Happy birthday to my buddy Porter, who is six today.

Luckily, this was a pretty uneventful year for my little guy. There was a little “snowdog” action during the snow storm, but he didn’t seem to mind that I had to shovel it all.

Porter’s weight is still down, and Sedagive? took him for a few walks before the weather got too hot. He’s made a lot of new friends this year, and he’s been happy to have more people to cuddle with on the couch.

If you’re thinking about getting a four-legged pal of your own, please consider adopting instead of buying one. Porter was adopted from Homeward Trails, and there are many great adoption agencies all over the country. Please consider rescuing a pup and giving them a forever home.

Happy birthday, Porter!

I am going to state up front that I’m biased about the point of this article. I’m a commuter. I see my motorcycle as a replacement for a car and my FJR 1300A is my primary transportation.

That being said, I know that a lot of people motorcycle for enjoyment, and a very very dedicated few motorcycle for the skill involved in order to do so well. I definitely appreciate the mastery perspective, which is one of the reasons I decided to write this piece.

Motorcycling as a pursuit, as a culture, can often be divided into halves. Cruisers vs sportbikes. No- or low-gear wearing squids vs ATGATT (all the gear, all the time) power rangers. US-made bikes vs foreign-made bikes. V-twin vs inline 4s.

There are varying degrees all along the spectrum, of course. There are a growing number of riders here who are “half the gear, all the time” for example, and wear a helmet, gloves, a jacket … and shorts. Or whatever. You get the idea.

One area that has really purchased a lot of my “riding meditation” time lately is racers vs commuters.

I belong to a message board, and right now it is pretty dominated by guys who like going fast and riding very precisely. They aren’t hooligans or squids. These guys have taken multiple riding courses, and have read many books / watched many DVDs on race-style riding. They have full protective gear and have been riding for years.

Yes, they are interested in going fast. They are also interested in the techniques of riding, both at high speeds and at very low speeds. They study

• trail braking
• up and down shifting to maximize power and speed
• how to establish a good line during a turn
• body positioning, including getting their ass off of the seat at the right time and dragging a knee
• making tighter and tighter U-turns at low speed without putting their feet down

I respect their desire to get better, and I also appreciate the pursuit of the perfect technique. But I am not this type of rider.

I’m a commuter, and instead I focus on the skills and techniques of riding safely in traffic. For example, I study the art and technique of changing lanes at speed on a highway filled bumper-to-bumper during rush hour. I am completely disinterested in knee dragging on the street, because the world is not a professionally maintained track. There might be something in an upcoming turn that I can’t see, and if I am fully committed to a line and leaned over to the utmost there is no room or time for a correction.

I try to improve my technique at these sorts of things:

• Anticipating the driving behavior of other motorists
• How to avoid cars that pull out in front of me at intersections
• Riding in the rain or other sub-optimal conditions
• Keeping from being rear-ended at a stop light
• Staying physically and mentally relaxed so I can ride longer distances during a single day

and many more — none of which are particularly sexy but all of which help to keep me commuting on a motorcycle as safely as possible.

There is some bleed-over of these skills and desires. Yes, going fast is fun. Yes, racer-motivated motorcyclists want to avoid being run over. Learning to brake hard, or to brake as much as possible in a turning situation, are skills that both types of motorcyclists would learn. My contention is that we’d learn them for different reasons.

Racer-motivated riders will learn to “trail brake,” or to lightly use the brake during a turn, in order to bleed off slight amounts of unwanted speed, settle the suspension, and set the bike up for a faster exit. Commuting-motivated riders will learn to trail brake in case they need to slow down on an off-ramp due to an accident or an obstruction in the road.

Learning to lean the bike over to encourage better turning is vital to both types of riders; however race-riders may push the lean envelope more.

Throttle control to a commuter means being able to navigate through stop-and-go traffic without putting one’s feet down too much. To a racer, throttle control means putting as much power to the ground as possible without lifting the front wheel up. Same techniques, different desires, different applications.

I am not saying racing-motivated riders ride unsafely; what I am thinking is that there’s one sub-set of motorcyclists who are driven to increase their skills. Of that sub-set, there are two sides to that same coin: people who want to learn the techniques of riding as fast as possible, and those who want to learn the techniques of riding as safely as possible on the street.

