We started shortly after the contest started on Saturday afternoon and worked for a couple of hours. We took a long break for dinner and to spend some time with the family, then we worked another couple of hours before bedtime. We had a plumbing issue in the kitchen Sunday morning that I had to take care of, so we didn’t get a chance for more radio time until the evening. We worked another 2 hours up until the contest close at 20:00 local time. Total time worked was 20 minutes shy of 6 hours.

Together we made a total of 40 contacts in 25 sections for a grand total of 2000 points. We worked for about an hour on 20 meters, but the majority of the time was spent on 40 meters. We never did find a section of bandwidth wide enough without QRM to call CQ ourselves, so all of our contacts were made via search and pounce.

Gillian worked the mic about half the time, and got several comments from other operators on how well she was doing. A couple of times her “YL” voice as it is called worked to our advantage, her voice jumped out of the pileup. On the same token there were a couple of times where I had to jump on and clarify the exchange as the receiving operator had a hard time hearing her high voice. To start with I helped guide her through the exchange, but by the end she was able to handle the entire exchange herself.

We had a good time sharing our hobby with each other, she learned a lot about contest operating, and got to make quite a few contacts, even though it was using my call with me acting as control operator. It is something we both will never forget, and she is even more excited now about studying for her General upgrade.

Even worse are companies that have a website to sell a product, list all the features, maybe a snazzy demo, then have absolutely no pricing information available. This leaves me scratching my head every time. When a company refuses to list prices for their product, it tells me a couple of things right off the bat. First it tells me that they are so over-priced that they are embarrassed to show their price unless they have a salesman on the phone to sugar coat it. Second, it tells me that they don’t have enough confidence in their product to let it stand on its own merits alongside their asking price.

My advice to any online company wanting to sell your product on the Internet is to always list your price. If you give lots of discounts, just list your base product and include a note explaining that the “price is often discounted, call to see if you may qualify.” Doing this allows potential customers to quickly determine if your price is even an option within their budget and allows them to compare your product with a competitor. It shows you respect the intelligence of your customers. If you’re afraid of that, then maybe it’s time to re-evaluate your price structure anyway.

When I opened up the front cover of the book, I saw something I realized I hadn’t seen in quite a long time, the due-date log.

The little flap of paper glued into the front of all library books, upon which the librarian would stamp or sometimes write in the due date when the book was loaned.  It brought back memories of being the first or second person to check out a book when I was a kid and being excited that I was able to get and read it so quickly.  Or just as memorable as being the last due-date on a page of the due dates, with sometimes 2 or 3 completely filled sheets underneath, and realizing how much joy this book has brought to dozens of people since the library started loaning it.  It could also tell you something about the previous borrowers, such as how well they cared for the book.  If I was the 3rd or 4th person to check it out and it was already damaged, I could tell at least one of those people had little respect for books, and likewise if the book was still in decent shape after a dozen or more uses, the previous readers were very respectful of the library and its books.

Technology in libraries has improved a lot.  It is wonderful being able to log into the library’s catalog with the click of the mouse at home or work if I want to find a particular book.  I can reserve it without driving in, even if it is at another library in the area rather than my own.  This is both convenient for me, and friendlier to the environment as I don’t waste gas to find out it isn’t there.  I get an e-mail from the library when any requested books are available too, and it doesn’t take more of the librarian’s valuable time to manually send a letter or call to inform me.  Inside the library it is faster to find something since the card catalogs have been replaced with computers, and you can search on far more terms than just title or author.

While overall I think the library experience has been vastly improved by the introduction of electronic recordkeeping, I’ll still hold a special place in my memory for the beloved due date reminder stamp.  This is one aspect of the library I am truly sorry my children will never know.

That said, I have found a huge oversight on Microsoft’s part, supporting old printers.  I have an older HP Laserjet 4L in my garage attached to my Linux server.  It is shared to the network using CUPS.  In Windows XP they had drivers included for that printer, so I just set up a new printer, pointed it at the right network address, and selected the driver and was up and running.  Piece of cake!  Not so with Windows 7.

I tried to set up the printer on Windows 7 and I noticed the list of available printers is very small, and my printer was nowhere to be found.  No big deal I thought, I’ll go find the Generic Post Script driver and use that, since CUPS and my printer work just fine that way.  Again, nowhere to be found.  Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?  From what I read it appears Vista suffers from the same shortcoming.  I can understand they need to let go of legacy hardware at some point.  Interfaces change, and the wider range of hardware that needs to be supported just holds back advancement and introduces more opportunities for bugs to show up.

