Pre-Departure Preps Underway

They rolled the payload over to the ship this morning, and tomorrow we'll do some RF power checks from the launch vehicle up to one of the equipment rooms. If that goes well (it always does), then Friday morning we'll flow live data from the ship, through the NASA TDRSS network and do an "End-to-End" test of the entire network we use to relay telemetry from the launch site to all the places it goes.

Yesterday they filled the LN2 tanks in the Launch Platform with NINE tankers of Liquid Nitrogen, and today they started loading the LOX. There were 8 tankers on-site when I left, with another 25 on the way. The day before departure they'll bring in three more to "Top Off" the LOX supply, for a total load of THIRTY SIX tankers of Liquid Oxygen. Something like ONE TON per day boils off during our transit down to the Equator, and we carry enough to make three launch attempts. The fuel can be drained back out of the launch vehicle and saved, but pumping LOX always incurs losses.

Almost all of the RF testing my little group handles is finished, and we're kind of sitting around twiddling our thumbs until Sunday, when we do "Roll Out and Erect", and run the full countdown, minus fueling the launch vehicle. The satellite builder for this launch is an American company we've worked with many times, and things go very smooth, as all involved have done this before, and we all speak English, unlike the last launch, when we could barely communicate with the foreign customer, leading to some "interesting" problems, and very long days.

Lucky Gunner Brass vs Steel Cased Ammo Test

I don't know how many of you received this in your email, but it certainly is an amazing amount of work and data gathering.

Go here and read the whole article.

Just amazing....
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An Entirely New Meaning for the Term "Enemy of the People"

As ususal, T.L. Davis has an excellent piece over at his place.

Please, go RTHT.

I always thought the phrase meant a person or persons who were at odds with society, and dangerous to society.

TL turns the meaning around with something so obvious I felt like I just got clobbered with the fabled "Clue-By-Four".

On a side note, when I worked at DirecTV we used to joke about how somebody would change the title to a movie to make it more "relevant" to the foreign audience.

When Will Smith's "Enemy of the People" was playing, and we were broadcasting it to South America, the tile had been changed to "Public Enemy".

A subtle change to some, but considering how corrupt most South American governments are, it was a telling change.
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Traffic Web Cams As Remote Intelligence Assets

Found this over at Rawles' Survival Blog, and it looks like a great idea.

Use all those Nanny State traffic cams to see who's moving what to where.

As long as you have power and an Internet connection, these could be useful.

This website has all sorts of webcams that might provide some "interesting" viewing.

"Fiscal Cliff" Survival Package

From a friend.....


Just wanted to let you know - today I received my Fiscal Cliff Survival Pack from the White House.
It contained a parachute, an 'Obama Hope & Change' bumper sticker, a 'Bush's Fault' poster, a 'Blame Boehner' poster, a "Tax the Rich' poster, an application for unemployment, an application for food stamps, a prayer rug, a letter of assignation of debt to my grandchildren and a machine to blow smoke up my ass.
All directions were in Spanish.
Keep an eye out. Yours should arrive soon.

Weird Network Problem at Home

Well, I got home from work the other night, and proceeded to fire up my PC to check my email.

Hmmm.....no network connectivity.

I powered up my Ham Radio PC to see if it had a network connection, and got the same type of error message.

I went and reset the Ethernet switch in my little "Network Closet", and things worked for about 2 minutes, and then the network connection dropped out.

About this time, my stepson arrived home, and said "Hey, could you check the Internet for me? I can't get on".

I told him I was in the process of doing that, and went and power cycled our Verizon router, and waited for it to come back up.

STILL no Internet connectivity, so then I tried to connect to my weather server, which is loacted in the living room, but on a different segment of our LAN.

Uh-Oh.....can't get to it, either. Hmmm....my little $20 "Dynex" Gig-E switch in the closet must have rolled over and gone casters up.

Since my Audio/Video PC is still set up on the dining room table, I powered it up, and was able to get on the Internet to see what Best Buy had in stock for a new Ethernet switch. I would up buying a Netgear 8-port switch like the one I have on my desk in the Radio Room to tie everything together with, and proceeded to swap out the "dead" Dynex switch.

Oh, boy......STILL no Internet access from the Radio Room.

Thinking perhaps the cable from the router to the switch had gone flakey, I then pulled the cat6 cable going to the router, and ran a cable directly from the router to the switch on my desk.

STILL no Internet! I went back to the living room, and tried connecting to the Home Theater receiver and/or the Oppo Blu-Ray player (they're both "Net Aware"), and discovered I couldn't reach either of them.

Hmmmm...something is definitely rotten in the network segment with the Home Theater, Radio Room, and stepson's bedroom, but a direct connection to the router works, as my wife's PC, and the Audio/Video editing PC have full connectivity.

