Looks like I may have lost a few posts and a few comments. Sorry about that.

I’ve linked to Daily Gun Pictures a few times, like this post. Then it was pointed out to me that the blog was just stealing content from other sites. Attribution is a good thing.

No data loss. If you’re seeing this, you’re here. If not, no point talking to you.

And thanks to Hosting Matters for their efficient response.

Looks like the drive on the server could tank. So, touch and go here. May lose some data.

Alt Weekly steals an image from Oleg Volk. Oleg is not amused.

* misspelling intentional.

That was the subject line of an email I got from rabbit with a link to this story. Who says blogging is formulaic?

A little birdie told me existing users can now invite folks to sign up.

Odd contraption. From a blog that’s new to me called Daily Gun Pictures.

Traction Control says go vote. I wonder why military and guns are in the same category?

At dentist.

My wife has an uncanny ability: any computer she touches will lose its internet connectivity. She won’t touch any settings. Just turns it on to check email or write something and our household internet connection goes poop. Sadly, I think there’s a gene that causes this and my son has it too.

My kids are into The Super Hero Squad. It’s entertaining. Yesterday’s episode featured a scene in which we discovered that all the super villains were planning their world domination on a social networking website called Maskbook, which looked just like Facebook. Funny.

Droid and how awesome it is. Here’s some helpful links:

Android forums is a handy resource. Particularly, this thread.

Specs and a round up of handy tips and tools.

A blog with tips

ShitMyDadSays (the only good thing I’ve ever seen from twitter) will be the basis for a TeeVee show. And it will suck, like most adaptations of things made for TeeVee.

Because you’ve not had enough yet.

And, while I have not heard any reports of people not being able to buy Droid phones, I’ve been unable to find any accessories for it that I want. The local Verizon store at the mall in Maryville had none. And the online store at Verizon appears to be out. So, I cannot find a carrying case or the docking station.

It doesn’t sync media players and your media has to be dragged and dropped from your PC via USB connection. Personally, I prefer that. I always hated itunes and windows media player sync applications. They duplicate things, take too long, and suck. So, not a complaint for me. But it may be for you.

At first, I didn’t dig the keyboard. But now that I’m used to it, I find it a bit more user-friendly than my crackberry. Keys are bigger and the shift/alt functions are a bit more intuitive.

Droid’s desktop (for lack of a better term) has three panels that you can scroll through. On the center (or main) panel, you can’t put shortcuts where it looks like the top row is. I can on the other two panels. I’d like to get four more apps on the main screen.

Another complaint I have is that the cable that came with it is too short.

Some folks may not like the fact that you really need a Google account to play with all the pretty things.

It looks like Verizon is about to make a mistake and charge a ridiculous fee for tethering your phone to your PC for internet connectivity.

Also, another review over at Knoxviews. The docking station looks pretty cool.

Update: Since someone asked about call quality, I’ll say it’s good. With the blackberry, my wife and others would complain that they couldn’t hear me when they called me at the office. My wife says she can hear me much better on this phone. Also, phone calls I receive are just fine.

You know, computer viruses are usually pretty nasty by tracking keys or deleting files. A new one can make you a felon by downloading child pornography to your computer.

A brief review. The phone is pretty much awesome. All sorts of free apps that work well. And it comes with a lot of gizmos. The voice activated search is pretty cool, though the kids aren’t that good at it since they tend to say ‘b’ instead of ‘v’.

The AK47 app is lots of fun and the kids like the bubble game.

Bar code scanner is nifty. Scan the bar code of anything and it will look up product reviews online.

I said earlier that I thought it had some sort of proprietary cable. I was wrong. It’s apparently the new micro USB and I had the older USB cables.

GMote is cool. Use your Droid to as a remote for your PC. Handy for watching netflix on the TeeVee and for operating media player.

Turn by turn directions are free. That is slick.

A few complaints:

There is a number in contacts that I did not put there. And I cannot delete it. Odd.

Keyboard was a bit difficult to get used to. I’d constantly hit two keys at once. Getting the hang of it.

I cannot uninstall some of the preloaded apps that I’ll likely never use.

