by srhuston

Emotional Feedback on a Timeless Wavelength

…Bearing a gift beyond price, almost free

Tonight, Stephanie and I head to the PNC Bank Arts Center for an evening with Rush, their 30th anniversary tour. They’ve got a new album out too, which is a tribute album (covers) to bands that inspired them in their creative process. “Feedback” seems to have received some good reviews, and I’ve heard a couple tracks from it already – so far, I like it! Counting down the hours until the trio takes the stage, and hoping the weather holds out until after the show (though it’s raining here right now, ugh). I’ll likely post something up here after the show, either tonight or tomorrow, for those interested. Needless to say, we’re in for an evening of great music, showmanship and all around good vibes :>

by srhuston

And *THAT* Is Why Hams Rule

So Stephanie and I were watching the opening ceremonies for the 2004 Summer Olympics, and we decided to head out to get some stuff around 2200. I needed soda for work and home, and we figured we’d get a couple other things while we’re out. Headed to the local ShopRite, got the stuff we needed, and came home.

As I’m backing into a parking spot, we both notice a rather large man with his shirt hanging open, whom we’ve never seen in the area before, just hanging around one end of the parking lot. I park the truck, turn off the lights and unbuckle my seatbelt, and this guy’s just staring at the truck. After a couple words between us, I re-buckle my seatbelt, turn the lights on and pull out of the spot, heading back out to the road. “Now what do we do,” my wife asks. Well, I don’t want to call 911 for something like this, since it’s not an emergency, and I don’t like dialing that number unless there’s something really bad happening (though I’m sure someone right now is thinking, “This is bad enough, dial the damned phone.”) So I grab my radio and tune in a local repeater. “W2SRH mobile, anyone on frequency?” No response. Tune in another repeater. “W2SRH mobile, anyone else on frequency?” “This is KC2MBY, what can I do for you?” Perfect. I ask Scott to look up the phone number for the local police non-emergency number, and he gives me one. Then said that if that number didn’t do it, let him know and he’d look for another one, or if it came down to it he could call some friends of his in the NJ State Police and work from there.

Why have I told this story? Because the same thing could’ve happened if I had no cell phone at all, or if I had no signal on it or the battery was dead. Scott, a person I’ve never met before in my life, could’ve saved my life had the situation been much worse. And even though it wasn’t, he certainly helped me out, someone whom he’s never met either, just in the spirit of what made us get into this hobby. This is what amateur radio is all about, people finding things they enjoy, experimenting with new technologies and ideas, and helping out their fellow hams and non-hams alike.

Oh, and the creepy guy in the parking lot? No idea – on a return drive-by of the lot, we saw him crossing the street and heading away, and when I returned a third time just after that, we watched him walk away. Took that opportunity to park and get our stuff, head inside. Called KC2MBY back once I got in the apartment and thanked him again for his assistance, let him know that we were safe and inside.

Posted in Ham /
by srhuston

Oh, and Get Me the Machine that goes *PING*

So… it’s been awhile. Partly because I’m lazy, and partly because I’ve been busy at work and by the time I get home, I don’t have much playtime. So what’s new in the world?

Been playing with APRS, the Automatic Position Reporting System (Some links: here, here and here). It’s basically a packet radio system, but instead of normal packet radio which is point-to-point, this is more of a broadcast type system. Packets can be destined for a specific radio, so you can send messages from one system to another, or they can be broadcast for all (all amateurs, that is, not really for the general public and therefore not “broadcasting” in the FCC’s eyes). Since I don’t have a TNC (Terminal Node Controller, basically a modem that connects to a radio) to receive APRS packets in my area, I have it setup with an internet link (the last link above is to APRS-IS, the APRS internet service, which links digipeaters over the internet) on my laptop and at work, the latter runs pretty much constantly now as W2SRH-1. Oh, and just for completeness, a digipeater is for digital packets what a repeater is for analog voice – basically, it takes the packet you send, and re-sends it for all to hear. This way, if you’re running a very low-power radio in your vehicle, your packets still have a chance of getting over a large area if a digipeater picks them up and rebroadcasts them. Now why would you run a packet system in a car? Because you can hook a GPS receiver up to it, and as you move about the planet the little TNC and associated systems will send out your coordinates as a packet, which is picked up by these digipeaters and I-Gates (internet gateways), and someone else with APRS will see a little vehicle icon move across their screen as you travel. Pretty neat! I can watch as people who live in my area, or around the world since I read an unfiltered feed at work (ie, the packets I get are not limited to a specific area), move from one point to another. While that may not sound too interesting to everyone, it is kinda neat to see, and has other uses as well. For search-and-rescue work, an area can be setup where the operation will take place, and if everyone is carrying APRS transmitters then someone can monitor their progress and see what areas they’ve covered. Or in the case of an emergency, someone can pinpoint the location on the map, and others can see it. You could even use it to mark off an event of some sort, or something that others might find important: an accident location on a highway that should be avoided (or where help is needed), or the current and predicted location of a hurricane (which I saw just yesterday). While using this system with a radio is how it was originally intended, it’s still neat to be able to use it with an internet connection.

