Batten Down the Hatches!

Got some heavy weather coming in Tuesday night, with rain and snow, turning to all snow Wednesday morning.

New accumulation predicted to be between 4" and 8", and the NWS is getting ready to release a "Blizzard Warning" for the Eastern Plains of Colorado.

 I would suspect Nebraska and Kansas will get clobbered, too.

 As long as it's not wet snow, I should be able to use the ^^&%^#% snowblower to clear it off now that I've have it fairly well adjusted and know where to soak it with silicone spray so it won't clog. Still hate the damn thing, though.....

So anyway....I'm making a run to DIA tomorrow, as the wife is headed back to SoCal for her oldest son's birthday, a visit to the Iowa to see the new "Lost at Sea" exhibit, and to see her friends again and have a Girls Night Out.

While she's gone I'm knocking a few Honey Dews off the list, like a new faucet/sprayer  assembly for the kitchen sink, a new little "Bar Sink" to replace the one that has a water leak that caused the porcelain to be stained and damaged, and replacing the wall mounting hardware for some of the towel racks and TP dispensers that are (still!) loose on the walls.

Brought in some more firewood, and the dog and I are planning on watching some movies while my sweetie is out of town. The fridge, freezer, and pantry are well-stocked with 'cold weather' food like soups and stews, and I'm planning on trying Larkburger after the snow moves through.

Keep warm and dry, my friends!

TGIF!

Well...not so much since I retired, but still, the weekend is here and The Little Guy will be coming by for the night.

I've been spending more time listening to my little Elecraft K2 connected to the BuddiStick in the back yard. The new power supply works transparently, and I bought a new external speaker to use with the radio.

It's a Palstar SP30B, and it sounds much better than the little Radio Shack/RCA #40-5008 speaker I was using. The RCA speaker is allegedly "HiFi", which means it tries to reproduce the higher frequencies (>10kHz) required for music, while the Palstar cuts off at around 8kHz, greatly reducing the amount of hiss and annoying high-frequency noise, which isn't needed for SSB voice communications.

The black cabinet with a dark grey front panel also matches the paint on the Elecraft quite well.

So while the speaker works very well, the radio bands aren't cooperating very much! The 20 Meter band (14~14.35MHz) folds up and goes 'flat' around local sunset, forcing me to drop down to 40 Meters (7~7.3MHz) or even 75 Meters (3.5~4.0MHz) to find anybody to listen to. I haven't heard much DX on 20 Meters, but 40 Meters has had a number of readable stations from Europe and VK/ZL (Australia and New Zealand). In the Olden Days, 10 Meters (28~30MHz) was commonly used for local chat, but then 2 Meter (144~148MHz) FM repeaters became wildly popular, and many of the local nets and round-table discussions moved there. So, I set the K2 to 28.300MHz (start of the SSB portion of the band) and tuned around a bunch over multiple weeks, and heard zip. Nada. Nil on 10 Meters here. Oh, well.....

And on the VHF/UHF scene, I picked up another Discone antenna to replace the one I trashed in Long Beach, and now I'm figuring out the best place and way to mount it. I have an RG-6QS cable running into the basement workshop from the outside, an "Abandoned In Place" cable feed, so I have a weather sealed penetration through the foundation. That would make siting the antenna on the North side of the house very advantageous, and there's a grounding block at that point, so it's a simple matter to connect some new coax there, and run it up to the new antenna.

I've got the OK to install a wall-mount bracket for it, like I had in Long Beach, but that house had stucco walls, and this house has wood-composite siding. I'll have to make up some 'cheat blocks', like a reversed wedge, to attach to the siding so I have a flat surface to work with.

And even though this is a light weight, low wind-load antenna, I have some questions regarding how to "nail this sucker to the wall", so I'll have to talk with our "General Contractor", the DIL's Dad. In Long Beach, I used expanding anchors driven into drilled holes in the stucco, and both of them held up very well, including the one that had both the weather station and a Comet GP-1 VHF/UHF vertical antenna.

But Long Beach doesn't get sustained 45~50MPH winds with gusts to 65, so I'm a bit hesitant to just lag bolt it into the siding. I'll definitely need some kind of 'backer board' up against the siding to give me the flat surface and spread the load out. With a couple of sections of the high-strength mast I have, this would put the new discone about 5' above the gutters, and in the clear.

