The Wandering Minstrel

. . . are a thin disguise.

Seriously - I’ve lived in California all my life, worked in Florida for months at a time, been to Hawaii, the Bahamas and Tahiti, and I have never seen a palm tree like this one along US Hwy 60 near Surprise, Arizona. Who the hell are these green enviro-freaks that think this is any less an eyesore than a good cell tower? In fact, being a techno-person, I think cell towers are a functional piece of infrastructure with an aesthetic appeal and not in the least offensive in metro areas.

Clickable image credit The Better Half - but don’t get her started on the rampant cellular-conifer eyesore issue. She has yet another discourse on those.

I spent most of my day today customizing the new HP G60-630us Notebook PC. I have a lot of favorite utility programs that I installed today.

I also installed the software for our digital cameras but there was a glitch. My installation disk was not compatible with Windows 7. Not to worry, I found a fix on Canon’s website and it went smoothly after that.

I backed up some files from the old laptop to the external half-gigabyte drive. I use Microsoft Office for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. I had quite a collection on the old hard drive (some were already backed up). Thanks to a tip from reader wolfwalker, I am able to connect an old external monitor and if the primary display goes black, I still have the secondary display.

The last thing I got done today was to install the software drivers for my Kensington docking station. It was quite painless and worked instantly.

I figured that was enough for today, but there are a lot more files and utilities to bring over. I’m using the new computer and setup to post this.

By the way, Windows 7 is a lot like Windows Vista with a few additional annoyances. No blue screens of death so far.

Free 9mm Ammo

M.D. Creekmore at The Survivalist Blog – a survival blog dedicated to helping others prepare for and survive disaster – with articles on bug out bag contents, survival knife choices and a wealth of other survival information is giving away a 1,000 round case of 9mm – 124 Grain FMJ (a $200 value – donated by LuckyGunner)! To enter, you just have to post about it on your blog. This is my entry. Visit The Survivalist Blog for the details.

Today, the new HP G60-630us Notebook PC showed up. I had to replace the old Dell laptop because the display was getting dim on one side and eventually failed in a ’soft’ way - that is the display would start out fairly bright, grow dim on the right side of the screen and eventually would go black. I can restore it by turning it off, letting it rest for a few minutes and reboot it. It’s good for a few minutes after each cycle then goes black again. Using the above method for small windows of data transfer, I was able to backup many files to the 500 gigabyte external drive, mostly photos but some data files as well. There are still more to go.

I chose HP rather than Dell this time because I used them at work before I retired last year. In the last five years of work, I had both desktop and laptop units. I liked them both.

The new unit comes with Windows 7 and has a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium processor, a 320GB hard drive, WiFi, a full-sized keyboard with numeric keypad and a 5-in-1 digital media card reader.

Now the fun begins. I have my work cut out for me the next few days customizing, installing my favorite apps and just getting used to the new stuff.

This is the inspiration for the flaming skull at the top of the page. After watching an action movie, I was inspired to create a flaming skull logo for this website. In the movie the main character plants explosives around the parking lot where his enemies have parked. Upon detonation, the flaming skull appeared.

I wanted to have that effect embedded into our logo, so I used a Flash™ animation editor to employ the original logo as a mask to allow the flame effect to be seen in the shape of the logo. The clickable image is from an image the Better Half made when I stopped the movie on the flaming skull scene.

Last month, I changed my subscription to American Rifleman to receive issues on the Internet. I just got the email notifying me that the March Issue was ready to be viewed. All I had to do was click on a link in the email, input my member ID and name plus entering an authorization code which was printed graphically on the authorization web page.                 Clickable image: User Interface.

After using the interface they provide and browsing the magazine, I am glad that I converted to electronic issues for several reasons. First and foremost, I have no magazines stacking up in the garage that have to be sanitized (i.e. shredding personal information printed on the address block) before recycling. Next, All the text can be brought up in a window where I can cut and paste items such as “Armed Citizen Reports” or other text that I would like to share with others via email or on this site. Not the last of a list of nice features is the absence of the binding crease in two-page graphics - you see the whole image sans creases and staples.

I am also a life member in the American Radio Relay League (Amateur “HAM” Radio). I sent an email to them earlier today asking if my monthly copy of QST could be delivered electronically. I am waiting for a reply, but I suspect they do not have the means yet. I cruised their member services website and could not find anything about electronic publication.

Actually, I’ve had the SwishMax 3 Flash creation software installed on my computer for quite some time now, probably several months. I just started using it today, having overcome the phobia associated with upgrading from the old package. You get used to using something and since it’s comfortable, you avoid the change - like breaking in a new pair of boots.

I dug up the source from my “Glock around the clock” project from last November and invested a little time learning the new tool set. I figured that I should rework an old package rather than starting something from scratch. I got it going a while ago using the Flash creator.

Another thing I wanted to mention is the on-line tool that I developed for embedding Flash objects on our websites. I upload the object to the server and then specify the URL of the object to my on-line tool, which then generates a JavaScript Embedded in PHP script, plus the JavaScript that I use to invoke the object instance in the web page. All I have to do is input the required parameters, hit ‘generate script’ and copy/paste the code it generates to the server and the embed tags in the post. Flash, produced this way, seems to work with most of the browsers out there, although if it works with IE and Firefox/Mozilla then that’s 95% of the users that come to this site. If you DON’T have JavaScript enabled, you won’t see the animation.

Since our first post back in November of 2007, we have enjoyed a steadily increasing number of hits. The steepest increase came in the first half of this year. Then, in August, something strange happened. There was a major leap from less than 3k visits per month to over 4k, but then the hits per month leveled out.

Analysis of the logs reveals that the readership has been increasing from direct requests or referrals from other Gun Bloggers, but the preponderance of referrals suddenly came from Google and other image searches. I guess that’s good, since our stuff is being seen by those outside the pro-gun community.

Thanks and Happy New Year to the readers of The Wandering Minstrel. Special thanks to Anthony at The Liberty Sphere and David at The War on Guns, for sending some of their readers this direction. Also, thanks to the regulars and the Gun Bloggers - you know who you are - for stopping by from time to time and for the blogroll links.

Best wishes for a happy 2010!