The problem here is I don’t even need to directly interface to the printer.  All I need is a postscript file generated and sent across the wire, where the print server will take care of the rest of it.  There is no reason for the generic post script driver to not be included with the OS since it is non-hardware-specific.  I’m communicating using Internet Printing Protocol, which Windows 7 knows how to do.  I don’t need any fancy proprietary USB driver that should never have been supported in the first place.

With the big effort being made by people across the world to be “green” this is clearly a step in the wrong direction.  If I was most any consumer I’d throw the perfectly good printer in the trash and go buy a new one.  Besides the environmental impact, Microsoft is expecting me to not only shell out $300 for the SuperDuperUltimate edition of the OS, they’re now expecting me to spend another $200-300 for a new “compatible” printer.  Upwards of $500 and another hunk of landfill space being taken up is the wrong answer!

What I did was a simple and (I think) elegant solution.  It does involve a couple of extra steps now, but I think the advantages far outweigh the drawbacks, and actually gives me some benefit over direct printing.

1. I created a directory on my Linux box acting as the CUPS server and shared it using SMB.
2. On my Windows 7 machine I connected a drive letter to it.
3. I installed the basic free edition of the CutePDF print driver, so now when I hit print it gets saved as a PDF document rather than being sent to an actual printer
4. When I want to print something, I “print” it using whatever program I normally use, then drop the generated file on the mapped drive.
5. cron runs a script (listed at bottom of post) runs every 5 minutes checking for the presence of PDF documents.  If they exist it sends them to the printer and moves them to a “printed” directory.

To me the extra step of saving the file and moving it to the print queue is a good thing.  If I want to print a page for my records, it gives me the opportunity to just keep it electronically while having the exact paper copy later if I need it.  I’ve also gone to print webpages and have it be completely screwed up when it comes out, even though the “print preview” looked good.  This way I have the opportunity to see exactly what is going to come out of the printer before it is ever on the queue.

The biggest disadvantage of this setup is it won’t work with any printing services that require direct contact with the printer, such as printing postage from the USPS website or some of those online coupon printing programs.  Luckily for those I can still use my wife’s PC.  As I said, these small disadvantages are trivial to me considering I don’t print very much, but when I need to print I can.

Hopefully this will help someone else out who wants to move to a newer Microsoft OS but doesn’t want to throw out some perfectly good hardware in the process.  It took me probably a half hour total of setup time (the print sharing and samba sharing was already set up) to get everything figured out and the script debugged.  You’ll need to extend your time if you need to install additional components that I already had setup.

Here is the bash script I use, triggered by cron every 5 minutes during normal PC usage times:

#!/bin/bash
cd ~/PrintQueue/

# Space removing portion of script lifted from #http://www.linuxconfig.org/Bash_scripting_Tutorial

DIR=”.”
# Controlling a loop with bash read command by redirecting #STDOUT as
# a STDIN to while loop
# find will not truncate filenames containing spaces

find $DIR -type f | while read file; do

# using POSIX class [:space:] to find space in the filename

if [[ "$file" = *[[:space:]]* ]]; then

# substitute space with “_” character and consequently rename #the file
mv “$file” `echo $file | tr ‘ ‘ ‘_’`
fi;

# end of while loop
done

#sleep 5

for f in $( ls ~/PrintQueue/*.pdf ); do
echo “$f”;
lpr “$f”
mv “$f” ~/PrintQueue/Printed/
done

While it was not planned, most of the completed circuits did not work the first time around.  This presented a perfect opportunity for some impromptu troubleshooting practice.  A couple of days after the workshop I breadboarded the circuit at home and made a couple of observations.  If the voltage is applied in the correct polarity, the LED must be installed in the correct polarity for it to work.  If the voltage is applied in reverse polarity, the LED will be very dim when installed correctly, and normal brightness when it is installed in reverse.  I also discovered the small green LEDs handed out for the practice circuit seem to be fairly dim in comparison to the other LEDs available.  I was also able to run 15 LEDs off of a single AA battery if I didn’t use those smaller LEDs, but only a few if I did.  I was going to try more but it was way past my bedtime and my desire for a horizontal position overrode my desire to push the circuit any further.  I want to work with Gillian to use a multimeter to determine the output voltage of the circuit, and show her how the current increases as more LEDs are added to the circuit.  I’m also curious to look up the specs of the transistor and see how many LEDs it should be able to safely drive before exceeding its safe operating current, is 15 pushing it?

