Out At Sea Again....Light Posting For A While

I'm out here to support boosting another up for Intelsat, so I have to be careful what I post.

I'll try and get a few things up over the next couple of weeks.

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Three More To Go....

WELL....my lovely wife and I sat down and went over our finances, how much I'll get from S.S., and the pensions I'll get from three previous employers, and we decided I can retire next year.
I'll still do some consulting work, and since clients I had before my current employer called me back a year ago April are still
calling me asking if I can do some work for them, I think we'll be just fine.The "Three More To Go" title relates to the fact that I'll only have three more launch campaigns to go on before my "R-Day".
I'm leaving Sunday morning for the current mission, then there's one around the end of November, and one more in late January/early February.
After that, they have NOTHING on the manifest, and the grapevine indicates nothing in sight, either.
Who knows, I might get laid-off again before I **officially** make my plans known, in which case I'll take unemployment for as long as I can get it.
I have several opinions about why they don't have customers lined up, but I'll save those for next August.
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Why Gun Control Made Aurora Shooting Inevitable

There's a very good article over at the California Political Review website about the shootings in Aurora.
The writer doesn't own a gun, but he supports our Second Amendment rights.
Give it a read, I think you'll find it very good.

Beginner's Reloading Advice?

I'm seriously thinking about getting started in reloading. I'm pretty sure I understand the basics, having helped my best buddy do it many times before I moved out here to Kaliforniastan in 1980, but I'm also sure things have change a LOT since 1980!

SO......I'm calling on my friends out here to suggest

1. Some good beginners books about it
2. Some good quality equipment; press, dies, scales, et al
3. Sage advice about how to do it, and store my supplies, safely.

I know a LOT of you have far more experience in this than I do, so if you had it to do over again, where would you change things, and what "rookie" mistakes did you make?

I promise I won't laugh.

God knows I've made plenty of rookie mistakes in most things I did when I was young and first learning about whatever new endeavor struck my fancy.

Now that I'm older, I ask and read anything I can find before I dive headlong into things!
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Too Much Work, But a Bit of Fun Today

I'll be headed out on another launch campaign next Sunday, and since I've been working 10~11 hour days, I haven't been posting much.
We finished our RF System checkouts early today, and since the Meteorologist was MIA, I blew off helping him do the Weather System checkouts (DUH! He wasn't even on the ship!), and headed for home.
I stopped in at my mailbox, and picked up a new Uniden BCD996XT scanner that I ordered the other day. Now, the Uniden BD796D scanner I have here in Radio Central is still perfectly serviceable, and the little Uniden Home Patrol that's out in the living room is a marvel, but my son mentioned the other day he'd like to put a scanner in his car, and since his birthday is coming up in a couple of months, I figured this would be an ideal "excuse" for me to get his present early.
Gee, I have to know how it works, and how to program it if I'm going to support it, don't I?
Now while Uniden includes some "free" software to program these, and there are some other free programs out there that can do it, I'm very partial towards using BuTel software to program these. The really cool thing about the BuTel software, is that if you have a subscription to the RadioReference website, the software will automatically connect, and sort out the frequencies, control channels, Talk Group ID's, and all the other things you need to know about a Trunked Radio System from the online databases Radio Reference maintains, and presents them in a very logical, READABLE manner so you can decide what to save to a local database, which you then upload to the scanner.
Sure beats buying a handful of crystals every time you want to change frequencies!
This all started the other day when he and I were talking some radio stuff, and he told me what systems he wanted to be able to listen to. Some of the things he wanted are on a "conventional" radio system, but the others are on a trunked system, which pretty much killed the chances of him being able to use one of my older scanners.
ANYWAY.....the BCD996XT is quite a capable receiver. You can plug a GPS into it, and as you change areas, it will change what systems it's receiving on-the-fly.
I haven't really begun to scratch the surface of this radio,but I'm sure by the time his birthday gets here I'll have it pretty well sorted out.
Gee....I might even have to buy him a new one, as this one will probably be worn out by then!
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CNN "Gun Control" Op-Ed Piece and Rebuttal

Thanks to Old_NFO, I found this site that gives the rebuttla to the brain-dead CNN piece.

Fisking a Gun Control Editorial
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Quiet, Relaxing, Goof-Off Day

We're in the midst of our next launch campaign, so I've been pretty busy at work the last week or so.

We busted our tails Thursday and Friday, with the result that we (my little RF group) didn't have to work this weekend.

SO....I slept in till 9 this morning (oh you sluggard!), and I've been just goofing off today. My son is coming over tomorrow so we can work on his car stereo/navigation unit, and I'm taking the Mrs out to dinner tonight to one of our favorite places, George's Greek Cafe.

If you *EVER* get in the Long Beach area, stop in for some of the best Greek food on the planet.  Friendly staff, excellent service, very reasonable prices, and as I said, most excellent Greek cuisine.

And I've been making some drawings and little fiddly bits for the all new-and-improved portable satellite station I'm going to use next year at Field Day.

I've got a super duty, 5' tall all metal surveyor's tripod that I bought for about $30. I'm going to make an aluminum mounting plate to bolt my Yaesu G-5400 Azimuth/Elevation rotator to it, separate the two rotator sections with about 3' of 2" heavy wall aluminum pipe, use one of my "spare" fiberglass cross-booms, a "spare" dual-band antenna, some preamplifiers I just bought from a friend, and I'll have an antenna setup that gives my 90% of the performance of my "big" setup, that's about 1/4th the weight, and 10 times easier to set up and tear down.

