Nom de guerre: Rivrdog

Captcha is back

Sorry, the experiment of doing without Captcha (the little hidden number box you have to copy into another box to get your comment published) is finished. The spambots re-discovered my blog after less than a week, and I am getting them over a dozen at a time now. Typepad, my blogging engine, doesn't seem to be able to deal with them effectively at the server level anymore.

For those who don't realize it, spam is more than a nuisance. Spams carry a much higher level of viruses, trojans, etc than do ordinary emails, and I would hate to have someone click on a spam comment, follow a link in it and have their computer trashed. Not on MY watch, babe.

Captcha is re-installed. If anyone experiences a failure to post on a comment, just right-click the body of your message, choose "copy" go to your email engine and paste it into an email and send it to perspac@yahoo.com I will then publish it through my editing function. Don't forget to put in your horsepower (blogging name, email and website) if you want that published with it, as well as the post you want the comment attached to.

Gotta go, but all y'all have fun out there and try not to run down any neurosurgeons, I might be needing one soon and I want to have a good selection of them, heh.

Blogger's introspection

*******************************************************************************

LAST UPDATE: OK, I surrender! Any idea of hanging up my spurs is now shelved! You lurkers have me convinced! I apologize for thinking all of you were just after the Boobage. But that remembers me, I haven't published anything to Boobage in a while, have to remedy that little FUBAR.....

*******************************************************************************

UPDATE: 042308 2149 PDT: OK, I turned off Captcha....we'll see how much spam I get in comments. BTW, I'm IMPRESSED with the response so far...

*******************************************************************************

OK, soul-searching time.

I am asking myself who I am writing this blog for, and the answer comes back, myself. That's how it should be, since a journal is about recording what is happening around the journalist.

I get 700-800 reads on most days, but the vast majority of them are looking for the tit and ass in my "Boobs" section. I probably get 50-100 reads from people looking for my opinions and the facts I present along with them.

Even that's OK, because I get some feedback along with those reads.

Make that, USED TO get some feedback. I must have been asleep when a law was passed prohibiting commenting on Rivrdog posts, but the effect is there, my comments have fallen off to near zip.

I guess you could say that without the feedback of the comments, I have no way of knowing if I'm just whistling in the wind or how my opinions are received, and yes, I care how they are received.

So, I have decided to put myself and my blogging on probation for 30 days. If my writing brings an appropriate level of feedback, I'll continue, but if not, I'll announce a closing date, far enough in advance so that interested folks may peruse the blog and copy such items as they see fit, but at the end of THAT period, I will close my doors, ending this four-year experiment.

I have a typical writer's depression at having too little feedback. I had to give up on my novel because of legal (criminal) liability involved with the project as I was writing it (and I refuse to water it down with hyperbole so it wouldn't land me in jail as a terrorist), so I don't have that outlet for myself. I kept on with the blog, hoping to stimulate a few minds out there, but those minds are either gone or as stunted as mine.

If I close up shop, you haven't gotten rid of me. I will simply revert to reading blogs and commenting on them (which I find myself doing anyway, I'll just do more of it if my blog goes away). I might open a Facebook page also, but I'm going to take the money I save and treat myself to 40 extra miles of driving per month. See the country. Bucket list. All that.

Ach! Der Knoppix!

Ach! Der CD ist in haltsverzeichnis!

Translating, I'm test-driving Knoppix, a Linux-based OS that runs off a CD. There is no Windows running on this Windows machine.

I'm doing everything off the CD, which is acting in stead of my hard disk to run the OS from. Sound familiar? If you've been computing as long as I have, you will have done this before, back in the day of Win 3.0.

I like it, for the most part.

Need help with polls

I want to start writing polls and running them here on Rivrdog Blog.

Anyone out there have much experience with them?

Are there any that come without a baggage train of advertising?

What about scripts? Most savvy browsing folk don't allow scripts. Don't these polls use scripts to lock out repeat voters?

Questions, questions.

References, please.

Thank you.

Happy Fourth Blogiversary to me!

