I'm here today to pimp some earplugs.  I love these things: they're SilentEar earplugs, and they're rated at NRR 32 (32dB reduction).  They work fabulously! They work so well, in fact, that after shooting my 9mm a few times with them, I came to the conclusion that the 9mm wasn't that loud.  When I forgot to bring them to the range once I thought I might be able to do without them for a couple of magazines; I didn't get past one shot.  They're excellent, and I won't shoot without them any more.

I've had the Boberg for a few weeks now, and thought I'd post a quick update. First: it gets prettier the longer I own it. Especially in comparison to other pistols I come across; the fit and finish is second to none. Second, I have had no ammunition malfunctions.  I've been firing cheap PMC out of it ($17 / 50 at Dick's), and I get a single FTF every third magazine or so.  I haven't tracked down the reason for that, but I don't CCW, and I'm not the sort of person who believes that the gun is going to save my life, so I don't much care.

One down! I bought a Boberg XR9-L.  I did manage to avoid paying the extra $300 for the Platinum; while I think the Platinum looks better, Monika thinks it looks like Jay Leno -- don't ask me, I don't know where she got that from.  In any case, I have it now, and I can't wait to shoot it this weekend. Here are some pictures. It isn't as thin or small as I expected it to be.

This is a quick-n-dirty how-to fixit for one particularly brain-dead Firefox bug.  It's two parts: the short term fix, and the long term fix. This will only help you in case you encounter a particular version of the generally buggy Firefox session management.  In this version of the bug, you open Firefox one day to discover that all of your tabs (and tab groups) are gone. However, when you eventually do follow the breadcrumbs and find your sessionstore.js, you may notice that it's really small, while sessionstore.bak is much larger.  If this is the case, then you may be suffering from this annoying (and yet fixable) problem.

#1 Boberg XR9-L  (Bought!)People are calling it a bullpup pistol, but it isn't; it just has a clever chambering mechanism.  It is designed to pull the bullet out of the magazine rearward on racking and push it into the chamber on return.  This allows the barrel to be an inch or so longer, because it can actually extend over the magazine.  On a small pistol, this can constitute a 30-50% longer barrel, which is not insignificant.  A longer barrel means more accuracy and power, and it's a fascinating idea.  It'll be my next handgun.

I'm going to try to avoid making this into a rant; I'm pretty irritated right now, though, so I apologize if some of that slips through. Due to recent issues with a Macbook Pro, I (and my wife) will no longer be buying Apple products.  I used to advocate, gently, for Apple, but now I will agitate against them.  Mr. Cook, if you're reading this: Apple's NPS just went down by a small amount.  Given current Apple support policies, I doubt that you're concerned about NPS, but there it is.

Tokuyo Mirin Yaki, Hosoda Bros. Inc. This may be the winner so far.  It has excellent flavor.  The packaging and form is unfortunate; they're large-ish cakes, and in Philadelphia it's hard to keep them fresh once the package is open, and in any humidity they get sticky quickly.  So do little ones in a bowl, but somehow those are still easier to eat.  Anyway, for taste alone, these rank up there with the Kameda JFC crackers.  These have a more pronounced soy flavor than the Kameda; I'm not sure if the Kameda have any soy in them, to be honest.

I know you're waiting, nay, poised, taught with anticipation, for my next rice cracker review.  We have three new kinds today. Kaki no tane, from Uegaki Beika Co. LTD, JapanI don't read Japanese, and I suspect that "kaki no tane" just means "rice cracker," and possibly not a specific kind of cracker.  In any case, these are the spicy moon or pepper-shaped crackers.  These are awesome; the MSG content is high, they're pleasantly spicy, and they have great flavor.  While spicy crackers are my least favorite kind of rice cracker, these are still very tasty and will be on my list to re-purchase.

I love rice crackers.  I have a veritable passion for them.  One of the great sadnesses in my life has been the baseless, cruel attack on MSG by the health fascists.  MSG is good. MSG in rice crackers is good.  Rice crackers without MSG are an abomination. Now, I admit I can be a bit slow sometimes, and I'll admit that it took me until a week ago to realize that in the age of the Interwebz, I could go online and find the forbidden MSG-laden rice-crackers.  A week later, and the goods have started to roll in, so I'm going to start a series of reviews.

For various reasons, I found myself doing a bunch of JavaScript stuff this weekend.  The project was to get a decent WYSIWYG editor into Redmine.  Because I don't feel like writing an essay tonight, here's the short version of what I learned: Redmine is actually pretty easy to write plugins for; the development model is not bad at allJavaScript sucks balls.  It is a truly hideous language.The jQuery and Aloha devs are programming gods.  What they've produced is incredible, considering the fetid, rancid cesspool that is JavaScript.jQuery is a nice toolkitAloha is slickAloha and Redmine documentation isn't very good.  jQuery is not bad"Dependency hell" takes on a whole new meaning in JavaScript.My biggest take-away from this was that Golang is a much better place for me; it's a lot less work to write good code in Go than in JavaScript; there's a lot less ambiguity.  I'm not sure if I could survive in the JavaScript world.  It's simply too chaotic for me.