of competency today.

This, in turn brought up the assassination of Lincoln and how terrible that was.  I was pretty eager to debate the fact that Lincoln was a pretty terrible person and was eager to provoke what was coming to him, but then someone stated the following, "Nobody should be famous for shooting another person."

This posed an interesting question considering that there are many people who can be thanked for doing just that.  Granted, most people might not want to be famous for shooting someone, but if the person they shot was undeniably consumed with evil, I think it can go without saying that they deserve a hearty thanks and a pat on the back at least.  There are many people who are on some level famous for doing nothing but shooting another person, and arguably doing the right thing, the following is a small list of examples:

Timothy Murphy is an American legend that likely got free beers for the rest of his life for his shot.

Simo Hayha  a.k.a. The White Death  also likely to have been called 'The Norse God of Thunder'

Soghomon Tehlirian totally a hero and the shooting is his only claim to fame.

Jozef Gabcik - killing Nazis is a pretty good case for being not all bad, but this guy = total hero.

and if there wasn't a security concern for his identity, I'd personally buy a drink for the guy that first shot Bin Laden.

I mean, what sensible person wouldn't fire shots in this guy's direction?

Point being, is that despite plenty of horrible people being famous for shooting other people, there are also plenty of good people who are famous for killing another person because they knew it was the right thing to do.

Maybe, just maybe...

I have been to one too many historic sites, museums, and state parks.  Why?  Well, every time I commute to work on the train, it ends up stopping at some point for another train to pass.  Whenever this happens, without fail, I expect for some armed cowboy bandits to hop on the train firing blanks with some kind of bit to go through, possibly involving a musical number.

Once again the internet sounds off

about something or another regarding the guy in charge of Mozilla, and consequently Firefox.  I stopped using Firefox ages ago, due to it's increasingly lackluster performance, but It's interesting that I've lived to see the day people are boycotting a non-tangible product because "gay rights" were curtailed by California's general public 6 years ago.  The whole thing stinks of witch hunt to me, and hopefully the man won't have his future ruined, despite already being forced to step down.

though from the news source for the story that I lazily googled, it's cool to see that Utah has a state rep that registers a full on 0% rating from the NARAL pro-choice America group.  This I also find funny in that a pro-choice group would rate him at a 0% when I'm sure he would consider abortion in cases of rape and/or when the life of the mother is in danger (as do I).

In other more lighthearted news, I have to admit that I got tricked good on April fools day.  Normally I'm on the lookout for people trying to pull a fast one on me, but I've been had like the rest of 'em.  Totally fell for the one story on Alert 5 news that said a Chinese J-10 defected to Taiwan.  Did not see that coming form a defense news site.

can you imagine how crazy that would have been?