I started this blog on February 8, 2004. Lotsa water under the bridge since then, and the following totals:

• Page views: 1,056,587
• Posts: 1,971
• Comments: 2,921

We've had a productive partnership, you readers and I. I scribble the screed, and you cough up the hairballs comments. As you can see, I average about one and a half comments per post. IMHO, it's the half-comments that are fun for me to read.

I couldn't do this without some of my stalwart crew, who send me at least half the ideas and concepts I write about. I am especially indebted to:

• "The EllTee", one of my patrol Lieutenants from my Sheriff's Office days. He is is also retired USAF, having risen to be Superintendent of Small Arms (CATM) at the Portland Air National Guard Base. The EllTee does KNOW his firearms.
• "Mad Ern", one of the USMC vets who stood fast at Chosin Reservoir during the Korean War United Nations Police Action. He is also retired Sheriff's Office, and taught me much of what I know about the River.
• "The Major", a currently-serving Deputy Sheriff of corrections, and retired USAF Air Controller (Scope Dope)
• Many others, some retired Deputies, some retired Military, and many, many other Bloggers who inspire me daily.

The blog is definitely a team effort. If it wasn't, I suspect it wouldn't be worth reading, but I happen to think it IS worth reading, and as many as 4,000 people have read it in one day (and as few as a dozen).

The purpose of this blog has always been to inform. Sure, the "Boobage" posts inform you of little save graphical information on female anatomy, but it IS information! Sometimes, I just inform you of the way I feel, but when I do, I'm fairly sure that plenty of others are going to feel that way as well.

Blogs are the "town criers" of today. In ye olden tymes, the town crier would walk to strategic places in villages and shout out the headlines of the day, which posed questions for the townspeople, who then got those questions answered next time they went to the market square. Blogs serve this exact purpose. You browse up my blog, and it says, "Buy more Ammunition", and you browse the "market square" of the Internet and soon find out that the reason is because your new President is about to issue an Executive Order banning it's importation. With Town Criers (bloggers), you never have to worry about the King (government) catching you blind-sided.

Looking at the Future, there may (okay, okay, there WILL) come a time when the government requires changing by some other method than the ballot box, because the balloting process has become so corrupt that it drops itself out of the proper "box order" of business ("Mail Box, Soap Box, Ballot Box). When and if that happens, the Cartridge Box gets inserted into the "box order". You will read about THAT first in blogs, as well. At that time, each blog which passes that word will have made it's final post. I suspect that such a time will eventually come for this blog, but until then, I have only to reload my bits and bytes, not my bullets into bandoliers.

Thank you for your support.

A celebration's in order, so browse over to this auction, and note what serious money will get you in the way of fine firearms. Note it well, because under a Leftist/Socialist type of government (better than even chance of that, starting in a year), such auctions will be a thing of the past.

Blog biz - new links

Two new daily reads for me. On the blogroll they go, too.

First is Cogito Ergo Geek (Latin mottoe, translates to "I think, therefore I am a geek") and Shooting the Messengers, which Jerry the Geek referred to, and I totally agree with Jerry, it's a first-class read. BTW, Jerry, I DGAFF if he's on Blogspot, and isn't THAT "shooting the messenger". Heh!

Meme reply

A blogger I'd not read before, but one who occasionally reads my blog (and finds it annoying but provacative, which is just how I intend most of my rants to be), has tagged me with a meme. That blogger didn't originate the meme, this blogger (who I also have not read before) did. Both blogs are somewhat left of center, it would seem.

For brevity's sake I won't repeat the meme, since it is somewhat obtuse and overlong, but you can read it all here in FreeThinker blog or the previously-linked one. This is an interesting meme though, because it speaks to bloggers who write to stimulate thinking.

It is also a good example of spohistry, because even though this blogger who reads me and classifies me as an annoying pissant pretends to be intellectually stimulated by some of my writing, he admits that he is prejudiced in advance against the points of view I express.

This is an exact case of the warp in thinking which I rail about frequently in this blog: pretend critical analysis. Real critical analysis, of course, doesn't start out with any pre-conceived notion except for the requirement for logic and reason.

I have only the tag end of my life yet to live, so I will die knowing that those who pass for savants in my culture have lost the ability to think critically, use the scientific method correctly, and arrive at logical conclusions as a matter of course instead of only by accident, as happens now with most mainstream thought and writing.