I used to play games with my father when I was younger, particularly after my parents divorced and I stayed with him on the farm. We’d play chess or cards most nights, along with any number of board games like Stratego, Pente, or Battleship. Once every two weeks we’d have a “guys night.” We’d start with burgers and an ice cream sundae, and finish up at the video game arcade. My father would buy $5 worth of tokens — about the equivalent to my entire week’s pay for doing chores around the house and on the farm — and we’d play until our faces were sore with laughing and the faux gold coins were all gone.

One of the best things about having a young man in the house is being able to play more games. Sedagive? and I played games every night before he arrived, but it’s always nice to have one more player on hand.

The hands on the clock have gone around a fair bit, and now I’m the adult observing how a young man plays games. I think the biggest thing that I have learned is that young people like to play. That sounds obvious, but at some point people stop playing the game and start playing to win. I guess this depends on the age and temperament of the person, and how they view competition. There’s an entire study of player types in the gaming world, but this goes beyond that.

I notice that he doesn’t care much for every intimate detail about the rules. Going over all of that crap means more time before playing. My friends won’t start a game without reading the rules at least twice, and pre-emptively arguing about how the rules are written and what they mean. Younger players just want to play as soon as possible. Older players want to make sure they don’t make any mistakes at the beginning of the game that may cause them to lose.

I’ll tell you — it’s a lot more fun when you just play the game instead of trying to game the gamers.

As such, we’ve had a blast playing games like Micro Mutants or Zombie Fluxx.While we haven’t gone to any arcades, it’s been great playing StarCraft II and Castle Crashers with him.

More importantly, it’s been fun for me to just play. We play StarCraft II co-op against the computer, and I get a chance to play around with units and build orders that I would never consider in my 1v1 competitive play online. We’ve restarted characters many times in Castle Crashers because we’re curious what would happen if we gave the fire knight an Alien Hominid lance or if the ice knight uses a big ass meat tenderizer.

I may not be back in Aladdin’s Castle playing Xenophobia or Galaga with my dad, but I am still appreciating the gift he gave me when I was younger. Thanks, Dad.

My “middle” dog Rosie turned five years old today. I can’t believe that so much time has passed. I adopted Rosie when I first moved back to Virginia. A lot of things have happened, and a lot of things have changed. There are some things that stayed the same, too — like Rosie wiggling in between all the other dogs to get a “first pet,” and rolling onto her back excitedly and thrusting her legs in the air before screaming “TOUCHDOWN!”

Happy birthday, little one. I’ll always remember you as a spotted potato pup in my hand.

I knew the car was going to be trouble as soon as I spotted it. I could see the left rear passenger window was covered by a sales sticker as the Toyota sedan sped up the highway on-ramp.

Great, I thought to myself, someone taking a test drive during rush hour.

The Toyota merged onto the lane next to me. I could see the driver chatting with the passenger, waving his right hand excitedly. The car was rapidly approaching the car in front of it, and I knew the Toyota driver wasn’t paying any attention.

I started doing all of the things I’ve written about before: I moved over to the left side of my lane, I put my finger on the horn, and I turned my head so that I could watch traffic in front of me as well as the Toyota to my side. I put the Spring Hypothesis to the test. Sure enough, the car started to come into my lane without signaling as soon as the driver perceived the car in front of him.

Beep-beep-beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!! my horn sounded. The car jerked right and swerved back into its original lane.

I kept my speed and moved ahead in traffic. I looked in my side mirror just in time to see the Toyota cut off an SUV behind me. The SUV flashed its lights and I heard another horn go off.

Even though I identified a source of danger, anticipated a dangerous situation, and reacted appropriately, I wasn’t out of the woods yet. Now I had to deal with my mind and body’s reaction to what happened.

Here’s how to deal with the emotional and physiological issues that come from surviving a near miss.
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About two months ago I had the opportunity to take the Utah non-resident permit concealed carry course offered by Proactive Shooters. Proactive Shooters is a personal safety and training company based out of Richmond, Virginia. James Reynolds, the founder of Proactive Shooters, is a retired law enforcement officer with twelve years of experience in New Jersey and Virginia.

When most kids were buying a case of beer on their 21st birthday, I had my butt in a concealed carry class in Richmond. Fast forward more than a few years later, and here I was in Mr. Reynolds’s class. Why would someone with a valid Virginia permit want one from Utah?

The reason is the tangled web of interstate permit reciprocity.
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The first StarCraft computer game was released by Blizzard Entertainment in 1998. StarCraft was a real time strategy game, wherein players controlled troops and buildings from an isometric “god-like” perspective. Units and buildings were purchased from resources mined by workers. In the multi-player modes, every player started out with one home base and a few workers. How the game progressed from that point was up to the different strategies of the players.

