*FINALLY* Feeling Better

After being knocked down by this damn flu bug for over a week, I'm finally starting to feel somewhat normal again, just in time to pack my stuff up, and head out to sea again on Saturday.

I made a COSTCO run tonight and picked up a bunch of snacks and things for the trip, and I'll lug some of that in Friday moring.

2x 3lb bags of pistachios
2x 12 pack bags of beef jerky
100 packets of Emergen-C drink mix
1 LARGE bottle of glucosamine sulfate for my battered old knees
2 bottles of Robitussen
2 boxes of Chloroseptic throat lozenges
1 HUGE bag of Hall's Mento-Lyptus cough drops

And various and sundry other items.

I also bought a new set of headphones, as my Koss Pro-4AAT cans finally bit the dust.

I had to replace the cable between the earpieces a few years ago, and then the 1/8" stereo plug failed, and now the plastic has broken on one of the earpieces so it won't stay on the headband.

I found a set of Sony MDR-7506 Studio Monitor phones at a good price, and they're quite nice. They don't seal out the background noise as well as the Koss' did, but they sound very good, with solid bass, midrange, and treble.

They probably reproduce more frequencies than my ears can pick up these days, as in my youth I subjected myself to a LOT of open-exhaust race cars, and el-cheap-o aviation headsets that hardly blocked out the noise of the little Cessna and Piper aircraft I used to putt-putt around in.

But I *ALWAYS* wore ear protection (and eyes, too) when shooting.
.
.

My Flu Shot Didn't Work

I've been getting flu shots since 2009 when I got really sick for about 2 months with some bug that just wouldn't go away. So far, things have been fine, with just "regular" colds.

Not this year.

I noticed I was starting to get a sore throat on Tuesday, and by Wednesday night I could hardly speak, and was running a fever.

"Dr. Mom" insisted I got to bed early, and loaded me up with some OTC stuff that helped. Thursday I stayed home from work, and Thursday night I had one of those coughs that kick in about 3 minutes after you lay down, making it rather difficult to get any sleep. I called in to work Friday morning, and my boss told me to STAY HOME, as we're too close to leaving to have me come in, spread something around, and have everybody else sick just as we're getting to the launch site.

Friday and Saturday morining I was pretty 'zombiefied' from whatever hit me, AND the cold meds, so I just kicked back and didn't do much.

I went in to work today at 0800 to help set up and run the final RF testing we do before they lower the rocket, and roll it back in the hangar, and everything went smooth as silk. We were finished by 1430, and rather than hang around, I came back home to take it easy. Tomorrow we'll get all our gear on the platform stowed for transit, and then wave them off Tuesday morning, with us following 4 days later on Saturday.

So beware!

There's a nasty bug floating around out there, and I hope it misses you....

No, I Don't Need "10 Bullets To Kill A Deer"

But I damn sure might need more than 10 to defend my family!

Mark Levin puts it all into perspective.

Please, give it a listen.

H/T to therightscoop.com

We Need More Baseball Bat, String, and Knife Control!

On the other hand....don't get the leftwing moonbats barking about this.

They might try and turn us into (formerly) Great Britain!

H/T to MissK and It 'Aint Holy Water.

Another School Shooting In Kern County

Wife just emailed me.

This from Reuters. 

And the L.A. Times.

No other info yet.....
.
.

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....
.
.

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.
.
.

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!