If, while firing your handgun, it suddenly stops shooting and the trigger does not even click, you may have either a type 2 or a type 3 malfunction.

This is a short recording of my brother practicing the steps to clear a type 3 malfunction, during the 4-Day Defensive Handgun class at Front Sight Firearms Training Institute just outside Pahrump, Nevada.

I was helping Wendee fix up her blog’s theme, this evening, and decided it was time to explore a new look for my own blog. It’s been a couple of years since I last muddied the waters, so I figured tonight was as good a time as any.

The photograph at the top of the page is an old covered bridge that we found, one day, while we were exploring the area around Peninsula, Ohio, where we used to live. The countryside was so beautiful that we would frequently go on hikes through the woods, and this was one of those days.

I’m not sure the color palette is exactly the way I want it, yet, so don’t be surprised if it changes just a bit. If you have any suggestions, feel free to offer those as well!

I’ve attached a zip file, containing this theme, to this post so feel free to try it out on your own blog!

Image via Wikipedia

“Republic.

“I like the sound of the word. It means people can live free, talk free, go or come, buy or sell, be drunk or sober, however they choose.

“Some words give you a feeling. Republic is one of those words that makes me tight in the throat. The same tightness a man gets when his baby takes a first step, or his first baby shaves, and makes his first sound like a man.

“Some words can give you a feeling that make your heart warm. Republic is one of those words.”

—John Wayne, as Davy Crockett in The Alamo.

Image via Wikipedia

Once you’ve recognized the importance of encrypting your Internet communications, the next step, of course, is to figure out how you plan to do this.

As with anything you intend to incorporate into your daily lifestyle, it’s important that you make a few key decisions up front, before you’re too committed to a particular approach. It’s also quite important that you find a relatively painless way to implement your plan: if it takes too much manual work, you’re not likely to do it all the time.

You Can’t Do It Alone

Encryption is about communication, and communication implies at least two parties. Whichever approach you settle upon for your day-to-day encryption, you will have to consider those with whom you will be communicating the most. This means you’ll want to select a technology that most of your friends and family will have readily available to them, as well. For example, if you wish to communicate with me, you will want to select an OpenPGP compatible solution, as I primarily use PGP Desktop Home for my regular correspondence.

X.509 Certificates

The easiest solution, though also the most expensive, is to purchase a client certificate from a trusted certificate authority, and install it into your favorite email client. There are a handful of certificate authorities which issue free certificates (albeit with no personally identifying information), but most of these are untrusted by the major operating systems. I’m aware of only one free certificate that is trusted by all the major operating systems, www.startssl.com.

As a software developer, I have used digital certificates in quite a few of my corporate software solutions, but I prefer to avoid the hassle and expense of paying for my certificates every year, for my personal use.

OpenPGP Keys

Back in 1991, Phil Zimmermann created the first “Pretty Good Privacy” (PGP) program, to enable political activists to secure their online communications. He released the source code into the public domain, because he felt that encryption technology was something that average people should have access to, not just corporate and government developers.

This is the approach I have settled on, for my own personal correspondence. While the technology is often a little bit more finicky to get working, because it’s mostly open source software, it’s the most popular protocol amongst non-governmental types, and there are quite a few innovative solutions based on it (such as encrypting instant messaging conversations and VOIP telephone calls).

My Current Implementation

At the moment, I am using Microsoft Outlook 2010 Beta 2, as my primary email client, and PGP Desktop Home v9.10.

I won’t go through a step-by-step installation guide, as whatever software you select will already have such. In my case, PGP Desktop was an ideal solution because, though it cost me $99 to purchase a license, it uses a client-agnostic proxy that filters my incoming and outgoing email traffic. It also intercepts AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) traffic and encrypts it, as well!

If you are using Outlook 2003 or 2007, there is an open source plugin called GpgOl that is available, as part of an overall Windows-oriented package of GPG (open source version of PGP) tools called Gpg4Win. As of today, I have been unable to get GpgOl to work in Outlook 2010, though I’ve seen a few comments on the support forum by folks who claim to have made it work. I’m thinking, maybe, they had it installed before they upgraded Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010.

