If it's broke, fix it

I'm a rather strange cat in that I can be completely calm and collected after crawling out of the smoldering wreckage of a car accident, but then lose my mind when I can't get the lid off a mayonnaise jar. I know it's backwards, but whatever. That being said, one of the little trifling things in life that agitates me to no end is watching two of my small children struggle to buckle their seat belts in the back of the van.

In this day and age, we have minivans with more horsepower than the V-8 sportscars I had in the 80's and 90's; we have sensors that tell you when your tires are running low; there's sensors in cars that can tell if you've been in a collision and will route a telephone call right to your upside down vehicle; there's rear facing backup-cameras, FLIR cameras, bluetooth, navigation systems. . .etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. But for some frickin' reason we can't make inertial locking mechanisms on seatbelts to allow kids to pull the needed slack to buckle up unless every stinking millimeter of belt is first fed back into the reel. I mean, the car isn't running, hasn't moved in days, and is sitting calmly in the driveway, so why oh why does the seatbelt insist on staying locked!!! Do you have any idea at how wonderful it would be if my kids could buckle their own seatbelts?!?! Oh, the time it would save me not having to crawl to the back of the minivan to un-jam the least sophisticated safety device in the car!!

This technological blunder drives me crazy because I thought mankind could do better. It reminds me of this picture:



For all our alleged intelligence, it's a marvel mankind is still at the top of the food chain.

Mommas, don't let your hippies grow up to be toilet technologists

As much as it angers me to do it, I have to again revisit the topic of toilets because this shit is pissing me off (the pun - flows through me, it does)!!

This is in no way gun related, but it has to be said.

The idea of low flow toilets had to have been conceived by stinky hippie engineers who dreamed of an invention to torture the common man. Little did they know about the severe water overuse in B.F., Virginia because toilets in a certain commercial building were flushed at least three times per use. There are babies suffering somewhere, in some forgotten country probably ending in -stan, because of this insane overuse of water here. Trust me.

Secondary to the malicious intent of torturing mankind and making foreign babies suffer is the thought that by making toilets use less water, somehow polar bears and penguins would have more ice to sit on. Or some shit like that. Saving water is what hippies do, damn the reasons and consequences, and they thought that that end could be accomplished in the engineering department of American Standard. What they in fact did is create toilets that have to be flushed, re-flushed, and re-flushed again, and possibly re-flushed several more times in order to achieve the same outcome as a toilet that uses twice as much water in one flush, which runs counter to the "low flow" label that they're branded with.

"High efficiency," my ass.

When using a toilet in the building where I work, there are always leftovers if you dare to check. Every single time. Before you even use the toilet, the very first thing you have to do is flush; and once you're done, it's a mandatory two flushes at the very least, and there will still be leftovers. And if your portion size is. . . .ummmm. . . let's say larger than industry standard, sometimes you wind up with a turd stuck fast to the side of the bowl that a measly 1.6 gallons of water just can't dislodge. That's a fact. With all the snorting toilets in the men's room, and the muffled toilet snorts heard through the wall from the ladies room, you would think a sounder of agitated warthogs lived here.

So the end result is that more water is used instead of less, which could all have been avoided by leaving toilet technology well enough alone; something some folks just can't seem to do. Accept that there are some things in life that can't be improved upon: take forks for example (You now associate turds with forks. Thanks, CTone!). There isn't anything that can be done to improve how forks function. Forks design has stayed pretty much the same for hundreds of years, if not thousands, but you can bet that some hairy toed hippie has thought of shortening the fork's tines to make people use less food or something, and thus save the moose. Following in that logic, maybe we can save the Teamster population by making shovels smaller, too; or make poop disappear just as well as 3.5 gallons by using half as much.

Fix it! Or at the very least, add a selector switch. I mean, we have adjustable gas blocks. Why not adjustable toilet flow regulators?

"Oooof. This one's gonna be a doozie! Better switch from "standard" to "dirty.""

Kidde Scorn

Ok, so why is it that modern smoke detectors these days not only cry wolf half a dozen times a year, but decide to do so only at zero-dark-thirty? It defeats the whole purpose of having them in the first place, if you're so used to them giving false alarms that you don't even bother to check the house out in the middle of the night. You instead spend your time waiting to hear which one goes off first so that you can either smash it on the ceiling with a broom like it's a bigass bug, or take it down and sling it out into the yard like I did last night.

A couple of years ago I updated our house to code by retrofitting the old battery powered smoke detectors with integrated, hard-wired Kidde smoke detectors. A week later I was far far away in a foreign land when the report from my wife came in that the whole house was beeping at like three in the morning. It finally stopped on its own, and didn't repeat that again for several months. At this point, it's a quarterly thing for the detectors to sound off for no reason, and it always happens late at night.

As a residential electrician in a past life, my experience has been that in a twelve pack of modern smoke detectors, one or two of them right off the bat are going to be defective. You normally find this out when you test them; the ones that are screwed up are immediately noticeable, and you replace them so that the home owners don't have an issue with them in the middle of the night. From what I can recall, the smoke detectors from my youth - the one you payed a nickle for and got ten free at the bargain bin at the local flea market - always worked like their supposed to for twenty years or more. You replace the battery when it starts to chirp, and they only go off when there's real smoke, like when you're burning some delicious bacon.

Somewhere along the line the manufacturers who make these detectors have fallen asleep at the wheel.