So, The Little Guy is here, and I built a nice fire for he and Grandma to sit by and read "Oh, The Places You'll Go!" by Dr. Seuss. He's not sure if he likes the snapping and popping of the fireplace, but he sure likes to stare into the flames.

Woke Up to 5" of Snow, B-Day Party a Smash, 3"~5" More Snow On The Way

Nice, dry, fluffy stuff, too! And I'm either getting used to using the ^&%$$%#!!! snowblower, or it's "working" better. Took my can Of PB Blaster! silicone lube, and SOAKED all the areas that get hit with snow, and trundled it out this afternoon. Did our sidewalk, and continued on doing the sidewalks for our neighbors on either side. Cleared half the driveway, and then got the shovel out to do the steps leading in to the house. Spent over an hour doing what I used to be able to do in 30 minutes, but "That's Life".

I tossed out some ice melt on all the foot paths to keep the still-falling snow from building up.

And then the MC put on his hat, and said "Let's get this party started!".

First order of business is the tearing of paper.....

A little golf set from Uncle Drew!

WoW! A Tee Ball set!

And my first two-wheeler!

And a slide for the big backyard our new house has!

The Little Guy got quite the haul! This was about half the stuff he got, the rest being clothes and books. He LOVES books, and we're doing our best to foster and nurture that interest. He loves to look through books, and if they have pictures in them.....WoW! He looked at my library in the basement the other day, realized Those Are All BOOKS!, and gave me a really strange look.

And as the presents were opened, the cousins awaited....

The Three Amigos.....

And topping it off? Cake and Ice Cream! What's a birthday party without cake and ice cream, eh?

And it was good, as evidenced by the thumbs up.

Hey, Bar Tender! Give that cute girl over there a round on me!

So we had a wonderful 2nd Birthday Party for The Little Guy. To think that two years ago when he was born 10 weeks early, he only weighed 2-1/2 pounds, and his Daddy could hold him in one hand, and to see him today made our entire family stop and give thanks. Watching him grow up is fascinating, and the older he gets, the more we interact, and the more fun we have. He was a bit upset that the basement door was closed, because he wanted to go down to the workshop. So, all the men folk trooped downstairs and watched him explore the workshop, turning knobs on the radios, going through my box of coax connectors (bright, shiny things!), and doing typical little boy stuff. We look at our grandchildren so differently than how we looked at our own children. I suppose it should be obvious to us, but I still marvel at how different it is.

So we had all the relatives over today, and made some plans for the upcoming warmer weather. We're planning a "St. Paddy's Day Shootout" up at the ranch outside of Wellington, where #1 son got his backstop scooped and arranged last Fall. This is the backstop for his "100 yd" range, and he'll be building a longer one this summer. The "Long Range" is planned for at least 300 yds for now, but he has room to do 1000 yds safely. He's also been dragging tons (literally) of new and used 4" and 6" "Drill Pipe" to the dump as a "Clean It Out" contractor, and is going to find a new section for me, cut it to 12', and square the ends. Then we're going to make a flange that fits the base for my Shakespeare AT-2011 vertical, and weld it on. After the weather warms up we're going to sink 4' of the pipe in the back yard, back fill it with concrete, and I'll finally have a proper support structure to get my "Big Stick" vertical back on-the-air. Now I'm back to sourcing a suitable outdoor-rated "NEMA" box for my SGC 230 autocoupler.

And the weather service is predicting another 3"~5" of snow tonight, a retraction from the 5"~7" forecast earlier today, with a low of -4* Sunday night. The snowblower is back in the garage melting and draining, and the batteries are back on charge. I ran it for over 30 minutes today, and the little electronic "Gas Gauge" on each pack showed greater than 80%, so it appears that battery life is "As Advertised".

2330 here, very light snow, and I'm hitting the rack. Herding a bunch of 2 year olds around takes a bit out of you!

2330 Here Where It's 30* and Snowing

Not very hard, though. It started around 2100 and has tapered off (for now!) to just a few flakes, leaving about 1" of accumulation. My "Snow Gauge" is a 12" stainless steel scale attached to the glass top of the patio table. Not super precise, but better than no gauge at all.

The forecast says "Up to 3"" overnight, with more coming in all day Saturday with the possibility of another 3".

