I spent part of this week hamming, and added two new states and one new country to my totals. I am not exactly setting the world on fire here, but I think I'm doing pretty good considering the extremely abbreviated schedule I keep.
The new country was Cuba. I heard the station quite loud as soon as I turned on the radio, and gave him a call. He was working a station in Ohio, and proceeded to work stations in England, France, and Norway before getting around to me. I was glad to get a nice signal report (remember, only 4 watts here) and a new country.
One annoyance is that two weeks after passing the extra class exam, my upgrade still has not made it into the FCC records. I would not be surprised at the delay but for the fact that the examiner said I should see it in 5 or 6 days.
My MFJ single-band radio has a habit of dropping RF power if I transmit more than a few minutes, which is not conducive to effective communications, to say the least. The output power shown on the power meter drops to near zero after 3 or 4 minutes transmission. Technical support at MFJ thinks this is a heating problem in the RF driver transistor and they are sending me a heat sink to install to see if that will cure the problem.
My next opportunity to get on the air will be December 12. I will see how the heat sink works out then.
Girls pummel man who exposed himself
"more than 20 girls chased him down the block. Two men from the neighborhood caught him and the girls took their revenge.
"The girls came and started kicking him and punching him, so I wasn't going to stop them," neighbor Robert Lemons told The Philadelphia Inquirer.
Susanto was later treated for injuries at a local hospital. Police said he would be charged with 14 criminal counts including harassment, disorderly conduct, open lewdness and corrupting the morals of a minor"
Those Catholic schoolgirls pack a punch.
The real "Nigerian Scam", live and living in Houston (for the moment).
"Sussman said his client denied allegations that he conspired with Mohammed Abacha, a son of the late Nigerian strongman Gen. Sani Abacha, to illegally transfer hundreds of millions of government dollars to offshore accounts."
Hey, where's my share? I want my share!
Just reading Groklaw with Darl McBride talking about all the Linux users he's going to extort money out of, to wit:
"... the 2.5 million Linux servers out there today that are paired with our intellectual property in them. We have a licensed product $699, $1,399. Chris [Sontag] is driving that and that's another multi-billion-dollar revenue opportunity. "
Well, Darl, you scumbag asshole, I am running Slackware on a 2.4.22 kernel, why don't you come try to get me to pay, you worthless piece of shit?
New Whale Species Announced by Japanese Scientists
In related news, excited Japanese whalers announced plans to locate and kill every member of the new species.
'Nigerian' Scam Robs Central Fla. Man Of $400,000
A fool and his money ... oh, well.
Principal Bans Jelly Bracelets For Sexual Innuendo
Urban legend hooks school system, news at 11.
Unbelievably, Netcraft reports that www.sco.com is runnng Apache on Linux!
How much nerve does it take to run the OS you are trying to destroy, while you are trying to destroy it?
Even Microsoft doesn't have the balls to do that. When they have to run a *nix-based OS, they use BSD.
I would wish that the Apache Group could find some way to revoke their license to run Apache as a server. They are benefiting from the same technology they seek to destroy.
Oh, and today is my birthday. For my present, I would like the SCO board of directors in federal prison, please. You think you could work on that?
I am an amateur extra class licensee.
I took the extra exam this morning, and passed with 94%. This license class used to require passing a 20 words-per-minute Morse code test, sending and receiving. Although I love CW, I was resigned to never achieving 20 wpm. I did try the extra test back in the 70's but you had to pass the Morse portion before you could take the written portion, and I couldn't get past the code test.
So that's where it stood for almost 30 years. I had not been paying that much attention to what was going on with amateur radio licensing until the last couple of months, when I noticed my license was about to expire and decided I wanted to become active again. Surprisingly (to me, at least) the code requirement for general and extra classes is now only 5 wpm. That explains why nearly all licensees are either Technician (no code requirement) or Extra class. If you can't do Morse code at all, and are happy to talk on 2-meter FM, you do the technician class. If you can do a little Morse code, and are fairly well prepared in the technical area (radio theory, electronics, etc.), you can do General or Extra.
