Rain and Other Stuff....

We've received over an inch of rain from this last storm system, bringing our season total to slightly over 8".

The NWS is calling for a 50% chance of more tonight, and then nothing until this time next week. Further North, the bay area's been really getting hammered, with more rain this month than our season-to-date total.

And there was another screwy "low speed" chase the other night. Some 30 year old known gang banger shot his sister-in-law, and then melted into the woodwork. The cops had a BOLO out on him, and he popped up in Reseda, up in "The Valley".

He took off with a squad in pursuit, and then proceeded to enter the 405 Southbound, where he slowed down to 5~30MPH for the next two hours, throwing stuff out of his car, and taunting the police the entire time. They finally got a couple of BIG SUV's after him, and did the -tap-and-spin maneuver to stop him, and then let the dogs loose.

I haven't heard anything else, but I think he'll be going bye-bye for a while.

And we got the antenna rotor "fixed" down at K6AA. It turns out it was a non-problem caused by letting the antenna sot at a fixed position for long periods of time.

There's a potentiometer inside the rotor motor unit up on the tower that's used to supply position feedback to the indicating meter in the control head. As the motor rotates, so does the pot, sending a variable voltage to the meter. It's a "wire-wound" pot with a brass "wiper", and when it sits too long in one position, a small amount of corrosion forms between the brass wiper and the NiChrome wire of the winding. Since the applied voltage is only about 6 Volts, it's not enough to "punch through" the corrosion, and the voltage never gets back down to the meter. All we had to do was run the rotor through its full range of travel a few times, the wiper cleaned the wire winding, and the "problem" went away.

We made a note in the station operating manual that to prevent this issue in the future, the rotor should be cycled through its full range weekly, but I'll bet this happens again within six months....

blech......Getting Over a Cold

Been a bit under the weather, so I've been taking it a bit easy.

We got clobbered with another .75" of rain last night. Started about 0300 and woke me up it was raining so hard. No flooding and no mudslide I've heard of, so all is well here.

Have a brunch appointment Tuesday morning at one of my favorite little places, The Think Cafe in San Pedro, and then on to the L.A. Maritime Museum to troubleshoot the antenna rotator....again!

From the descriptions given by the operators at K6AA, the rotator is malfunctioning. It might be a loose wire on the back of the control unit, or the direction indicating potentiometer up in the rotor head may have gone TU. Since none of us are "certified" to climb the tower, and lack the now required insurance, if it is the rotor head, that'll mean hiring the guy we use to come out and swap the rotor head out with one we'll have to order if our troubleshooting leads to that problem.

Here's hoping it's just a loose connection on the back, as between ordering up a rebuilt rotor and paying the guy to swap it out, that's about $600 the club would rather not spend!

Stuff That "Our Side" Knows and Understands

You've probably seen this before, but it's always nice to see it again.

Graphic courtesy of Matt Bracken and the good folks at WRSA.

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!