Too bad.

The Razer Deathadder is an ergonomic gaming mouse, molded for the right hand, but a left handed model is available. It uses an advanced infrared sensor capable of 3500 dpi sensitivity, but let’s be serious… Are you really freakish enough to use movements that small in your FPS escapades?

Well, let’s look at it this way. Before, I was using a Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical. Yes, one of those, and I had no problem with it. I’ve played Unreal Tournament, Urban Terror, Starcraft, Starcraft II, and plenty of others with this mouse.

But when, after several years the left button stopped clicking reliably, I was looking at mice – planning to replace it with the exact one I had been using – and I started hearing about gaming mice, mostly the Logitech MX518. However, Logitech just sounds… icky. I’ve used a couple of Logitech products in the past and never liked them, plus their gaming mice just look… cheap somehow.

Enter Razer. Of course Razer has been the name in gaming mice since the Boomslang came out in ‘98, but I always looked down on them as silly junk peddled to gullible gamers. Somehow, though, I became too intrigued for my own good and started looking seriously at their products until finally I purchased the Deathadder. I figured I didn’t mind spending the money on a mouse that was obviously of high quality and would likely last me a few years, so I went for it.

I had heard that the Deathadder was pretty big, but the first thing I noticed when I unboxed it and plugged it in was… it’s pretty big. I was accustomed to what Razer refers to as the “claw grip” and the “fingertip grip” due to the size of the Microsoft mouse, but the Deathadder just naturally fills my entire hand. It took me a day or two, and lots of fiddling with sensitivity settings, but I’ve come to the conclusion that I really like it. I currently have it set at 1800 dpi with sensitivity set to 6.5, which I assume means it’s functioning at roughly 1170 dpi. So I’m certainly not taking advantage of the power of this fully operational battle station, but I am really enjoying the slightly increased sensitivity, the comfort of the mouse, and definitely the smoothness of its movement. (The Teflon feet on the mouse have it gliding across my bare desk – no mousepad – smooth as butter.)

So will it up your game? Maybe, maybe not. Will it be more comfortable? Well, that’s personal preference, but to me, most definitely!

My main gripe with my old holster was that when sitting down, the gun jabbed into my side. I thought it was the rear of the slide, and the MTAC’s leather backing covers the back end of the slide – perfect, I thought. Then I got home, slipped the Glock into the holster, and sat down, only to be disappointed to find it rammed right into my ribs. It was the grip all along, and the Minotaur holster doesn’t really do anything to stop that. I toyed with positioning and adjusting the cant for some time, and while it did get a bit better, it’s still very, very noticeable while sitting.

Keep in mind that I’m 6 feet tall and weigh roughly 135 pounds. I have NO meat on my ribs, so what I’m thinking is actually that my body shape pretty much makes it impossible to overcome my problem. I have a sort of dip between my hip bone and my rib cage (not quite as gross as it sounds – I don’t look anorexic, I’m just unusually thin) that any holster naturally wants to pull itself into.

I could reduce the holster to a more neutral cant, but this would cause the butt of the Glock to print, or if I moved the holster farther forward (3:00 position) the rear of the slide will start to poke out my shirt, so I’m at an impasse right now. On the bright side, I’ve found the position that, when standing, hides the gun perfectly and is very comfortable. It’s only sitting that I have a problem with, but I’ll keep fiddling with it and update if I come up with anything better.

Pistols are another story entirely. I only started getting heavily into handguns within the past few years, and with how little I shoot, I haven’t been able to experiment and work on getting rid of a nasty flinch I had. I couldn’t hit jack with a pistol unless I was lucky enough to flinch AFTER the bullet left the barrel.

Everybody says that all you have to do to cure a flinch is lots of dry firing and squeeze the trigger slowly, so the break surprises you, instead of slapping it. Well, I did both.

Didn’t work.

Dry firing is a different beast. I never flinched while dry firing, so I really don’t think that carries over into actual shooting (unless you do it thousands of times, maybe), and squeezing the trigger slowly didn’t make a difference because I would stand there flinching repeatedly throughout the trigger pull, anticipating the break. So you know how I got over it?

I stopped holding onto the gun.

As soon as I stopped squeezing it in a death grip like it was a fish trying to escape, the flinch was gone. With a Weaver stance, I apply the most grip with my support hand, but still don’t give it a death grip, and only apply minimal force with my dominant hand. You only need enough force to keep the gun from slipping through your hands, holding onto it harder doesn’t reduce recoil, that’s in the wrists and arms.

The tension in my hands seemed to worsen the feeling of recoil, making me anticipate it more, and therefore I would flinch and throw the muzzle down just before every shot, totally wrecking my aim.

I’m still a pretty bad shot, but I can at least hit within a couple inches of where I’m aiming instead of going a foot or two low every time.

Just as a CD, Alchemy is fantastic. The audio quality is a bit lackluster, be it from the recording or the production of the CD, I don’t know, but the performance is top notch. The extended performances of Tunnel of Love and Sultans of Swing (6:15 and 5:07 longer than their album versions, respectively) are still amazing after listening to them countless times throughout my life, and the opening on Once Upon a Time in the West just sucks you in.

