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Riding the Vespa

Well, I got a chance to take the Vespa out this morning and put a couple of miles on the old girl.  I’d had her out a couple of weeks ago when we were watching Natalie for the day; Lisa wanted me to take her for a ride, which we did.  She liked it, and so did I – since it started up pretty easily and ran well.  I had to replace the fuel line after the first ride, it was hard as a rock and shook loose, but aside from that things were grand.

Today it started with a little encouragement, ran pretty well, and I rode all over the neighborhood.  The whole time I was enjoying the ride, I was also making a mental list of things I needed to do to get the scooter reliable enough for longer rides around town.

  • No taillight.  I need to look into that, not sure if my custom LED tail light is kaput or just not getting power.  Either way, I have a new repro of the larger assembly here.  It’s of horrible quality and needs to be completely re-done on the outside, but the guts seem serviceable. Update: The LED light was completely blown.  The new housing is fixed and ready for paint, and bulbs are on their way from Scooterworks.
  • It needs a new fuel line some time in the next year or so, before this one hardens up.  The stuff Scooterworks sells as fuel line…  well, it sucks.
  • A new gas cap gasket would be good.  Scooterworks strikes again.  Why the hell would you sell a gas cap gasket that’s not gasoline-proof?
  • I really need to look into the brakes.  I think one is dragging, which doesn’t help matters any.
  • A rear view mirror or two would be a very welcome addition.
  • Timing, yet again.  A couple degrees more advance will make it a LOT easier and faster to start!!!  If ScootRS ever has the VL1 CDI 12V conversion kit again, I’m buying one.  Period.
  • A couple of scratches need to be touched up, yet again.
  • I really do need to finish the last of the floor rails.  Of course NOW I can buy a complete set for the VL1, instead of cobbling something else up to make it work.  But I’ve already spent enough on the floor rails I’m not doing it again from scratch.
  • One of these days I would like to re-run the gear shift and clutch cables, and adjust the clutch.  I want to get rid of the CLUNK when shifting into first, and be able to turn the handlebars all the way to the right without the cables hitting the legshield.  The parts are cheap enough at a bike shop, and I think using heat-shrink tubing would be just the trick to get the old cables to drag the new jackets through.
  • I’m still not sure whether the odometer is registering miles or kilometers.  At some point I want to either ride a measured distance and figure it out, or take a GPS along for a ride and compare it to the odometer.
  • It needs current tags.  I think I’ll see about getting historical plates so I don’t have to hassle with it every year.
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Shack update

The new “shack” setup is in progress.  The main radios are up in the office/shack room, and I’ve got a new PC built for ham use.  I used mostly leftover parts from either older computers or projects that just didn’t work out, like the media center PC.  In the progress I’ve gotten much further with MythTV and some other stuff than ever before, but that’s a different story.

I have the wire cut for the Loop Skywire antenna, but it’s not up yet.  I may need to beg or borrow a HyperHanger from a buddy to get the thing up in the trees.  Right now I have a random length of wire out the window, which hears a little and causes massive RFI in the house when I try to transmit even with low power, so I haven’t made any contacts yet.  I really need to get that loop up before winter!

I’ve been playing with some ham radio apps for Linux.  The biggest problem so far has been the plethora of sound card mixers and management apps on the PC.  OSS, ALSA, and half a dozen others sometimes appear to compete for control.  I am going to try to remove some, but I suspect that dependencies will keep me from doing so.  I think one of the biggest challenges Linux faces is a complete lack of agreement, discipline or even half-hearted effort by app developers to standardize on ANYTHING.  If you want to run six different apps, chances are you’re going to have six completely different sets of dependencies that will cause problems with everything you try to do.

But that’s a rant.  The station is coming along, slowly but surely.  I figure by Thanksgiving I should be back on the air.

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We need a new TV.

So last night I decided to try out the new whiz-bang Linux box running MythTV, connect it to the big screen in the family room to watch a couple of movies.   As it happens, though the PC has DVI and HDMI outputs and optical sound output, it’s just not going to play.   The TV’s available screen resolutions and interlace modes just don’t match up with what the computer tried to shove at it.   Though it was sold as “HD ready” at 1080i (or maybe 1080p, I don’t remember) there are severe limits on what it will do.

So, I finally gave up.   Disappointing, but I know all the new LCD panels will handle whatever mode I can throw at them…   and use the HDMI interface for the sound as well, making it a one-cable proposition.   I like that.   Maybe two, if we use S/PDIF for the sound.   Of course everything needs to go if we make the switch.   The receiver (aside from a dead remote receiver) has no HDMI switching, only component or S-video.   The DVD/VHS combo won’t read CDs, and has been a little finicky with some DVDs as well.   Maybe Santa will drop a nice new Samsung LED flat panel down the chimney this year.

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A little bit of early snow

We got a little surprise yesterday morning.  Fortunately the roads to Hastings were clear, so we were able to get out to Pete’s game without any problems.  Unfortunately, they lost to Morningside.  The Broncos are now 5-2, with their two toughest opponents behind them.

A shot of the back yard
A shot of the back yard
This one shows how deep it was...
This one shows how deep it was...

By the time we got home last night most of the snow was already gone.  We still have some hanging on in the back and side yards where it’s well shaded, but the rest is dry.

Hopefully it will get warm enough today that I’ll be able to get the sprinklers blown out.  Temperatures are supposed to be in the 40s for the next several days, with no freezing lows, but of course you never know for sure.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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“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.