I'm a P38 fan, I have two world war II P38 and one post war German army P1. It is a nicely designed weapon, way ahead of its time.

It's interesting to know so many modern military technology were started from World War II German weapon systems; assault rifle, jet fighter, stealth bomber, cruise missile and ballistic missile, the list goes on and on.

This is a windy and cold day, a bit of rain here and there. I'm surprised by how busy it is in the main range. All the shooting positions are taken. The range officer is holding a piece of paper full of names. These are the unfortunate people who have to wait. Lucky for me, there is still a club member only pistol range available.

This time I only have one pistol with me, my beloved Beretta 92FS. It never jams, shoots accurately, very easy to dissemble and clean. The grip fits my hand very well, not like my Glock 17. Glock 17 is almost a perfect gun if not because of its grip. In a combat condition, this can be fine. But in a target practice setting, when hundreds of shots are fired in one session, the pain it caused in the webbing between my thumb and index finger can be very annoying.

As usual, I put targets 25 meters away, the maximum distance I can get from this pistol range. At first I shoot standing with both of my hands holding the gun. Later on, I switched to single hand shooting. The grouping is a bit larger and dispersed, but they are all punching through the targets, which are the size of human head. I'm very satisfied.

Last week, I delivered a speech on the origin of paper money. Here's the complete written copy.

What I'm showing you is money. More precisely, paper money. The paper, which this money is printed on, has no intrinsic value by itself. The 20 dollars value is declared and enforced by the government. Here in my hand is another form of money. This silver maple leaf coin has a declared value of only 5 dollars. But its market value right now is 37 dollars.

Money, as the medium of exchange, has two main functions. One, it is a unit of account for value. Two, it is a store of value. Precious metals, like gold and silver, have been used as money for thousands of years exactly because they fit these two functions very well. How does paper money perform? Not so well. As a unit of value, paper money devalues too much and too fast due to government over printing. Can you imagine the length of a metric meter getting shorter and shorter? If this should not happen to a unit of length, why do we allow it to happen to a unit of value? As a store of value, paper money is worth nothing by itself. Its value is declared by the government. But unlike gold and silver, governments come and go. When a government is in deep trouble, so too will be its paper money.

If paper money is so fraud, why are we using it today? To answer this question, let's go back in history. Let's revisit ancient China where paper money was first invented.

This year I acquired two World War II P38. They are nice collector pieces! Both are good looking, good rifling, and all matching serial numbers. One was made by Walther in 1943. The other was made by Spreewerk in 1944. The Walther AC 43 one has the single line code on the slide, which is very rare and adds more value to the gun.

Kim Jong Il died yesterday. What's going to happen? Chaos or opportunity or both? Who knows, this could be the start of World War 3!

Yesterday I tried to create a Korea conflict scenario for my newly released Deep Battle game. But I was stuck on the map. Usually I use Google earth and Google map to help with my map design. But North Korea? It was blank in both Google earth and map. Not much details on cities, roads or anything. I give up for now, maybe some other time in the future when there's more information available to public.

Now I'm thinking about my gold and silver investments. They may get a boost tomorrow from this uncertainty.