So now I have passed the Extra class test (sometimes disparagingly referred to as "Extra Lite"), and can go chase the exotic stations that only hang out in the bottom 25 KHz of the bands.
Another Friday off, an opportunity to try for some contacts. I didn't get started until around 12:30, and tuned into an absolutely dead 15-meter band. I am using an MFJ-9015, a CW-only transceiver which tunes only the CW portion of the band. Scanning from top to bottom yielded only static and occaisional spurious tones.
Around 1:00 I heard some weak activity in the low end of the band, below 21.010 MHz. I am not currently authorized to use that segment, so all I could do is listen. The signals were very weak, and after a few minutes I moved on.
Around 2:00, though, the band started to pick up, with activity mostly between 21.040 and 21.060. I was able to work a station in Washington with a very good signal report (remember I am only running 4 watts). Shortly after, I worked a station in Maryland. I heard a station in Ontario, Canada, but a lot of other stations were also interested in working him, so around 4:00 I packed it in.
Tomorow I am taking the examination to upgrade to extra class, so that I will be able to use those segments that I can't use now.
In case you are having a problem remembering what scum-sucking, asswipe, corrupt fuckwits the management at SCO Group are, here is an example. Invoicing for embedded Linux? All their "stolen IP" claims involve multi-processor systems and disk access methods. Don't see much of that in systems that live in EEPROMS.
There isn't one thing here a few well-placed .30 cal softpoints wouldn't cure in a hurry.
And if I see that in a headline, I am throwing a party.
Dennis Francione, well on the way to a 4 and 8 season at Texas A&M, showed what kind of class he has last year.
Somebody stick a fork in this turkey. He's done.
Clear Channel stations in Cleveland, Raleigh, and Houston started a fire-storm with on-air comments advocating running cylists off the road, hitting them with car doors, or throwing objects at them.
"After the Raleigh and Houston broadcasts, Cowan mounted an Internet campaign against Clear Channel that created a national nightmare for the company. Clear Channel still faces complaints filed by bicyclists with the Federal Communication Commission, which grants radio licenses. "
"The company explained that after the Houston and Raleigh broadcasts, a producer in Houston was fired and the Raleigh morning team was suspended. In Cleveland, after a meeting with Cowan, Clear Channel officials apologized on air to bicyclists, broadcast public service announcements about sharing the road and donated $10,000 for bike advocacy. "
Clear Channel radio stations are all too often overflowing cesspools of filth, modeled after the "king of all media", the head potty-mouth Howard Stern. I would like to think that the individuals involved in these events are no longer working in radio, but I'm sure other stations, hungry for the ratings that filth always brings, hired them within days.
But if they decide to try to come down on cyclists again, they'd better watch their backs.
I finished (mostly) the Linux box today. It now will boot up, load the ADM8211 card driver, configure the encryption, and get an IP address by DHCP. The main issue I had to deal with was getting it to ignore the missing keyboard and stop complaining that Linux is a virus. (What the heck is that all about, Trend?)
I installed webmin, turned on swat, and was pleased to find that it loads ssh by default. I also started apache.
I have it sharing a directory to the Windows PCs with read/write access, so I am almost there. The neat thing is I can plug the system into a wall outlet anywhere in the vicinity and turn on the power switch, and 60 seconds later I have a file server/webserver up and running on my home network.
Cool.
I took a day off from work today to do a little painting and to work some more on my Linux system. I have Slackware 9 installed on a 40GB drive and I want to make the box wireless. I had picked up a TrendNet TEW-223PI PCI card a while back for about $30 and downloaded what was purported to be the driver for it, an Atmel driver package. Alas, that is not the right driver for this card. A Google search turned up the right driver from the ADM site, which compiles into 8211.o, which modprobes very nicely and turns on the card just fine. (Here is the ADM8211 Linux driver.)
Update: where the heck did ADMTEK go? Here is a local copy I saved. It worked for me, your mileage may vary.
