Leather Belts

I found a couple places that sell made-in-USA leather belts.
Solesu
Leather & Things

NH & FL Carry Permits

The application for New Hampshire carry is available online.

Florida requires that an applicant send away for a packet.

Combat Shotgun

I've been thinking up ways to trick out a Remington 870 shotgun for home defense. I was thinking that the 18" barrel (since MN prohibits SBSes) with a pistol grip, metal pump foregrip with a rail to hold a vertical grip, extended tube magazine, and receiver attachment with a shotshell holder and rail to hold a red dot would be pretty good.

Then I got to thinking that it'd be neat to have a detachable magazine for a shotgun. Flipping through Shotgun News, I saw an ad for a Izhmash's Saiga-12, which is an AK-47 receiver converted to fire shotshells. A company called Alliance Armament makes modified Saiga-12s as well as 20- and 30-rd drum magazines. Sweet! The base gun itself is only $600 or so, but when one starts accessorizing it, things get expensive really fast. Alliance offers a "reliability service" which makes me think that the Saiga as-is has issues. Their rail system is $250, and the drums area $380 and $425.

Then again, semi-auto only could jam in a critical situation. The SPAS-12 can operate in either mode, which would be better. I think I'll stick with the cheaper pump option for actual defense, but I might buy a Saiga-12 just for the hell of it.

Demiforce

This guy I used to know at OSU from the Japanese Club apparently has "made it" in the game industry. CNN has an article about his game Trism.

I saw the link in my CSS reader and figured I'd skim it. The pic kind of looked like Steve Demeter, and his name was mentioned in the text. "Nah, it can't be" I thought, but when the text mentioned Demiforce, a handle he'd used in the past, that settled it. Steve was always pretty driven to write games, so it's not really a surprise. Pretty wild, though.

Google Blows

I've had to keep these pages hidden by blanking out the template since I posted about "CCAW". I realized that the phrase was sufficiently unique to turn up high on the list of a search of that phrase, so I deleted the post and submitted a removal request to Google. They pulled the page from the index, yet it was added again later by the crawler for some unknown reason, and linked to the page that was supposedly deleted. Fuckin' piece of shit! With the pages blanked I can still access my links, which is kind of all I care about. Still, it sucks the way this worked out.

Glass Blocks

I was considering making a glass block skylight, so I did a little search and found that a company IBP (Innovative Building Products) makes them. It wasn't quite what I was looking for, but amusingly enough, IBP is a Berkshire Hathaway company.

IBP also makes glass walkways and such, which is kinda cool, too.

Pittsburgh Corning actually makes glass blocks—the IBP skylights are a derivative product. They have a projects site as well. According to IBP's site, other vendors include Solaris, Mulia, and Weck.