Tired and dusty the cowboy rides his noble horse across the desert. From the arid plains of Arizona, through the deserts of the southwest and into the Rocky Mountains. Miles of wide open range greet the solitary traveler in Big Sky country. And all for a good cause... helping feed children who might otherwise go hungry. A noble cause indeed.... if only the cowboy had been so noble.

The tale of Richard Fipps' con goes back several years. In the late 1980's Fipps was convicted of armed burglary, a conviction he appealed on the basis that Fipps didn't carry the rifle with him while committing the burglary. Florida's appeals court found the facts fit the crime of armed burglary and that the minimum sentence would stand.

While in prison Fipps changed his name to Richard Handy, a moniker he'd keep for several years before changing it back to Fipps several years later. In the meantime Fipps didn't stay out of trouble with the law. Another conviction came in 1993, this time for stealing horses. Read more about The tale of a con

As you all know, I am now RL1. This, ironically, means that I am no longer flying. When I was trying to get RL1 the instructors had an incentive to fly me. Now that I have attained that position, there is no reason for me to fly. In fact, I am simply the lowest rated regular pilot in the company. If someone is not going to fly that person is me. For example, when the aircraft get flown to Jacksonville to be put on ships, I wont be going.

This leaves plenty of time for me to be "initiated" or "hazed" or whatever you might want to call it. The senior warrant officers had the idea that it would be good for morale for the new guys to share the responsibility of carrying a lance at all times. My company - Bravo Company - is known as the "Lancers". I will, therefore, be constantly carrying a 4-foot long, homemade wooden lance in two-week shifts until I become a CW2 in March. I began carrying the lance today. What a joy. It is especially fun to carry when I am doing PT (physical training) such as running.

I have been working on fixing my motorcycle recently. During my last ride I broke the water pump cover, two turn signals, and bent the handlebars. I guess I was supposed to steer around the trees. If any of you are wondering whether I am adopting the lifestyle of a native Tenneseeian, check out the attached picture of me fixing my dirt bike - in my living room!

Searching for any recent work on the DirecWay XML-RPC problem I came across a WordPress post. When I looked into the problem last spring, however, the problem seems to be with DirecWay's Web Acceleration product. Reboot the modem (thereby killing the accelerator) and XML-RPC calls work fine. Wait for the accelerator service to start and the XML-RPC calls fail regularly.

Maybe someday in the future DirecWay will fix this problem with their service. Or maybe someday rural customers won't be held hostage by this truly poor service provider.

The Long Rider's Guild has a story about Richard Fipps. Fipps came to the attention of Nevada authorities earlier this year when his supposed charitable ride was exposed as a hoax. We'd written about it here and began talking with the Guild to put together all the information we could. In the end it is a very sad tale of a felon spinning a story of an old-west cowboy working to help kids when in reality it was a horse and car stealing armed burglar in court on domestic violence charges when he was supposedly riding the wide open range.

Monday we'll have more about how the sloppy journalism of newspapers who failed in every aspect of fact checking helped this con man to ply his trade anew with more victims taken in.