Sarah Palin’s new assault rifle
I wrote about it here, but the NRA is giving the governor a beautiful custom built .50 AR-15 style assault rifle in honor of her defense of the second amendment. Whether you like guns or not, the workmanship on this one is pretty spectacular.
Don’t miss anything, subscribe!
Shooting an AR15
This weekend I had a good time shooting my friend’s AR15 out the Nevada desert. All told we put 470 round through it over the course of a couple hours. The video below wasn’t my best shooting, but both us did manage to hit the pins every time it was our turn to shoot.
Not too shabby considering I was standing, unsupported shooting through iron sights with a slight wind.
Don’t miss anything, subscribe!
More Americans think global warming is natural
Despite the best efforts of Al Gore and his legion of leftist alarmists, most Americans believe that global warming is a natural thing.
According to Rasmussen reports, only one out of three voters believe global warming is caused by human activity.
The rest of the story is here.
Don’t miss anything, subscribe!
My new XD 45
A few weekends ago I wrote about going shooting with a friend and his new Springfield XD 45. It had been a long time since I had shot a gun and I enjoyed it thoroughly.
Well, I had so much fun that my wife and I went shooting. She brought her .22 Magnum revolver that she got from her brother and we also rented a Glock 17 (9mm). We had a good time and I was hooked. I wanted my own handgun.
I did some research and it seemed like the XD was the hot thing out there now. I enjoyed the Glock, but I liked the XD just a bit more. It also came with more for the money, and I told my wife I wanted one.
So she ended up getting me one for my birthday, along with a UpLULA speed loader, a couple of extra magazines and cleaning kit. It wasn’t easy finding one as they sell out pretty quickly, but find one we did.
XD 45 with UpLULA loaders and cleaning kit
First 100 Rounds
Today I got to shoot it for the first time and I put two boxes of round through it. I am very pleased to say the least. The picture below shows about 4 mags worth of rounds. With the exception of a few stragglers most are in pretty a good group. If my math is correct, I put 73% in a 5″ grouping. All of these were at 10 yards.
First 100 rounds with XD 45
For a little fun I put a couple mags into some head shots. Only one miss. Again at 10 yards.
2 mags into the heads
I then hooked up a smaller target, put it at ten yards and shot about a mag and half (the rest of my .45 rounds). I was a bit off on that one and wasn’t too pleased. Maybe it was a little fatigue, who knows. I also shot my wife’s .22 for a little variety. It is quite accurate and I managed a couple of 2″ groups with it at 7 yards.
All around, I am very happy with the gun and my shooting. I plan on going at least twice a month and working on those groupings.
Don’t miss anything, subscribe!
Upgrading to Grails 1.1
I spent about a day’s worth of work upgrading PatriotRoom.com from Grails 1.0.4 to Grails 1.1.
There were two areas that I had trouble with. The first was the plugins and was the easiest to overcome. I just had to reinstall them. The second however was logging which was completely revamped in Grails 1.1.
Personally I always had mixed results with logging settings in different environments. Turns out this site was the worst. However I like the new approach although it took the longest to get right. Some of it is because the documentation is a bit light in the area, especially with regards to custom appenders. I use two appenders, a daily rolling appender and an email appender for errors.
My file appender now looks like this:
appenders {
console name:'stdout', layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{ISO8601} [%p] -%X{user} %X{ip} # %X{sessionid} - %c{2} - %m%n')
appender new org.apache.log4j.DailyRollingFileAppender(name:'rollingfile', datePattern:"'.'yyyy-MM-dd",layout:pattern(conversionPattern: '%d{ISO8601} [%p] -%X{user} %X{ip} # %X{sessionid} - %c{2} - %m%n'), file:'../logs/patriotroom.log');
}
I still haven’t gotten the email appender working yet though.
Besides that, I also had to turn off the nice warning about the createLinkTo tag being deprecated. Guess I should fix those 
The best part of the upgrade though is the –nojars build option. This is a real timesaver. My war file went from 25mb down to 6mb, which means my upload times went from just over 2 minutes down to 18 seconds. Now that is nice!
Don’t miss anything, subscribe!