Gillian’s lamp she made currently only has 5 LEDs installed, but if we replace those smaller green LEDs out with the larger green, and some more orange/red LEDs, we should be able to run at least 10 LEDs since her battery compartment holds 3 AA batteries in parallel.  We did notice the transistor tends to warm up a bit even with the 5 current LEDs, so we may be limited more by the tolerance of the transistor rather than the capacity of the power supply.

All in all we had a great time and Gillian learned quite a bit.  While she hasn’t grasped the full concept of electronics work yet, she does now know how to do basic soldering, and understands that different parts do different things, and that combining those individual components makes larger components.  We’re currently working on a basic walker robot built out of cardboard, so she’s learning how the electronic world (Arduino) can interact with the physical world.

Just a quick rundown of what I’ve been up to in my “spare” time, is the weekend before last I attended Boise Code Camp. I didn’t have time to fully prepare my presentation, so I just attended this year rather than presenting a half-finished talk. I attended several sessions on robotics and physical computing, and they all pointed in one form or another to the Arduino microprocessor development platform. It is a very cheap but powerful method to of getting started playing with digital circuitry and interfacing a PC to the physical world. I went ahead and ordered one myself, so expect some projects to start appearing here soon.

Work was spent getting all of my loose ends tied up in preparation of being gone this week. Thank you to everybody who has allowed me to concentrate on my family right now rather than worrying about what is going on at work.

I’ve watched a couple things on the TV after getting home in the evenings from the hospital. I’ve needed something to do while doing nothing, and a good movie is a good way to do it. Mythbusters is back on, as is South Park, and I watched the movie Walking Tall.

Anyway, that is just a quick update on what is going on in my world. Makayla has been cleared to go home today, so as soon as the doctors get done with all the discharge mumbo jumbo we’ll be headed that way.

Max 10 hours per week of TV – Made it. Even though I was sick and watched quite a bit of extra TV, it was all non-trackable according to my goal.

• Knight Rider (0 hr) -Forgot to set this to record on the new satellite receiver.
• Battlestar Galactica (1 hr) – Caught up on a few episodes, still have a way to go.
• Biggest Loser (2 hrs) – One of the Idaho girls got sent home, I was hoping they’d stick around longer.
• Dirty Jobs (0 hr) – Didn’t air last week.
• Grey’s Anatomy (0 hr) – Didn’t air last week.
• ER (1 hr) – Watched a few episodes to try to get caught up.
• 24 (1 hr) – Watched the rest of the 2-hour episode we started last week, then one more. We’re missing an episode so I’ll have to see if I can get it on Fox’s website.
• Solitary 3.0 (1 hrs) – #7 was the winner much to my surprise, I thought #4 would take it.
• Non-tracked viewing: A bunch of educational shows, and a few movies Hi-Def is simply amazing on nature related shows…

At least 2 books per month -February’s goal met, now working on March.

• New Moon by Stephenie Meyer – Finished!
• Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer – Finished! Took less than a week!
• Breaking Dawn by Stephenie Meyer – About 1/4 of the way in already.

Minimum 3 blog postings per week – I wrote 2 entries but haven’t published them yet. I did just finish up and publish a page I had written over the last week though.

100 lbs (2 lbs/week) – These last couple of weeks have been so busy and so stressful I haven’t been paying as close attention as I should to my diet. I also missed going to the gym most of last week, and have not been getting up early enough to go this week. I’ve been getting to bed slightly later than I intend (the dangers of reading a good book!) which has made me pretty tired in the mornings.

Budget – I’m happy with where we’re at this week.

Max 10 hours per week of TV – Made it.

• Knight Rider (1 hr) – I’m liking how they’re changing the show, I think there are many more places they can take the show now.
• Battlestar Galactica (1 hr) – Falling further behind in watching.
• Biggest Loser (2 hrs) – I can’t believe the records some of the contestents are breaking.  Only 9 weeks into the season and several of them have already hit some major milestones.
• Dirty Jobs (1 hr) – Normally I hate recap episodes, but when Dirty Jobs runs them, they show more of the behind the scenes information that makes it worthwhile.
• Grey’s Anatomy (0 hr) – Didn’t air last week.
• ER (1 hr) – Didn’t watch this.
• 24 (1 hr) – Starting to get caught up. We’ve watched  the first 2 hour episode, and half of the 2nd 2 hour episode.
• Solitary 3.0 (1 hrs) -Down to the final 3.
• Non-tracked viewing: Other than some evening news, I’ve watched a few episodes of The Dave Ramsey Show and a couple of episodes in the background of Cops-type shows while working on other things.