Last night we had another one go down - the second this year - at a quarter til' three in the morning. Knowing my wife, she no doubt lost the rest of the night's sleep over the event, which means she'll suffer at work today over an item that I would gladly pay three times as much for if it just worked like it's intended. If not, it's back to the flea markets for the nicotine coated one's that some farmer took down when the battery died. I know those will work.

Grrrrrrrrrrr.

Anger Management

So this last weekend I decided not to blow a gasket when my Competitive Edge Dynamics Millennium 2 chronograph once again gave me absolutely nothing of worth. This was my 5th range trip using it without a reading at all, or at least an accurate one. When I got my third reading of 85osomething fps from my 308, I tried my 1911 with handloads and got 600 something, so I went ahead and did myself a great big favor and calmly dismantled the device with accurate fire from my pistol.



If they weren't so expensive, I would probably buy a dozen more for this purpose as it worked pretty spectacular as a target; at least, way better than it does as a chronograph. As I had said before, from all of my research on chronographs, the sensor/screen technology is very primitive, and when you chose one brand of chronograph over another, you're not buying better electronics so much as you're buying features. The sensors are going to be the same.

Checking out this post on LongRangeHunting.com forums told me what to expect from CED's customer service, which appears to be lacking. I wasn't interested in a $72 refund check for my troubles, and I also decided that I wasn't getting duped for another $90 for the IR screens only to have to build a "black box" to make a supposed reliable piece of equipment perform as it was intended to without it. In my experience, Competitive Edge Dynamics builds their chronographs out of the finest snake oil, and perhaps I should have seen it coming. From their website:

Expanded digital chip design now gives the CED M2 the ability of reading velocities at much lower light levels. On clear days, this means the ability to chronograph from early morning till almost sunset.

Close to sunset is when my Shooting Chrony Beta and Competition Electronics ProChrono would start to give errors, so this is the line that sold me for the most part. The M2 gave me errors the first time I ever took it out, which was in the late afternoon, so the above line is bullshit.

I also did research on gun forums to find out what the general consensus was, but apparently didn't look hard enough. I also could have scrolled down on CED's information page to find an extensive list of reasons why their shit chronograph won't function. Caveat Emptor - buyer beware: if you have to do a "flashlight test" on a product that costs twice as much as the competition just to see if the fucking thing is even working, you have been shammed. I offer you evidence now about this piece of equipment with the hopes that somebody looking into chronographs will know what to expect. If my words aren't enough, take a look at what you can expect at 3 o'clock in the afternoon while out testing loads on the range:



This could be you , sports fans! See all those "e" marked down? Those are errors. Also, actually shooting these loads that I tested at range showed the velocities to be over 200 fps faster than what the chrony was reading; gravity doesn't lie. Now you know and can make your choice. For me, I'm going to buy another $80 Shooting Chrony Beta model to put in my range bag, and later buy an Oehler 35 when I have the fundage. And for the time being, I'm on a jihad to expose all the pathetic pieces of gear out there with reviews and posts like this one.

Equipment Change Proposal: Cameras, cell phones, and other electronic junk

This post is rage against the electronic machine, and it probably ain't gonna be pretty.

My bane in life is that nothing electronic lasts around me, and that shit is for real. I'm waiting for the CIA to knock on my door with a one-way ticket to China for a new job sitting in an office across the street from the servers for their intelligence agency. If you want connectivity problems in a building, around office computers, or around people with cell phones, just sit my happy ass twelve feet away and it will happen. Mrs. CTone has commented that I have a magnet in my head.

Now that that is out of the way, whomever designs cameras, cell phones, and other electronic doodads can go blow a goat. Tonight the fam and I were decorating the ol' Christmas tree, you know, something that only happens once a year, and the only working camera in the house ironically was the one in my brand new but barely functioning cell phone; my seventh in two years. OK, technically my sixth as one of them - a BlackBerry - was slain dead by a 33" tire on my XTerra due to the shitty engineering of the bastards at Maxpedition.

Why yes, bitterness IS my middle name. How did you know?

Flashback to yesterday: I picked up the not-quite-two-year-old Sony A300 DSLR camera to take some pictures of the little ones, and when I turned the thing on it made this "Brrrrrraaaaaaaaappppppp" sound that emanated from the lens. Did the same thing when I turned it off. I went to reach for it tonight as it was a picture taking moment, with the kids hanging ornaments on the tree and all, and remembered that the Sony happened to not be capable of doing its designed duty due to suckage. My old standby is my shitty Canon PowerShit SD750 that had to be sent back to the factory brand new, right out of the package. . . . . .twice. Well, that camera sucks too! Turning it on gave me a white screen. It still makes a flash, and you can zoom in and out, but no picture takey takey.

My relationship with the PowerShit is not a nice one; the first time I used it was on a trip to Germany, and out of almost a thousand pictures taken, about a hundred of them you could make out what they were.

Mr. Goat, I am pleased to introduce you to the folks at Canon.

My new cell phone is a Samsung Captivate with Android operating system, and it randomly gets so hot sitting idle on my desk at work that it warns me to turn it off or it will burn up. Also, it turns itself off about once a week for no reason at all that I can establish. WTF?

I don't know much about low voltage electronics other than they are unreliable as hell. Laptops are a perfect example; anything with Windows in it only lasts about three months for me. That's not a lie. The only reason -- Only. Reason. -- that I no longer do Movie Guns anymore is because out of the three laptops that I own, and two desktops that I did own, none of them stay functioning long enough for me to do a post. Either the CD/DVD drive burns the fuck up the first time I use it, or Windows Media Player shits the bed (every time; I was burning the second CD I ever attempted in my new work laptop the day before yesterday and WMP took an unrecoverable dive. It does not work anymore), or the operating system crashes (often), or an update installs a driver that doesn't work and the computer won't boot.

