Scott McLaughlin

So while we were at our last camping trip which was the annual Culbertson/Watson family reunion (my wife is a Culbertson) we did our annual shooting day, which there’s a few pictures of in that link, this year we didn’t have as many firearms as usual due to a few people not showing up this year.

Anyway my American Spirit AR15 decided that it was going to have all kinds of problems that day, including consistent jamming (which its never done before). We finally got it all cleared and people started pumping rounds through it. After 4 or 5 35 round clips it jammed again…only this time in a really bad way.

It actually had a live round jammed into it that had somehow managed to wedge itself above the bolt inside the reciever. Unfortunately i didn’t get a picture of the live round jammed in, only what was left after bullet extraction. I’ve never seen anything like that before, nor had anybody else even the military guys.

One of the cousins who’s a great weapons handler decided he’d take it away from the group and see if he could pop the bullet out of the casing to get the powder out since the round was live it was extremely dangerous to transport. After monkeying around with it, it didn’t explode on him and he got the bullet out of the casing.

Last weekend I stripped the thing down, the upper receiver is pretty hammered, so I’m going to have to replace it. I think I’ll replace the bolt as well. Talking to a couple of different AR experts I know (military guys who handles these a lot) the general consensus is the early jams (which were caused by a primer from a casing falling into the gun somehow) must have caused issues or wore out the extractor on the bolt and when the round loaded it didn’t line up right and due to the extractor being weak the casing was able to ride up and over the top of the extractor. Very odd, but that seems to be the most logical chain of events. i don’t think we’ll ever know.

Here’s the pictures of the tear down and damage. I’ll take some more when i get the new parts and re-assemble it. I’m just glad the thing didn’t explode on somebody! Its been rock solid for 10 years.

Over the last couple years I’ve really started looking at what type of conveniences newer technology has started bringing to the modern home and how they rate on a couple of things, in order they are:

1. Make my life and my familys life better
2. Coolness factor
3. Save me money on a recurring basis (its all about the LRO)

Cool stuff has been around for 10+ years, however most of it was ludicrously expensive, hard to obtain and install. Over the last year or two lots of things are becoming more affordable to me and the coolness factor is sky-rocketing.

Previously I wrote up the ever so cool addition to my house of a Tankless Water heater. Ya it still rocks, and I still highly recommend one. The trouble with being on the bleeding edge of this type of technology I often pay the price of “having it first, but later models are better”. The current Tankless heaters are probably 10-15% more efficient and are much bigger gph wise. Mine has certainly never been an issue, but I had it early on and first so the coolness factor is high but you often tend to not get the best features.

Whilst there has been several things like this I’m all over, the one for today is the newest edition to my primary residence which is a in-house power monitoring system. I previously had a little $130 unit (Efergy E2 monitor) that connected to the “mains” in the breaker panel and gave you entire house usage and tracked your power bill to some extent. It was a wireless unit that went to a remote box you could carry around and see how much your wattage changed as you turned things on and off. It would also dock to a PC via USB and download data for graphing and tracking…it was nifty…but it just wasn’t enough.

For years I’ve looked for systems that would monitor all circuits in the house and use a web based interface. I hate all applications that lock me to a single computer, i want access via the web to my data anywhere I am. A few people had home brewed them, which I debated doing but I just wasn’t gung ho enough, eventhough #2 coolness factor was through the roof on those.

Finally a company released a device that meets most of my requirements. Again being the early adopter I’m sure in another 12 months there will be 3 or 4 of these companies with even cooler units…but hey i’ve met #1,#2 and #3 and the coolness factor is obviously high.

So with that said here is a link to the review I did of the eMonitor Energy Monitor Service that I recently installed in my primary home. It will include links to photos of installation and web interface screen shots.

As I mentioned in previous posts last night was the Portland show for Toad the Wet Sprocket at the Mcmenamins Crystal Ballroom.

I was extremely excited for this show, as I already attested to and why, in my previous post back in April. Well it finally arrived.

The opening act, I forget their name, was a band out of Seattle. Its not that they were bad, but they had so much going on, on stage, it just sounded a lot like a huge wall of noise. I liked the style of music they were attempting but at least in that venue at that time, they didn’t quite seem to pull it off. Cello, Violin, Accordian, Keyboard, Percussion, Drums, two guitars. Seemed like a lot. But they did a good job of making everyone want Toad to come out all the more!