So, today, I ordered the Blu-Ray. A little word of warning for those in the U.S. of A.: don’t buy it from a mainstream U.S. store. There are sellers on the Amazon Marketplace that have it for roughly $20 instead of the $30 everyone else is asking, which, from what I hear, is because Warner Bros. is simply importing the regionless UK version into the United States instead of pressing their own, which jacks the price up for some reason.

I’m hoping to have my copy in-hand before I head out for Las Vegas and the west coast on July 4 so I can report back on it.

I mostly chose the Frequent Flyer over the more popular Original Instructor Belt because I won’t be attaching any emergency lines to my belt any time soon, it’s cheaper by about six bucks (nine if you go for the 1.25″ version), and I liked the look of the rings better than the Instructor buckle.

Why did I need a new belt? Because people on gun forums told me so, that’s why! The added stiffness of a “gun belt” supposedly helps a lot when carrying for an extended period of time. I received the belt today and wore my Glock around the house for a while, and I might have noticed a bit of difference, but it wasn’t exactly life-altering. It did make a difference when I tried on my brother’s USP in his paddle holster and was able to cinch the belt down on it to the perfect tightness. With a standard belt buckle, I would have needed a hole in between to get it to exactly the right tightness, but with the Wilderness belt I was able to adjust it down to where it took off a lot of that lopsided feeling without squeezing my guts in. The Glock in the Don Hume IWB holster didn’t seem much different, but I also don’t care for the holster that much, so we’ll see what happens when I try a new holster on my old and new belts.

Unfortunately, my Comp-Tac is still in the production phase. They advertised an 8-day production time when I ordered (though it’s down to 7 now) and it’s been 5 business days since I ordered, so hopefully it’ll ship by the end of the week. I intend to post a review and my further thoughts on the belt when I get the new holster in my hands.

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Update: Their advertised production time is down to 6 days now. Today is day 6 for me and still no word. Dang!

My friend stepped in some gum on the ground without realizing it, then got in the car, pressing the old gum into the floor mat. If it wasn’t my dad’s car, I probably would have just taken the lazy route and left it until such time as it caused a problem for me, but it was my dad’s car, and I therefore couldn’t just ignore it.

Going in, I had no idea how to remove old gum from carpet, so I did a quick Bing search. The most popular answer was “put ice in a plastic bag and set that on top of it, then scrape it up with a spatula or dull knife,” so I tried that.

Pffft. Yeah right.

That got me nowhere, so I raided the laundry closet and grabbed the bottle of Zout Oxy Foam, which I guess is actually intended to soak a stain before you put it in the laundry rather than use as a carpet cleaner, but I’ve used it on messes in carpet before and it seemed to work. Still, I had no idea if it would do anything to gum, but I didn’t know what else to do, so I tried it.

I gave the gum good coverage with the foam and let it sit (I pretty much just let it sit until the foam fizzed away, so 30 seconds or so) then scraped it with a knife. The liquid that was scraped up on the knife was a pinkish brown and the gum was red, so I figured I was getting somewhere. I wiped the knife on a paper towel after each scrape and pretty soon, it looked… clean! After spending twenty minutes with ice and getting nowhere, it took me about five minutes with the Zout stuff, and that’s only because the gum was spread around and stuck in four or five different spots.

Of course, then I wiped up my workplace on the dining table with rubbing alcohol and took half the rooster designs off. Oops!

But here’s the problem. I’m still working my way through its decidedly 33-hour tutorial and I’ve realized that, while making the experience smooth to ease into (or possibly easy to smooth into), I now have no reason to buy their sixty dollar game because I will never replay it from the beginning.

When it takes five hours to get to the part of the game where you can do something besides run forward into battle and select Auto-battle, never will I have the patience to sit through that again knowing that I could be experiencing the excitement of switching paradigms AND selecting Auto-battle.

I’d also like to mention that I had Listerine in my mouth for the entire duration of writing this post.

It's too big, Gus! (Click for full size)

Apparently they had used this heatsink, a Scythe Mugen-2 Revision B, to overclock an Intel Core i3-530 to roughly 4.3 GHz from its out-of-box clock speed of 2.93 GHz. Calling that “pretty impressive” would be a considerable understatement.

Unfortunately for me, this seems to have given me the idea that I could back off from the Core i5-661 (3.33 GHz) that I was planning on buying, to the considerably cheaper Core i3-530… and overclock it. You’ll notice the ellipsis. That’s because I’ve never overclocked anything, and in fact, have been kind of an opponent of overclocking most of my life. However, the ease with which this Core i3 seems to be overclockable, as well as the fact that I’m planning on using the ASRock H55M Pro motherboard (chosen because it’s slightly less expensive than, as well as reviewed better than the closest equivalent Intel board, and the added benefit of a second PCI Express x16 slot) which apparently has excellent overclocking options from the BIOS, means the temptation to overclock is higher than I’ve ever felt before.

All I can say now, though, is… we’ll see.