I can't tell you how much moolah I would drop down for some tickets to watch a pride of syphilis afflicted lions tear apart the whole Microsoft staff in one horrific bloody massacre. I'd even spend the ten bucks for some stale popcorn.

I may need a custom made tinfoil hat to shield my magnet from my electronics, or the folks making em' need to figure this shit out and make them not suck. It's true that I may be a mutant - I have DVD players that don't work, cell phones that don't work; I've seen every register at my local Wal-Mart reboot simultaneously at the very moment I swiped my bank card . . . .twice (once while the Mrs. and I were dating and, no shit, I was right then telling her about how I have some sort of issue around electronics).

The chances though that it's really me are slim, while the chances of mankind making mother boards and microchips so small that the copper running through them grow from the heat and short out are startlingly high. It speaks volumes though, to me anyways, that there are so many things that we humans use day-to-day that are just not built to last. If they were, then I wouldn't have so much to bitch about, now would I? What has to be done or not done for some people to build useful stuff that doesn't fail when you need it? Why is it that products used nowadays that has low amounts of voltage running through it barely seem to make it through the year? Is it because technology is advancing at such a rapid pace that it's better to just buy a new phone every year than update it?

I will make it my Christmas wish to have one electronic gizmo last the full 2011 year, or the fuckers that build the stuff will again hear my wrath!

Equipment Change Proposal: Suunto edition

**Update: A picture is worth a thousand words:



Click to make bigger. The black watch is the Suunto, and you can see where the pathetic little nubbins of elastoplastofantastico broke with such ease. Also, you can see the Suunto's $40 replacement which connects the strap via big steel nubbins of stainless glory. Not gonna break there. I'm going to JB-Weld the hell out of the Suunto vice sending it back for a new plastocraptoelastomerase housing that will fall apart when exposed to pressure.

But to make my point, the engineers at Suunto managed to cram all that techno goodness into a rough and tough housing small enough to go onto your wrist, and then when it came down to the structural part that connects to the strap, they went to lunch. It's the exact same phenomenon that happened with my Maxpedition phone case. They built a hardcore case and then when it came to the belt clip they just stuck some junk on there and called it a day. No wonder we outsource so much labor to China; if it's going to suck, might as well make it cheap too!

To any engineers that may make it to this site, please take the time to do a 100% job so that stuff doesn't suck.

****

OK, so my Suunto Vector watch broke on me again this weekend, and I'm really pissed off about it. If you recall, I broke it earlier this summer after it was waaaaay out of warranty, but Suunto fixed it for $55 which made me happy. Turn around time was short as well.

So Saturday night the holes where the pin that attaches the wrist strap broke clean in the exact same way it broke before. The pin just pulled right through with little effort. At the time, I was wrestling in a life-or-death fight with a crazed killer in an alleyway sitting on my bed holding baby CTone, and as I casually placed my arm down as support so I could lean back, that's when the watch broke. Again, no effort involved; the watch had just slipped down to where my wrist bends, and when I put my weight onto my hand, I felt the watch give.

So now I'm looking at the back of the watch, right at the failure point, and it dawns on me how shitty the construction of the watch housing is. I forgot to take a picture this morning to show you, but here's a 5.11 watch that had a similar failure, and you can at least get an idea of the problem.

Now I'm no engineer, but I am a mechanically minded soul who has built a ton of shit in his time. You people out there who have also built a ton of shit take a look at that last link at that man's watch and tell me: who the hell thought that it was a great idea to construct a watch with a tough housing to hold all the cool ballistic doodads, and then just go all half assed on where the strap connects?

"Hey Earl, you reckon we aughta put some more material in there, you know, where the strap thingy that physically holds the watch to the arm attaches? Looks like there's barely enough material there to hold off a good sneeze."

"Hell no! What are you crazy? Failure points Shmearlure points!!! We're engineers for cryin' out loud!! We do shit our way, even if it sucks and makes no sense!!"

"So what, you wanna keep it that way? It would be so simple to just reinforce that area to make it stronger, and we would end up with a product that is 100% bomb proof! We could really be proud of what we built!"

"No. Just. . . .no. If anything, we should make those pin holes as thin as possible to save the company the extra money for the high tech polymer. If the damn thing breaks, that's not my problem."

So there you have it. I was browsing the comments on the Suunto website, and noticed a glaring trend where people bitch about the wrist straps breaking. I found this to be the case with the Vector, as the strap on mine basically rotted off from several years of me never taking the watch off. Ultimately it's going to happen with anything other than aluminum or steel, which brings me to my latest dilemma: do I send my shitty Vector back to Suunto for another $55 servicing, after which I will have an awesome watch that could be ripped off my wrist by any four year old kid, or do I buy a Casio G-Shock from Wal-Mart for $50, and then save up some cash for a quality watch made of steel that's not likely to fold like a cardboard box the moment it has some torque applied to it?

The thing that gets me is that no one out there that I know of makes a watch with the features of the Suunto or Casio Pathfinder in a material that doesn't suck. I'm thoroughly convinced at this point that plastic watches are basically just disposable. Suunto just happens to make really awesome disposable watches, and if I want something that will last me a lifetime and I can pass down to one of my kids, it has to be constructed from something that has stood the test of time.