While I was investigating software implementations of PGP for Windows, I also came across a product called cGeep that looked very promising. It also uses the Outlook plugin approach, though, so I decided to go ahead and pay a little more to get PGP’s proxy, so I could know it will work with the cutting edge, beta software that I often run.

What Are You Waiting For?

If you value your privacy and individual liberties at all, I strongly encourage you to invest an hour or two setting up an encryption system on your computer. If you need any technical assistance, I can’t promise to be an expert, but I’d be happy to assist however I can.

Image via Wikipedia

When you were a child, you may have had a “secret language” that you used with your friends, to protect your conversations from your pesky younger sibling. Of course, as soon as you began to use your secret language, guess what! Your sibling knew that your conversation was interesting and he or she wanted to know what you were saying all the more!

Most people have the opinion that encryption is one of those features that you only need once in a while. For example, after the PATRIOT Act was passed, NPR did a story about how people were increasingly concerned about government eavesdropping on their communications. Yet, when they interviewed the manager of the team, at Microsoft, responsible for Outlook’s encryption features, he said:

If I’m sending mail to my wife about what time to pick up my son at soccer practice, for example, it’s not really something that needs to be encrypted; it’s not a particularly, you know, important secret.

William Kennedy, Manager of Product Development Team for Microsoft Outlook
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5227744

Of course, it’s reasonable to consider such a message unimportant to encrypt. But, when Mr. Kennedy decides to encrypt only the emails which contain his social security number, or confidential passwords for Microsoft internal servers, guess which emails are going to be collected and targeted for cracking by eavesdroppers?

The mere fact that you encrypt only “important” messages is like advertising which messages are “important.”

For more reading on the importance of using encryption, check out the links on this page: http://www.diigo.com/user/kenlefeb/Encryption.

I want to be a kid again…

I hereby officially declare that I don’t want to be a grown up anymore.

I’m tired of deadlines and bills due by the 1st of the month.

I’m tired of Insurance premiums and cut off notices.

I’m tired of working from sun up to sun down and have so much of my pay go to taxes and people that will not work.

I’m tired of traffic jams and idiot drivers.

I’m tired of crooked politicians and having to read the fine print.

I’m tired of car repairs and dripping faucets.

I’m tired of watching good people that fail to think for themselves, fall victim to slanted news and biased journalism.

I’m tired of rolling out of bed when I really, really, really don’t want to.

I want to look forward to Saturday morning cartoons like the Bugs Bunny and Road Runner Show on a black & white TV. It was actually fun to go outside and turn the antenna on the side of the house so that I could pick up that out-of-town CBS signal.

I want to crawl under the house with my Tonka trucks and play in the dirt, dig holes and play the doodle bug game with the sand bugs.

I want to climb trees and ride my bike until my legs give out.

I want to help He-Man defeat Skeletor.

I want to impress pretty girls on my skateboard again.

I want to go roller skating on Saturday nights in my parachute pants and feel cool.

I want to spend everyday in the woods with my friends building a super cool club house.

But you know what?

Tonight I’ll fall asleep after watching the news about how our country is going down the drain and our freedom is decaying by the day.

Tomorrow morning the alarm clock will sound and I’ll groan as I roll out despite my desire to stay in it.

I’ll climb in my truck and fight the traffic on my way to work, where I’ll put in at least 8 more hours of labor to support those that choose not to.

I’ve had a bad day…

Ok, I’m done…

This reminds me of one of my favorite lesser-known movies, The Adventures of the Wilderness Family. Particularly, the opening scene where Robert Logan is sitting in Los Angeles rush hour traffic, and suddenly realizes that he’s just sick and tired of the rat race.

He actually does something about it, like we all often wish we could, and this movie tells the story of his family.

NOTE: I’ll warn you that this movie is quite poorly produced… my kids would be bored before the opening credits finished rolling, but the story it tells is empowering to those of us who share UGA’s sentiments in the post I quoted above.

