Accomplishment

I've just returned from checking on the various sleeping members of the family. Upon entering my 22-month old son's room, I found him asleep on top of the covers, and his toddler-sized bed also included the following:

• Books, several, in pile, up to 12"x 18" in size
  
• Bear, one count, plush, large, white, teddy
  
• Pirate ship, one count, 18-inch long equipped with 3"/1.5 caliber swivel gun, mechanically fired
• Pirate, one count, 3" tall, assigned to the HMS Arrrr.
• Parrot, one count, pirate, assigned to same.
  
• Toy, one count, 8-inch diameter, bash-the-button carousel type with musical features
  
• Chair, toddler sized, made of foam and upholstered with Spiderman motif
• Pillow, one count, toddler size, authorized for use with bed
• Kitty cat, one count, plush, authorized for sleeping with

For some reason, I am very proud to have had to remove a pirate ship from his bed before I could tuck him in.

Gun nut?

New Jovian Thunderbolt (hat tip to JayG) provides the Jeff Foxworthy-esque list, for which I offer my meager evidence:

I own fifteen Magpul 30-round AR-15 magazines, purchased in October 2008.

I own no .223/5.56 AR-15 uppers.

Yet.

Welcome, MArooned readers

JayG was kind enough to reciprocally link my blog, for which I will evermore gratefully give him credit.

Please feel free to comment on some of the older gun-posts. I'm hoping that I, the FNG at riflery, will have some of my ignorance cured, and in so doing, provide a good reference for other newbies of the fine American tradition.

I promise more soon: a pink AR-15, appropriate for a small girl. Stay tuned!

In which I put holes in paper

...and only somewhat reliably. I post this in hopes that someone out there will tell me what I'm doing wrong.

Let us begin on a pleasant Father's Day afternoon at the range. Pleasant, in that as I arrive, winds are southerly at about 15 knots and a shower is pushing through. As my keen weather sense told me, however, my timing is perfect, as it takes time to unpack the rifle, mount the optics, assemble the target stands, and shoot the breeze with another club member. Just as my targets were ready to be taken down-range, the squall line passed, the sun came out and the wind calmed.


Basic lay-out at this point:

At 100 yards, four (4) sight-in targets mounted with blaze orange duct-tape to the target stand.

At 200 Yards, slightly to the right and above the 100 yard target, two (2) sight-in targets.

I am shooting Lithuanian mil-surp 7.62 NATO ammunition. We know that this ammo is a good match for the M-14 because the Honorable William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States of America (1992-1998), rather than let surplus M-14s be de-milled to be semi-auto only (a simple, irreversible and cheap procedure) and sold through the CMP, instead gave a lot of them away to foreign nations and had much of the rest of the surplus stock destroyed. Lithuania was a beneficiary of American generosity, and thus they had to procure well matched ammunition for their new precision rifles.



So, first target goal: verify zero of the re-mounted optics. All-in all, not bad. I had a couple fliers, and I could tell that I had done so right after the shot went off.

I'm shooting from the bench with the Grip-pod collapsed down, the rifle is resting on the "toes" of the bipod feet. I can adjust aim from the positioning of my shoulder and my left hand tucked under the butt of the stock to provide some fine control. I'm sure this is considered disastrous technique, but it seems as stable as if I has locked the rifle in a pintle mount.

Mostly, I though the grouping was to the right a bit, so I adjusted the scope right 5 clicks, with 1 click = 1/10 MOA.



Second target, I don't think I did any better.



Third target, I think I brought it more to the center, but I'm still veering right and ranging pretty widely vertically.



Now, I know this looks worse that the previous three, but this one was an experiment: I was testing out my new glasses prescription and using just the iron sights. The front blade obscured the entire center square of the target. I'm shooting right and low, and my grouping is rather wide, but I'm feeling rather good that the grouping is only twice the size of my 20x scope-magnified groupings.



The less I say about by 200 yard targets (this being the second target), the better. Suffice to say that my shooting low and right is amplified due to the increase range and another 1" of bullet drop. Any left handed desperadoes out there better watch out: I'm going to seriously graze your shootin' arm and love handles.



I can't blame my inaccuracies on anything but my skill. I had excellent sight picture through the scope. The picture is good enough that when I held my half-breath for the shot, I could see my heartbeat moving the scope reticule. I tried to keep my squeeze on the trigger just tight enough that I could fire right after my heart beat.



In this image, you can just barely see the iron sight picture. It's much too bright for my iPhone to take a good image of the target, but you can see the front post and the blade to either side, though the rear aperture and under the scope, through the gaps in the A.R.M.S #22 scope rings. It I didn't have the rubber MAPGUL ladder-type rail protectors on the upper rail, there would be a little more of the lower arc of the sight picture.

So, the question now is what do I need to do to correct my technique. These results are OK to land a round on a human-sized target at about 200 yards, but the M-14 is spec'ed to be good out to 500 yards in the hands of an infantryman. My range can do 500 yards, but I'm sure I'd be harassing the moles rather than landing hits.

Time to do what I always intended to do.

I may have started this blog for the purposes of classwork, but under it all, I intended some day to be a gun blogger.

So, I'll start with My Very Favorite Gun™: my M-14.

Specifications as shown:

• LBR Arms M-14 semiautomatic M-14 receiver
• Sage International enhanced battle rifle stock with stripper clip sight base
• A.R.M.S #22 medium height scope rings
• Leupold VX-3L scope
• Grippod GPS02
• 20 round magazine

Assembled with GI parts by master M-14 armorer Ted Brown

OK, I have the gear. Now what am I going to do with it?

