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Posts Tagged → Walmart

January 13th, 2008

Fairly Productive Weekend

In my last post, I told how I was going to work on the antenna to get the ice storm damage repaired.  Larry Cline came over yesterday and we took that antenna down, repaired, and installed it back on the tower better than it was before.  I turned on the ham radio and made a call and immediately got an answer from a QRP’er running 8 watts on 40 meters from South Carolina.  Then I was called by non other than Bob Heil of Heil Microphones from East of St. Louis.  I spoke with a guy North West of Seattle on 17 meters, then someone North of San Francisco, and then Cuba.  I would say the antenna is working well.

This morning we woke up energized and put the remaining pile of tree limbs in the truck and then raked up the last of the mess and sent them to the dump.  Now our yard is clean and free of any tree limbs, twigs, or leaves in the front yard and back.  What a wonderful feeling to have that nightmare behind us.  I am so glad to be done with that ice storm and have everything repaired and back in order as though it had never happened.  This afternoon I am going to start up the generator and run all the gas out of it because it is not good to let old fuel sit in the tank for an extended period of time.  I think I’ll do some filing this afternoon to get some organization done.

My wife’s expensive video card died on her computer so I had to take it out.  That really disappoints me since it is only a month old.  She went to Altus Friday to see her sister and she came home last night.  She seems to have had a good time.  She was up bright and early this morning doing laundry before I woke up.  It is really good to have things back to normal.  I am healthy and trying to not take off any days from work so I can make up the lost time last year.  I certainly do not want a repeat of that.  Well that is about all for today.  I am off to Walmart to buy a garden hose reel.

Technorati Tags: Walmart,Heil,Heil Sound,ham radio,ice storm,KD5MAF,Larry Cline,K9EID

By Paul • Posted in Amateur Radio, Personal • Comments
November 17th, 2007

Death of Email? No Way!

I have seen several articles around the net the last couple of days such as Slate, Thomas Hawk, Peter Haus, John Murrell, and Eric Gonzolez posting about the end of email.  These articles either agree or disagree with the fact that children are abandoning email for social networking sites.  Many make the argument and even advocate that email will and should fade away because of spam being out of control.  They argue that because most email people get are spam and just take too long to go through.  The position that many kids today do not even check their email being evidence of email’s demise may be compelling but I think it misses the point that kids do eventually grow up.

I have to agree that my own kids never check their email.  They would prefer to send messages back and forth via MySpace.  I often choose to use Facebook myself over email.  Despite this truth, I understand that as an early adopter I like to jump to the newest toy of the day.  I just love it when new ways to communicate are invented.  I have a MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Twitter, Vox, Wordpress, and a whole host of other accounts.  I am always jumping to the newest toy.  I think most people in the United States are like this.  That is why Wal-Mart continuously builds bigger stores.  Here in Oklahoma City, we have had Wal-Mart for years.  Nevertheless, Wal-Mart continuously closes their stores and builds newer, and bigger stores.

I work on an Air Force Base and have to deal with the fact that I cannot access any social networking sites, or webmail accounts.  At work I am unable to access Zooomr, or Flickr or any other photo sharing sites.  I am unable to access any instant messenger sites either.  The bottom line being that the only way you can access the outside world is to use the base email.  For security reasons most people can understand this control.

Secondly my kids will not use instant messaging either, opting to send messages via MySpace.  At some point they are going to need to send files to each other.  If they do not use an instant messaging program, they will most likely choose email  I do believe that email will continue to be a necessity.  While the above articles make some valid points that are compelling, I do think the predictions of emails failure are missing the point that many corporations, government agencies will not allow their trade secrets to be traded over a third party social networking site.  With this in mind I will have to respectfully disagree.  Email is likely to be around for a long time.

Technorati Tags: email , social networking , myspace , facebook , xanga , twitter , flickr , zooomr , walmart , wordpress , vox , Thomas Hawk , Peter Haus , John Murrell , Eric Gonzolez

By Paul • Posted in Internet, Technology • Comments
July 7th, 2007

Not keeping to schedules

I had high hopes for this week.  I was off for July 4th and I took of the 5th and 6th using vacation time.  I had planned on working on my school work and getting ahead so I would not be behind like I was in the last unit.  Well that did not pan out as I had hoped.  I spent all day Thursday and Friday setting up a ham radio repeater to get the WIN System working on it.  Larry, KD5MAF, a cousin by marriage came over on the fourth of July for dinner and we talked about getting our repeater back on the air after two months of down time.  We were blocked from the WIN System for pulsing a couple of months ago and we just shut it off because the problem was intermittent.