Still to do is to edit the scripts to run iwconfig to put in the encryption key and ifconfig and dhcp to get an IP address from the router, configure Samba so the other systems here can see it, and it should be ready for prime time. I figure about another two hours should do it.
The next iteration will be a fast mobo/CPU combo in a new ATX case, but that's down the road a bit.
This required a little research on the internet to get some tips on how to configure a wireless card under Linux, but the information is out there and the software/drivers are freely available. Life is good, Linux is free. (Fuck you, SCO.)
US crackdown on bioterror is backfiring
An astonishing percentage of federal agency managers are imbeciles who should not be allowed to wander around in public. Apparently the FBI has a particularly high concentration.
This stupidity is causing the loss of actual knowledge, but the morons enforcing this are checking boxes on their resumés and could care less about the long range effects of their actions. That attitude neatly sums up that of at least 80% of the federal managers I have known in my career. Every position is a stop on the way to the next position, possibly a contract job after retiring from federal service. They are so intent on checking the right boxes for the next position, they hardly take the time to learn what the present one is.
When I was much younger and very naive, I believed that those in charge were put there because they were wise, competent, and caring. Mostly, they are none of those things.
Lawyer shot outside courthouse
From an update:
"Strier's civil attorney, Steven Trolard, has said his client injured three disks in his back last year in a car accident and won a $100,000 settlement, which was kept in a trust fund administered by a court-appointed trustee and attorney.
Strier's doctor recommended surgery to repair the disks, but the trustee, Evelyn Murphy, and Curry, who was Murphy's attorney, would not release the money, Trolard said Sunday in a telephone interview.
At a hearing just before Friday's shooting, Murphy was removed from the case, but not before she and Curry were authorized to withdraw more than $6,000 from Strier's trust for their work, Trolard said. "
Next time visit a shooting range first to sharpen your skills. If there ever was someone who needed shooting, this lawyer and the trustee certainly qualify.
Zell Miller, demonstrating that it is still possible, though increasingly unlikely, to be a Democrat and a patriot.
Don't look for him to stay in the party of treason much longer. If he doesn't leave in disgust, his "colleagues" will stick a knife in him for endorsing George Bush.
There used to be Democrats who were also proud Americans. Zell Miller is one of the last of the breed.
The Patriot Act used to go after local crooks? Now, what was the road to hell paved with again?
How long before the Patriot Act is used to go after shoplifters, red light runners, overdraft check writers, etc.?
A screaming liberal TV critic throws a tantrum in this "feature" column titled 'CBS - the cowardly network'.
I guess McGinn is a tad bit upset over the cancellation of the mockumentary, The Reagans. He should take a pill before he chokes on all that bile.
While waiting for the car to be repaired, I spent the day getting the Suburban (the wheel-losing Suburban) washed, stripping some wallpaper, and building a Linux box.
It's running the 2.4.18 kernel. (Hey SCO! Up yours!) Had to replace the CD-ROM drive before I could get a complete install, but after that, it went well. One odd thing I noticed is that X-Windows and KDE take a long time to come up, at least compared to what I am used to. The CPU is a 500 MHz AMD K6-2, which should be speedy enough.
Stripping wallpaper sucks. I don't recommend it as a hobby.
Another of my cars (#2 of 3) had a "Check Engine" light when we returned from our trip. This is a '94 model with 101,000 miles, so I was not optimistic.
My pessimism was well justified. The bill to turn out the light was $1007.98.
This same car required a 4-wheel brake rebuild a month ago, for $950.
Double bummer.
Just back from a two-day 700-mile roundtrip to west Texas. I am beat. The trip was uneventful, thankfully, except for a wreck (not involving me) near Ranger. The involved vehicle was ripped wide open, with the roof completely gone. I have never seen that much damage to a car before. I doubt any occupant could have survived.
The timing of this trip meant that I completely missed the ARRL CW sweepstakes contest. Bummer.
Maybe next year.