Crawl Spacin' Update

Got the holes drilled through the floor in all the rooms where they need to be, fed the cable pairs through, and cleaned out the closet that has the hatch so I could take a look down there.
As you can tell, I'm apprehensive about diving under the house, but after I pulled the hatch and stuck a drop light down there, it doesn't look *too* bad. The dirt is dry, and looks pretty well compacted, and best of all, I measured 27" from the "floor" to the bottom edge of the joists.
YAY! I won't have to worry about getting stuck while I'm crawling around down there!
There was a nice breeze coming up through the hatch, and *NO* foul odors of any sort, so I'm guessing we don't have any plumbing leaks. I even took one of my small low-light video cameras, connected it to a old monitor I have, and "probed" around under the house as far as I could reach with the pole I had the camera mounted to. No beady eyes stared back at me, and it looked remarkably free of cobwebs and other junk.
If all goes as planned, all I should have to do is crawl about 15' to each cable pair, and bring them back to the hatch area. I've drilled holes through the floor in the closet by one of the side walls, and that's where I'll bring the cables back up through the floor to connect to the splitters and 8-port Ethernet switch that I mounted on the plastic plate today.
I was going to use a piece of plywood, and then I remembered I had several plastic cutting boards left over from a project, so I grabbed one of those and used it. It's easy to drill, doesn't splinter, and doesn't need to be painted to look nice. I've used various sizes of plastic cutting boards to mount radio stuff on over the years, and a bonus is that they even have a handle built-in!

Crawl Spacin'

Well, at least that's what I call it.
Since I'll be returning to work in a couple of weeks, I got a fire built in me to finish up some projects that got stuck in the doldrums for the last year. The first one out of the Job Jar is to finish up cabling the house, which as the post title implies, requires going into the crawl space to pull new RG-6QS coax, and Category 6a network cable.
The way the house is wired now for the TV is antiquated, obsolete, and a general MESS. The cable was originally installed waaay back when they had to run TWO cables to each cable box because the analog systems they had back then didn't have enough bandwidth to carry all the channels. Each Set Top Box ("STB") had two "F" connectors on it where the coaxes attached, and the box would do an A/B switch internally to get all the channels on the cable system. I'm pretty sure this hasn't been used since the early 80's, so that would make all our existing cable, connectors, and splitters at least 30 years old. And the original installation was your typical "Paid by the job, not the hour" installation, which means they did it the quickest way possible. This resulted in some of the cables being (poorly!) mounted under the eaves, and run down the side of the house into (and back out of!) the nearest ventilation grill. We literally have cables running everywhere, and I can't make heads-or-tails as to which are the "gozintas" and which are the "comesouttas". All the cable on the outside of the house has several coats of paint on it (NOT good to paint coax!), and over the last year I've had to replace several connectors, and redo some splices to get the signals in to the STB's up to an acceptable level. Since the system is all digital, along with all our TV's, you don't get "snow" or "static" if you have a weak signal. The picture will just freeze, or pixelate/artifact if the level drops below what the STB can decode and send to the TV. I knew the cable was pretty crappy the first time I saw it, so I bought a 1000' foot spool of Belden RG-6QS, and a BIG bag of Snap-N-Seal compression connectors so I could (eventually) rewire the place.
When we got Verizon to install FiOS for us (it's amazingly fast!), all they did was disconnect the cable drop from Charter (our previous TV provider), and plumb the new signal from the Optical Network Terminal (the big gray box on the side of the house where the fiber comes in from the utility pole) into the existing coax.
YEEECH!
What I'm going to do is to pull a new coax, and a network cable, from each room to a central point, which happens to be the middle bedroom, a.k.a. The Radio Room. I've made a thick plywood panel that I mounted the required splitters and a Gigabit Ethernet switch to, and after I dive under the house and pull the new cables, all I'll have to do is put the connectors on, plug it all together, and then swap the coax from the ONT to the new wiring. If it all works properly, I'll cut the ends off the old cables, stuff them back down through the hole in the floor where they come up, and remove all the exterior cables.
We'll have a nice, new, low-loss coax, *and* a Cat6a Ethernet cable, in each room, and the outside of the house will be cleaned up. It also gives us ALL the cables at one central point, making it much easier to troubleshoot if that's ever required. And we'll probably have half the signal loss we do now.
A couple of the "access ports" the original installers used had FOUR paired (8 actual coaxes!) cables coming out, and haphazardly running up to the eaves, and then running every which way.
Over the last few days, I measured/guesstimated the cable length I'd need from each room to the "Server Closet", added 10' to each length, and measured/cut new sections of cable. Then I taped a network cable to each coax, and drilled new holes in the floor to pull the new cable pairs through. I made the cables extra long, as my old adage is "Better 10 FEET too long than 6" too SHORT!". If it was a straight-line measurement of 12' from one location to the "Server Closet", I doubled it to 24', and with the added 10', I wound up with 34'.
When my wife asked me why I made them soooo long, I just smiled and told her that compared to my "cost" of spending a lovely day crawling around under the house, the cost of the actual cable was insignificant!
I have a Tyvek suit with hood, some good flexible leather gloves like driving gloves, a bunch of the anti-particulate face masks, a good pair of goggles, and a good BRIGHT lantern. I'll also take a long-handled brush with me to "clear the way" as I go Crawl Spacin' on Thursday. My stepson is home that day, and he'll be topside helping me by feeding the cable through so it doesn't kink or hang up on anything.
I haven't done this in years, so I'll be extremely careful, and if it looks like I can't fit where I have to go, I'll back out and we'll figure out some way to fish the cable to where I can grab it.
I don't relish doing this, but it's got to be done.

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?