Took me so long to type that in and edit it, that now it’s tomorrow. Er, something.
Category Archives: General
God, Sometimes You Just Don’t Come Through
So sue me, Tori Amos just came on the playlist on the Mac :>
Well, it’s a Friday. That’s one good thing about today. So far it’s about the only good thing, I think. Just really run down lately, and I’ve been getting a good amount of sleep too so I’m not sure what is causing it. Oh well, maybe I’ll catch up this weekend and start getting up earlier again. I kinda like that, especially in the summertime, since it means I get home with plenty of daylight to do whatever I want.
Printers out of toner, people asking about problems they apparently emailed me awhile ago and I have no recollection of them, nobody on the air on my way in this morning, no more Dr. Pepper so I’m drinking root beer which isn’t caffeinated, and I just want to go outside and play. Steph has a lot of work to catch up on this weekend, so Dave and I are probably going to head to the club shack and … well, I dont’ know what. But we’ll do something. Hell even if I spend the time just scanning around the HF bands and listening, it’ll be fun. And more interesting than sitting in front of a TV could ever hope to be. John and Aimee are coming over tomorrow night for dinner, and then Chuck and Ellen on Sunday night, but other than that I think the only plan is for Stephanie to get her work done, and me to stay the hell out of the way while she does it :>
I upgraded iTunes yesterday, and I like the “Party Shuffle” feature. I can now go through the random list of songs it’s picked out to play, and decide if I really want to hear them or not instead of spending time pressing “skip” when something I’m not in the mood for comes on. Speaking of which, I’m in the mood to indulge one of my bad habits. So I guess that’ll be all for now.
Jeff Bridges said it best…
“Elementry physics, a beam of energy can always be diverted. Are we there yet mommy?” –Flynn, from the movie “Tron”
That’s about how I feel right now. Turns out the March of Dimes walk I was supposed to do communications for wasn’t on Saturday, it was on Sunday. So I woke up at the ass-crack of dawn on Saturday for nothing. After driving over there, not finding anyone, calling Kip on the radio a few times and hearing nothing, and then coming home, I was now awake enough (and it was around 8am) that there was no way I’d be able to go back to sleep and get the rest I didn’t get overnight. So I hung out in the apartment a little bit, and then heard Dan calling Paul on the repeater. After Paul didn’t answer, he called me. Turns out he was on his way to the club shack to climb the tower and get the rotator off the one mast, and Paul was supposed to meet him there. I talked with Steph for a bit, figured out our plans for the day, and then headed over there to join them. Good thing I did, since Paul never showed up (we didn’t hear from him to find out what happened). Got the rotator down, and then I headed home, and Steph and I went down to South Jersey to return the scale she bought. After a little driving around behind the store, we ended up in the pines, and by this point I was in a bit of a bad mood. Tired, cranky, and just alltogether not feeling very sociable. Stephanie talked me into staying in the pines for a bit and doing some four wheeling, and I did. And I started to feel better. Funny how that place can just turn my mood around.
After hitting a couple trails, and getting back out to the highway, we came home and had dinner. I went to bed a little after 22:00 since now I knew I had to get up early, and had already nixed a lot of sleep I could’ve had Friday night.
Sunday I woke up and went to the park again. This time there were people around too :> I hung out and helped Gary and Gerry setup a portable HF station idea they’d had, and it worked very well. Then I got assigned to a location on the walk, Checkpoint 3. It was kinda neat, for one thing talking simplex with everyone, and being in a completely directed net (Even if I could see the other person from my location, I had to communicate with them through net control, not directly to them). My only problem came around the same time the walkers starting coming through my area (which was the last checkpoint on the walk), and that is the fact that there were no bathrooms near this checkpoint. I heard someone at CP1 say they were packing up, so I called control and asked if someone might come over to relieve me for a few minutes. CP1 called in and said he could do it, and then control gave the go-ahead. A rather painful 5 minutes later and Joe showed up, and even let me borrow his truck so I could get there faster (not bad for someone I’ve never met before). After the trip out and back, Joe and I manned CP3 until there were no walkers left, and then we headed back to control. Helped pack up there, and then stood around for I’d say an hour chatting, about 7 of us in a circle. It was nice, in some cases to put a face to the name, and to meet some people that I hadn’t heard on the air before then.
I took a nice hour-long nap yesterday afternoon at one point, and ended up staying up until 00:00 to watch a show on Comedy Central. Oh well, so much for getting up early on Monday, time to set the alarm for 9 again so I can get some sleep. Now I’m just about ready to head in; doesn’t look like much happened over the weekend, just a few people whose accounts were closed and now they’re noticing that they can’t login. That could be interesting.
Are You Feeling Okay?
Yes, three days in a row. I must be ill.
Woke up this morning and did my normal website scan, and when I looked up my callsign to see if the vanity call I applied for had gone through, I found that my callsign was cancelled. Slight panic. Then I see that the other application attached to it was passed. Oh, okay, that’s much better. So my callsign is now the much easier to remember W2SRH. At least easy for me. Well, it’ll be easy once I remember that I’m not KC2MSJ anymore. Now it’s just a matter of talking to the people who already know me by the other call, and them hearing the new one attached to my name, before I stop confusing people other than myself :>
Let’s see, what else is new… Well, Steph found out that because she only has 3 credits left for her MAT degree, they automatically denied her financial aid for the summer session. Argh! There’s nothing left that she needs to take, and the way they work out the semesters it would be impossible for her to have had 5 credits left for this summer. The good news is that she found a Spanish class that’s available, and might be able to take that to bring the credits up to where fin. aid will be happy, and it will give her a refresher on the language since it’s been awhile since she spoke it often. Ahh, college bureaucracy, I’d almost forgotten how asinine it was.