What it all boils down to is that I have plenty of other things to spend money on right now, least of which is fixing something that was supposed to already be fixed. I don't have time for that.

Suunto, why don't you make us all a bad-ass watch that doesn't suck? Can you make one out of steel? And by steel, I don't mean one that has a bunch of steel held together by that worthless elastospectacularplastomer bullshit that you guys cheerlead on your website; I mean a hardcore steel housing with a steel wrist strap held on by big ole' honkin steel pins. Can you do that for me please, thanks much.

Equipment Change Proposal

I've been trying really hard to not be so negative lately, but the bitterness. . . .it BURNS!!!!

The ingenuity in the baby care department is seriously lacking.

At approximately 0'dark thirty this morning I was up with CTone the youngest, cursing under my breath as usual as I was navigating those shitty monochrome buttons on the pajamas, when I realized that I hated the next part of the event before it had even happened--making a bottle.

Everyone's technique is basically the same: grab a clean bottle, turn the water on full hot, keep a hand under the water to tell when it gets warm, fill the bottle when it gets to the proper temperature, and then you have to add baby formula to finish the deal. Simple enough, except that you have to measure the formula using the provided measuring scoop, which being clear in color buried in white powder makes it a pain in the ass. I mean, the engineers at the baby formula factory might as well make the scoop out of the fucking camouflage from Predator.

So it's dark, because any light whatsoever makes baby think that it's time to play, and you have a wet hand, and you have to fish around in the jug of formula for a scoop that you can't possibly see, so you end up trying to delicately find the end of the scoop without getting the powder all over your hand. And if you get that shit under your finger nails, you're done son. Baby formula and water is what they use to make Gorilla Glue.

Huge pain in the ass.

Does Enfamil get a better deal on clear plastic scoops? Are engineers these days even smart enough to engage their brains and make scoops for white powdered formula out of a colored plastic that disgruntled dads can see at night? Would it be asking too much to make the scoop handle out of red plastic? Fuck! It's not rocket surgery! Fix it!

While we're still on the subject of stupidity, clear plastic, and baby stuff, perhaps the engineers at NUK and other companies that make pacifiers would be so kind as to make them in readily seen colors as well. After the bottle/formula incident this morning, I found something else to bitch about.

Pacifiers were sent to the earth by Satan himself to torture working moms and dads, and if you're going to use them, at some point you should know that it means nightime hourly trips cribside to give screaming baby the plastic thingy that he can't find for himself in the dark, inches from his face. The plastic ninny is a fucking addiction, so you would think that making them blaze orange, or maybe putting some tritium inserts in the damn things would be wise so that you don't have to be the one swirling your hands around in the crib trying to detect them without swatting little Johny in the face.

They're made in either clear, white, baby blue, light green, light pink, or light yellow plastic. Stop right now and think about the sheets on your little precious' bedding -- that's right, white, baby blue, light green, light pink, or light yellow. Don't Soldiers wear clothing that blends into their surroundings so that they cannot be seen? What do you jackasses think you have done when you make baby's pacifier in those colors? You've made them camouflage. Why do we even have to be stuck with those colors anyways? There's a whole pallet of thousands of colors to chose from, and you idiots pick the same ones every time?

While I'm thinking about it, when the hell is Magpul going to make a pacifier in foliage green or flat dark earth, so that I can see it in the crib at night?

You don't have to conform to the same theme that everyone else has done for years. It's like an ant line, where every ant follows the one in front of it because that's just how it's done. Oh yeah, I'm calling you engineers ants! You're ants! Mindless little worker ants, who have to stay in line or they get lost and hose the whole line of ants up behind them! You go get a degree so that you can do the same shit that everyone else does! Can't you think for yourself?

Seriously though, I can't stand the pacifiers; I never used them because I have thumbs, and because those thumbs are attached to my hands, I didn't drop them on the pitch black dirty floors at Outback, run them over with the stroller in Wal-Mart, or lose them in a dark crib. They were always there when I needed them, and I quit sucking my thumbs when I was four, so the whole "you can't take away their thumbs; they'll suck them until they're thirty" argument is moot.

The pacifier will eventually become a major issue when you have to take it away from your rugrat. I'm not kidding about the addiction part; if you take them away for the day to only be issued out at night, your kid will wander around the house aimlessly, mumbling over and over about "ninny; where is my ninny?"

I realize that baby equipment is new territory, not like, say, parachutes, where the learning curve was way more steep and required advancements that pretty much took everything off the table early on.

Before you build something, sit back for a minute and picture yourself as a dog-ass tired dad, scooting out of bed at 2 a.m. to attend to screaming Johnny, dried out contacts, brain disengaged, you walk out into the hall barefoot and step on those annoying little plastic animals that might as well be steel spike strips, cursing under your breath; do you really want to be trying to find a white plastic thingy on a white sheet in the dark?

You would think that y'all would learn some of this shit in school, and not be getting it from a no name blog. It's alright though, my advice is free. Now, what are you going to do with it?

Equipment Change Proposal

Haven't done one of these in awhile.

I'm gonna try real hard to keep this somewhat clean.

The latest thing that has my blood boiling is my YORK gas furnace. It seems the engineers at YORK haven't the slightest frickin' clue as to the magical force known as gravity.

