Phony Facebook Accounts

So far I've had five pop up out of nowhere. It took about 4 hours for them to respond the first time and kill the fake account, but now they're stamping them out about as fast as they pop up.

I think it also helps that several of my friends have notified them, as they're killing them off in minutes now.

Oh, well.....

Anti Trump Tripe

From a (former) friend on FarceBook comes this.

Indivisible: A Practical Guide For Resisting The Trump Agenda.

I'm not going to link to it. You can Google it. I know, it's a good thing to read and try and understand what "The Other Side" is up to, but every time I do that I get nauseated. I'll leave it to those with stronger stomachs.

Anyway....it's supposedly written by "Former Congressional Staffers" who "know all the tricks" to getting Congress to "listen".

Notice the emphasis on the word "tricks"? Not advice, or suggestions, but the TRICKS, by God!

Typical lib-speak, as it implies the easy way. Rather than relying on logic and facts, we'll just "trick" them into listening to us., wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

I'm so sick of this friggin' BS it makes my blood boil.

Got Nuttin' Today....

Just been tinkering on yet another ( ! ) laptop for my friend's animal rescue place.

This one had a hard-disk that was on it's way out, so I ran to Best Buy yesterday to grab a new drive, and now it's finishing up all the Windoze Updates.

I bought a 500 GB Seagate drive for FIFTY BUCKS....think about that a second.

The first brand-new hard drive I ever bought was in December of 1996. Fry's Electronics was having an after Christmas sale, and I bought a Western Digital 1.6 GB drive for TWO HUNDRED BUCKS.

And that was a very good price at the time.

So, what this means is that the drive I bought has over two-hundred and fifty times the capacity for one-quarter of the price.

In other words, the "raw" price-per-bit has dropped by a factor of one thousand in the twenty years since I bought that first drive.

And the reliability and performance have increased by a great margin, too.

I haven't bought any memory lately, but the first memory I ever bought was sometime in 1995 for my son's first computer.

I paid $35 per MEGABYTE for it.

4 meg of memory cost me about $150 out the door back then, and IIRC it wasn't even EDO (Extended Data Output) memory, just "regular" FPM, or "Fast Page Memory".

Today, 4 GIG of memory is about $25 at Newegg, or  greater than FOUR THOUSAND times cheaper.

And it's much faster memory, to boot.

I'm not sure if this makes me feel old or not......

***YAWN*** Happy New Year!

Lots of fireworks around here last night, and something I hadn't noticed in previous New Year's Eves.....gunfire!

Drove the dog nuts, and I had to give her a couple of Benadryls to get her calmed down.

I just hope the "people" shooting off guns were shooting them into the ground.

Every time I heard somebody start to dump a magazine, I'd start counting shots.

EVERY time it was 15 shots or 17 shots. Every. Single. Time.

So, hey Kommiefornia....how's that "High Capacity Magazine" ban working out for you? Pretty good, huh?

And I could have sworn I heard somebody rip off a string of shots in full-auto.

Considering were only a mile or so South of infamous North Long Beach, it was probably a banger bangin' away....

Quiet New Year's Eve....

Not much going on here. My wife went to visit a dear old friend from High School, so I'm just snuggled in here tonight with the dog, listening to the scanner, and seeing what mischief other people are getting into tonight.

Quiet night so far, but then it's only 1930 here, and I expect the "action" will pick up several hours from now.

Went to In-N-Out for dinner tonight, so I'm nice and full, and will be hitting the hay early tonight.

Happy New Year, everybody!

Terrific Apollo / Saturn-V Launch Composite

This one of the best I've seen.

Just about makes me shed a tear....

Also reminds of standing on the Launch Platform Odyssey at 154*W, 0*N with one of my friends one night. The Moon was up, and I said to no one in particular, "Gee....We went there once"....and he almost started crying.

Funny what makes grown men tear up, isn't it?

OK....It's **OFFICIAL**....I'm Going To Be A GRANDPA!

We've known for a while now, but wanted to wait until The Kids In Colorado announced it.

Making the announcement of the wonderful news are, left to right, Coco, Obie, and my big lovable moose-of-a-dog, Diamond.

As expected, my wife is absolutely ECSTATIC.

Any doubts she had about moving to Colorado went POOF! the moment my daughter-in-law told her.

Gee....looks like I'll have to buy another set of tools in around 15 years or so......