The object of the game was to eliminate your enemies’s forces. Multiplayer games could range from one human player vs one computer player to up to eight players duking it out. You could play in teams, in a giant free for all, or set up teams and switch in the middle of the game to screw over one of your pals at random.

There were three main races to choose from, which was an innovation at the time. Most RTS games offered two sides; StarCraft offered a rock-paper-scissors approach that demanded different tactics depending on what race you were facing. Players could choose from the zerg, which were a hive-mind alien species that used cheap soldiers to swarm their enemies; the protoss, a high-tech and highly-evolved alien species that featured expensive, high-quality soldiers; or the terrans, humans-in-space that were stuck right in the middle of the quality vs quantity spectrum. These core differences plus the flexibility of unit selection and army composition added a variety to the game that allowed it to survive way beyond its expected prime.

The game became a major success, particularly in South Korea, where it became a professional sport with paid championships. While I never got close to that level of skill, I played StarCraft for about four straight years. I would reinstall the game every year or two and play for a few months. It was a great break from the massive multiplayer online role playing games that ate up a lot of my time back then.

Rumors of a sequel took off in 2002 when Blizzard released WarCraft III: Reign of Chaos. There was a secret demo mode wherein players could control units from StarCraft as rendered by the WarCraft III game engine. Talk flew about StarCraft II being released. Little did we know we’d have to wait another eight years after WarCraft III for a true StarCraft sequel.

It was worth the wait.
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I really like my HTC Incredible mobile device. It runs (for now) the Android 2.1 operating system, and I really like a lot of the hardware and software features on my phone.

One of the things I missed the most about my old HTC Touch (Windows 6.1) was Spb Software’s “Spb Phone Suite” that let me set my ring tones and notification sounds to different things depending on the time of day (my review) .

I transitioned to a nice phone in between the HTC Touch and the HTC Incredible, but being a “dumb phone” I didn’t have the option to change my settings automatically. I really missed the time-based switching of Spb Phone Suite, and I also missed the ability to whitelist certain callers, who would ring through no matter what time of day.

Setting Profiles, a program made by Probeez, handles the profile switching that Spb Phone Suite did, except it adds a really useful twist: it adjusts the profiles by a multitude of criteria, including my location — all automatically.
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While a lot of the people I knew got drunk when they turned 21, I bought my first hand gun and applied for a concealed carry permit. I still have that Glock 27, but as the years have passed I have acquired a few more pistols. Some I loved, some I hated, and some I wanted to love but wound up hating anyway.

I liked the simple operation of the Glock, and its basic design. Disassembly and reassembly were easy, and my 27 has been super reliable. I have probably put 8000 rounds through it without a single issue.

However, it was hard for me to shoot. I have a few ergonomic issues with the grip. The most important one is that the frame rubs on the top joint of my thumb, and after about 200 rounds it wears through my skin. I also found the recoil of the .40 S&W cartridge to be a bit too much for me to shoot at a faster speed.

Fast forward to last year. I acquired a Rock Island Arms 1911 Government pistol and fell in love. I became very accurate with the pistol, partly because the ergonomics of the 1911 were better for my particular hand, and partly because the metal frame and slide absorbed a lot of the recoil from the .45ACP the RIA belched towards my targets.

There were two problems, though: the Government was quite large and heavy in comparison to my other CCW pistols, and the magazine capacity was much lower than I’d desired. Sure, you can carry extra magazines but that adds weight and reloading under pressure could be an issue for some.

I purchased a 1911 Rock Island Arms Officer’s model a few months later, but after about a 1000 rounds the handgun suffered a catastrophic magazine latch failure that scared me off from using it as an every day carry (EDC) piece.

I wanted something that had the dependability and ease of maintenance like a Glock, but the ergonomics of a 1911. I started doing some research. If a Glock 27 and a 1911 met up at a block party and made passionate love, their baby would be the Springfield Armory XD45 Compact. Would the polymer-framed handgun be the answer I was looking for?

Sort of.
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Normally when I review something I love it or hate it. I can recommend it, or not recommend it. There might be things that I like about a product I dislike, or things that I wish were different about products I otherwise care for.

So when something like Bump Patrol’s aftershave anti-razor shaving product comes along, I don’t know what to do. I am so neutral on the product that I think I may have trained myself out of needing Bump Patrol’s offerings.
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