The cool feature that it runs multiple apps at once has one drawback. It doesn’t really close a lot of them when you think you’ve exited. But there’s an app to close them called TasKiller.

Quite a few of it’s features rely on having a gmail account. I already had one so not a big deal.

Since I’ve played with it a lot, battery seems to drain pretty quickly.

I never owned an iPhone but I played with them a lot at the store. Always tempted to buy one but, at the end of the day, I just couldn’t switch to the horrible AT&T service. But in a day, I’ve decided I like the Droid better. If I’d owned an iPhone, that might not be the case.

Droid is an awesome gizmo.

Update: The manual leaves a lot to be desired and I haven’t found a help file yet.

I have one. It rules.

People seem to like it, reasoned or not:

The newspaper was investing time and resources generating stories, but these other sites, run mostly as a hobby, were linking to those stories and moving the conversation about the articles elsewhere.

“There was a point at which KnoxViews was really taking off,” McElroy says, “and it concerned me as I thought, ‘Is the nexus of community dialogue going to be shifting away from the News Sentinel to an Internet forum, and what does that mean for our future?’”

KnoxViews had—and continues to have—an openly progressive tilt, so to forfeit the lion’s share of community dialogue to a site driven by a particular set of political and social values could have marginalized a great many other community voices; or it may have run them into their own respective realms, creating echo chambers of like-minded people rather than a Darwinian common ground where the best ideas survive.

So when the Sentinel relaunched its site in 2007, it linked comments to usernames and allowed them for every article. The effect was palpable. Randy Neal, founder of KnoxViews, says he immediately noticed an exodus from his site to the News Sentinel’s; with the help of some contentious local issues, before long knoxnews.com was hosting nearly 50,000 comments a month. The crisis of irrelevance had been averted.

Interesting. A forum was a threat to the local news rag. The local news rag opens comments and that impacts the forum’s traffic. Of course, about two years ago, was also when Knoxviews decided that dissent would not be tolerated. I find that funny.

Ok, thanks to WordTwit, the twitter account is active again.

And I’ll say ignore it. And you’ll make smart ass comments.

Ok, this one works. Thanks to Mike for telling me about WordTwit.

Looks like I have the blog to twitter thing worked out. I’m using twitter tools now. Will let you know how it goes.

ETA: Doesn’t add links to the blog. That’s kinda worthless. So, no twitter-fu for you.

Commissioner Mike Walker has been blogging since Al Gore invented the internets.

In an update to this, Newscoma notes the irony since the press rarely links bloggers even though bloggers have been the source. True. I’ve seen stuff bloggers first wrote about appear in the press sans attribution plenty. But no one cried about it.

And Michael says:

Don’t you just love MSM growing pains?

1 – I’ve decided to upgrade the memory. What chip does the EeePC clamshell take?

2- Microsoft is pimping Windows 7 for netbooks. Anyone try this?

Internet is serious business.

Via ACK, comes some whining about linking and crediting and whatnot. Yes, a blog is complaining that someone dared to draw traffic to it.

BTW, sparky, shouldn’t your post there link to the offending piece? I know these hyperlink thingies are hard for the press sometimes but that seems a bit, err, inconsistent.

Update: Grantham tackles both the hyperlink and the though questions:

How long the breadcrumb trail has to be before you are ripping off other people’s content is a very good question. Kleinheider did the right thing, but the editor of the Nashville City Paper online probably didn’t.

Links and such are an interesting thing. For instance, this morning I was doing some blogiating* and realized I had over 34 tabs open in the browser. So, by the time I had commented on something, I’d forgotten where I read it. As such, I likely didn’t credit one of the members of the breadcrumb trail. And that happens all the time.

* I think I just invented a new word.

I know. I type faster than I proofread.

A look at black market guns. In a video game.

Bill Quick asks help in finding Clayton Cramer a job.

I guess the media is in trouble then:

And in case anyone’s curious, a link from SayUncle generates a LOT more hits than one from the Boston Globe.

Suddenly, my home internet connection will not go to certain sites. All computers and all browsers. I can’t, for example, access Post Politics. The connections time out. Been happening a couple days now. Any ideas?

