Becsta.COM

I started shooting in November 2009, and competitively early in 2010. By the end of 2010, I’d achieved a lot in my new sport, by discovering a hidden natural talent for shooting.

As noted in a previous thread on Becsta.COM, I was given the opportunity to qualify for selection to the Australian Shooting Team, heading over to compete in the WRABF Rimfire and Air Rifle Benchrest World Championships being held in Charleston, South Carolina, USA. I had one opportunity to do this, at the 2010 RBA Nationals, and in the end, I prevailed – I received a phone call on New Years Eve with the news that I’d been selected.

Over the following six months, I’ve been busily preparing for the trip of a lifetime, renewing my passport, booking flights, attending to the paperwork required to get a rifle and ammunition over to the USA and back, booking accommodation, seeking sponsorship, and practicing.

Two days ago, I arrived home, worn out, exhausted, a bit sick and emotional, but satisfied that I’d participated in a quite amazing adventure.

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August 12th, 2011 | Tags: Shooting, Travel, WRABF | Category: Competitions, Shooting | Leave a comment

It seems I missed New Years – I was playing Half-Life 2 on Steam, and completely lost track of the time.  Oh well, it certaintly _was_ “one of those years”.

The year started off with me being on 7 weeks of Recleave.  I did nothing.

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January 1st, 2011 | Tags: 2010, Ice Hockey, news, Rant, Shooting, xplorer | Category: General News, Rant | Leave a comment

I was doing my usual bit today, reading various tech pages on the Internet, and discovered a link to a tool called NameBench.  This tool times a set of queries to international and local DNS servers, ultimately determining whether the DNS servers currently being queried are the fastest responders.

A few years ago, I was using the iiNet main DNS servers, but was having problems with some apps (IIRC Apple iTunes, and I think also YouTube on the iPhone over WiFI).  A look through the Apple Support Forums gave me the hint to try the OpenDNS servers.  So I did, and my problems were resolved (I think…).

Anyway, I downloaded the NameBench tool, ran it, waited about 20 minutes or so, and this was the result:

NameBench Results

Not a bad result at all, being able to speed up DNS queries by over 100%.  Testing of iTunes was good, it certainly felt “snappier” when browsing the iTunes Music and App stores. I’ve since changed the DNS server settings on my iMac and broadband router.

So now I’m querying why I used OpenDNS again??

January 1st, 2011 | Tags: dns, IT, opendns, tweaks | Category: General News | Leave a comment

I’ve been getting right into programming again, as work is slow, projects have dried up due to lack of funds, I have some spare time, and I need a break to recharge and refocus. Working on a Mac has been a lot of fun, so I decided that I’d try some Cocoa programming.

The plan at this stage is to write an application to control a programmable timer system, and then expand this across to the iPad and iPhone.

So far, I’ve only managed to code an MVC architecture, using the architecture described in the book “Cocoa Design Patterns”. It’s very much a learning process for me at the moment, as Objective-C and Cocoa are new topics, but I’ve been hitting the books hard – eBooks in particular.

• Beginning Mac Programming (Tim Isted/Pragmatic Press)
• Cocoa Programming (Daniel H Steinberg/Pragmatic Press)
• Core Animation for Mac OSX and the iPhone (Bill Dudney/Pragmatic Press)
• Core Data (Marcus S Zara/Pragmatic Press)
• iPad Programming (Daniel H Steinberg/Pragmatic Press)
• iPhone SDK Development (Bill Dudney/Pragmatic Press)
• Cocoa Design Patterns (Eric M Buck/Pearson Press)
• Programming in Objective-C 2.0 2nd Ed. (Stephen G Kochan/Pearson Press)

Spending at least an hour each way on the train every day is good time for reading eBooks on the iPad.

November 30th, 2010 | Tags: coding, mac, objective-c, osx, programming | Category: General News | Leave a comment

I managed to survive another ice hockey season relatively unscathed.

The season itself was quite interesting, as I switched team, and played with the Penrith Phantoms, as my sister’s daughter invited me. My aim was to just play the season out and enjoy it, as the Phantoms were 2009 Champions.

The differences in the play styles between my old team, and this team were chalk and cheese – we contested every puck, I was told on numerous occasions to “step up” rather than skate backwards in one-on-one defensive play, and our defense was amazing.

Probably the biggest adjustment I had to make was the fact that I wasn’t a core member of the team – I wasn’t expected to anchor the defense, so I found myself a bit lost at times, not knowing how the plays evolve.

I had to skate hard, simply to keep up!

I also quickly discovered that all the other teams considered playing against the Phantoms a challenge, and they certainly took it up to us this year. Every game was hard, fast, and we never really had every game in the bag. But in the end, we won all bar one drawn game.

We ended up winning the Grand Final. It took me 6 years to play in a Grand Final, and win a medal.

I don’t know what the future holds for me player-wise, given the success I’ve been having shooting in smallbore target sports. I suspect my commitments to ice hockey will be mostly behind the scenes, with HockeyPulse taking up sponsorship opportunities.

October 13th, 2010 | Tags: Ice Hockey | Category: Ice Hockey | Comments Off

Shooting at the RB Nationals

As noted in an earlier blog post, I decided to have a go at shooting a benchrest discipline called RBA. This is similar to the discipline being shot by TRA. However, the RBA discipline is harder, as the RBA 10 ring is roughly the same size as the TRA X-ring. So it’s harder to shoot high scores on an RBA card, against a TRA card.

The RBA Nationals are being held at the Belmont Rifle Range, in Brisbane, Queensland, over two days.

Day 1

Getting up at 3am is hard, but I had to do it. Drive from 4am from Sydney, up through Newcastle, turn off onto the Bucketts Way, then Thunderbolts Way to Armidale, then up the New England Highway to Brisbane, and the range at Belmont. The total trip has taken about 11 hours, with both my sister and I exhausted.

It’s time to sleep – tomorrow is a practice day, and I have 700 rounds with me for the whole weekend. I’m expecting to use about 400 rounds this weekend.

So, at this stage, what do I think my chances are of winning? I’m expecting to do quite well, but don’t really expect to win, as this will be my second ever RBA shoot. I’m more comfortable shooting the TRA cards, of course, but my 156/180 centers at the Enduro a few weeks back tells me that I should be able to shoot high scores in RBA.

If I drop one or two points per card this weekend, I’ll be happy.

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July 29th, 2010 | Tags: RBA, Shooting | Category: Shooting | Comments Off