What else is new lately… we got a new machine at work, which is supposed to hold all the data that people want to keep on spinning platters but not backed up. 15 SATA drives, 200GB each, 3U enclosure. Only one problem: No floppy or CD-ROM drives. No problem, we’ll install Fedora with a USB key! Bought two keys, threw a boot disk on one of them, plugged it in, and… oh, another problem, the damned motherboard doesn’t boot from a USB device. Great. Oh, wanna go three for three? Okay, Fedora doesn’t have drivers for the motherboard’s SATA ports. Hell, RedHat in its entirety, as well as the Linux kernel, doesn’t support them – the company that sold it to us compiled a patch from who-knows-where into the kernel to get it to work. Well this just makes things interesting, doesn’t it? One good thing lately, we got rid of 10 of the old Sun Ultra5 workstations, and there’s only two of them left in the building. Those two will be leaving soon, like as soon as I get my hands on them (one’s in a pile in the server room, and one’s in a pile on someone’s desk). We should have enough computers from the decommissioned Beowulf cluster to replace a couple of the Ultra1 workstations too, and it’ll be good to get rid of them as well. That will still leave us with a few Suns in the building, not as many as when I started but getting close to a manageable number since the one machine that is serving their filesystems is no longer under hardware contract, and starting to show its age.

Along those lines, we also have to move faster on deploying LDAP to replace NIS, since our NIS server is getting overloaded (same Sun that serves ‘/’ to the other Suns). At least I’m guessing that’s what is happening, all I know is that every now and then I get error messages from various machines in the building that they can’t contact Newton for NIS information, but when I login to them things are working fine. NIS isn’t really well equipped for this kind of setup anyway, while LDAP is a bit more robust. I tested some LDAP server stuff today, including replication (where one or more ‘slave’ servers get their information from the LDAP master; the slaves are read-only, the master allows writes also) and auto-failover, and it all worked wonderfully. I setup a client machine to listen to the master and slave, logged in, did some things, killed the master and tried logging in again… and it worked just as fast as when the master was up, only it was talking to the slave now. Tried a write operation, and it failed with “Unable to process request”, quite a fine answer when I try writing to a read-only database. Brought the master back up, tried it again… and it tried to write to the slave, got an error, and bumped right over to the master where it worked fine. Perfect! End result is that I can setup a few slaves, and if the master gets overloaded or goes down, the slaves will continue to serve data, but nobody can change their password (nor can any new accounts be created) until the master returns. Sounds good to me!

Stephanie’s graduation is in a couple weeks, that should be fun. At least one of us graduated from college, and she’s now got more letters after her name than I will unless I get some certifications (but she’ll always have more degrees, I don’t think I’ll ever be going back to school). Before that, however, is … RUSH, Live at the PNC Bank Arts Center in Holmdel, New Jersey … ahh, this should be good. I have heard a couple songs from their latest album, it’s a tribute album with all cover songs from bands that inspired Rush (Geddy Lee singing “…sometimes I wonder what I’m a-gonna do, ’cause there ain’t no cure for the summertime blues…”).

Okay, on that note, I just went and looked up the tabs to Broon’s Bane again, and wish I had a room where I could practice and not wake anyone up. ‘Cause now I want to try to play it again. Like I wouldn’t get frustrated since I haven’t touched either my 6-string or my 12-string in ages, but I still want to play. Grr. Off to bed with me.

by srhuston

Don’t Walk

Okay, so I’m going to sink slightly and post a rant. Not that me ranting is sinking from my normal self, but because I’m doing it here and most personal websites like this seem to only be an endless torrent of worthless verbiage, a diatribe that seeks to prove how everyone else in the world but the author is incorrect… okay, I feel better. Now the real rant :>

Crosswalks. Not so much the crosswalk itself, but the people in them. Now, the law states that vehicles must yield the right-of-way to pedestrians in the crosswalk. I’m fine with that. See how it’s written? “yield the right-of-way to pedestrians IN the crosswalk”. That’s wonderful. If someone is in the process of crossing the street, you should let them. Sure! No problem.