Update: The internets have apparently unfucked themselves. So, it works now. I guess someone poked Al Gore with a stick.

The Internet’s. On this day, forty years ago, Al Gore created it. In other news, I’m younger than the internet.

GunPal: Like Paypal, only not run by douchebags.

Michael Silence notes:

The FBI has expanded its investigation of reported death threats against the attorneys for the alleged ringleader in the torture slayings of a Knox County couple.

The News Sentinel was served Monday with a federal grand jury subpoena for information related to a comment posted in September on its Web site, knoxnews.com.

On the advice of corporate counsel, the newspaper turned over the information late Monday to FBI Special Agent Gregg Harmon.

For a good cause, Project Valour-IT.

A comparison of anti-gun groups, bloggers, and the NRA on Twitter.

Except that, to some people, it is.

Newscoma notes a councilman used the word blogger as a slur. Well, to people in power, it probably is. After all, when they want a message out, they usually go to the press because they have a cushy relationship with the press. The press, after all, has to play nice if they wish to continue having access. Being a concerned citizen with an audience is threatening to those in power.

On the left, you’ll notice that more gun folks are advertising here. Outdoors Trader, that is.

Yesterday, I mentioned the SRWare Iron web browser. Looks like I’ll be hitting the Firefox again. It crashed twice today, one time even giving me the Blue Screen of Death and requiring a reboot. Also, while it is fast and slick, I like the options for tabs in Firefox better. I really hate that middle click won’t open a closed tab and that closing the last tab closes the whole browser.

to Joe!

Someone took Google Chrome and removed all the nonsense that allowed it to communicate with the mother ship and made a fine browser. SRWare Iron is pretty slick. If I find a decent download manager and a way to make it stop closing the application when I close the last tab, I may switch.

It’s fast. Real fast. And, unlike Firefox, the hotkeys in wordpress work.

From the brand new EeePC. So far, I am digging it.

Defense Review’s RSS feed, that is. Or they really are trying to sell me acai berries and gambling. Which they are not. David is aware of the situation. Careful out there.

Rich is hanging it up. He says:

My mistake has been thinking that liberalism,or more properly, progressivism, is an ideology, as is conservatism. That is, an idea, based on facts and reason, useful for describing te behavior of a society, and the best manner of organizing that society. It isn’t. It has more in common with religion than anything else, complete with hierarchy, a rigid orthodoxy, excommunication for dissenters,and an intolerance for questioning.

True. But substitute Republicanism for conservatism and you have the same thing.

A USB uzi

On Facebook, people hate Mondays, look forward to the weekend, their kids did something funny, they ate something, and like cats. Just so you know.

Also, it seems that I’ve had quite a few people attempt to befriend me. And I didn’t know who they were, so I hit the ignore button. And now it’s occurring to me that they’re bloggers and blog readers. I guess that’s the danger of using internet pseudonyms. Is there a way to un-ignore those requests so I can go back through them?

And if I ignored you, sorry about that. In social media, I assume there’s a high ratio of spam. But seems FB doesn’t have that problem.

Update: from comments, I apparently cannot un-ignore you. So, if you sent a request and did not hear back, re-send it. But let me know you’re a blog reader. Or you can send me an email at:

To tell me about it.

Michael notes our legislators received an award for openness even though they exempted themselves from open records laws.

A look at the FTC ruling and blogs. Meanwhile, Ann Althouse notes some issues with the ruling:

The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they’ve deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we’re supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined.

It’s not like they’ll be selective in enforcement, now is it.

It trust my life to a GLOCK. And my wife’s to a ParaUSA. International Cartridge Corporation makes kick ass ammo. Blackhawk makes the finest shirts I’ve ever owned and the excellent SERPA holsters. Crimson Trace makes the best laser sights on the market. I buy ammo from CheaperThanDirt and LuckyGunner.

The FTC can also kiss my ass.

Update: It does occur to me that I pretty much have made all those disclosures anyway because I want readers to know the relationship. Not because I care what the FTC says. So, I guess my civil disobedience isn’t all that hardcore.

Ben tells us about free sounds on the internet. Here’s some gun sounds.

