The same friend of mine who sent me the link about the AK-47 is participating in a worth while fund raiser. He's a madman on two wheels (bicycle, not motorcycle) and here is a link to his fund raising effort:

http://www.firstgiving.com/michael01612

He's got quite the blog as well (http://michael01612.spaces.live.com/) and it usually streams around various topics. It's worth a read and even more importantly is his current fund raising effort. Give it a look.

A good buddy of mine sent me this interesting and educational article on the AK-47:
http://www.sptimes.com/2007/01/07/Opinion/The_real_weapon_of_ma.shtml

I agree with many of the comments related in this article. I love my AK and even though I haven't shot it is most definitely a mood changing weapon. Just owning the gun gives you a strange sense of reassurance that somehow no matter what the world throws at you that you will make it through in 1 piece.

I've really been slacking off on this blog for various reasons but I hope to get back on track not that certain distractions have been put away. My current blog entry is all about guns. A coworker of mine from IBM in Austin, TX came up for a week of cross training and we went shooting one of the mornings. He's a big Texan and he likes guns so enough about wondering if we had a good time or not.

This shooting session prompted me to re-evaluate my current gun situation. I decided to sell my 100 year old Winchester shotgun as I just don't use it at all and I really can't see myself relying on it for home defense or for sporting purposes as it's gauge and choke (16 gauge, modified choke) aren't well suited for Skeet shooting and it's age makes me wonder about it's reliability should I ever need it for something big.

I have narrowed down it's replacement to 2 different weapons:
1. An AK-47 (modified for single shot obviously as I don't have a Class 3 license that would permit me to own a full auto weapon)
or
2. A Ruger Mini-14 (semi-auto rifle that shoots the same NATO 5.56mm cartridge as the M4/M16)

My brain tells me to get the Ruger as it will be cheaper than an AK but my heart and soul say to go with the AK. Both guns will be reliable (I'm not going to bury the weapon in sand or snow, something that I'm sure the AK would excel at), both guns are probably more accurate than my shooting skills would allow for, and finally both guns would 100% provide the home defense "scare" factor that I'm looking for.

Time will tell what I do. I'm waiting to hear back from a local gun store that has both in stock to see what kind of deal I can work for a trade of the old Winchester against either of these guns. I'll be sure to post the outcome of my trading adventure.

OK. It's been a while since my last Journal update but I've been very busy. I have been reading (actually listening) to A Short History of the Korean War by James Stokesbury. I wanted to get a soup-to-nuts overview of the war since my only real exposure to what went on over there is either from MASH (entertaining but not exactly accurate) or from movies.
This book is a good overview of the war starting off at the end of WW2 and the formation of the Communist presence in SE Asia and takes you through the various campaigns of the conflict. I learned alot about the war: I had no idea that the North Korean Army ran over the initial US forces (the South Korean ROK forces didn't put up any real resistance early on either). A few months after the start of the war when supplies finally started reaching the UN/US forces things got alot better and the war could have and perhaps should have ended at this point in time. I'm sure that if the powers that be realized that if 2 more years of fighting would have them back to this point they would have considered ending the war at this point.
I could go on for pages about this book but I really enjoyed reading it. I had hoped to get the Max Hastings book on the Korean War but I couldn't find it in my library network.

I have been searching my local library's online catalog to see if I can find a good audiobook about the war in Korea during the early 50's. Unlike WW2 or Vietnam there are hardly any apparently good books out there that would give me a good historical account of the causes of the war and then the timeline of the war itself.

I thought I had found one when I came accross this book @ Amazon by the eminent historian Max Hastings, but I can only find it in print and not on CD. I suspect that I will check out this book and read it rather than listen to it.

I have also looked into movies to see what I could find there and the best one that I can remember is the Bridges at Toko-Ri. The storyline isn't that great but the flying scenes contain some rare footage of the age of early jet military aircraft.

As the average age of our war veterans gets higher each day and thus the number of vets still alive is reduced I can only hope that somehow we get more stories published about the Korean War from the veterans of the war.

I had no idea that on this date in 1983 a potential nuclear war was prevented by a Soviet officer Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov. When you read the account of this event on various sites around the WWW it's amazing that it received such little attention even when the event became public 5 years afterwards. It was almost like a real War Games movie scenario!

Think of this post as a floating list of my Firefox bookmarks ..... each day I browse the following sites as part of my "eat breakfast at my desk routine".

General news and information always comes from the BBC for me. For more local information I refer to Boston.com.