"Knucle Draggin' My Life Away" on Hiatus

Ken (wirecutter) over at "Knuckle Draggin' My Life Away" has decided to take a break for a while.

Although I'm sure 99% of the blogosphere knew this before me, I understand it.

C'mon back anytime, Ken.....you've got a lot of friends out here!

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You Didn't Build That

My buddy Jeffro found this, and it's amazing.

WELL on it's way to becoming one of the top websites of the year, I'd say....

You Didn't Build That

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20 Reasons Why It's Good To Be Barack Obama

1) It's all the golf you can play and as many free vacations as you want. The teleprompter tells you what to say to the crowd and if anybody makes a joke about you, someone calls him a racist!

2) You get a Nobel Peace Prize just for showing up.

3) No matter how much worse black Americans do under you than George W. Bush, Kanye West is never going to say, "Barack Obama doesn't care about black people."

4) You can eat a dog and PETA will still love you.

5) No one seems to find it odd that you simultaneously repeat Harry Truman's famous line, "The buck stops here" -- as you blame George Bush, Republicans in Congress, greedy corporations, the European economy, and even ATM machines for your many, many failures.

6) The Occupy Movement still loves you despite the fact that you've shoveled billions of dollars in taxpayer dollars to Wall Street firms via bailouts and loan programs.

7) You can have a net worth of 11 million dollars, go on multiple 6 figure vacations per year, and hobnob with the wealthiest Americans at swanky 40k a plate fundraisers; yet no one bats an eye when you criticize Mitt Romney for being rich.

8) The press doesn't incessantly repeat the body count in Afghanistan in every article about the war, like it did when George Bush was in Iraq.

9) You get to keep Gitmo open, sign on to the Patriot Act, fight in Afghanistan and kill terrorists with drone attacks while leftists complain that you haven't tried to go after Bush for committing "war crimes" because he did the same things.

10) The mainstream press judges you not on what you've done, but on whatever you happen to be saying right this moment, even if it's different from what you were saying yesterday.

11) After creating jobs overseas with stimulus money, you can criticize Mitt Romney for having a Swiss bank account without being laughed at despite the fact you're holding fundraisers in Switzerland, Sweden, Paris and China.

12) The same press that was utterly uninterested in your background when you ran for office in 2008 considers Mitt Romney's religion, what date he left Bain Capital, and how hard his wife worked when she was taking care of their kids much more important than anything you did over the last 3 1/2 years as President.

13) You can simultaneously block the keystone pipeline and ANWR while you hold up offshore drilling in the Gulf and demonize oil companies, yet claim with a straight face that you're trying to reduce gas prices.

14) Despite the fact that you're conducting war across the globe and have never served in the military, nobody calls you a chickenhawk.

15) Even though your administration helped kill 300 people with guns, including an American citizen, gun control advocates have zero interest in getting to the bottom of it.

16) You have the single most important job on earth and yet, most people seem to be thrilled that you're spending more time campaigning for reelection than you do working.

17) The mainstream media is much more concerned with the possible racism or bad motives of anyone questioning you than it is with whether your policies actually work.

18) No matter how much of an utter failure you are, most black Americans feel compelled to pretend you're not a disaster because they're afraid everyone will judge them by how incompetent you turned out to be.

19) You have a National Debt Charge Card with a limit of "Infinity" and you're not scared to use it.

20) Your biggest accomplishments so far after killing Osama Bin Laden are ending the manned space program, having the longest string of over 8% unemployment of any President since WWII, putting more Americans for food stamps than any other President in history, killing the work requirements in welfare, giving up on stopping illegal aliens, adding more debt in three and a half years than Bush did in eight, and decimating America's health care system with the least popular entitlement program in history. Yet, you still have a chance to be reelected. It doesn't get any better than that.

Go Kart Racing

A week or so ago when my son and I were were headed back from the range, he mentioned that we should go kart racing one of these days.

Well.....we went today.

Now I've done more than just a bit of racing in the past. I used to run SCCA B-Production cars, and even won the regional title back in 1974.
And I've done my share of after-hours racing out on the deserted two lane blacktops back in Illinois. We knew the roads very well, and blocked off both ends, and any intersecting roads, and went at it. Not "Street Racing" in the sense that you hear about in the news, but still pretty illicit. The cops knew we did it, and pretty much left the group I was with alone, as we NEVER did anything in town, and strongly discouraged all our peers from doing stupid shit on the main streets, side streets, or any other streets in town.
A few years ago, one of my buddies talked me into going to driver's school down at Lake Perris. My buddy continued his kart racing, and last I heard was doing quite well in the Denver area.

ANYWAY....we went to the K1 Speed  indoor track today, and I had an absolute blast. The karts are electric powered, with a 20 h.p. motor, and can reach speeds of 40~45 mph.

The facility is clean, well-equipped, and the staff are very friendly and helpful. If you have a question, or need some help, somebody is there pronto to assist you.

Now some people might say this isn't "real" racing, but then they've probably never raced anything in their lives.

Trust me, this IS "real" racing. The karts accelerate very quickly, have more than enough power to slide through the corners controlled by the throttle (NOT the fast way around), have hydraulic disc brakes, real racing tires, a 3-point harness, roll bars, and look to be fairly well built.

My first race had me throttled back electronically, but the second race they let me have full power. Took a few laps for me to get on my game (it's a perishable skill, just like marksmanship), and I started turning faster laps.

I'm sure we'll be going back, as my son wants a rematch after I beat him!
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