Someone is taking his control of the internets and giving it to foreigners.

ACK asked “Is That Jason Powell In Blackface?”. When I saw it, I thought the oversensitive race warriors would react like they do. And they did. ACK apologizes.

The du Toits are set to return to the internets: The Kim and Connie Show.

I told you they’d be back. Everyone comes back.

Via Bob.

I don’t know who these guys are and am not affiliated with them. But I might need one of these shirts.

Over on the left, you’ll see an ad for Ultmak. Not only are they advertising here, but I endorse their products. I was happy with mine. More here and here.

Burglar leaves his Facebook page on victim’s computer

Someone clipped the wife’s car in a parking lot and took off her passenger side mirror. That’s her story, and she’s sticking to it.

Anyway, she called up Honda and said she needed a new mirror. They were happy to do so for $300. Instead, we ordered one for $30, paid $15 to ship it and I put it on myself in about 30 minutes. You really can Google up directions for almost anything.

Mr. C. reports GBR-IV Raises $8243.80 For Project Valour-IT

You’ll notice over there on the left that Cheaper Than Dirt is now advertising here at SayUncle. And you’ll notice on the right that Lucky Gunner Ammo is also advertising here. The reason I bring this up (in addition to sending a few more eyeballs to those helping me pay the bills) is that it’s good to see the gun industry folks utilizing blogs for advertising. After all, my readers tend to be the target market.

Photographic evidence that one should never fire both barrels of a 12 gauge unless one has to. And by ‘has to’, I mean in case you’re attacked by a polar bear or something. That bruise looks even worse today.

Steel Challenge videos

I met a hero this weekend

Several pictures, for you enjoyment.

Dirtcrashr on the steel challenge and dirty guns in the desert.

Gunbroker does $1B in sales.

Pics of a Brit with a gun. Yes, we had someone from where Great Britain used to be show up at our gun blogger event.

Some gun porn

Molly can shoot! Lots of guys were feeling bad for getting beat by a 13 year old girl.

Sebastian and Alan Gura have an Iphone light saber fight.

Not really accessed a PC in a few days. The old feed reader had 1,100 unread entries. I hit mark all as read. So, if I missed anything important, let me know.

Light posting today but some stuff to follow. All nighters on planes suck.

Getting closer. Blogging light today.

Hanging with Alan Gura. I’ll tell him you said ‘hi’.

In reno.

Or on the internet.

The latest Threeper v. Prag dust up that I wasn’t aware of is summarized by Joe.

Heading to Gun Blogger Rendezvous. Light blogging. All posts are pre-loaded. So, if you want to argue with me, I’m not here right now. Leave a message at the beep.

And, if all goes as planned, as you read this, I’ll be on a layover in the people’s republic of Chicago. Getting a dose of hope and change. And probably breakfast.

Don’t put pics/video of you doing illegal stuff on the internet.

Discussed last night on the radio. Breda rounds up some links. And Joe on what he should have said.

Tam hits 2M. Say, that referring url looks familiar.

Barack’s button to shut down the internet has been made public.

Yesterday, this blog turned 7. On bloggiversaries past, I’d run numbers. So, here are some:

21,231 Posts
80,428 Comments
3,567,333 Visits
6,385,322 Page views

At the Gun Blogger Rendezvous. You are going, right?

In the event of cybersecurity emergency, they want to shut down. From Tam, who notes:

the oft-derided USA-PATRIOT Act is still with us. I guess they only hate it during election season.

I’ve been on facebook for a week. Here’s what I have learned:

Everyone is having a bad day.

People hate Mondays.

But they like cats. Facebook is like a Garfield comic. No word on lasagna yet.

The sports franchise from your particular geographic region is superior to the sports franchise from my particular geographic region.

I am the only person on Earth who doesn’t play Mafia Wars.

Blog about the police, spend time in jail.

Michael:

Off-the-record sessions, such as the ones White House reporters have traditionally attended, are meant to shape the message, not to inform the public. So the next time someone decries the new media, point to the above cozy arrangement as an example of what is getting busted up.

Finally signed up for that. Lost an hour and a half. I told you so.

