I’ve decided to start making some pages for the weapons I own. Might add a little flavor to content aside from my posts. First up is my AK-74M. The links (at least for now) will go under the “My Stuff” category in the sidebar.

Well, my second exam this week is done. I’m not going to say it went well, but I had some level of answer for everything. It was a long exam. I don’t think there was a single person that left early. We’ll see how it turns out. I’m not real confident about the one tommorrow yet either.

I saw something yesterday that I thought was interesting. I was at a stoplight behind a relatively new white BMW 325i. I noticed it had a paper tag in the rear window and assumed it was recently aquired. The light was rather slow, so I had plenty of time to take another look and then I realized it had lettering across the top of its rear window that read something along the lines of “Jackie Cooper BMW Temporary Vehicle” (I’m a bit foggy on the exact wording). Then I noticed that it had a real tag and not just the paper tag. It was one of those fancy plates and read something like “Cooper BMW”. I thought that was pretty cool. I know lots of mechanics or shops have loaners, but I would hardly expect them to be so nice. I realize Jackie Cooper is a BMW dealer, but I wonder if Porsche, Mercedes, or other high-end brand dealers do the same.

Last week, Snapstream released the long awaited BeyondTV 4. I waited until Sunday night after Grey’s Anatomy to give it a whirl. On the plus side, it seems to have a smoother, more clear picture. Waht do I mean by that? Well, the colors seem even more vivid. The image is less jumpy (quite clear in the screen tickers on the news channels). The edges on things are sharper. The strange thing that it seems to have fixed is signal noise. I have had some signal noise that has been bugging me that I just assumed I couldn’t do much about. With version 4 those noise lines seem to have gone away. It now will also transcode my recorded shows to DivX too. I really like that. So, what the down side? 3D accellerated translucent menus no longer seem to work for me. I set it up with those initially and they seemed to work for a day or so, but no longer work. Starting Viewscape and going to Live TV leads to a mostly black picture with garbled noise on the right and bottom portion of the screen (sound still works). Switching to overlays work. I just really like the look of the translucent menus better. Maybe after another point release or I upgrade my video card things will come back again.

My SP-10 is in transit back to Special Weapons yet again. Let’s hope that the third time is a charm. The turn around time for the last two warranty trips was 10 and 9 days respectively. That puts us just after Thanksgiving depending on UPS. I guess I need to get another case or two of ammo to test with when it gets back.

Well, one exam is out of the way. I think I did much better than I would have thought before. We’ll see after they come back from grading, but I’m pretty confident I didn’t fail or do too badly. Two more exams left on the roster. These will be tough ones.

You know, considering how long I’ve been at this, I should never have a surprise like I did this morning. I’m sitting there looking at the syllabus for one of my classes and notice that I have an exam in that class this Friday. Here I thought I was going to just have a busy week with homework and two exams. In fact, I really have homework and three exams. I hate weeks like that. To top it off, I just don’t feel the motivation to get off my ass and really study for them. We’ll see how it goes.

I saw Chicken Little yesterday. Nice movie. For being a kids movie I thought the story line had a little too many things that would need some higher understanding, but maybe I’m underestimating kids. We were going to try and watch a couple of other movies, but the show times just weren’t quite right. It turned out okay. I enjoyed the show. I’d put it on my recommended list. The War of the Worlds references were cool. This isn’t quite a redeeming film for Disney, though. While it’s good (especially compared with what they’ve been putting out recently), it is still missing something that their classics have. I can’t put my finger on what that is, but it is missing something.

I hit the range again, and brought the SP-10, RAV-22, and Makarov. The Makarov ran like a top (as expected). The funny thing is that when I sat down to clean it, I couldn’t get it apart. Maybe my hands were greasy or something, but I couldn’t get the thing apart for the life of me. It’s a Makarov, it can take it. I’ll clean it another day.

The RAV-22 got to try a diet of some different ammo. I definitively proved it doesn’t like Winchester Wildcat. It does, however, seem to like Winchester SuperX. That stuff ran very well, except for the occassional hangup in loading a round. This happened on other brands too, but it is kind of odd. A round comes forward out of the mag and sometimes hangs on the lip of the chamber. It seems the lead is soft enough to let the chamber dig in and that’s then end of that. Typically the round gets bent enough I wouldn’t even try to use it again. David mentioned throating the chamber a touch. I need to contact Feather to find out for sure. It’s got enough ammo run through it now, I’m fairly sure it’s not just tight from being new.

The SP-10 was a real son of a gun. It didn’t get through a single mag without a jam. In fact, it’s acting about as bad as it did before I sent it in for warranty work the first time. I’m getting a bit more than frustrated with it. I intended to run my last 500 rounds of 9mm through it, but I had had enough after 300 rounds. In the end, it was getting FTE’s at every second or third shot. When I took it apart for cleaning it was less dirty than after the previous 500 rounds (which also didn’t run spectacularly, but ran better than this). I don’t know. Hopefully Todd can shed some light on the matter and make it right.

Well, I got to go out to David’s today. He gave me a couple boxes of .22lr ammo to try out and see if my RAV-22 liked it. Still not 100%. The box of Remington Subsonic seemed to be a little under powered. It didn’t eject very well. PMC Target Match (or maybe it was Match Target) had plenty of power to cycle the action, but it would hang up loading occassionaly (much less hangs than the Remington Subsonic failed to eject properly). So, off to try more flavors of .22lr I go. As David put it, “you sure can pick’em.” Ain’t that the truth. Anyone that can buy 2 AK’s that don’t feed properly must have the magic touch. At least those were fixable.