Her original due date was November 23rd, but we were expecting her to arrive a couple of weeks early, as both of our sons were. On Monday morning, we had a regularly scheduled doctor’s appointment, where they ran some tests to monitor Wendee’s gestational hypertension. Apparently, they were alarmed at the results, as we were told to check into the hospital for seven days of tests and monitored bed rest!

When we arrived at the hospital, the doctors on call reviewed Wendee’s test results and decided it was an overreaction to keep her in the hospital for a full week, but went ahead an admitted her for a 24-hour stay, just to keep an eye on her and make sure everything was alright.

After the excitement of the day, we were both having a little difficulty getting to sleep. Well, “a little difficulty” is an understatement for Wendee, whose hypertension was aggravating a pre-existing sinus condition and resulted in a splitting headache that just wouldn’t go away.

At around 12:30 in the morning, Wendee sat up and exclaimed that her water had just broken, so we called the nurse and abandoned all hope of getting a good night’s sleep. After consulting the primary obstetrician, the doctors decided to schedule a Caesarean section at 6:30 in the morning. When asked for some pain medication, to help her get to sleep, Wendee was told by the nurse that she’d have to wait until the anesthesiologist had come to talk with her, but was assured that he was “on his way.”

Well, at around 6:00, with no relief for her pain, the anesthesiologist finally arrived, but it was too close to the operation to give her any medication. The flow of nurses and doctors began to increase, as everyone was preparing for the upcoming surgery.

At about 6:45, we all wheeled into the operating room for the birth.

The team got to business right away, but I was a little disappointed that this hospital wouldn’t let me actually watch the operation, like I did at Holy Spirit Hospital in Camp Hill, Pennsylvania (for Joshua’s birth). They required me to stay on the head side of the little blue curtain they’d raised to prevent Wendee from seeing her own abdomen opened up. I recall finding the experience with Joshua to be very educational for me.

While we were waiting for Sophie to arrive, the nurse assistants were standing next to Wendee and myself, and they were just carrying on with all kinds of small talk, just like you see on those silly soap opera-esque hospital shows like Grey’s Anatomy.

Finally, we heard Sophie crying, and I jumped up to take a few pictures of her! Here’s the very first photograph of the most important woman of the 21st Century!

Needless to say, we are all very happy to finally have Sophie in our family! Both of the boys are very excited about having a new sister, but Joshua is particularly thrilled that he is now a Big Brother! Many times, throughout the day, he exclaimed, “I am both a little brother and a big brother!” Or, he’d say, “I’m going to be a good big brother for Sophie!”

Image via Wikipedia

A T.R. Reid recently published an article in The Washington Post, wherein he attempts to defend Obama’s universal health care program against the five most common criticism.

It’s really just a reiteration of the same old talking points that keep scrolling over and over on Obama’s teleprompter, but I did a quick, off the top of my head, review of the article in the attached PDF file.

I was driving on the freeway the other day, following closely behind a black Mercedes Benz. In the lane to our left, next to the Mercedes was a maroon Buick. Apparently without looking, the Buick began to merge over. The driver in the Mercedes didn’t start waving his arms- he didn’t start honking- and he didn’t unnecessarily slam into the Buick.

He simply reacted perfectly- I saw him look to his right, and he merged onto the shoulder at the same speed as the Buick was merging into him, all the while gently tapping on his brakes to let me know that he was slowing down. I gave him plenty of room, and once the Buick was completely in his lane, he merged back on, in front of me.

While some people might fall into a panicked series of swerves of corrections, this driver handled a bad situation perfectly- I don’t think we even lost 10mph.
My point is this- THIS is the essence of the Armed Citizen. We don’t take things personally, we just see what needs to be done… and we do it. The driver in the black Mercedes could have retaliated. He could have been offended that this guy would merge without looking- but he knew that getting upset wouldn’t help him avoid an accident.

“The Armed American Report,” August 17, 2009, by Tim Schmidt