Chatting last night, Alan on blogging:

People don’t want to read. They want to click links.

True.

Busy now.

But here’s a story of an accidental discharge wherein one criminal shoots another.

Congrats to Guav and wife on the new arrival!

Forging bloggers usernames?

Such as whether or not the Watchmen character Rorschach is a sociopath?

I think so. He just happens to be a calculating sociopath with a cause.

Back later. Dentist.

Insty links to this. When I click on it, I get this message:

You have been Banned from viewing this Blog.
There are most likely two reasons for this.
1. You were abusive or a troll in the comments section
2. You are from a Forum that I do not want viewing my Blog
3. You are in the countries of Russia, Iran or People’s Republic of China

If you feel this was a mistake contact me at tpblogeditor at gmail dot com.
If you are from the Country of Russia, People’s Republic of China Tell your leaders to embrace true freedom and not political oppression and I might let you back in.
-Pat
Owner
Political Byline dot com

I’ve never been to that site before, I’m in the USofA, and I didn’t get there from a forum. I guess they don’t like traffic from Insty. Seems redirecting traffic from one of the higher traffic blogs is not beneficial for building a readership. And note that I wasn’t actually banned since I managed to get around it in about 0.5 seconds.

Update: Seems to be fixed now.

Apparently, what he meant was it applied to you:

The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.

A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a “compelling need.”

Good idea: using social networking tools to build a relationship with your boss.

Bad idea: using the same social networking tools to call him a pervvy wanker and complaining about the fact he expects you to do your job.

A bit back, I mentioned PayPal wouldn’t sell the raffle tickets for the ParaUSA GI Expert that was to benefit Project Valour.Well, Lucky Gunner has stepped up to to help sell the raffle tickets. Hats off to these guys. My next ammo purchase will be through them.

Via Kevin.

The SEC has new rules regarding cell phones and such at games. With blogs and twitter, they fear coverage of their games won’t be doled out to their liking. Seems to me as though the SEC could turn this into a business of selling twitter or blog coverage.

No real point. Just wanted to use the headline. Seems they’re undergoing a DOS attack.

Time is getting near for Gunblogger Rendezvous IV. Ridefast has a nice little round up of some of the sponsorships, people, and goodies that will be there.

Ben Garrett on the FTC’s pending nationalized media:

Interpretation: Five million bloggers exercising their First Amendment right isn’t a good thing for American democracy.

Mentioned the kerfuffle about Outdoor Wire and the blogosphere. Curt gives props to how Jim resolved the incident.

Tam seems, err, unimpressed.

Mentioned yesterday how the blogosphere was blamed for internet rumors even though no bloggers I know of had mentioned the rumor. Well, Steve reports a retraction:

Having heard from a couple of bloggers yesterday, I am going to plead guilty to an inexact application of the word “blogosphere”. Some of the very people I’ve characterized as the future of communications feel – justifiably – that I’ve tossed them under the proverbial bus recently.

That’s not the case. What I have done is use a term of art (blogosphere) as shorthand for all the myriad of internet communications. When I received nearly 100 emails and forwards of excerpts of a single report – and dozens of associated rumors- regarding Daniel Defense, I wrote that the “blogosphere was roiling”. A more accurate depiction would have been “rumors have been flying regarding Daniel Defense across the internet”. It was an unintentional shot at a group of individuals who I really do regard as integral parts of information distribution.

Hats off to Jim Shepherd for the correction.

Aunt B.:

And so, in the new tradition of newspaper folks, I immediately contacted the AP and asked them to sue him for using my joke to amuse his reader!

Actually, you should send him a bill.

We gun bloggers seem to take the blame for all sorts of gun industry rumors. Even though none of us that I know of even mentioned it. Not the first time Jim Shepherd tried to poo-poo blogs, either.

The annual gathering of a bunch of gun nuts is less than forty days away. There will be all sorts of goodies at the event and some people you may have heard of. I’ve been asked a few times in email if the event is open to readers. Yes, it is. Feel free to register and attend. Though any questions should be directed to Mr. Completely, who’s running the event. See you in September.

Stuff to do. Maybe later.