Waiting to hear from Gary to see if I can swing by and use his SWR meter on the mobile rig this afternoon. Another guy had mailed me and was going to swing by yesterday morning to let me borrow his, but I was in meetings all morning and missed him. If it comes down to it I can always wait until the club meeting next week, and just ask someone to bring their meter with them. Hell, it’s light enough out late enough that I’ll still be able to check everything out, and maybe even fix it if there’s a major problem, at 1900. As long as it’s raining, can’t be working on the antenna while it’s nice weather.
Oh, one last thing. Heard this strange noise as I was driving in, and when I got to work I checked the antenna (sounded like it was bouncing off of trees or something). Turns out that the part that has the set screws to hold the antenna onto the NMO base is loose. So I’ll have to whip out the toolbox at some point today to secure that a bit better. Not a terrible deal, but again makes me glad I haven’t cranked the power up to 11 yet.
How’s This?
Wow, two days in the same week (in a row, no less), and I’m writing stuff in here. Guess I’m not quite cut out for the whole atmosphere that is… well, that word that I can’t stand which has weaseled its way into modern vernacular beginning as a contraction of the words ‘web’ and ‘log’. No, don’t say it. You’ll sound just as stupid as everyone else does when they say it.
Anywho, I’ve got to start doing something about my eating habits. When I started here, I was accustomed to eating 2-3 meals a day. But now that I wasn’t hoofing it across a campus anymore and spent 90% of my time in a chair, I ballooned quite nicely. Finally broke 200, which on my frame isn’t quite good. Then last summer, I worked my way down to eating one meal a day, sometimes just a snack (not much of an appetite with the stress I had) and I dropped a lot of the weight back off. Was it a healthy thing to do? No, but the end result was good even though that wasn’t exactly what I was aiming toward. Now, I’m still around one meal a day (though it’s usually a big one, my wife sure can cook :> ) but this week I’ve been coming in early – for me – and man am I hungry around 1200-1300.
Common sense would say that I should go eat something. Problem is I’m too lazy to go by myself, and only like to eat alone if I’m truly alone, not in a cafeteria with a boatload of people while I sit at a table for one. Perhaps I should get back into bringing a lunch with me, though I also like the idea of not taking one and then not feeling guilty about leaving 30-60 minutes “early” since I didn’t take an hour long break.
Of course, I hear crack is quite the appetite suppressant too…
Frigate
As they say in the ship building business, anyway.
I’ve turned off comments on the website. Not like anyone was commenting anyway, it was all junk from spammers trying to hawk their wares (warez?), none of which I really need (left to the imagination of the reader). So they’re off.
In other news, I took my ham exam this past weekend, and passed it. So within a few days from now (hopefully, others have told me it took a few weeks) I should be seeing my call sign on the FCC’s database, and I can start pushing that ‘PTT’ button on my radio. Probably going back down to HRO sometime around the 3rd of April to pick up the mobile rig to go in the truck, and then likely spending the 4th on installing it :>
Well I’ll Be…
Just noticed that there was a comment on one of the older postings. I thought that was interesting, since I never told anyone about this site, so I wondered how someone found it and found it interesting enough to comment.
Then I read the comment.
“I can answer your questions about any of these topics”
Interesting since the topic was about a movie I’d just gone to see (obligatory link).
The poster? Something about online casinos or some such junk.
Gaaaah! Spam! Make it go ‘way!
You’re So Vain…
…you probably think this story’s about you. Okay, so I had to come up with a title, and couldn’t think of something. Sue me. No, wait, don’t do that. I don’t have anything to give up anyway.
So, it’s been an interesting week. My father-in-law had back surgery on Friday, and it took awhile before they got back to us to let us know the outcome. Finally heard on Friday afternoon that he came through just fine; there were a couple complications, however even with that he was in and out in 3.5 hours (they’d estimated 4 total). He was due to be released today, but on Saturday afternoon he was already home and enjoying the effects of the final shot of morphine they gave him. Next is 3 weeks of being stuck in the house (can’t go up and down stairs, and there’s stairs to every doorway). He should make a full recovery, and from the people who have had the surgery done before, he’ll be feeling better than he has in quite some time.
What else? Saw Big Fish on Sunday. It was most excellent. I was looking forward to hearing either I’ve Seen All Good People by Yes, or Solisbury Hill by Peter Gabriel, but the soundtrack was quite good even without their presence (both songs were used in the trailers I’ve seen). Very touching story, and also quite amusing to see the main character’s storytelling skills at work.
Well, I guess I should be off to bed. Stephanie is taking my Yes DVD’s down to her father’s tomorrow and spending the afternoon there so he’s not alone in the house. I wonder if he’s going to make her sit through all of them in a row…
Whoopee
Man am I bummed. Things have been so-so at work lately, and I keep having the feeling the Sword of Damocles is somewhere above me. I really like the people I work with, and the work that I do, just more often than not feel unappreciated from the higher-up types. It’s pretty bad when someone asks for your expert opinion on something, and then disregards it. *sigh*
Had a pretty good Holiday (and Birthday) Season. Got a ton of new movies (all said and done, seasons 2-4 of Stargate SG-1, there’s 15 DVDs right there, plus more), the latest release from Gary Larson which weighs a ton, and best of all the watch I’d been eyeing up since around Thanksgiving. Here is the webpage for the watch, and man is it neat.
Alright, Now What?
Okay, now that I’ve got this up and running, what to do? I could import all the stories that were in the old system, which I think isn’t a terrible idea, but first I think I want to go through and change the style around a bit. Add some graphics (which I’ll first have to create), that sort of stuff. Now I’m starting to wish I’d actually cared to learn things like CSS and some real HTML design.
Nahhh….