Happy New Year to all!!

Gary and I will try to stay up until 10 pm tonight

Javelina!

Javelina, a.k.a. peccary, often visit our property at night. They make my dogs go nuts, but the javelina have figured out that the dogs are inside or on the other side of a fence. So they ignore the barking. We have not been successful in photographing these guests until now. Locally, javelina are called pigs.

Photo by Gary Gromer.

IDPA Carbine

“There’s no such thing as an IDPA Carbine. IDPA is a pistol match”

Yes, of course.

IDPA Carbine is something I made up. I was having lunch with some YRL shooters, talking about ideas for the IDPA matches. One person suggested adding carbine stages. After thinking through it, we decided to have a side match that works just like a BUG match, but with carbines. Everyone is in the same class and division. We use IDPA rules – all shots from cover or on the move, 10 rounds in the mags, etc., but we don’t shoot from concealment Don’t laugh, one can conceal a carbine – in one of those Coleman folding chair bags. Remove the mag to keep it from printing. I know someone who did this with an ak-47 and walked around a city park, no one gave him a second glance. We use only paper targets.

I modified my web scoring application, ActionShootingScores.com, to make it easy to score these.

We increased the funds raised by our IDPA matches by adding carbines.

IDPA purists may be taked aback, but I like the idea.

IDPA Katrina stages

Michael Bane writes in http://michaelbane.blogspot.com/2006/12/eating-yummy-crow-for-new-year.html    “The speed reload is still the primary tool, but practice the tactical reload under time pressure (and Powers-That-Be in IDPA, you might give some thought to including Katrina stages!).”

Giving a real world example of the need for a fast tactical reload the Katrina aftermath. “standing in four feet of slimy toxic mud mixed with raw sewage and the occasional dead dog…let’s say you need to reload really really badly…” Yeah, I would not want to have to fish around for a partially empty mag in that you-know-what.

But what constitutes a Katina stage? My range committee would designate me as a target if  I emptied the port-a-potties in one of the bays. Only kidding!!

Server problems at PlanetArgon

PlanetArgon’s ion server, the one that hosts ActionShootingScores.com, crashed and burned 12/27. I’m told it will be down most of Thursday 12/28. This is really bad, I am rather dissatisfied with them over it. I’m going to do the wait-and-see thing I guess. Maybe it’s time to move to a different hosting company?

I have backups of the application files and a recent database snapshot on other computers, of course.