Author: dale

Posted on

Busy day!

Got up early this morning to make it out to the Ak-Sar-Ben Amateur Radio Club’s hamfest.  It was pretty much a bust as far as sales, and to be perfectly honest it was about as small and sparsely attended as any I have seen.  Still, it was nice to see some of the guys, and I did pick up a couple of cheap LED flashlights.

Got home and put a coat of clear polyurethane on the new desk.  I hope it’s the last coat, but I’m not too confident about that.  It’s looking pretty well, the 400 grit sanding between coats of clear satin are doing wonders for the finish.  I’m hoping to get it brought up and put together tonight.

Then I mowed the lawn, front & back, and trimmed some tree branches that were hanging too low to suit me.  Our grand-niece Natalie was over for a while, so I pulled the Vespa out & we went for a little putt around the neighborhood…  her first time on a scooter, I’m sure!  The Vespa ran surprisingly well, and started right up the second time after I fixed a bad fuel line.  I think I’m going to put historical plates on it so it stays registered.

Posted on

I’m making station plans…

Since I’ll have a nice new desk/operating table in a few days (mine is customized and even bigger than the picture) I’m making plans for the new, reborn ham station.  So far what I have planned is:

I have not decided yet whether to put the HW-16/HG-10B combo up here or not.  It depends on how much room I have to work with after everything else is in place.  I am also debating the VHF antenna issue.  I have a J-pole I can use, and a quarter wave vertical would be trivial to build for use inside the room.  There’s also a QST article about a quadrifilar helix that looks very interesting; I could put it in a corner and disguise it as a room decoration.

Posted on

Oliver (Bellevue Little Theatre)

Lisa & I saw Oliver last Friday evening, and I have to say the newspaper reviews were pretty much spot on.  The show was really good, we would have enjoyed it even if our daughter hadn’t been in it.  She, of course, was far and away the best singer in the cast; there was some mighty fine acting going on as well.  Denny Maddux did a fantastic job as Fagin, especially. Tim Vallier plays Bill Sykes, and does it so well you can barely understand the thick Cockney accent…  but you’ll hate his guts just the same.

There are a lot of younger actors in this production, and they do an outstanding job.  The picks for Oliver and the Artful Dodger (Max Hauze and Brock McCullough) were right on the money.  There really weren’t any flat spots in the show – other than the scene changes, done in full view of the audience by the cast & crew.  For a moment there I thought we might be watching a Snap! production, but Fagin & Sykes weren’t eyeing each other lustfully.

If you can get a ticket, do so.  You won’t be sorry.

Posted on

Weather sucks.

Well, it looks like the weather forecast was off by a day. I had been hoping to get the bike out this afternoon for a little while, but it’s nasty and has been raining off and on since last night. I suppose if I were really dedicated I could gear up and ride in it anyway… but I think I’ll stay in and work on the new desk instead.  I’ve got about one more day before it’s ready, I think, just the clear coating and final assembly left to do. That sucker is huge.  I have emailed the pearl supplier to see if I can use the pearl treatment in brush-on clear, or if I need to spray it.

Posted on

“ME”-ligion

Pete sent me a picture message this afternoon; apparently there are some flavor of quasi-religious nutbars on campus there, advertising their views with signs of some sort and, no doubt, flyers and noise.  I couldn’t quite make out the writing on the sign in the picture he sent me, so I asked him what it said.  His response was, “Well, we’re all going to hell, basically”.  Nice.

This is one good example of what I like to call “ME-ligion”.  It’s kind of like religion, but more personal.  In a ME-ligion, your belief system boils down to this: “Everyone in the entire world is going straight to Hell.  Except ME, of course, because obviously God agrees with ME.”  And, one assumes, those who agree totally with and are willing to be completely and unquestioningly subservient to the individual in question.

There are ME-ligions based loosely on Christian beliefs as well as Muslim, Jewish, and some really oddball beliefs.  Wherever you find arrogant, self-aggrandizing megalomaniacs you’ll find a new and more nutty flavor of some religion.  And, hey, once you’ve convinced yourself that only YOU have the answers and that everyone else is going to be smitten by God anyway, it’s not a big leap to realize that it’s OK to shoot them or blow them up.

