I was reading a little bit this morning before work. I have not really been following Ruby
on Rails very much as I have slowly been drifting away from development over the
past 2 years. I watched a short
demo and felt very inspired and enabled after seeing a demo of how easy it is
for someone to build a web app with Ruby.
I have a couple of things in mind so I am going to try to find a little time
this weekend to research this a bit further.
We had a small snow-sleet event today. Around 4:15pm the power went out. I decided
to implement our basic emergency management plan.... I rolled the generator outside
and flipped the sub-panel from shore power to the generator. That provides basic power
for the fridge, well pump, furnace and a few lights and outlets in a couple of spots
in the house. Nothing fancy but enough to live on.
We took this as an opportunity to go out for supper. (We could have cooked on the
grill or done something else if needed.)
Our builder laughed at us for putting in a generator sub-panel and having a few of
the circuits moved around. He response was that the power never goes out. --Yeah,
right. The power has gone out several times in the 2.5 years that we have been at
the new house. We bought the generator this summer when we had longer power outage
after some big storms rolled through. (We had the panel but did not own a generator
that was compatible with our new home... go figure.)
I wish that we had spent the money when we built the house and bought one of the automatic
cut over systems to have everything on the generator system. Then the generator
would run on the big LP bottle that feeds our whole house.
Overall we can survive here during the standard kind of emergencies as long we can
top of the gas cans once in a while. It probably points out that we should stock up
our food shelves a little more and think through a bigger plan.
If you have a plan the chances are that you will not need to execute on it... if you
don't have a plan Mr Murphy will force you to make plan to execute.
Two more slots. Last night I turned on the radio for a few minutes and worked VP6DX
on 30m CW and 40m SSB.
I think that they begin to pack up today. I would suspect that these are the final
contacts that I will make with Ducie Island during this DX Expedition. It is incredible
the signals that they are able to work in the noise.
Sweet... I just got them on 17m RTTY. Now I need to focus on 10m and 30m.
I have VP6DX in my log 11 times in the past week.
The folks operating VP6DX have some great ears. It is amazing to work them on 160m.
I hope to try to get a couple more bands/modes with them before they wrap up the operations
there.
I am eating lunch and watching CNN for a few minutes.
Mike Huckabee: "I am not a Wall Street Republican.... I am more of a Walmart
Republican." (He is speaking live from Wichita, KS.) I suppose
that is an appropriate quote given that he was governor of Arkansas. (Home of
Walmart.)
He is an decent speaker given his background. It is interesting listening to his stories
while I eat lunch.
Ben and I spent some time on Saturday working the Minnesota QSO Party. Ben is 7 years
old and this was his first time operating the radios for any period of time. He operated
SSB and I handled the logging and coaching duties in addition of a few CW contacts.
It is not a power house score... but we had a good time and enjoyed ourselves... it
is a hobby after all. This was the first time that I had actually used the triband
beam, 40m dipole, and 80m shunt in the same contest. Overall I was pretty happy with
the antennas as they seemed to play fine.
Ben was pretty excited about using the radios... now I just need to work on getting
his brothers into the shack. I would like to try to setup a sched with someplace exotic
like the south pole weather/science station.
This was my first VHF contest that I have worked from our new house in EN25. Overall
things worked pretty well. The band conditions were pretty brutal which is typical
of Jan in Minnesota.
This contest had a lot of firsts for me:
Some things that I would like to add, change, improve for the next VHF contest:
Thanks to KC0IYT/R and W9FZ/R for the bands and grids... it would have been a much
slower contest without you.
I have a new name and slogan for Mitt Romney.
Flip Romney - He
will tell you what ever you want to hear.
Current race observations:
I would like to see Kennedy vs. Huckabee or Thompson and that is not too realistic.
I would be really interested to hear some good debate among them on how to move the
country forward.
The Democrat's have a real dilemma:
The Republican's have dilemma:
Huckabee seems to be a new force within his party. McCain
is likeable but his window came and went 8 years ago.
Ok... Huckabee's quote made me laugh about as hard as I have in a long time.
I can understand why people might be upset with the confederate flag (I don't like
what it stands for.) I think that Huckabee has the perfect perspective on it:
”South Carolina people know true conservatism when they see it.You don’t like people
outside the state telling you how you ought to raise your kids, you don’t like people
from outside the state telling you what to do with the flag,” Huckabee said during
a rally at a Myrtle beach airport hangar. “In fact, if somebody came down
to Arkansas and told us what to do with our flag, we’d tell’em where to put the
pole.”
from Fox
News + other media sources.
