Alex Brown

got bricks of .22 waiting for this silly rain to let up...

Agreed.

Thanks! This is good stuff. I had been practicing the waistband stash a few weeks before the classifier, but I got a nice new belt right beforehand, and its stiffness made it feel awkward to toss the mag in, so I switched back. My third match, which I shot in December, was a low-light, and stashing in the waistband caused me to drop the mag and almost earn a PE. I heard the clang just as my sights were back on target. Need more practice!!!! The frankenstein walk? I have no idea where that walk came from (and i swear it didn't feel like i was doing that at the time... haha), but your description is dead-on. I'll have to work on that more once I get out of this tiny apartment and the temperatures warm up. As for the transitions-- I've been working on these assuming that if my peripheral vision can grab the next target, I should leave my head attached to the 'turret' and just snap my eyes to the target before bringing the gun there. this is the way I shot the transitions in this match (albeit slowly, I must admit). Are you saying it's faster to move my head, even if the transition is a short one like in the el prez? thanks!!!

hey all, thought i'd post a video of my first match this year (fourth ever)... i've been stuck with just airsoft for months now, since the local ranges are all outdoors and were covered in snow. i have totally neglected my reloads-with-retention in dry fire, among other fairly obvious things (moving and shooting, for example), but i thought perhaps some of you more experienced types could give me some things to focus on this year. i dropped a heck of a lot of points in stage 3 (first stage I shot in the match, but 3rd on video), and I'd love to attribute that to lack of trigger time lately, nerves, and an apparent eye warm-up period, but i don't know. How many points? Let's just say that excluding the points dropped on the third stage would probably have nudged me into expert... in any case, I'm glad to have a classification, and I'm excited to do some shooting this year and get better. I welcome all criticism (from USPSA shooters and IDPA shooters alike) without further ado,

The Herd... -2006 SV650S- many upgrades, almost all one-offs by yours truly -1965 Honda CA77 Dream- built by yours truly, featured in Motorcyclist Retro in an 8-page feature I wrote about a 3,000 mile cross country trip on it -1962 Honda Supercub C102- built by yours truly, features a 110cc lifan engine and RIPS. like, highways speeds... -1985 Honda VF500f- my first bike! -1983 Vt750C (not shown)- another cross-country warrior, given to me by a friend who bought it and rode the circumference of the US one summer on exchange from Barcelona.

here's mine!

+1!

INFJ, and the description is dead-on.

This is a known bug. I plan to fix it in the next version, but first, do any of you have a desire for the program to export an excel or text file containing your practice session times? I'm working on this right now, but I'll go ahead and release the next version sooner if this isn't important. I've already fixed the bug mentioned, and I've also incorporated an option to go back and change the threshold without exiting the program. Let me know! EDIT: and yes, this error occurs when the program doesn't hear your shots. is this happening all the time for you, or just occasionally?

1/10/10 equipment: airsoft goal: see sights, see magwell, see sights, 'look the shot off' drill: draw, two shots on 1/3 scale 'A' zone at 10 feet, slide lock reload, two shots on 1/3 scale 'A' zone at 10 feet cold splits around 1.53/.33/2.3/.33 LOHF around 1.3/.24/2.03/.24 notes: -those sights move pretty stinkin' quick, and it's too easy to get sloppy with the tiny recoil. If I had room, I'd move back, but I guess the best I can do is make my 'A' zone smaller. -I think my reloads are pretty efficient, but they're very slow. I feel myself fumbling to get the mags out of my cloth mag pouch. Something with a little more consistency of resistance would help, but I think the biggest place I'm losing time is getting the sights back on target. Might be bringing the gun down too far, and I probably need work on resetting my index from the gun 'tilted' position. -I hate writing times down. I am thinking about making a new version of my laptop shot timer program that saves times and drill name/description into an excel file or something...

the eyeball looking things are a placeholder graphic (supposed to look like a cassette tape) to let the shooter know the program is recording. do you see the text 'Recording' written above that graphic? I'll have to look into the other thing. As far as I know there are only three ways 'out' of the program. One is selecting 'n' when it asks you if you want to continue, the second is the bug relating to when the program doesn't hear any shots, and the third is closing the window with the 'x' button. Let me try it on my Vista-equipped laptop and see if i can reproduce your problem during my practice this evening. I developed the program on my netbook, which runs XP, so I guess there could be compatibility issues (although I doubt it). thanks for the feedback!

Glad to help. Hope it works well for you. I'm just too damn cheap to buy my own timer. Some tips that might make finding the 'sweet spot' in threshold setting a little easier: -I programmed this thing very simplistically- essentially, the program 'looks' for peaks in the sound trace that are greater than .09sec apart (not many people run splits faster than this, I don't think). If your microphone input volume is too high, the 'blast' from the pistol will distort in the recording, and the program might get confused. If changing the threshold adjustment at the beginning of the program doesn't work, make sure your input volume isn't too high or low. In your 'accessories' menu in windows, use the sound recorder to record your voice, loud claps, maybe even your airsoft. If the sound is distorted, turn down your computer's input level. If it's too quiet, turn it up. -My microphone input level is set around 50%, and if I stand in the vicinity of the computer while training, with the threshold on the program set to 35, neither the TV, the ventilation fan, or the cat contribute to my shot string as recorded by the program. -If you see more shots than you fired, especially if they're separated by something eerily close to .09 seconds, you probably need to turn up the threshold adjustment (by quittting the program and restarting it until I write a new version that's more user friendly) because it's picking up echo. -One other known bug right now is that if the program registers zero shots, it quits. This is also an easy fix, but until some people use this and fill a laundry list of things to fix, I'll leave well enough alone.

Can't wait! My first match was IDPA at lewistown in October, and then I've done two in Delaware county (near my parents' house, over thanksgiving and christmas) since. I've heard great things about Hollidaysburg, and I guess I'll see you when the weather breaks!

Man, I'm so sorry for all the trouble. I tried to install from the beginning to see what might be going on in your case. I started with just the zip file, extracted it, and double clicked the install file. During the install, that DOS window appears, disappears, and the following files pop up in addition to the readme and setup file: -basicshottimer_0_1.ctf -basicshottimer_0_1.exe then when i run the program .exe file for the fiirst time, a DOS window comes up and says it's extracting the CTF archive... then says CTF archive extraction complete, and then the shot timer program runs in the DOS window like it's supposed to. When you look back into the folder basic_shot_timer_noruntime, a folder called 'basicshottimer_0_1_mcr' should appear. If I were you, I'd delete everything except the zip file and try again (don't uninstall MCR, just delete my program's directory), now that you have the MCR from matlab installed properly. Please let me know how this works, and thanks for bearing with the teething issues and my incompetent instructions. I don't often make standalone software, so the ins and outs are a little fuzzy for me. Nevertheless, The program's already given me back the 2 hours I spent making it 100-fold in useful feedback, and I hope it can do the same for others as well...

Let me look into this. The problem is that every computer I own has Matlab on it already, so when I tested the MCR download, I might have been fooled by the fact that my computer could already run the program, and has files and folders in place that other computers won't. If there's a way for me to host the file WITH the MCR, I will do that. Much less hassle for those downloading it, but it'll be aboutr 150Mb download instead of 500kb... thus is the efficiency of Matlab. Writing a program this small with that package is killing a fly with a sledgehammer. In the meantime, will someone try using this link to download the component runtime? http://www.bioacademy.gr/bioinformatics/Br...d/download.html these guys have a program built in the same version of matlab as I used, so the MCR version requrements should be the same.