Back to the network closet, where I unplug everything except the cable back to the router, and the cable to the Home Theater gear, which has it's own little D-Link 4-port 10/100 switch.

NOW I can get to the Onkyo receiver and Oppo Blu-ray player from either PC that has a direct connection into the router.

I reconnect the cable to the Radio Room segment and all works well.

I reconnect the cable to the back bedroom, and all works well.

I reconnect the cable to stepson's bedroom, and BLAM.....the whole network GOES DOWN.
And for the first time I noticed via the LED's on the network switches, that there's a tremendous amount of traffic flying around.

I pull the cable to stepson's bedroom, and all the traffic disappears.

HMMMMMM......WTF is going on in there? His PC and his X-Box are turned OFF, and I know I have the BIOS in his PC set so you can't remotely hit the PC with a Magic Packet to turn it on.

X-Box go berserk? Cable get crushed/shorted?

I go into his room, and he helps me pull his PC from under the desk, and I see the special Netgear "Home Theater and Gaming Series" Ethernet switch I bought for him some time ago. This switch has the traffic on certain ports prioritized, so that your X-Box or PS3 gets priority over any other device connected to it. It supposedly reduces the "Ping Times", something critical for networked games, but otherwise it's just an Ethernet switch.

It has five ports. One port goes to the Network Closet in the Radio Room, one port goes to his PC, and one port goes to his X-Box.

But all 5 ports have cables in them. It's then I notice that two of the ports are "bridged" with a yellow cat5 jumper cable.

I seem to remember having a yellow Cat5 cable in there so his girlfriend could use her laptop until we got all the wireless issues solved, but I thought I'd pulled it out after we got her laptop working on the wireless network segment.

I ask him why he has the cable connecting the two "unused" ports, and he says he doesn't know anything about it, but then his girlfriend chimes in and said she saw the free end of the yellow cable "just dangling there" and decided it had to go *somewhere*, and since it looked like it would fit into the unused port, she plugged it in!

Now, I don't remember specifically why you never connect two ports togther, as it's lost among all the dust of my brain somewhere under "Networking 101", but I know it's a Bad Thing to do so.




Ahh....found it. It's called a "Switching Loop" and causes the switch to broadcast out of *every* port it has,  causing a "Broadcast Storm", and will bring even a well-managed network to it's knees.


As soon as I unplugged one end of the mysterious yellow cable, "traffic" on the LAN went to about zero, and all connectivity was restored.

In retrospect, I should have fired up Wireshark (formerly Ethereal) on my Linux box and observed what type of traffic was bringing the network down, but by the time I "fixed" the problem, and restored everything to normal, it was 2130, and my bed time!

Happy New Year!

Now get back to work!

You have tens of MILLIONS of welfare scammers, disability scammers, Social Security scammers, and ALL of Washington D.C. to support!

Video Project In The Home Stretch....

And yow...I learned more than I really wanted to, but what I needed.

After fighting for a day with trying to get the project exported to Adobe Encore, I just gave up, and figured I'd just burn the compled file, already in MPEG-2 (DVD) format to a disk.

That worked, and it's playable, BUT.....

It didn't have any menus, and required me to do some things with my Oppo BDP-83 Blu-Ray/DVD player that *might* not be possible to do with other players in order to get the disk to play.

Since I'm not sure how many copies of these my brother-in-law will make, I figured I'd better do my best to make these a "universal" disk that will play in any player.

Off to the Adobe Encore forums!

Adobe has some very nicely done on-line tutorials, so for most of today I've been reading, experimenting, and most importantly, LEARNING how to use all the software I have.

It's NOT real intuitive, and the Dynamic Linkage between the two programs has to be done correctly, or *nothing* happens.

Well, I finally figured that part out, and how to make those nice menus with "Play", "Set Up", "Chapters", "Extras", and all that stuff you see when you pop in a store-bought DVD and play it.

Fortunately, Encore has a "Check Build" function you can invoke that checks all the various things required to get a functional DVD built, and boy, did it come in handy.

After reading all the warnings I got the first time I ran it, and spending several mores hours reading the forums, I was able to understand and fix all the warnings and errors it generated when it checked my project.

The first disk id rendering now, and I should be able to burn it and test before the end of the year......!

After that, assuming it plays OK, I "just" have to assemble the various sequences for each disk I want to author, export them from Premiere Pro to Encore, and build them.

And I'll probably forget all this stuff in two weeks, and go through the hair-pulling routine again the next time I use the software.

CWII Waiting In The Wings?

The Silicon Graybeard had some links to some very interesting reading.

The first is a great piece over at Free North Carolina, and the other a piece over at Angry White Dude's place.

Go over to Graybeard's place and RTWT, as he's much better at writing about this stuff than I *ever* will be.

MY take on things?