This does NOT mean that if someone walks up to a crosswalk you should slam on your brakes to let them go by. They’re not in the crosswalk, they’re approaching it. Maybe they’re just stopping to get their bearings and going to turn the other way, you don’t know. Either way, there’s no freakin’ reason on this planet to stop for someone standing at a freakin’ curb. When the traffic is clear, they will step out into the crosswalk, assuming that’s where they actually want to go, and they’ll cross the street. At that point, oncoming traffic should stop to let them cross. Not just because they’re standing at the curb. Or for that matter stepped off the curb and standing right next to it.

Okay, next point. This one isn’t necessarily a state or federal law, more of a law of freakin’ physics. A vehicle travelling at 40MPH, and weighing approximately 2500 pounds CAN NOT STOP just because you stepped out in front of it. No point in giving dirty looks to the driver because you walked in front of him when he’s only 30 feet away from said crosswalk, ’cause the brakes are only going to do so much before the front fender gets to do its own dirty work. Is there a crosswalk there? You bet there is. Does that crosswalk mean you can jump out into it and expect the freakin’ world to stop because you’re crossing the street and too damned busy, important or just plan STUPID to look both ways and make sure there’s no oncoming traffic first? Survey says… NO!

Last one, and then I’m done for this rant. When approaching an intersection on foot, and said intersection has a Walk/Don’t Walk sign (for the stupidity enhanced, many are now a walking dude vs a red hand held up in a “STOP!” like way), don’t just look at how the cars are going currently and cross the street if it says Don’t Walk. Why? Because unless you’ve taken the moment or two to see what the traffic signal situation is, and especially unless you know what the signal pattern is, you don’t know when the next light is going to turn green. Ya know, they make those little buttons that say “Push here to cross street” for a reason, it’s so you can push the button and the little hand will turn into a little walkin’ dude when it’s safe to go. How many times does it happen that I’m about to move forward in my truck, because my light is now green, only to see that someone is now standing directly in front of it because they’re not paying attention to the traffic signals, or they just stepped out into the intersection as it’s turning green? Too many to count, though I’d definitely use more fingers to count those incidents than I usually use to wave to the idiot pedestrians.

Okay, I lied, one more. When you do cross the street, and you do see that traffic is coming (it happens sometimes even when you’re paying attention, I’ll give you that)… or some kind soul has stopped to let you cross in front of them… HUSTLE! No, not the dance, move your damned ass across that street. Don’t mosey, meander, saunter, swagger or shuffle. MOVE IT! If you’ve got two good legs that can get you from point A to point B without needing a car, then they’re good enough to put a little spring into your step as you cross the street, so the kind soul who is currently refraining from leaving a “raeydooG” tattoo on your backside doesn’t have to wait so long that he needs another shave just to continue on his way. This should especially be the case if you are the freakin’ idiot that walked into the intersection without first looking carefully at what’s going on and now have a 1.25 ton vehicle bearing down on your current position.

That’s it, I need a brush guard for the Sport Trac.

by srhuston

Hacking is Fun

Goodbye huston the Demigod…

You went to your reward with 5153550 points,
The Eye of the Aethiopica (worth 4000 zorkmids and 10000 points)
The Candelabrum of Invocation (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Bell of Opening (worth 5000 zorkmids and 12500 points)
The Book of the Dead (worth 10000 zorkmids and 25000 points)
1 diamond (worth 4000 zorkmids)
1 amulet of reflection (worth 150 zorkmids)
and 19718 pieces of gold, after 73277 moves.
You were level 30 with a maximum of 408 hit points when you ascended.

by srhuston

Over-Do It? Nah…

So Stephanie was down at the shore yesterday for a bachelorette party for a friend of hers from college, and I had the day to figure out something to do. Went to the DVRA Foxhunt in the morning, which is an event where one person hides a transmitter somewhere, and we all start at a location within 10km of the hiding spot and try to find it. My team got there last partially because we got stuck behind a footrace in Pennington – when we pulled into the parking lot we weren’t far behind the rest of the people (many were just getting out of their cars). After that I went home for a couple minutes and then up to the club shack, thinking others would be there for a VHF/UHF contest going on this weekend. Apparently they’d all left just before I arrived, but no big deal. I stayed there for a little while listening, and apparently the contest hadn’t yet started, so I was going to head home when the cell phone started buzzing that the server room was too hot.