Way back in the mid 90's when my house was built, YORK engineers were too busy playing D&D and smoking pencil shavings to actually pick up the part about gravity in school. Apparently on their first job, they decided to put the condensation drain outlet on the furnaces they were designing four feet off the ground, so that when the outlet jams up with crud it leaks all over the fucking furnace and gets all over the floor. Also, the outlet is positioned so that the PVC pipe that you stick on to it to allow it to drain can't be tilted downward to give that gravity a chance to work.

Keep in mind that in the mid 90's we had ICBMs that could rain death on hundreds of millions of people, and there were space stations in space. Mankind could build all of that, but can't place a drain on a gas furnace in a spot that lets gravity work. I guess those that can, build space stations, and those that can't build furnaces.

The next thing that engineers have jacked up is the "Limited Slip Differential," known to those who have actually been offroad as the "Un-limited Slip Differential." What it all boils down to is car manufacturers are a bunch of cheap-ass swindlers.

Stop me if you've seen this before: your bad ass four wheel drive truck right off the show room floor, in all its 35" tire glory, with all its skid plates and Z20-something "off road" shocks bought as part of that "SVT/NISMO/SR5/Goat Hoof Ninja Traction "racing package," gets hung the fuck up in a wet grassy field with a 5 degree pitch because the "Limited Slip Differential" lets the right rear tire spin at will, while the left rear tire is. . . . .limited?

Seen it before, haven't you? There is an amazing piece of technology that is finally, Finally being incorporated in brand new cars so that you don't have to buy one yourself and pay thousands to have someone install for you. This technology is called a "Locker" and it lets the driver lock the differential at will so that both wheels spin with equal traction. One cannot spin more than another, because they are locked together. They don't work so well on the street where you have to take corners and all, so that is why lockers are activated by the driver when needed.

Every single time I have ever been hung up in the mud, and every single time I have witnessed someone else hung up in the mud, without exception, was because one wheel in the front and one wheel in the back are spinning their little asses off, while the other two wheels do nothing. Limited Slip is for every day driving on the street, and absolutely useless for serious off road. It kills me to see the truck industry pushing these so called "off road" packages with winches, shocks, skid plates, and shiny stickers, and then equipping both axles with FAIL so that the very moment you get into six inches of mud, you essentially have a two wheel drive truck with a glowing light on the dash saying you're in four wheel drive.

My XTerra was not equipped with lockers, although the newer ones have lockers in the rear differential. It's criminal that manufacturers do not equip both axles standard with lockers on newer trucks. And before you bring up cost and how silly it is to add such a simple and cheap device to a truck, let me ask you, do you have "traction control" on your truck? These devices apply brakes to the wheels that are spinning, with the idea that the wheel not spinning will somehow get motivated and actually do something. While traction control may have some worthy application on sports cars and minivans, in my opinion they are a shitty gimmick for off road vehicles, and they are much more expensive.

I mean, that's the answer for the ol' "one wheel drive" problem? Install some complicated computer controlled doohickey that slows down the wheel without traction? Why not install something that works from the very start, and stop screwing the consumers with your pathetic junk.

I've got three kids in diapers and I'm gone at work for eleven hours most days, so when I've finally acquired the two hours to go out and do some shooting, I don't have the time to be dicking around with a fucking shovel trying to dig my truck outta the mud because you douchebag engineers at Nissan don't have the common sense to build axles that lock.

Lockers. Live them. Love them. Install them on every automobile so that we may not get stuck when the going gets rough.

Equipment Change Proposal

This one is the baby stuff edition.

Baby Clothes.

Some time ago, a genius individual designed little metal snaps that are amazingly strong, and very durable. Well done. But then some not-so-genius person decided that putting like thirty of them on tiny baby clothes would be a super idea. Then, along came some dumb-ass who decided that having thirty of them on tiny baby clothes wasn't quite stupid enough, and he or she sat down and pondered at length on how to make clothing your kid an absolute nightmare.

The solution was to make these little snaps the same color as the clothes.

EUREKA!!! I'LL MONOCHROME THE TINY LITTLE BUTTONS!!

And now, when dad gets up at the crack of 0200 to change little Johnny's diaper, and has to change out pajamas because the first ones are filled with poo (more on this in a minute), figuring out the fucking puzzle of how to snap the PJs back together becomes an under-the-breath curse fest, as dad can't find all the snaps to click them back together with his large, fat fingered calloused hands.

Hey, you people who design baby clothes, how about painting those snaps with glow-in-the-dark paint, or at the very least leave them silver? You can't even imagine how much you would be helping the world if you made the task of changing a kid easier for fathers.

Next up - Infant Diapers.

Infant diapers are the biggest failure I can think of right now. The sized ones for older babies are terrific; whomever is responsible for designing the technology for them should be given a Nobel Prize, a high five, and a space ship for being so fucking awesome. The amount of over-night nastiness that those things will hold is simply astonishing.

But the infant ones are shittier than the shit they're designed to hold; the people who dropped the ball on these really need a severe ass kicking.

The problem with them - and I do mean all of them; we have tried every brand with all of our kids, even the generics, and they all do the same damned thing - is that they sure do absorb liquid alright, but it takes too long. When your kid pees, it flows right out, all into their clothes with all those damned monochrome snaps, and into the sheets, or worse, your shirt.

Now you're all pissed (get it!! HA!!) because not only do you have to change your shirt, and little Johnny's diaper, but now you have to navigate the dreaded infant pajamas in the dark so you don't wake him up even more than you already have with your cursing.