And Saturday night is expected to bring an additional 2" to 4".

March is historically the 'snowiest' month here, with an historical average of 12".

The Little Guy finally crashed out around 2115. He knows something's up, but he's not sure what. All the adults were playing with funny hats tonight, and he loved it.

Since his birthday is the same day as Dr. Suess, guess what theme the party has......



If you guessed:

YOU WIN!


I'm sure a splendid time will be had by all......

Not Much Happening Here.....

Which is a good thing!

Borrowed this from Rev Paul:

This is also a pretty good approximation of a Chicago winter, so I chuckled pretty heartily when I saw it.

State-wide totals for the snowpack this year are around 120% of "Normal", so it should ease the drought some. Just hope we don't have any bad flooding this spring.....

The Little Guy's #2 birthday is this weekend, and we'll be hosting the party, which means kids everywhere. We've been cleaning the house the last few days, and I made some changes to the little radio station and workspace I have set up in the sunroom. I pulled out my BIG, HEAVY Astron VS-35 linear power supply:

 And replaced it with a much smaller, lighter Alinco DM-330MV switching power supply.

While I didn't used to be a proponent of switching power supplies for this service back in Ye Dayse of Olde, ones designed for this service have gotten quite good. I also added some ferrite cores on the DC leads coming out"just because". Since I originally bought this supply to use with the Elecraft K2 that I have set up, I figured it's about time I made it earn it's keep. Besides, it's easier to move a 5 lb power supply around than it is a 30 lb power supply.
Oh, and I installed "Baby Smash" on the wife's PC, and gave The Little Guy his own log-in and keyboard.

Thanks to zuk for the tip on Baby Smash. It looks like it'll keep him entertained, and the wife has already agreed giving him his own account was a Good Thing!

Peter Tork of "The Monkees" Passes

RIP, Mr. Tork. 

And I have all the albums.

GROAN.....Down The Windoze Rabbit Hole.....

Arrrrrgh.......spent the last couple of days working on the wife's PC and all that entails.

It all started out when.......

She came to me the other night and said her PC no longer recognized her password and she couldn't log in to the machine. No problem, I'll just get my software tools out and reset her password to blank characters. Since she'd been allowing the grandson to pound away on the keys while logged in to her account, I figured maybe The Little Guy had randomly slapped some combination of control-alt-Windows key-delete or something and hosed her account.

Yeah.......right.

First, I couldn't locate my discs. I used to keep a ton of stuff in my laptop bag so I could  fix/repair/read out/etc the various systems I used to work on. I had several special discs with various software tools on them, a portable USB CD/DVD burner, a USB floppy drive, cables, adapters, and other "misc junque". After I hung up my spurs, I unloaded that 10 pounds of stuff, which lightened the bag, and slimmed it down, too.

BUT......where'd I put the damn discs?

After spending an hour or so, I gave up and went online to find the tools again. Spent several hours doing that, and trying out "Trial Demo" programs that wouldn't do what I needed, I broke down and paid the $20 for the "Full Version".

I reset her password, rebooted the machine, and called her over to enter a new (or the old one) password, and when she tried it kicked back an error message about "Could Not Load The User Profile". She turned and said "See? It still doesn't recognize my password!".

Oh, boy..........that's a COMPLETELY different error message than "Password Incorrect. Try Again".

So having wasted (not "spent", but wasted) several hours, I had to research what the real error message meant, and fix that problem.

Hours later, after having implemented every single "answer" that Micro$oft had to fix this problem and getting nowhere, I decided to replace the hard drive with a new one, reinstall/update everything, and then go about collecting her data off the 'old' drive.

And as long as I'm at it, I'll replace the DVD drive that won't eject.

And upgrade the memory from 4GB to 8GB, the maximum this motherboard (Gigabyte GA-P35-DS4) can handle.

Wound up replacing both DVD drives with two NOS ASUS drives I had, and replaced the 300GB hard disc with a 2TB drive I had as a spare from some time back.

The DVD drives I had in there were IDE, with the big, flat ribbon cable, and the ASUS drives are SATA, with one small cable, and power. That meant I had to swap out the data cables and power cables to swap out the drives. So, another trip down to the basement to dig out the right cables, and BTW...where's my big tub of PC memory?