Sometime last week I moved the vents on the new A/C unit to try to redirect the cold air where it was more needed, and apparently created a hot zone right in front of one of the racks. So a little more moving around and it was fixed. Back to home I went with nothing to do, and watched a little TV. When I realized I was falling asleep on the couch, I thought I’d go for a bike ride to wake up and do something. Before I knew it, I was 3/4 of the way to the club shack (maybe 5 miles away from my apartment) so I went there and hung out for about an hour. Around 1800 I headed back home on the bike, and this time I timed it – with the couple rest stops I made, which weren’t very long (maybe a minute here and there) it only took 45 minutes to get home. Not too bad, and probably a 10 mile trip all around. Stephanie was a little floored that I rode that far with not having been on the bike much at all before that, but if there’s one part of my body that’s in good shape it’s my legs. I felt a little wobbly going up and down the stairs both when I got home and shortly after that, but by the time I went to bed I was just fine. So I guess I didn’t over-do it at all :>

We planned on having people over tonight, but most of them weren’t able to make it (and the one person who was, we haven’t heard from since the invite, so we don’t know for sure if he’s coming). Other than that there’s no real plans for the day, so we’ll see what the afternoon brings. Next week at work I have to swap out some bad drives in one of the large filesystem servers, and then bring it down for a filesystem check to see if there’s any damage to the data (probably is, but we’ll see). Also need to come up with a decent way of updating the Yum repositories for automatic updates at work, so that if there’s a package I don’t want to bother updating I can exclude it. A little shell scripting will do the trick, just need to sit down and figure it out.

Guess that’s good for now, off to take a shower.

by srhuston

There’s Something You Don’t See

..namely an out of shape guy on a mountain bike, smoking a butt. Okay, it’s counterproductive, but it’s a dirty nasty habit that I still haven’t shaken.

Anywho, it’s been awhile since I put anything in here, and I thought about it a couple times but just didn’t mosey over to my website from work (where I would have more time to sit down and write than if I normally try it from home). But today I’ve got a bit of time. Actually got into work a little early for me, and left at a normal time so Steph and I went for a bike ride shortly after I got home. Headed over to TCNJ and rode around the campus a bit, and then back to home. I *knew* I should’ve put the speaker-mic on my HT as I left, but I didn’t, so when I heard Dan (K2QM) calling I couldn’t really answer without pulling over and stopping. Oh well, next time.

So what’s new and exciting this week… got a local repository setup for not only doing new installs (Fedora Core 2 is what we’re looking at) but for updating old installs as well. Just this afternoon I got the last of the machines updated, so now everything is running the latest patches for everything. Only a handful of machines that aren’t, but they’ll be upgraded by hand to FC2 before long (they’ll be the first ones to get the upgrade since they’re the oldest and not patchable currently – I’m not setting up a yum repository for 6 machines). Kinda nice to be able to move an RPM into a directory, and that night all the machines in the building will install it without extra work.

Since the last entry, I’ve also got all the equipment at home to be able to get on the air (not much, just power supply, another magmount and antenna) plus the quick charger for my handheld and the speaker-mic. Only I haven’t been able to do much with it because of how I’ve been working lately. Also trying to setup Camden County RACES with my brother-in-law since he’s doing a cleanup down by where he lives and didn’t know what to do for communications during the event. With any luck, anywhere from 10 to 20 hams will be there to take care of it (myself included).

Probably other stuff, but I’ve put this down a couple times and come back to it, and I don’t feel like thinking anymore. Back to the Dungeons of Doom.

by srhuston

Eight Days a Week

As in, how long it’s been since I wrote something here :>

So last night sucked. Well, kinda. I worked fairly late, and then headed up to the Sarnoff club meeting at 19:30. Ended up staying there until almost 22:00 chatting with a few people, including David (N0YMV) and a few others I had met before, a couple I’d talked to on the air but not yet seen in person like Dave (K2ULF). Finally got home around 22:30, had dinner, hung out a bit, and around 00:30 saw an email about a possible problem at work. I headed back up to work and got there around 01:00, hung out with the guys who were observing remotely (connected from Princeton to a telescope at Apache Point, NM) and worked on a couple issues that were going on there, and ended up getting home around 04:00 after getting gas and taking my time — as well as calling out for anyone else who was awake on the repeaters at that hour. Nobody was. Talked with Bruce WA2ZST on my way in to work, he was chatting with someone else about roads and towns in South Jersey where I grew up and taking me back to my old stomping grounds. Pretty funny when you hear someone up here talking about Bridgeboro Road and how it cuts a straight line from Moorestown to 5-points in Beverly, and I know exactly where that is.

