Carnival of Cordite #11

Oh drat!

I've been busy with maintenance of this website, and I lost track of the really important stuff.

Carnival of Cordite #11 is UP!

Keeping abreast of the latest RKBA issues has become a priority here, especially since there has been a dearth of IPSC issues to talk about for the past several weeks. I've found that this is a great place to graze for up-to-the-minute commentary and analysis, and I want to encourage you to use it as a weekly resource if you're at all interested in these issues.

Gullyborg of Resistance is Futile! has been organizing this weekly compendium of RKBA bloggerfests for about 3 months now, and it has become so labor-intensive that he has been farming-out the hosting duties ... which is why Pajama Pundits hosts this latest edition.

The mere fact that they have commented favorably on some of my contributions has nothing at all to do with my enthusiasm for the round-robin TFH. I swear this is true. (But my ego appreciates the adulation, and my blog stats are consistently HYPED when the Carnival publishes every Friday and all the readers chase the links. No writer objects to having been read!)

As a brief aside, I mentioned the other day that I wanted to host a bloggerfest, but it's really hard to find pro-gun bloggers in the red state of Oregon. Let me see, there's me, and there's gullyborg, and there's Brian who hosts the Albany IPSC website, and there's ... well, I don't know for sure. I'm waiting to hear from them. This may not fly.

In the meantime, I've invited gullyborg to attend the next IPSC match in the Columbia Cascade Section of USPSA. (All of the referenced websites are linked in the sidebar, which you will be able to find more conveniently when I get he weekly archive list moved further DOWN the sidebar!) I don't know if he's ever seen and IPSC match, but I thought it would be a good way to meet and get to know each other better.

No response yet from my private email to gullyborg. I suspect this is due to his busy schedule as a Law student at the University of Oregon. If he can make it, I hope to have some photos and text of the event sometime next week.

Announcement: Geek Blog goes Weekly!

This website loads WAY too slowly, especially if you're accessing the internet with a modem (as I am). My friend Fish asked today if there was anything I could do to make it load more quickly.

Well, yes. There is.

I've been archiving this blog on a monthly basis since December, 2004. That makes it easier to reference recent posts, because I don't have to refer to the archived files. But it doesn't make it very easy to open the website, because there is so MUCH GeekCrap to load before it can be read.

Starting today, I am archiving on a weekly basis. This won't show much immediate change in the amount of verbiage that must load, but after I have a few days posts published the older articles will drop into the Archive basket. They'll still be available, but they won't load when the website is immediately opened.

A note: I have been adding pictures to the website, because I think they add interest. I won't stop doing this, but I'm planning to use smaller pictures so they load faster. This has been a consideration all along, and in the future I'll be making this a PRIORITY rather than a CONSIDERATION. In other words, I won't use large-format pictures unless I think the subject matter warrants this. The criteria, not presented in order of priority, will be:

• honey shots
• gratuitous gun pictures (such as action pictures of people actually shooting)
• honey shots where honeys are shooting firearms
  

(Note to SWMBO: apologies for the demeaningly sexist term 'honey shots', but if I include you in the picture you're usually shooting, and ... well ... you ARE My Honey. If it's an issue, I'll try to include pictuers of women who aren't you. Just to avoid any embarassement on your part, you understand. After all, I'm a 90's kind of guy.)

While I really like girls, I'll try to provide either small-format pictures, or links to large-format photos when appropriate.

Why am I making extravagant efforts to reduce consumption of precious 'bandwidth'?

Last night I wrote a 3000 word evaluation of a 2000 word article from Reason. I didn't post it, because it was so long. But I started this blog so I could write as much as I want, on any subject that appeals to me, and now I find that I'm censoring myself. This pisses me off irritates me, because the reason I started blogging was that I had more to say than most people want to read. As I 'may' have mentioned before, I have been writing Geek-Length Posts to The Unofficial IPSC List for years, and fielding a lot of criticism because I wrote more than some people thought I should impose on their mailing list. Now the Blog is bogged down, and the Unofficial IPSC List has had no traffic for several days.

I guess I need to find a balance somewhere. Increasing my blog archive frequency is the best altrenative to not writing so much, so often.

If I have to resort to archiving on a daily basis, I'll do that. But let's try weekly archiving first. Okay?