rboudrie

www.uspsa-nationals.org for detailed schedule of the match events.

It makes sense if you understand how the business operates. If you are big enough in your market segment (Walmart, Brownells, Midway) you can dictate a standard set of terms suppliers must agree to if they want to sell through you. One common term in the firearms accessories retail business is the unconditional right of return for refund or credit. If Brownell's (an example whose terms I am familiar with; I assume Midway is similar) accepts it as a return, the seller MUST take it back and give Brownell's full credit. It is not uncommon for the manufacturer to get products back that have been abused; gun parts that were improperly smithed; etc. - and they have no choice but to refund the wholesaler or discontinue selling through that vendor. My guess is that the [their] standard terms include such a "unconditional return clause", but do not have a provision for maintaining an inventory of spare straps in the warehouse to take care of situations like yours.

It's more like "how long does it take for some supplier to start selling at a price lower than what they have proven people will pay in order to take market share from a competitor?" Most intelligent suppliers will be very careful about starting a price war, and many may wait for others to lower their price before they do. In other words, bullets are priced just like you house is when you are trying to sell it - the most the free market will bear while moving the desired volume.

Shooters will get "hit total summary stubs", however, NPMs are not itemized - they do not get you points, nor do they take points away, so they are not explicitly accounted for. Since the Palm verifies the correct number of rounds accounted in order to accept a score, there is no need for a NPM column on the stub sheet. Ditto for the competitor summary on the results stations - all totals for each box (A/B/C/D/M/PR/NS) will be shown, but there is no itemization with the total NPMs on a stage.

Every match is a learning experience for both match directors and competitors alike and with a bit of luck, there will be continual improvements. If you felt your concerns about a change in course of fire were not adequately addressed, how about taking up a collection and filing an arbitartion?

The more services and ports you have available on a system, the greater the vulnerability to hacking. This is why the USPSa on-llise credit card systems use specialty vendors which deal in secure commerce (that way, I don't have to worry about contacting card members if uspsa.org is hacked). Another interesting package is "tripwire", which is used on Linux to determine if any packages have been changed - since the irst thing done after rooing a system is to replace several of the commands which would show the presence of an addiitonal logged in user.

I just fixed a recently introduced bug which is probably the source of your problems. Please give it another try.

The most unusual TSA comment I received was at the Providence, RI airport when the younger of two baggage screeners asked the older one what the procedure was for the gun he saw when doing a manual inspection of the gun case. The older TSA agents response was "It's got the declaration tag so it's OK. That's an SVI but I usually build on Caspian frames myself." No, I did not recognize him.

I have one up at www.uspsa.org/chat but have not yet decided if this is useful enough to support as an official feature of the page, or decided if it should be a "members only" feature. Comments welcome.

I will follow up with Dave Thomas. He emailed me an EzWinScore database file for the 3gun, and I used this to generate Tactical results for posting using the development version of EzWinScore 2.30. All results except 3 gun tactical were generated at the match so the disconnect is probably limited to "tactical aggregate" only. rob

It looks like the score transfer file generated by EzWinScore does not include an aggregate for Tactical (something t hat will have ot be corrected). I have emailed Dave Thomas about this asking for the EzWinScore datbase so I can post Tactical Aggregate results manually, so they should be up in the not too distant future.

Not abundantly clear? I thought directly stating such at the top of the USPSA List was sufficient.

Everything Vince says is true, except that John Amidon adds guns to the list directly

There are a number of high quality bags out there, but it's worth noting that Green Mountain offers great support. I send the carry strap to a 10+ year old bag back to them since the clip broke and made it clear iI was willing to pay for a replacement. A replacement was shipped promptly and free, with a note to the effect of "the design has changed - if this does not work call us and we will get you something that does." I've also found there is a great correlation between sponsorship and customer support, and Green Mountain is no exception. Companies where are generous at prize tables tend to be generous when their customers need support, and the converse is often true.

The RO should listen for "additional information" (a missed "D" hit at the edge of a target), but once the decision is made an RO who is confident and polite can end it by saying either "That's my call. You have a right to have that target re-scored by the Range Master. Do you want me to have him summoned to the stage"? (if it's a scoring issue) or "That's my call. You are free to contact the Match Director if you wish to arbitrate." (It it's an issue other than scoring). As a Range Officer you need to be polite but firmly follow procedure - and let competitors who disagree you that the way for them to escalate is to follow the process provided in the rulebook; not raise their level of unpleasantness with you.

USPSA is currently offering FREE HOSTING on the USPSA.ORG web server at no charge to sections and areas on a capacity available basis. Yes, you can use your own domain name (set the dns to ns1.simonthedog.com and ns2.simonthedog.com). There are a few catches: 1. The service must be requested by your area director, and must be for a sectional or area site ONLY. 2. We do not guarantee backups - you have to keep your own. 3. Site management is via a cpanel control panel which allows you to control pop email, mailing lists, forwarders, MySQL databii, etc. Technical support from me will be minimal - I will keep the system working, but cannot hand hold on details. 4. The system is Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP based. 5. Space of at least 500MB. Traffic has no set limit, but this is subject to keeing withint overall server limits (as of today, we have used less than 2% of our monthly bandwidth on the server) 6. There is no guarantee this will be free forever... but not plans to do anything else either. The webmaster (me) is doing this on his own using leeway granted by HQ. There are currently no plans to charge in the future, but HQ and the board make the final decisions. If I find it is easy to support sections and areas, I may suggest making this service available to clubs at a nominal fee. 7. If the server is down, it means USPSA.ORG is down too. Getting that up will have my full attention and be treated as a top priority, but I can't guarantee perfection. 8. You will have ftp, shell (telnet & ssh) and MySQL access. 9. The server supports https, however, I do not have any certificates installed and do not recommend it for commerce since it's not a "hardened" system (all on-line USPSA credit card transactions are done using separate specialty services for security reasons).