Sic semper ignorati. Dung-beetles, all.

Crunching the blog-stats

According to the blog-stats, I should reach the million page-view mark on November 20, if my average of 725/day holds up.

Is there some sort of "millionaire's club" for bloggers? Like there used to be for realtors? (Nowadays, a million in real estate sales probably comes with your third home sale, on the average).

BTW, about the same time, at my present low rate of about 1.2 posts per day, I will reach the 2,000 post mark.

Very sobering. Each time I put up a post, an average of 500 people view it. If one out of ten actually gets the point of the post, that's fifty people a day educated. I'd better see the Teacher's Union about a card. I'm doing better than any public school around here....this is only a hobby....yeah, right.

2,000 posts. That's a lot of scratching out the screed.

My only wish is that this keyboard was an actual weapon, and I was actually scoring kills on the enemy hordes.

Who is my enemy, you ask?

Pick any one of several of the archived topics and read from the bottom to the top, and you'll know.....

Linkwhoring, Generally AND Specifically

This blog's policy is that no linkwhoring is done here. Trackbacks, which are a formalized version of linkwhoring, only provide a conduit for spammers, so they are turned off on this site.

This subject came up because of the strange strategy of Front Sight, Inc, the weapons training folk down in Nevada (no link, you notice, you can Google it).

Front Sight made a curious offer. If you gave them about 25-30 links, they would have sent you a certificate for one of their good, but overpriced training sessions.

They must not have enough bookings, but have staff which they can't let go, so this is the business plan they came up with to fill their class dates and boost their standing, a "reverse Google-bomb" of sorts.

Everybody I know (2 people) who have taken classes there were satisfied with the training, but it isn't cheap. First you have to get yourself to Vegas, and only those in the Southwest can conveniently drive there. Flying means shipping guns on the air-cattle cars, and Sec'y Chertoff won't like you if you do that, even though it's legal.

So, couple of thou for the class, maybe $500/800 for the air tickets, ammo, incidentals and you have shot the hell out of Three Large.

There's another way to do it. Several ways, actually. You could join your local police reserve, and get decent training for free. You could go to an equal quality but lesser-cost venue such as Oregon Firearms Academy, which puts on fine classes for around one tenth of Front Sight, or, if you were intent on spending the bucks, go to your local commercial firearms range and hire a qualified instructor to give you one-on-one training. My guess is that you won't pay much over $75/hr for the range tutoring, so you can get quite a bit of it for your money.

Of course, if you're a real range rat, and practically live at the Boom Saloon, you probably already know some range instructors and can cadge your lessons for free.

The best use of Three Large is to get some local training, and spend the rest on good firearms and ammo, or reloading gear.

This tempest in a teapot has consumed too much of our time.

No real offense to Dr. Piazza, but you sir, are a whore-master, and those gunbloggers who succumbed to that offer are link-whores.

I haven't gotten into it, but if you ask YOUR lawyer, said barrister will probably tell you that the best thing you can do with your blog is to keep it as a hobby, and not try to earn money from it. If you're a gun blogger, in the not-too-distant future, the gummint may be looking for an excuse to shut you down. What better way to get your good gunny advice off the Intarweb than by intimidating you over non-payment of business taxes for money you made off your blog?

I can see a day coming when offering gun advice will be pushed into the category of promoting violence, and perhaps even promoting rebellion. Of course, when that day comes, I will no longer be blogging because I won't have time out in the field, where I will be participating in the Second American Revolution, to do any blogging. I have a bright line that I am fairly well convinced that the government WILL cross, in their attempt to convert us to good unarmed Socialists. When I see a target backlit by that bright line, I'm off to war.

Still, it will help all of we prospective revolutionaries if we aren't in concentration camps when that line is crossed. One way is to stay below the radar and give no agency cause to plot a Ruby Ridge at your house.

Note on a revision

...in the post, "Don't read this post (Revised)" I made a couple of mistakes in one example I used in that post, so I corrected them and took the opportunity to insert a revision. Since the post is so heavily revised, please look at it again, and comment appropriately. Thank you.