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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Every once in awhile I buy a weird doo-dad that I don’t otherwise need. I never know if the widget is going to be awesome or a total piece of garbage, but either way it will make for a good Gibberish entry.

The Squeezeit! is a classic example of a random purchase that turned out to be pretty damn good.
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We drink a lot of coffee at Gibberish. My coffee must be hot, ideally just right below the “omg this burned my mouth” hot. Coffee becomes bitter as it cools, so I want my Joe as hot as possible.

I had been using my caffeine molecule stainless steel mug from Think Geek before a visitor “borrowed” it and put spicy, flavored tea in it. This wrecked the mug, as the lid was tainted by the spice flavor despite repeated washings.

We started searching for a replacement, and Sedagive? returned with the Thermos King. Boy did it live up to its name.
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True confessions, Gibberish-style:

I love organizational gadgets.

I like containers, drawer spacers, crazy ass universal knife blocks, can racks, magnetic spice holder doo-dads and stackable bins. I love all that stuff.

So it wasn’t much of a surprise to me that I really liked the idea of the Rubbermaid 1H42 pan organizer. What was a surprise was how effective it was, for so little scratch.
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I love flashlights. Like pocket knives, they are a tool that when you need it, you really need it. I used to carry around a “Mini” MagLite and the MagLite Solitaire but those were too big for pockets and I hated wearing a flashlight on my belt. Fast forward several years and I started buying LED flashlights for the house. They were still too big for my tastes until I stumbled upon the 9-LED flashlight from Harbor Freight Tools (see my review).

Even with such a small design, I sometimes forgot the flashlight or left it at home. I was walking through Harbor Freight not too long ago and found a single LED keychain flashlight for $0.99. I had avoided these before because they always seemed too underpowered to be of much use. However, I figured for a buck it was worth it. Cheap Gibberish entry, at least.

Then I found TEN similiar LED keychain lights on Meritline.com for $5.99 (they are now $5.39 as of this writing). That’s including shipping! I had to wait about a week for my order to arrive.

All of a sudden we went from a quirky one-off review to a full-on cheap ass key chain flashlight shootout.
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Sometimes you get what you pay for. Sometimes you need high quality gear that won’t fail on you when you need it the most.

And sometimes you can get by with the bare minimum because something is better than nothing at all.

The 9 LED flash light from Harbor Freight Tools is cheap, inexpensive, and pretty damn useful. Oh yeah, it can be had for as little as $3.99 for a pair.
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It’s an odd time of the year to commute on a motorcycle. The temperature changes so much between the morning and the evening that it’s hard to dress appropriately. It was 53°F when I left the house this morning, and 77 when I came home. Wind chill put the ride in at 42°F – 50°F, which was too warm to run my heated gloves, but too cold to just use my grips.

Luckily I have some silk glove liners from Tour Master, and they are an inexpensive, if fragile, way to bridge the temperature gap.
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Motorcycle gear and accessories are a funny thing. What might be inexpensive in the automotive or boating world is much more expensive when the label “motorcycle” is applied to the same product. This happens a lot with things like waterproof switches, fuse blocks, and auxiliary lights.

Now, motorcycle auxiliary lights come in one of two flavors: “marker” or “running” lights that are used to help other people see the motorcyclist, and lights that are used to help the motorcyclist see better at night.

There are many lighting products for motorcycles. Supposedly, these cost more money than their automotive counterparts because they are smaller and are made of tough-sounding materials in order to survive the harshness of the open road.

For example, Hyper-Whites are a popular, LED “marker” style lighting system. The LEDs are in a waterproof housing, and the kit comes with a waterproof switch. It will run you about $120.00.

Or, you can just buy some cheap-ass LEDs off of eBay for $5 each and a $2 switch from RadioShack and see if they do the trick.
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Here’s a nice problem to have: too many high-definition doo-dads and not enough high-definition ports on your television. That’s the situation I was facing on both of my televisions. I have FiOS TV, an Xbox 360 and an HTPC on both sets. I have two HDMI ports on my upstairs TV, and my downstairs television only has a single DVI port.

I picked up an IOGear 3-Port HDMI switch from Amazon last week for about $25. There are cheaper, no-name switches out there from sellers I’ve never heard of, but I was new to HDMI switches. I wanted to be able to return it easily if there was something flaky about the technology.
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