I don't really know what will happen, but if Big Brother starts pushing too hard, I think we'll see a lot of Matt Bracken and Vince Flynn "Term Limits" stuff start to go down.

One thing to keep in mind, is that even if you back off a rattler after you've annoyed him, he still might strike.

And since the dunderheads in power are too stupid or too ideologically driven to back off......

Video Project Progress

Well, I *finally* have all twelve tapes on hard-disk, a process called "Ingest" in the biz.

I had some real hair pulling moments doing this, as somewhere along the line, the audio settings in Windoze got changed, and seven of the twelve tapes recorded without sound.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!!!!

After I re-recorded them and stopped the capture, Premiere Pro would hang up with a "Conforming XXXX.AVI" message, and the progress bar indicating it was saving to disk never budged. After a few minutes of this, the program would stop responding, and die.

Took me most of a day, a lot of head scratching and book reading (Yes, I *do* RTFM), and prowling the Adobe Premiere Pro forums, but I figured it out. The bit rate between what Windoze had the sound card set to, and what Premiere Pro was using, didn't match, causing a huge problem that Premier Pro tried to correct, by transcoding the audio (part of the "Conforming" process) to the bit rate used for DVD.

WELL.......if the bit rates are different enough, it can take forever to resample the original audio stream, and convert it to the new rate.

And in some cases, it simply can't be done without causing big "holes" in the data stream, which the program won't accept, and so you spiral down in flames, waiting for the job to finish.

SO, now that I have all the tapes *properly* recorded to disk, I assigned the "In Points" and "Out Points" to each of the 18 "clips" I made from the twelve tapes. The "Ins" and "Outs" are simply the points at which the video starts to play, and are used to eliminate the first few crummy/bad/distorted frames of video that the camcorder produces when it first starts to record. They're used for other things, like selecting where you want to do other stuff, but for now that's how I'm using them.

Now "all" I have to do is to assemble the clips in a sequence, add the transitions ("Fade To Black" stuff) between the clips, make sure the completed sequence will fit on a DVD, and save each sequence as a "Project".

That will complete the editing portion of the project, and I can go on to "author" the DVD using Adobe Encore, and then burn the DVDs for my brother-in-law. He says his kids, now fully grown with their own children, have never seen the tapes.

The reason I built a studio-grade PC hardware and software suite, was that I wanted to be able to capture HD video from the Component Video jacks on the back of my DirecTV box, back when I had DirecTV.

I literally bought EVERY "consumer grade" video capture device on the market, and tried them all. Some of them has S-Video inputs, and a couple had "component video" inputs, and they ALL used USB to connect to the PC.

They ALL sucked, producing at best, video that looked like a VHS tape.

So, I bit the bullet, and bought a Matrox RT.X2 video capture card, which came bundled with a full version of Adobe Premiere Pro.

While this is still a top-notch video capture and editing system, times have changed, and now there are little stand-alone boxes that will actually do HD video, and they cost a whole lot less than what I paid for my hardware.

But then again, we're paying about the same for 40MB fiber-to-the-home as I was for my dual ISDN lines that gave me 128kB back in 1997, and those dollars were a whole bunch bigger.

Merry Christmas, Everybody

One of my "other" favorite Christmas songs is Gregg Lake's "I Belive In Father Christmas".

When he first released this song he caught a lot of flack for being anti-religious, anti-Christmas, and a whole lot of other things.

I caught him by surprise, as he intended the song to be about how Christmas has changed, and had become too commercialized.

The lyricist, Peter Sinfield, said that he considered it to be about the loss of innocence, and childhood beliefs.

Lake said later in an interview:

"I find it appalling when people say it's politically incorrect to talk about Christmas, you've got to talk about 'The Holiday Season.'
Christmas was a time of family warmth and love. There was a feeling of forgiveness, acceptance.
And I do believe in Father Christmas."

Doesn't sound "anti-anything" to me.

May you and yours have a very joyous Christmas, and a very Happy New Year!


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They said there'll be snow at Christmas
They said there'll be peace on earth
But instead it just kept on raining
A veil of tears for the Virgin birth

I remember one Christmas morning
A winter's light and a distant choir
And the peal of a bell and that Christmas tree smell

And their eyes full of tinsel and fire

They sold me a dream of Christmas
They sold me a silent night
And they told me a fairy story
'till I believed in the Israelite
And I believed in Father Christmas
And I looked to the sky with excited eyes
'till I woke with a yawn in the first light of dawn
And I saw him and through his disguise

I wish you a hopeful Christmas
I wish you a brave New Year
All anguish pain and sadness
Leave your heart and let your road be clear
They said there'd be snow at Christmas
They said there'd be peace on earth
Hallelujah, Noel, be it Heaven or Hell
The Christmas we get we deserve