I'm going to shoot it of course!

Let's lay out clearly where I'm starting from: my family was never into firearms of any kind, so I don't have a background from that angle.

I was an officer in the Air Force, but if you think that qualifying with a 9mm Beretta a few times lends any general familiarity with firearms, you've got another thing coming. I'd opine that I learned more about poker while in the Air Force than I did about firearms.

I came to my real passion for firearms courtesy of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and the bequest of my Grandfather.

When my grandfather passed on, he specified three things in his will for me:

• A YF-16 roll-out coin (he worked for General Dynamics)
• A framed picture of several F-16 models, including the F-16XL (a company executive-only perk, surreptitiously acquired)
• A Colt 1911 Series 70

My first duty station in the USAF was England, so, obviously, I couldn't take possession of the pistol there.

My second duty station was Hanscom AFB, where I supposedly could take possession of the pistol. Some people would get discouraged by the barriers Massachusetts puts up against firearm ownership. I got determined and pissed off. Once you take the dive, you might as well learn to swim.

So, now I have a rifle, and a fine one. One that, as I required of Mr Brown, could absolutely out-shoot me. My challenge is to rise to the capabilities of my rifle.

So, that is the theme of this blog, when I 'm not digressing off onto tangents: My process of learning to shoot. Eventually, it will also include the progress of my offspring learning to shoot in about 1.5 years.

Tighten your OODA loop

Death to the Waterfall Method!

Reading The Agile Manifesto, I am struck by the similarity to Spiral Development principles that were espoused while I was working at the Electronic Systems Center. One of the biggest problems AFMC was facing was that the requirements for more and more complicated systems were being contracted out, with increasingly long schedules (thus increasingly large cost), and when the thing was dropped on the doorstep... it wasn't quite right.

Spiral development is an attempt to avoid the program management difficulties of the Waterfall Method of system delivery. Since most programs are an improvement on an older system, the first deliverable is usually one that is only slightly better than the old system, but it is specifically design to be modified towards an vastly improved end result. The next cycle of the development is to take the current state of the system, decide what enhancements can fit into the next spiral, taking time and cost into account, and them field the improved version in about a year, or an upgrade kit.

This is a program management technique, but it has a lot in common with the OODA loop. Everyone engages in OODA loop behavior. You can make a strong case that simple things like balance are highly optimized and subconscious OODA loops. In business and system development, it is a scheme for making decisions and implementing actions at a faster pace that a competitor can. Flexibility and agility are words that can be used to describe it.

Ultimately, if you can make good decisions and implement effective actions faster than an opponent (even if that opponent is your own status quo), you can "out-maneuver" him and establish a dominant position.

Remember that you must be able to take action as fast as your decision process. If the kinds of actions you can take don't produce results for 6 months, then 6 months is as soon as you can make the next effective decision. It does no good to change your mind at three months for such long-lead-time actions, because all you do is confound your accumulated results and restart the 6-month clock again.

Blog my thoughts...

"A beautiful company"... it's a nice idea.

If fact, it is probably a good way to maintain stability in a company so you can continue to make profits for shareholders. There's just one problem with that: the Board.

Unless the Board has the concept of "beautiful company" in mind, what they're going to see is a lot of fooferry being employed when standard top-down practices produce known results of profitability. Ignore the possibility that "known results" may not be as high as an established profitability under the beautiful company concept: How do you measure the beauty of a company? Anything you cannot measure is an opinion.

And an opinion shares much in common with a certain posterior orifice: everyone has one, and they all stink. You can't manage reliably to opinions.

So, in order to make the Beautiful Company concept palatable to those whose job it is to ensure stockholder value... we must create some workable metrics, and relate them to profitability. Anecdotally we find that beauty must have a relationship with profitability...

How do we measure that? What combination of objectively gathered numbers can be composited to indicate a presence of Beauty, and show a trend in the increase or decrease of Beauty?

What is all this then?

How in the world did I end up with a blog?

By and large, most blogs I've seen are inhabited by people for whom the epitome of expression is "OMG WTF LOL@NEWBS!!1!!1!!one!!". They remind me of the guy that shared a computer with me in my Junior High computer class. He would giggle like a loon as he randomly dragged his fingers on the keyboard, thrilled that his actual fingers made actual letters appear on a screen.

Of the remainder that can string one word after another in some reasonable approximation of some written language, most are filled with people that can't reason their way out of a paper bag. I'd blame the public school system, but the worst offenders claim to have an Ivy League education.

Of that fraction, most don't have anything to talk about that interests me.

They say 90% of everything is crap. Due to the magic of the internet, I'd increase that by a power of three. (Update: 90% to the third power is 72.9%. Obviously, not what I am intending to convey. Instead, the inverse: 10% of everything is worth-while, and on the internet, that is to the third power, thus 0.1% is worthwhile, and the remaining 99.9% is crap.) So why would I want to dive into the compost pile that is the blogosphere, with the narcissists, idiots and [insert topic] geeks?

'Cuz I has to. Shucky-darn.

And since I have to, I suppose I'll set this up properly so I can get some use out of it. I have some ground rules for myself:

• Outside of classwork requirements, I'm doing this for my own enjoyment. I owe nothing to anyone.


• This is my clubhouse. If, hypothetically, someone wanted to comment on one of my posts, I'll keep the post if it is on-topic and non-trollish, even if the poster disagrees with me with some facts and reasoning. I'll throw away the rest.


• My instructors and classmates will be able to identify me with this blog. Other than that, I'm keeping myself to myself. I don't see any value in attaching my name to the blog for self-aggrandizement purposes, and relative anonymity has its virtues.