Finally got the cables and memory modules after 45 minutes of rooting around (it would have been several hours, but I've been sorting and binning stuff for the last several months), went back upstairs, and finished the hardware upgrade.

PC booted up just fine, and I started the Installation-Go-Round, with Windows 7 Professional, Office 2008, and all the drivers and stuff for the motherboard.

And then I started the Windoze Update go-round.

And round...

And round.

It's just finishing up the latest round of updates, 184 in all, and I'm sure once it's been rebooted it'll still want more.

And then I can reconnect the old drive and start moving files. If I can't get them using Windoze, I'll pull the drive and connect it to one of my Linux machines, and move them over the network.

And The Little Guy will no longer be allowed to pound on the keys while the computer is on.........

Speakers and Things.....

Got the speaker cabinets all glued together, foamed inside, and "finish sanded" to the point where I can now apply the first coat of the Dura Tex product.

Sanding the MDF they're made from is pretty easy with my $15 Horror Freight orbital sander and a 1/4 sheet of 100 grit paper. It evened out all the corners and edges quite nicely.

There's a few small gaps where the glue didn't completely come out to the exterior surfaces, but the first coat of the Dura Tex should act as a gap-filler. I know they're sealed up pretty tight, as I made sure there was enough glue to completely cover the mating surfaces, and I could see a good bead of glue coming through on the inside. I wiped the inside corners with a damp paper towel, making a nice fillet between the parts.

And we've been cleaning up and straightening out the house for The Little Guy's upcoming 2nd birthday party in about two weeks. *I* may think the house is clean and ship-shape, but wives have other ideas of what "clean" is!

Other than that, not much going on. Been cold and "wintry" the last few days, and we got about 1" of snow last night. Single-digit temps at night until the end of the week, and light snow expected.

Sleep Well, Little Rover, Your Mission Has Ended

Well, with some sadness today, NASA announced that the Opportunity rover has not responded to numerous wake-up calls since August last year, and the mission has officially been ended.

The "Little Rover That Could" lasted far beyond it's "90 Day Warranty", and wound up being in service for 5,352 "Sols", or Earth-days of operation.

And she covered a tad over 28 miles from the landing site to her final position.

In June of 2018 she got covered with dust from a Mars-wide dust storm, and the output of the solar panels dropped, and dropped, and dropped until NASA decided it was best to put her in "Hibernation Mode".

Since she'd survived dust storms before, there was hope that after the dust subsided, that the normal Martian winds would blow the panels clean, and she'd wake up on command.

Alas, Opportunity has not responded to wake-up commands, so today NASA pulled the plug.

I haven't heard if they'll occasionally swing a dish that way and call "Hello? Anybody Home?", or if they'll just write her off.

Anyway you look at it, they got a pretty big bang-for-the-buck with this little explorer!

The Marine and the Sailor.....

From a good buddy.....

                                   The Marine and the Sailor

An old Sailor and an old Marine were sitting at the VFW arguing about who'd had the tougher career. 

"I did 30 years in the Corps," the Marine declared proudly, "and fought in three of my country's wars. Fresh out of boot camp, I hit the beach at Tarawa, then at Iwo Jima where clawed my way up the blood-soaked sand, and eventually took out an entire enemy machine gun nest with a single grenade. As a sergeant, I fought in Korea and walked back from the Chosen Reservoir. We pushed back the enemy inch by bloody inch, always under a barrage of artillery and small arms fire. Finally, as a Gunny Sergeant, I did three consecutive combat tours in Vietnam. We humped through the mud and razor grass for 14 hours a day, plagued by rain and mosquitoes, ducking under sniper fire all day, and mortar fire all night. In a firefight, we'd fire until our arms ached and our guns were empty, then we'd charge the enemy with bayonets!" 

"Ah," said the Sailor with a dismissive wave of his hand, "Lucky bastard; all shore duty."

Snowblower Stiil A Worthless P.O.S.

It's going on Craigslist or NextDoor.com TONIGHT.....

The scraper blade is set a little above the minimum, and it still hits things.

It's better, but still not very usable.

And then the wife wants to know "Why didn't it cut the snow shorter?"........Because with an 1/8" gap, it leaves an 1/8" layer of snow!

DUH.....


On a "Bang-For-The-Buck" basis, this thing is absolutely the worst purchase I've ever made.