At least 2 books per month -February’s goal met, now working on March.

• Twilight by Stephenie Myers – Finished!
• The 9 Steps to Financial Freedom: Practical and Spiritual Steps So You Can Stop Worrying by Suze Orman -Finished!
• New Moon by Stephenie Meyer – About 2/3 of the way through this one already.  I don’t think I’m going to have a problem with this goal.  Now I just need to decide on a non-fiction book to read this month.

Minimum 3 blog postings per week – I had 2 posts this week, and honestly it felt good just writing a couple of posts as I wanted to rather than feeling pressured into making a 3rd one.  I still don’t want to drop this goal, but I haven’t decided how to re-write it to meet the spirit of my goal in the first place.

100 lbs (2 lbs/week) – Up 2.3 direct, also up 2 on the averaged trend. These last couple of weeks have been so busy and so stressful I haven’t been paying as close attention as I should to my diet.  I also missed going to the gym most of last week, and have not been getting up early enough to go this week.  I’ve been getting to bed slightly later than I intend (the dangers of reading a good book!) which has made me pretty tired in the mornings.

Budget – I’m happy with where we’re at this week.

Maybe I watched too much Star Trek as a kid.  If you look at the very basic foundation of their society, they don’t work for a paycheck and go home at the end of the day and try to forget about what they do during the day.  They all work at a job that is enjoyable to them and is a challenge to them, and in exchange they are provided with all of their “needs” and their reasonable “wants.”  Look at the crew in Engineering.  Sure there are days where things break and things don’t go according to plan, but the overwhelming majority of their time is divided between general upkeep of the systems, and research into bettering those very systems.  They figure out a way to attach the sensor array to the warp drive to exponentially increase the range and accuracy of those sensors.  Sure that attracted an alien race from another dimension that wanted to experiment on crew members, but the point is they were working to better the equipment so they could increase the learning efficiency and potential for their society.  They don’t go home at night wondering if what they did is going to make a difference, and by the same token they don’t expect get rewarded with physical items for major accomplishments.  The drive is in the pride of the work they perform.

The unfortunate reasons that our society can not support true socialism at this point is primarily because of two main points, the first being corruption.  When you get leadership (or even middlemen) that find ways to cheat the system and siphon off their own resources, that creates a drain on the society.  As they gain more and more resources, their power to drain even more grows and creates a vicious cycle.  The rich get richer, and the society gets poorer.  This also applies to literary works.  Copyright was originally designed to allow a performer or author to sell their works without competition for the first (approximately) decade, after that their work would move into the public domain so that the entire society would be able to benefit.  Unfortunately we have corrupt leadership in place that has taken the intent of copyright and extended it to allow a media cartel to run the show.  No longer can a budding author take a book from 10 years ago and change key elements in the story and re-write it into a new work based on the original.  This is a prime example of taking a socialist idea and killing it with corruption.

The second reason is there are way too many people in our current society that are more than happy to freeload off of whomever they can, and do the least amount of work they can to get by.  Why work when they can get whatever they want anyway?  Our society even encourages this behavior right now, with government “assistance” programs designed to take the benefits away if a person even tries to get ahead and get off of the program.  A person receiving a disability (or SSI) payment every month will lose that money if they try to work extra in order to get ahead.  Even worse, they are not allowed to save any money.  The SSI payments are designed to help with basic living and medical expenses.  If the person were allowed to save up $5-10K, they would be able to afford the medical expenses out of their own pocket and would no longer need SSI every month to play catchup on the medical debt.  Instead, they are told they have to spend every dime they make or they will lose the assistance.  It is no longer an assistance program to help a person get ahead, it is a full time job designed to keep them from getting ahead.

