Red Dawn 2010/2011

"Red Dawn" is one of my favorite movies. I didn't see it when it first came out (me BAD!), and I didn't see it until around 1999 when I was working at DirecTV. One of the fringe benefits of working there was that they gave ALL the employees a free system, with all the programming, Including NFL Sunday Ticket, for free. I'm not a football fan, so I mostly watched the movies, and a few series' I liked.
ANYWAY....the remake of Red Dawn was supposed to be about the ChiComs invading the US, but it seems the studio executives started getting nervous over portraying our major lender (and a 1.5 BILLION dollar export market!) in what was perceived to be a bad light. The movie was edited, and all the graphics digitally altered, to make the new Bad Guys be the North Koreans. Gotta be ultra-PC In Hollyweird, don't cha know?
It will be interesting to see how well they pulled this off, but the trailers look pretty good, and I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
On the Red Dawn 2011 website you can create you're very own "Citizen Alert" poster, so I filled in the relevant information about the Most Dangerous Man in America these days, and here's the final product.

Obama Steps Down, Apologizes for "Damaging America Beyond Repair"!

April Fool's!

Happy Birthday M1911!

Best
Pistol
Ever
!

Happy Birthday Harry Houdini, Wherever You Are

Geez, even the Google Homepage has it.

R.I.P MIR, De-Orbited 15 Years Ago Today

On 23 March 1996, at 05:59 UTC, the Soviet Space Station MIR reentered the atmosphere, and burned up.
Call it what you want, the MIR did yeoman's duty as mankind's first long-term outpost in space, and I was rather sad to see it go. There was a very active Amateur Radio station onboard, and I made numerous contacts, using both FM voice and packet radio, with the crew members. It was always a thrill talking to them, even if it was for only a few minutes, and I always wished them a safe journey. It was a double-thrill for me, as all of the equipment I used was either home-brewed, rescued from the junk pile, or considered "obsolete" by other Hams I knew.
My FM radio was an Alinco DM-590T a friend gave me that was in a zillion pieces, and missing a few at that, my antenna was a home-brewed 2 Meter Collinear. And my packet radio setup was a Commodore 64 running an A&A Engineering "soft modem" with Digicom>64 software. Since the C64 could not multitask, I'd run the satellite tracking program (I still have the disk somewhere) once a week, and print out the list of passes that I knew would be in reach of my little station. Then before the pass, I'd fire up the C64, load the packet software, tune the radio, and wait for them to come in range. When the packets started to decode, I'd connect to the bulletin board, and leave my best wishes for a safe journey to the crew.
One of the things I remember most was listening to the when Mike Foale was onboard, and they suffered a collision with an unmanned Progress cargo ship. It really knocked them for a loop, and Amateur Radio was one of their few remaining communications systems (scroll down to find the story in the link) until they got the MIR patched back up again.
The QSL card in the picture is one of the ones I received from them, and is one of the most treasured ones in my collection.

Whoo-Hoo! Going Back To Work....

Just got a call from the company that took over the site I worked at for my former employer.
They made me an "offer I can't refuse", so I'll be headed back in the middle of April.
It will be fun going to sea and doing rocket stuff again.
At least I hope it will.........

Cold, Wet, and Windy.....

Wet is wet, and windy is windy, but "cold" is relative, so before everybody from outside of Kaliforniastan starts telling me "You call THAT cold?", just let me say I grew up around Chicago, and spent time in the winter in Idaho, both Dakotas, and Montana, so yes, I do know what COLD is.
Cold is having your flashlight go out in your hand, because at 40 below, the batteries freeze.
Cold is having to cut your engine oil with a pint of kerosene (a trick we used before you could buy 5W-10 or 0W-5 synthetic oil) because otherwise your engine won't crank over in the morning.
Cold is hearing your breath freeze (it sounds like little firecrackers) as it drifts away.
Cold is having to use a 100 Watt soldering iron with a special tip because a 40 Watt iron will not get hot enough to melt solder outdoors.
So with that out of the way, it's barely gotten above 50 degrees here, and it's been raining all day. We've accumulated .65" since midnight, and the winds are running about 15mph continuously, with gusts over 35mph.
The barometer is at 29.59 and falling, it's going down to about 45 degrees tonight, and rain will continue all day Monday.
Yeah, I know, it's a "Slow News Day", and I wanted to post something while I'm updating my laptop to OpenSUSE 11.4.

UPDATE:
As of 9pm, we've had 1.2" of rain, but the wind has died down.
It's 48 degrees, which is pretty cool for this time of year.

"No Match for a Good Blaster"

H/T to Conservative Scalawag for finding this.
I recognize maybe half of them, but this goes far too deep for me!
The original, and the shirt, are available here.
Enjoy!

Hillary Stepping Down in 2012?

Well, at least she is according to what I read in the paper this morning, and heard on Hannity's show a bit later.
Wonder if it will be to spend more "quality time" with Bill?

Beech King Air Crash at Long Beach Airport

I usually listen to the tower at LGB all day long, but this happened after I turned the radio on. I noticed that there was a lot of helicopter activity around one of the runways, and that the runway was closed. I didn't think anything about it until my wife came home and told me about it.
A Beech King Air went down on takeoff, killing 5 of the people on board.
More here at the Press Telegram.

Man With 4th Amendment Written On Chest Sues Over Arrest

I almost didn't believe this when I read it.
According to the suit, while under interrogation on December 30, the authorities wanted to know “about his affiliation with, or knowledge of, any terrorist organizations, if he had been asked to do what he did by any third party, and what his intentions and goals were.”

Read the whole article here.