An interesting opinion, but some more details are needed to fully understand it: 1. Do you feel the store has the right to detain someone by force who declines a search? (I'm not talking about a "probable cause" detention here; just detention for refusal to submit to search) 2. Do you feel the store has the basis to bring criminal charges if someone fails to submit to a search? If so, what charges?

You know you live in Bruce Gray's old apartment when the kitchen sink drain is an pipe which sticks out the wall fo the shower stall about 2ft above the floor and drops the drainage into the shower drain.

A bit off topic, but the USPSA "Safe Handgun Competitor" course is now certified by the state of Massachusetts for a carry permit - but, it has to be given by someone with a MA instructor's license.

CAL stands for "Charter Annual Life" and exists to allow Charter Annual members to upgrade to Life status without losing their cool membership number (Ie, CA157 => CAL 157). There are also "B" numbers (Benefactor) - life but with a larger donation, and "S" (Sponsor), but no one seems to remember exactly when and why it was used. And don't forget that you get an RD number when you become USPSA President, and get to keep the number after you retire from office.

I'll start by fessing up with my list of Palm issues from the match: 1). Two shooters had the first digit dropped from their time (a time of 37.xx seconds was reported as 7.xx seconds, and a time of 12.75 seconds was entered as 2.75 seconds). This was a result of data entry error, combined with a failure to visually identify the discrepeancy when reading scores off the Palm. These were quickly identified and corrected. 2). Four scores were not entered into the Palm - one was brought to our attention by the shooter, and the other 3 were found by stats. In each case, stats located the paper log of the score within a couple of minutes and entered the missing score. 3). Two shooters had a procedural they did not earn on one stage. We believe that this was due to the RO holding the palm with a finger touching the screen. 4). One shooter had a paper time reported which was .05 second slower than that on the Palm. This was corrected during the posting period. #1, #3, and #4 could have been avoided by visually verifying the scores at the time the RO was writing the scores on paper. #2 appears to be user error - failing to hit "done" to store the score after showing it to the shooter and recording it on paper. The up side is that we ran a 230 shooter, 10 stage match, with one laptop and a stats crew which only needed to be in the stats room part-time, and had results within minutes of delivery of the last palm to stats. Much of the time we saved was spent providing RO support with the Palms, and dealing with new user training issues. If the RO staff was already "Palm scoring experienced" prior to the match, I could have run stats without assistance. Other thoughts ------------------- My involvement in match production was limited to registration and stats support, however, I will be offering a few suggestions for next year: 1). Printed walk-throughs to be read verbatim 2). Dedicated RO shoot time rather than "shoot through" 3). A rigorously followed squadding schedule 4). Arrange for a posting area at the hotel so competitors who don't bring a laptop can check their scores each day without waiting around at the range.

I will be working as stats director for this match, but will not be serving as RM or MD. If you have a concern about the running of the match, Dave Uchida is the Match Director and person to deal with. I am certain, however, that the Infinity Open is being run as an approved match with payment of the relevant USPSA mission count fees. This match will use the Palm based scoring system we used at the Area 7 Championship. Yes, we will have a paper backup of score totals and each competitor will get their own copy.

I will be posting directions to the range on the Infinity Open web site as soon as I get them from Dave Uchida. The squadding will be done about two weeks before the match (I have all the requests submitted with the applications) once Dave tells me how many squads and how many in a squad. We will have a confirmation letter out to all competitors (by US Mail) at least two weeks before the match. Signups are going well, arrangements with numerous sponsors have been made; and it should be a great match. And yes, there are still some slots left.

Ok, let's talk about prize table welfare. Some would consider it welfare to tell the vast number of shooters who are either not skilled enough to advance in their class; don''t have time to practice; etc. Is it really "fair" (a nebulous term at best) to tell those shooters "You will not be permitted to compete in a large match or Area Championship unless you are willing to pay a surcharge so that the people more skilled than yourself can receive payback from your entry fee"? Of those respondents answering the Area 7 Survey (www.uspsa.org/survey question #8) question on this topic, 3% preferred order of overall finish; 79% preferred order within class; and 17% preferred door prizes. The real prize at a match is your place on the scoresheet, and the sense of personal achievement in self-improvement. Since there will never be an objectively "right" answer to this perennial question, the best way to handle it is for matches to set their own policies and let the invisible hand of the free market sort out what match product people want to buy. Rob Boudrie

I fixed the problem which allowed viewing of member results by tweaking the URL. This is an example of why the USPSA.ORG server contains no highly confidential information - we use separate services for our On-Line store and membership credit card processing which specialize in secure services. I'd prefer to spend my time trying to think of new features to add to the web site, rather than worrying about continuously hardening our server. Thanks for pointing this out.