I will say that the Crystal Ballroom most CERTAINLY leaves a lot to be desired from an acoustical sound point. Its definitly one of those venues you roll into as a sound guy and realize your evening is not going to be an easy one. While the room is very cool and a very fun place for a show, the acoustics in that room would challenge even the most experienced. I’m going to ice this cake with the fact that the sound system in that room is not very well designed, I think a lot of work could be done to increase the show experience in there. It was interesting to watch the front of house guy struggle with that room and PA most of the night. I use to do this for a living, so I could feel his pain but he handled it well.

So let’s remove the crappy acoustics and weak PA and look through at the performance. It was wonderful. The entire band was excited to be there, they performed well and put on a great show. The crowd was exteremely responsive and stomped and hollered for the 4 song encore they eventually did. They played for about an hour and 15 minutes then came out for another 20 minutes on encore. I was okay with that considering they played all the stuff I wanted to hear and the tickets were only $25.

I would absolutely go see them again, maybe not if they were in the Crystal Ballroom. It would be really nice to see these guys at this point in their career in a nice hall like the Schnizter, or better yet at an outside venue.

Thanks for coming to Portland Toad, you guys are as good as you’ve ever been and I enjoyed seeing you again!

Well recently, and by recently I mean um, a month and a half ago, I had a lovely little red 1996 328i BMW. It was fun to drive, easy to work on and I had done numerous upgrades to it.

On Michelle and my’s 10 yr anniversary I was driving into work, spacing off about things to come and went through a light a bit late, honestly I don’t even remember seeing what color it was, but based on traffic it must have just changed red, and a lady turning at the intersection, oddly enough hit me on the front drivers side of the vehicle.

Now granted that car is a BMW but neither of us were moving very fast and I slid sideways to the curb and she spun around 180 degrees, but the damage to the car exceeded $6,200.00. I was quite blown away by that, I knew it’d be expensive…but. The other vehicle hit the front wheel just right and push it and all the connecting hardware and goods straight up inside the engine compartment…yum.

I keep full coverage on all my cars. Its not that much more on vehicles you own that aren’t brand new, and I can afford it right now, so why not….well it paid off this time. Progressive is quite awesome and was fast, efficient and literally had me a payment within two days. I was at fault obviously, but because of the full coverage it didn’t matter. So they paid me out the value of the car plus some other minor things with a nice fat check around $5,500…wow that was a suprise. I’ve dealt with Progressive twice, both times they have been awesome. Also because I’m a 4+ year progressive customer, they have a clause to prevent any accident size from raising my rates regardless of fault…we’ll see if they hold to that.

Alright long story short, eventhough I didn’t tell all the gory details, the wife and I decided we should replace it, eventhough its a third vehicle and not necessary for us to survive on a daily basis. But we liked having a car (we have an SUV and a truck) and something fun to drive when we go out or travel without the kids. So we went on-line shopping.

We got lucky and found a broker in Portland (313 Motors) which is run by a guy and his son as a side business, who had a couple cars in inventory, but mostly finds cars for people off auctions. These guys have been amazing, honest and gone out of their way to make everything all good for us.

He had a 2002 330ci and a 2002 530i. We drove both on a sunday afternoon. The 330ci was cool but wasn’t what we were really looking for because is a VERY small car on the inside. Even smaller than our 328i from 1996. The 530i was perfect. I’ve always wanted a 5-series. And being a 2002 it had a lot of great features, the bigger engine and lots of upgrades. This one has the 235HP 3.0l engine…yum.

The coolest part is, that the 530i had the sports package in it. Which means it has all the features the M5 has, except for the engine. So it has the sports seats, M5 mats and steering wheel and feature sets. It also had the cold weather package in it. Most excellent. Minus a couple small details the car was perfect and was right around 100k in miles, so not bad for the low asking price of $9500! Minus what the insurance company paid me for the 328i I really scored on this one.

Its been a joy to drive, and its is amazingly fast, combined with comfortable on long drives.

Maybe one of this times I’ll do a full write up on the car and review it.