Well on the fourth of July, we thought about connecting the IRLP node directly to the repeater the way the IRLP website says to do it.  In the past we had it connected to a link radio that transmitted the signal to the repeater.  So at 9:00 PM on the fourh, the the only place that was open was Wal Mart.  We drove up there and bought 100 feet of six conductor telephone wire.  On the fifth of July I went to Radio Shack as soon as they opened and bought an RS-232 (DB-9) connector, two 1/8″ stereo audio plugs, and a package of RCA jacks.  Larry came over to my house and we went to work on the repeater.  Larry assembled the wiring harness that went from the IRLP node to the repeater.  It had to be pretty long because the IRLP computer stays in the house where it is cool.  After working on it for 13 hours I just gave up.

It was working well except when we hooked the sound card output to the repeater, the local audio including courtesy tones and CW ID’er would be very low.  Both Larry and I were very disheartened by the whole thing.  I called my dad and told him the symptoms but he was too tired to understand what I was talking about.  Well yesterday the sixth, I got  a call from my dad and  he told me that he had been thinking about the problem.  He said it sounded like the low 8 ohm impedance of the sound card was draining the audio of the repeater.  He told me to try installing an isolation capacitor to block any DC from passing through.  I went back up to Radio Shack and bought several different sizes of disc capacitors and the first one I tried worked.  I installed a .01 uF capacitor in-line with the sound card output to the repeater.  It worked immediately.

Then Larry and I spent a couple hours trying to set the audio levels correctly and was plagued with the IRLP node audio being too high even when the mixer was set to only 1 on the meter.  After replacing the sound card a few times, I went back to the repeater and found the volume was set too high.  Suddenly the system was sounding great.  Man what a job but it is sounding good.  I went to bed on the fifth thinking we had just wasted a whole day and then one day later, it is working.  On our club website I updated the links on the left so that we can have streaming audio for the WIN System as well as our two meter repeater.  I just stole a link from the WIN System website and put it on ours for convenience since they already had the streaming going.  Our two meter repeater we have been streaming for a number of months already.

Well I am very satisfied with how it all turned out.  It has never sounded better and I am already getting positive feedback.  I would like to give my thanks to Larry, KD5MAF, my dad Paul Sr., W5QO, and my lovely wife Sunday, KE5APB.  She took care of us when we were racking our brains.  She kept us with drinks and food.  I can honestly say that I have the best wife in the whole world.  I love you Sunday. Well, this leaves me behind on my school work again.  I will just have to buckle down and get that caught up this week.  I need to keep priorities straight but it is also satisfying when other things in life are working.  Thanks for listening to my update.

Technorati Tags: IRLP, Internet Radio Linking Project, repeater, ham radio, amateur radio, ham, radio, Radio Shack, Walmart, KD5MAF, W5QO, K5GLH, KE5APB, Del City Amateur Radio Club

By Paul • Posted in Amateur Radio, Oklahoma City, Technology • Comments
June 24th, 2007

June 23, 2007

We just got home from seeing the movie Evan Almighty this evening. It was pretty good but also pretty crowded. We went to the Harkins Theater in Bricktown downtown Oklahoma City. It rained this evening for a little bit and I really enoyed the cooler evening. It was in the low 90’s but very muggy before the storm moved in bringing the temperature to the low 70’s. That was very nice for late June. We were suppose to go to my boss’ house for a party today but she canceled due to the muddy lawn from the recent rain.

My son has been pretty bummed lately because he likes to skateboard and the city makes it illegal to skate anywhere. I thought about looking up the regulation and seeing about trying to get a petition going or something to get that law repealed. I do think it is not right that our city council has put the teenagers into a position where they are outlaws for simply riding their skateboard. It is really a tragedy. I will post more later.

Well the kids got their cell phones yesterday along with unlimited text/picture/video messaging. They seem to love them and so does Sunday and I. It is nice to be able to get in touch with them while they are out with their friends. They keep sending message back and forth all night. Now that we have unlimited messaging with video and pictures, I need to get a new phone that has camera on it. That will be handy for all the storm chasing.

Man, I still have tons of school work to do and am having a tough time getting motivated since I have a couple of very boring topics to cover. Neither of them are interesting enough to keep you from dosing off. We just got back from Chili’s and Wal-Mart a few minutes ago. We got a new ice cream machine. Tonight we can make some home made ice cream. That should be exciting.

Technorati Tags: Evan Almighty, Harkins, Harkins Theaters, Bricktown, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, skateboard, skateboarding, Chilis, Walmart, OU, T-Mobile, cell phones

By Paul • Posted in Oklahoma City, cell phones, education, movies • Comments