I can't tell you how many times I've been dressed for work, holding the youngin' in the morning, and then feel warm piss seep into my shirt. They all do this, and it's frustrating. The diapers do not absorb fast enough to stop the flow from fleeing out the sides. Also, keep in mind that infant poo is pretty much liquid too, and nobody likes to have the mustard stain on their shirt.

The disapointment that I'm talking about here is that apparently, technology is such that size 4 diapers are advanced enough to stop ten ounces of pee at a rate of 1 1/2 OPS (ounces per second), but not advanced enough in infant diapers to stop three ounces of pee at a rate of 1/2 an OPS. How do you screw that up? Why half ass the infant diapers?

No excuses, just fix it!

Equipment Change Proposal

This one is fresh from this weekend.

The Walther P22.

What a jammamatic piece of craptastic goat shit. The gun is a joint venture between Walther and Smith and Wesson. I have a strong belief that when these two firearm manufacturers decided to start building guns together, they first decided to fire everyone in their employ that had ever done Quality Control. Just fired their asses and sent them home.

I bought my P22 like five years ago or more, and it's a very fun little gun to shoot - when it doesn't suck. I have several friends and family members who have this gun as well, and theirs sucks too; although they still enjoy shooting it. I cannot.

Now, there are a number of threads on how to make it not suck. I have read them. My problem is that for every problem fixed, another problem pops up. One would think that in the almost ten years that this POS has been in production, that the good folks at S&W would have all the problems ironed out, and that they would offer to fix their older guns retroactively considering the pathetic warranty that comes with them. This is not the case from the overwhelming number of problems that others have posted.

The first complaints were about the magazines - I know someone who has shitty magazines - but mine came with the better ones. Even with that, the gun will only shoot CCI Mini-Mags with any reliability, as any other ammunition will jam the gun. Mine stovepipes with just about every magazine. Also, I bought the 5" barrel for mine which comes with this fake compensator. The accuracy with this barrel is great, but the compensator would walk its way down the barrel when I shot it, making me have to pound it back down. Yeah, not very safe. I found out it was because of a missing screw - a worm screw as S&W calls it - that screws down through the compensator and into a notch in the barrel sleeve. Mine didn't come with it, so I ordered one from S&W, and installed it, and now the compensator doesn't walk down any more. I took the gun out for a spin this weekend to make sure that fixed the problems, and for my troubles I was rewarded with a gun that won't fire in double action. The hammer catches on the safety notch.

Hey Smith and Wesson, if I wanted a single action .22 pistol, I would have bought a Ruger Single Six. At least that gun will fire any ammunition that you stuff down in the cylinder. Do y'all care to build a .22 caliber pistol that doesn't suck?

Thinking back now, the first pistol my wife bought was a Walther PPK in .380 acp, also a joint Walther/S&W deal, and that gun was returned to the store within the hour. It didn't even get a full box of rounds fired through it. I fired the first magazine, and after the third or fourth round the rear sight fell off and wouldn't go back on. It just slid right through the sight cut in the slide with no resistance.

But back to my P22: my problem now is that I have to either take my Dremel to the gun in one of the many user fixes listed in the above linked forums, or I can send it to S&W for repair which will cost me money since it's no longer under warranty. Or I could do as several ARFCOM posters have suggested and toss the piece of shit into a lake, but only after I stuff a dollar into the grip so that I can say I threw something of value away.

Why, oh why can't people these days make stuff that works? This week I'm sending my new T.A.D. Gear jacket that I got three months ago in for repairs; I have a two year old JVC camcorder that I need to send back because it keeps telling me it can't find the battery (while it's on); I still haven't figured out how to fix the nightmare in the bottom of my gun safe; and the list goes on and on. I have a ton of stuff to either fix or send back, and I'm pretty tired of it.

If you build stuff for a living, and you're reading my rants, please please please with ammo on top start making things that don't suck!!!! Go that extra mile and make sure it's not going to fall apart the moment John Q. Public tries to use it.

Equipment Change Proposal

I've had a bad day, and I'm in the foulest mood, and I've been fighting the moron invasion for the last hour.

The target of my rage: automated voice answering systems.

These have become the pinnacle of frustration to millions of Americans. Let me tell you about why they are the one of the most un-sat devices that mankind has ever devised -- because when customers such as myself are trying to call customer service for whatever, and the stupid electronic woman's voice that's supposed to soothe you but doesn't asks one of the thousands of possible arbitrary questions that have no relation to what you need, and at the moment she says "say 'I need assistance for pain'"" - at that moment is precisely when your child shouts out from the back seat and queers the whole process - "Proctology department, you got it." Now you're going to cycle into a department that you don't want, with another arbitrary list of options that have no bearing on what you're doing, and the only real option at this point is to hang up and try again. That can take an hour or more, and you can bet that the customer will be screaming by the time they get ahold of a representative.

Also, the loathsome Gollum looking creatures that design these automated systems have figured out that pissed off customers like me will just hit "0" over and over again until we get a real person on the hook, and they've made it so you can't do that anymore.

I'll tell you right now, calling customer service and finding out that it's one of these unhelpful machines is a good way to get me to spend my money at your competitor. And to the geniuses who thought to write their customer service number with letters - you do know that these days, most phones have QWERTY keypads that don't have multiple letters assigned to numbers, right? I mean, you'd have to be pretty clueless to miss that. You have no idea how frustrating it is for a guy who is just trying to get some service, and can't because some goon thought they'd be clever by writing out the name of their company in their phone number. Try figuring that out while heading down the interstate.