Need a great deal on something or feel like spending money on stuff you don't really need? These two sites can help you out!
                www.slickdeals.net => This is a well organized site that lists only truly "slick" deals on it's main page. If you're looking for something specific, however, there is a better site to use.
                www.fatwallet.com/c/18/ => This is FatWallet ... easily searchable but contains lots of noise. Usually the good deal to junk deal ratio is low but this is the place to search before you buy something online.

Want to read up on PC hardware and software gear? Check these two sites:
                www.tomshardware.com => The famous Tom's Hardware site ... great hardware reviews and comparisons on this site.
                www.neowin.net  => My favorite site for gleaming insights on the latest software news (focusing on Windows and the Power User)

Everyone needs a good site to get the weather and I switch between these two:
                www.noaa.gov => Just plug in your zip code and it gives you the National Weather Service forecast for your zip code. Not the best imaging here but the forecast is really what you need.
                weather.unisys.com => This site has better imaging than the NOAA site but it misses in the way that it handles Severe Weather Statements and warnings.

I'm a big F1 fan so I hit these two sites for daily news updates and race coverage:
                www.planet-f1.com => PlanetF1 is a good site for articles and editorials but it lags in it's news coverage compared to other sites.
                www.f1-racing.net => This site has lots of great news articles but no editorials. Just the press releases and facts here.

More sites to come but those are the big ones that I hit each day. Maybe you'll learn to like some of them too!

I have been re-reading my copy of Not Without Peril over the last week. This book is by a local NH author who has spent the majority of his life in the White Mountains.

The book details the various tragedies of bad luck, bad planning, and just bad timing of centuries of mountaineers in the White Mountains. I have bought this book 3 times already: the first 2 copies were lent out to friends/family and never came back. I am not sure if they enjoyed the book as much as I have or they just plain forgot to return it to me but I hope it's the former.

If you like reading about survival (and sometimes not survival) and you appreciate the "local" bend to this New England focusing book then give it a whirl. Just go ahead and buy it because you're not getting my copy.

A few weeks back I wiped my home PC clean and reinstalled Windows XP Professional. I had been running the same install of Windows for over 2 years and it was long overdue to clean up all the crap that I had installed/uninstalled along the way.

When I had gotten the OS installed and updated I had to choose a game to install as my entertainment for the PC. I looked on my shelf and saw some nice games: Far Cry, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, Madden 2007 football, etc. I chose the game that I enjoyed the most however: Half Life 2.

HL2 is a long game (I'd say it clocks about 40 hours of play time before you reach the end) and although it has it's flaws it looks great on today's PC's with high-end graphics cards installed with the settings cranked up. Although I'd love to be able to fast-forward through some of the cinematic sequences I can live with those periods of downtime as the action quickly gets going after the cinematic sequences end.

I have also played HL2: Epsiode 1 which is a sort of expansion for the game but I didn't like it too much... it was too short and seemed to be more of a gravity-gun festival than a real game.

Half Life 3 is not expected to be released.... rather the developer will continue releasing "Episode" style games that are shorter than full games but are released more quickly.

First of all it's 9/11 all over again and I look out the window and realize that the weather is exactly the same as it was 5 years ago. Maybe it's a little cooler but the clarity of the blue sky sure seem awfully familiar.

I listened to a set of MP3 files that someone posted to the newsgroups last night. The files were the WCBS radio station in NYC and it was from 9/11/2001. It was amazing to hear the traffic chopper describe the first plane striking the building and then all the comotion and insanity that would follow in those next few hours. I wonder how my 5 year old will feel as she learns about 9/11 in school as she gets older. She was 9 months old rolling on the carpet and playing with Elmo while we watched everything unfold on TV. 

Other news from this weekend is that my favorite Ferrari F1 driver Michael Schumacher is retiring after 15 years in the sport. He's still at the top of his game for the most part but sooner or later you've gotta go and I think he's making the right decision to leave while he is on top. I'd like to think that he'll win this years Championship (3 races to go in the season and he trails the #1 rival by only 2 points so it's all up for grabs now) and go out on top.

I also heard that an ex-Police buddy of mine who enlisted in the 101st Airborne and has since been medically discharged from the Army is now on the verge of becoming a full time police officer. Good job! He took the crazy route to being a cop by enlisting in the Army as an MP and went to Iraq twice getting wounded twice. Now that he's back in the US his Combat Veteran status certainly helped him to shoot up the ladder but he paid the price in more ways than one.