Merry Christmas to All My Friends and Family!

Me In Full-Geek Mode c.1967~1968

A high-school buddy of mine on FarceBook found this photo of me and posted it.

The ham gear is the Heathkit "SB Series" I built, consisting of the SB-301 receiver, the SB-401 transmitter, along with the SB-600 speaker, SB-630 station console, and HD-10 single-lever keyer.

The receiver had the optional 400Hz CW filter, and the transmitter had the optional "crystal pack" so it could operate as a stand-alone transmitter. If you didn't install the optional crystals, you were locked to the oscillators in the receiver. You could operate "split" or slaved together in "transceiver mode", but the transmitter couldn't operate by itself without the heterodyne crystals installed.

The box with the large meter to the left is the control box for my "HAM-M" antenna rotator, which was installed in my 70' fold-over tower that I bought used and refurbished.

The antennas in use were a Hy-Gain 402 2-element 40 meter Yagi at 75', and a Hy-Gain TH6DX about 10' above that.

Yep, I put out a pretty BIG signal, and then added about 10dB more when I built my dual 4-100 amplifier.

The receiver has my Renwal "Visible V-8" kit on it.

This is down in the basement of "The House I Grew Up In" back in Joliet, Illinois, and is before my Dad's buddy, Master Carpenter Al Poole, built the beautiful L-Shaped desk/console for me along the back wall, and down the left side of the picture for about 6 feet. I can't pin down the exact year for this as I don't remember when the desk was built.

I don't remember which one of my Dad's buddies did the electrical work, but I had him install  a 220V/25A circuit and outlet for when I had my linear amplifier finished. I knew I couldn't get enough power from a 110VAC outlet to be able to run a 1000 Watt DC Input amplifier, so the 220 outlet was a must.

Here's a shot without yours truly in the picture, showing the 220 Volt outlet directly above the transmitter:

The "Visible V-8" was one of the hundreds (possibly more) of model kits I built over the years, along with the "Visible Man", and the Monogram P-51 Mustang that was molded with a clear skin, and has numerous changes over their silver-skinned version of the same model.

I used to drive my poor Dad nuts every time I built a Monogram WWII Navy plane, and asked him if "I got it right"!

Took me a while to understand that my Dad was a SeaBee, and while it technically qualified as being "In The Navy", he never served on a carrier, knew very little about Naval Aviation in WWII, and the only time he spent on ships was going between islands in the Pacific on his way to build the next airstrip, bridge, base, hospital, and all the other stuff the SeaBees did.

As far as the Visible V-8 was concerned, it was a pretty neat kit, with little bulbs for "Spark Plugs" and a "working" distributor to light them up at the right time.

I was always jealous of the Visible Chrysler "Slant Six" that my best buddy Joe had.

His model actually had real metal screws to hold the connecting rods together, and as I recall, piston rings you had to install on the pistons! How cool is that!

Christmas is Almost Here....Have You Been Naughty or Nice?

You'd better be nice, because Santa does NOT like naughty!





Shamelessly swiped from Lone Star Parson.

Merry Christmas everybody!

Rainy Wednesday on the Iowa

Been raining here again (.7" last night, with more to come), and it was a pretty soggy day yesterday on the Iowa.

I dropped off a new Ben-Q "Short Throw" projector that my wife and I donated after a plea for a donation at the Crew Dinner we went to, and then headed to the Comm Center for my typical Wednesday stint.

I'd noticed one of the projectors down in the museum area by the gift shop was off, but didn't know it was broken and "beyond economical repair", but that's taken care of now.

And I replaced the video card in the NI6BB station computer as the fan on it had failed, and the computer would shut don with a "video hardware fault" after being turned on for around 10 minutes. I put one of my "in stock" high-end video cards in it until I can get the fan replaced on the card that was in there. Since the $50 card that was in there was more than adequate for the programs we run, I'll pull my $300 card out after I put a new fan on the card that was in there.

During on of my forays out on the deck, I answered some questions from one of our visitors and his little boy. Turns out he was a Combat Photographer for the Army, and was in 'Nam from 1965 to 1967. He'd been from on end of 'Nam to the other, and told me he was currently working on a book about his experiences.

Unfortunately I didn't get his name, as I got too wrapped up listening to the stories he told me!

As always, it was a great day on the Iowa!