Posted on

The office is coming along

We went to Ikea while we were in Minneapolis for a wedding.  I had heard a lot about Ikea, and most of what we saw was some fairly good quality stuff.  There was some dorm room quality stuff I wasn’t too impressed with, but for the most part it seemed to be an excellent value.

We settled on a Galant desk system for the office.  Unfortunately, one piece of the desk top is too big to ship UPS, so the shipping cost was going to be $300…  and we had driven Lisa’s car instead of the pickup.  Oh well.  I have ordered all the frame and leg pieces, and will be making the desk top myself out of some birch plywood.  The only part giving me any concern is a large radius cut for the top, and how to treat the edges.  I’m leaning toward some hot-glue veneer edge band, mostly because of that radius.

In the mean time, the floor is looking good and my buddy Stu tells me some satin polyurethane will touch up the finish if I need to do any trimming or sanding.  Have not gotten on the air yet, but it’s coming one of these days.  Oh, and the Fusion averaged about 36 MPG for the trip.  38 on the way up with a tail wind, 34 on the way back with a headwind.  It was getting around 36 each way on the east/west legs, with a slight crosswind.

Posted on

A new office

It’s nice to get out of the basement!

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on a new home office.  We took the carpet out of one of the empty bedrooms, painted the ceiling (thanks, Rob!) and walls, and I put in a bamboo wood floor.  After putting the trim is back in place, I ran phone, Ethernet and coax cable to a wall jack and moved my work laptop up here.  Now all I need to do is find some suitable furniture, as the computer table I am borrowing is really not the right height.

It’s looking like I may finally get a working ham station too.  There is a good sized window over the back yard, with a good run to two maple trees.  I had plans to run a number of end-fed half wave wires to the trees, but have decided to just run one end-fed wire instead and use a tuner.  I managed to toss a temporary run of around 70′ or so into one of the trees, and the rig’s internal tuner managed to match it OK on several bands.  Haven’t tried any contacts yet, maybe if I get a chance today.

Of course now I have to clean up the basement area where I had been working.  Ugh.

Posted on

Spammers suck.

This morning I came downstairs to find over 100 SPAM comments had been posted to my blog overnight.  None of them were ever visible, of course; I don’t allow comments to be seen until I have seen them first, and that is the exact reason why.  So far I have had one real comment (thanks, Lisa!  I love you, too) and several hundred spammers trying to publish links to God only knows what.

Screw ’em.  I have a delete button, and I know how to use it…

Posted on

Fusion Hybrid, 3 months in

Well, we’ve had the Fusion Hybrid for roughly 3 months now, with a little under 3600 miles on the odometer as I recall.  This car continues to perform extremely well.

Saturday we took it to Hastings to watch the Broncos soundly defeat Briar Cliff (34-20, and the game was not as close as the score would indicate).  From Omaha to Lincoln we were in heavy Husker football traffic, moving at a steady 65 MPH.  I think we were in a pretty constant slipstream with the solid line of cars and trucks, we got 43 MPG between our Omaha fill-up and the far side of Lincoln!  Amazing.  Our overall mileage for the 299 mile round trip, including some in-town driving in Hastings after the game, was 38.6 MPG.

I wasn’t exactly nursing it along; we drove at the same speed we normally would have, other than the Omaha-Lincoln stretch.  There we drove as fast as possible, which was 65 MPH.  After we cleared Lincoln, I had the cruise control set for 70 for the rest of the trip out and back.  We stopped at the Stangs’ house to pick up Buddy on our way home.  I figure we used less than $19 worth of gasoline for the trip, and less than half of what my truck would have used.  In fact, we probably got almost the mileage we would have gotten on the Harley.

As for the features other than fuel economy, the car is still impressive.  Lisa likes the rear view camera and early warning system when backing out of places; it’s pretty nice that the car will pick up approaching vehicles and warn you before you’re able to see them in a crowded parking lot.  The sound system is great, and we’re even getting used to using the Sync system occasionally.  The hands-free Bluetooth is nice.  We’ve loaded several CDs into the car’s internal jukebox hard drive; my only gripe there is that while you can play music from a USB drive, you can’t transfer the files to the jukebox.  Oh well.

It’s a keeper.