Anyway, since I was in so late and got home so early, I left an email saying I wouldn’t be in today, and I wasn’t. Woke up around 10:30 to someone banging around in the parking lot, and went back to sleep until Steph came home around 15:30 from her class. Realized what time it was so I got showerd and dressed right quick, loaded the bike onto the back of the truck and we headed out to Princeton to go to the N2ARC station at the American Red Cross on Alexander Road. Met up with Gerry (N2GJ) and a couple other folks I hadn’t really met before, we checked into a net that was taking place in Connecticut I think, and then Gerry showed us the station setup and the equipment. Was very nice, because I think this is the first time that someone’s shown me a station setup and actually made sure I knew what I was looking at and how to work it. Granted I already know how to work a 2m rig, and a bit about APRS and how it works, but to have someone show you how to change antennas and retune the radio is a lot nicer than pointing at a black box and saying, “That there’s a HF rig,” and that be the end of it. While I’m saying good things about him, let me point you to his website – n2gj.org. Check out his list of famous hams too!

After that, we headed over to Pep Boys and picked up a new lock for my hitch (so I wouldn’t have to keep putting the bike rack in the bed of the truck, or leave it hanging off of there for anyone to pull the hitch pin and walk away with it) and then shot up to Dick’s Sporting Goods for Steph to pick up her bike, and me to drop mine off. We got all the accessories we’d need for hers, and Jay looked over mine and said an overhaul was in order. Clean up the cables a bit, regrease things and make sure everything is in adjustment. Also I’m getting a kickstand and a new seat, the one I have on there currently is … well, not too kind to the posterior. Picked up a new water bottle for each of us too, an insulated one that will keep the cold stuff cold. Woo, flashbacks to an old McDonald’s commercial. She tried out the bike in the parking lot there and then later when we got home, and she likes it a lot. Originally was looking at road bikes (the old-style “10-speed” kind with the curved down handlebars and such) but ended up getting a “comfort bike”. Wider tires like a mountain bike, but less aggressive tread; shocks on the front fork and I think on the back as well; spring seat that’s a little wider also; and adjustable in multiple ways for making your ride more pleasurable but still able to go from the asphalt to a dirt road like the ones that parallel the D&R canal around here. All good.

After that we headed over to Town & Country for dinner, and what a dinner tonight! Usually I’m just happy with an order of chicken fingers and fries, but tonight we were both in the mood for a real dinner. Chicken fingers were the appetizer, then I had a sliced london broil with mushroom sauce (wasn’t bad, just brush off the vegetation) and baked potato(e), Steph had this seafood sampler platter that was huge. And everything came out in courses that were well spaced, I had time to let each part settle before the next plate came out. It wasn’t our normal cheap diner run, but it was definitely good. Hell, I’m still full from it all now, and that was a couple hours ago :>

Well, this oughta make up for not writing in awhile. Anniversary is tomorrow, and Steph is going to stay in her class until it’s over (summer course, only meets three times – she doesn’t want to cut out early, and I don’t blame her in the least) so we’ll have our nice dinner out this weekend. And, I talked with someone at Universal Radio this morning, I think my order is going out today or tomorrow. Meaning, with any luck, I’ll be able to get on the local repeaters from the apartment with the HT on a bigger and better antenna, instead of having to go out front on the HT or (as I have been doing) sit in the truck on the mobile rig. That’ll be kinda nice.

by srhuston

Hangin’ with the Police

So I got a call this morning from someone at the Ewing Police Dept. Only, I was kinda expecting it. I contacted them to see if they still have a ham radio station at their emergency operations center, something that Kip had told me they had (last he knew, anyway). Turns out that they don’t, and the person I spoke with said he would know what it was – because he’s a ham too. So I emailed Kip and Bob (since Dave mentioned his name as someone he’s working with on a new comm center) and told them what I found out, and now I’m not sure what’s going on. Both of them mailed me back separately, so I don’t think either knows what the other said, and both seemed to be ready to make the next step. Aughh! As long as both of them are at the club meeting tomorrow night, should be okay. I can talk with everybody in one room and sort out the details.

I know there was other stuff I wanted to write in here, but I don’t remember what it was now. Guess I’m coming down with CRS a little early.

Posted in Ham /