Capitalism isn’t all bad either.  When people work hard and save their money, ideally they are able to use that money to help society by donating to charities, building community centers, and things along those lines.  The problem is too many people don’t understand this and hold onto their money so tightly that it doesn’t do anybody (including themselves) any good.  For a good example of the way to do it, take a look at Bill Gates.  This man has more money than anyone could ever possibly need.  He set up a non-profit organization (Gates Foundation) that he funnels his money through to do amazing things to help the citizens of our little planet.  Even though the company that made him his money has a reputation for being money grubbing and heavy handed, he still chooses to take his own share and use it for good.

There are so many problems in this world today, but rather than working together to solve them as a group, we tend to pick our own little slice and try to make sure it is given the priority.  Until we all learn to work towards a common goal as a society and move all of our actions in line with that goal, we will never progress beyond where we are now.  Unfortunately we spend too much effort on propping up the failures rather than emphasizing the successes.  All I can do is raise my children to work at something they enjoy and to be proud of the work they do, and maybe someday we’ll be ready to become a true socialist society.

My personal opinion is that we have the “victim” mentality so entrenched into our society that we look for reasons to cry foul rather than

raising an alarm when something truly heinous happens.  Instead of laughing at something intended to be a joke, we let it get under our skin.  We try to hard to be “politically correct” that we’re willing to be very drab just to make sure we don’t accidentally offend someone.

The reason racist jokes are offensive is because we allow them to be offensive.  Take the classic Mel Brooks movie Blazing Saddles as a prime example.  I’ve heard that Cleavon Little (the black star of the movie) was questioned as to why he would star in such an “offensive” movie that constantly uses the “n-word.”  He explained that by poking fun at the blatant racism in that movie it took most of the negative connotations away.  How can anyone who sees the movie take racism seriously?  They took a very derogatory term and turned it into a joke.  Also by the end of the movie all of the people who were complaining about a colored sheriff were glad to have him there, so it showed exactly how racial prejudice accomplishes nothing.  After producing the movie, supposedly they received many complaint letters from people, but the interesting thing is all of them were from caucasians, not blacks who would be the ones to take offense.

A more recent example of a movie which treats racial stereotypes as a joke is Undercover Brother staring Eddie Griffin.  Its been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I remember the opening scene of the movie shows Eddie’s character in a stereotypical big “afro” hair style driving in a convertible, skidding tires around corners, while never spilling a drop of the orange (or was it grape) soda in his hand.  He gets to headquarters and the “password” to get in was a secret handshake with a robotic arm, where it replies “You’ve got soul!” before it lets him in.  If you get down to it, it is using several “black” stereotypes, as well as essentially saying Caucasians don’t have a soul.  Is it being “offensive” to everyone?  No, its just a joke!

Where do we draw the line over what is considered hateful or what is funny?  I’m a fat, Caucasian nerd, with glasses/contacts, semi-blond hair, a receding hairline which I normally just shave off completely, and I listen to eurodance music.  Do you know how many jokes I’ve heard that apply to something that I could take offense to? I don’t though because they’re funny! They aren’t meant to be hurtful so why should I allow them to bother me?  If we’re to say it is wrong to make a joke about a particular group’s skin color or religion, why don’t we say it is wrong to make jokes based on a group’s weight or hair color?  What about making jokes based on people from a particular region or state?  How about a profession such as being a lawyer?  Nearly every joke made is at someone’s expense, even if is at the expense of the joke teller themselves.  Show me one person who hasn’t told at least one blonde joke in their life, or a joke about a priest and a rabbi, or any number of similar joke and I’ll show you someone who has no sense of humor.

The black woman the mayor sent the joke to blew this thing completely out of proportion.  What did this accomplish?  Nothing except to draw attention to the image that would not have gone further had she simply deleted it.  Instead it was on the national news and put out on the Internet for everyone to see and pass along.  Even though the mayor appologized, she still said “it will be difficult for [us] to work together.”  I can agree with her there!  Now the mayor will be afraid to say anything to or around her just in case she decides to take offense to something and make it out to be some form of harassment.  I’m sorry, but if she felt the need to rat him out to the national press over something as trivial as this rather than deleting it and asking him not to send her things like that in the future, I wouldn’t want to be friends with her or work with her any longer either.  Talk about creating a “hostile work environment!”

The longer we allow these things to drive our emotions, the longer it will take to put an end to racism and hatred in general.  Well, I thought I would play some basketball this evening, but we all know “white men can’t jump.”  I guess I’ll just go home to my parents’ basement, order a pizza and drink Mountain Dew, while I play video games and look at adult magazines.  Sheesh.