I just went through this with GNC, and by the time I finally got ahold of a flesh and blood person I was beside myself with anger. Reggie was good to go though, and got my problem solved quickly. Who would've thought a human could fix something better than an electronic bimbo with a nice voice?

Fix it!!

Equipment Change Proposal

Today I decided to finally anchor my little gun safe to the floor. About six months ago I bought some Red Head Hex Sleeve Anchors to do this task, and I'm now in a huge predicament. So far only one of the pins has not completely failed:



Whomever designed these ridiculous pieces of shit deserves to spend a day in a big ass washing machine filled with Brillo pads and roofing nails. Morons.

So in my experience, these things have a 75% failure rate. What if hand grenades had a 75% failure rate? Marines would be pretty pissed off, no? How about your DVD player? How often does it fail? That's right, not very often. That's because they are generally engineered to do what they're supposed to do.

The knife industry is a perfect example of how good engineers build shit that is so over-engineered, it will probably not fail even if you use it like you're not supposed to over and over again. In the case of these Red Head pins, they are engineered by incompetent people to not even do exactly what the fuck they're designed to do one single time. Now I have one pin that's stripped because it couldn't stand the abusive tapping with a 16 oz. hammer that drives it into the concrete, and two pins that won't tighten because the design sucks and the pins spin in the expansion sleeve.

AAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!

No excuses, just fix it!!!

Next up, we have the Clorox wipes. The wipes themselves are amazing, and are quite handy around the house. The problem is that when you get down to the last 25% of the wipes in the jar, they knot up into a big ass clot that comes flying out in a spectacular mess. Getting a face full of bleach really pisses me off.

Just to put things into perspective, engineers can build an internal combustion engine, which is an amazing marvel of human accomplishment, but can't seem to get some wet paper to feed from a plastic tube. Have you ever seen a running engine without a valve cover? It's simply astonishing how everything is so precisely timed that an explosion can be harnessed, making it possible to power a two ton car up a hill or a fighter plane into the air. Now take a close look at this mess:



Not very astonishing, is it?

Hey clorox, how about fixing this mess. . .

Equipment Change Proposal

Taking into consideration that my career path does not allow me to save the world via smart engineering for the moment, I figured I would throw some ideas out there for y'all to pick over.

I don't want credit - just fix it!

Wireless internet routers.

Is it possible - you electrical engineers, I'm asking you - to make one that doesn't have to be manually reset twice a day just to maintain connectivity? I mean, do NASA guys have to send up an astronaut several times a week to push the reset button on a spy satellite with a stylus so we can keep eyes on Russia?

Didn't think so. Fix it.

Toilet seats. Yeah, I'm gonna go there.

How stupid do you have to be to screw up a toilet seat? Don't answer that, just know that you do. You gleefully advertise your $400 product being able to flush an entire wastebasket of golf balls with one delicate push of the brushed aluminum handle, and then put a pathetic plastic seat in the box? I know you guys think you're clever when you make the seat so that when it's lifted, it has to be like a millimeter past center to stay upright, but did it ever dawn on you that the little imperceptible swaying movements that guys make when they're pissing at 3 o'clock in the morning are enough to disrupt the seat's center line and make the damn thing fall down? It'd be nice to not have the seat cutting through my stream before banging down and waking up the wife. Also, perhaps the ladies would be thankful that they can actually put the fluffy carpet thingies back on.

Just a thought.

Please, for humanity's sake, the next time you're building something and think you're so smart, give a looksee at the little things so you don't screw them up.

You have to have a degree to be this stupid

%&**#$%^@!!!!!! Engineer hating profanity laced rant on!!!

Let me tell you a story about how I ran my cell phone over with my truck today.

These days, I am married to my cell phone; not because I can't put the thing down -- indeed, I would have gladly punted this thing if I didn't need it -- but because of how my family situation is right now. I'm going to be vague on that point for now, but know that I have to have a constant line of communication with my family. It is an absolute must.

My now dead phone is a BlackBerry Bold. It does so-so as a phone, and ok as a PDA, and horrible for internet; so for all intents and purposes, it's a piece of shit in my book. I've had cell phone troubles for awhile now, so that's no surprise.

BlackBerries come with a shitty holster that breaks with the slightest touch. It barely has enough oomph to stay clipped to your belt -- I've spent plenty of time retracing my steps in rained out parking lots with a flashlight looking for my stupid BlackBerry that fell off in the dark -- but beyond that, some dipshit engineer connected that weak-ass clip to the holster part with the flimsiest little nubbins of plastic so that when you sit down, the daggone holster snaps right the fuck off and falls to the ground. This is true of other cell phone holsters for other phones, like the shitty HTC Fuze that I had. I have about half a dozen of these broken holsters, and I've thrown many more away in countless airports from all the times I've broken them while getting into narrow plane seats. And before you say it, I have a narrow ass, so it's not like the problem is on my end.

Now, you would think that with the popularity of cell phones in general, and BlackBerries specifically, that design teams for cell phone holsters would say during team meetings: "You know, this design really sucks. We can do better than this, and we should, because we're engineers, and making stuff better and stronger is what engineers fucking do!"

But that's not at all what happens in today's world. Instead, at these team meetings what is said is: "You know, this design really sucks. We probably should do better than this, and we could, but fuck it, making stuff better and stronger is for someone else to fucking do!"

So, knowing full well that shitty holsters are as prolific as cell phones, I took to ordering a holster for my new BlackBerry from a company I thought had a different mentality: Maxpedition. Because when you work in an office environment, you have to have Hard Use Gear Everyday. It just makes sense.

I have owned Maxpedition stuff in the past and have favorable things to say about their quality, but their Clip-on PDA Holster is a steaming turd, and is the terminal piece of my engineering fail that directly led to the death of my shitty BlackBerry.

It seems that during the design phase of this particular piece of kit, one of the engineering minions went to the engineering overlord and said:

Jimbob - "Hey Earl. I just got done building an absolute bomb proof PDA pouch for the SNF, and I'm stuck on the Ballistic Belt Integration Device part. I need your input where. . . "

Earl - "What's the SNF?"

Jimbob - "The Stealth Ninja Force; the new agency Obama created to hunt down Islamic cannibal zombies that try to blow up buildings and planes and such, and read them their Miranda rights with extreme prejudice."

Earl - "Oh yeah. Man, do those guys have a huge budget! Well, I see what your talking about with that Integrator thingy. Those SNF guys, as well as regular office dwelling Americans, need the strongest possible clip for the strongest PDA pouch on the planet.

It looks like you've done a hell of a job already with the 1000-Denier water and abrasion resistant light-weight ballistic nylon fabric; the Teflon® fabric protector for grime resistance and easy maintenance; the UTX-Duraflex nylon buckles for low sound closures; the Triple polyurethane coating for water resistance; the High tensile strength nylon webbing; the High tensile strength composite nylon thread, stronger than ordinary industry standard nylon thread; and the Stress points double stitched, Bartacked or "Box-and-X" stitched for added strength. Way to go! The last thing we would want to do at this point is to put some ridiculous clip. . .er. . .Ballistic Belt Integration Device on it and make it a piece of shit. Therefor, I say we loosely sew three thin pieces of nylon on the back, and hang a $.02 piece of stamped sheet metal all half-assed on it.

Jimbob - "Earl, your such a genius! What's your secret to being so smart?"

Earl - "A good breakfast, my lad! First thing in the morning I pour myself a heaping bowl of whole grain dumb ass, and then wash it down with a tall glass of pulp free stupid."

I'd like to kick the ass of the guy who designed this trash. When I walked into work this morning, I felt the emptiness on my belt where my lifeline to my wife should have been. The clip was there, but no pouch, and no phone. Jumping back in my truck to retrace my steps led me to the driveway of a family members house, where my phone lay smitten in the snow. Apparently it only takes a bump to dislodge the holster from its $.02 stamped sheet metal "Heat treated heavy duty spring steel clip, jet black power coat" belt clip. The guy or gal who designed it has probably already left this world because they clearly do not have the mental capacity to cross the street.

Thanks for your help, Maxpedition, but I think I'll pass on your products from now on.

Now, I'm sure that there are some sharp engineers out there. As a matter of fact, I know it. I work with some of the finest engineers the world has ever seen. Where I work is kinda like in Better Off Ted, but with everyone wearing 5:11s and talking about guns. Cool place. Also, if you didn't catch the headlines this week, the US Missile Defense Agency shot down two ballistic missiles with a Laser mounted on a 747.

Smart engineers built that Laser, the missiles, and the plane; but some engineers are apparently too stupid to make a cell phone holster rugged enough to withstand an RPG. A hand grenade rampage. A machine gun assault. Getting out of the truck with two toddlers. Awesome guys.

And it isn't just the stupid cell phone holsters, or the shitty cell phones that go into them. No, engineers have really dropped the ball lately, like with my Triple Aught Design Stealth Hoodie Reloaded (thanks for ignoring my email on this, too); my Burris XTreme Tactical scope rings; my Gateway Computer. . . twice; my big ass Gateway monitor; my wife's laptop; my Samsung TV that makes a screeching noise and barely turns on; my Canon Elph camera that wouldn't focus right out of the box, and is waiting for me at Best Buy after its second repair; my Jard AR15 trigger that I noticed the other day has a chip missing from the sear (a post for later); that shitty piece of metal shit called a shelf that failed, sending my brass hither and yon; and the list goes on and on. I don't have the time to post them all here.

Again, there are some fine engineers out there; but it does seem that lately universities across the country are stamping them out of nothing and sending them out into the world to wreak havoc. Either that or they're taking a big syringe and injecting them in the forehead with a massive dose of Botard before they let them graduate.

What gives?

One day when I have time, I'm going to go back to school, get my engineering degree and fix the mess some of y'all have made of this world. It's gonna be a big job, but somebody has to design stuff that doesn't fall apart like a two dollar watch the very moment someone lays a hand on it.

That doesn't include un-fucking the Windows operating system. Someone else is going to have to do that. Or perhaps just leave the thing be and get some marketing gurus to help take the market back from the Microsoft scum.

That alone would quench a great deal of my bitterness.

GRRRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrr!!!

Update: Several engineers have chimed in, and so far none of them are throwing barbs at me. Maybe I'm not crazy. Commenter Geodkyt has the money quote with this:

"I think that a prerequisite for entry into an engineering program should be two years in a Real World job, where shit that breaks get people killed."

Yes indeedee. That's what I'm talking about. Too much these days though, we have people who lack this experience going into places like OSHA, who sit around pondering day and night on how to wrap everything in bubblewrap so that there is no possible chance of getting hurt. I would rather have reliable equipment prone to surviving in austere environments instead of shitty equipment that won't put your eye out when it lets go at 15,000' at night while strapped to the back of some CCT operator.