Boys Night

Jacob and Ben came home today from spring break at Grandpa's house up north.

This afternoon we watch some YouTube videos of model rockets then we built some model
rockets together. Then we ran some errands to picked up some tacos and burritos,
a movie, and a new Xbox 360 game. After dinner and a movie we played Xbox. Project
Gotham Racing 4 was pretty cool.  We like the street bike racing.

Ben and Joe are playing the Marvel heros/adventure game right now.

I am worn out time to call it a day.

Twin Cities Robots

http://www.tcrobots.org/

Hmmm... interesting link that I found as I was googling for information.

Revell Too

http://www.revell.com/VEXplorer.275.0.html

It appears the model company Revell is also trying to get into the robot game. I suppose
it makes sense... many kids today no longer build models... but they do play with
computers and electronics.

Robot Parts

http://tamiyausa.com/

I am flipping through a robot enthusiast magazine while I am cooking dinner. There
is a real nice two page add show a LOT of nice RC parts that could be used for Robots.

SQLite

I was on the road today driving my sons up to meet my dad for spring break. (We meet
half way which is Brainerd.) On the way up I was listening to a podcast that was talking
about SQLite.

It is an Open Source/Public Domain database. It is a flat file based system. It is
not going to scale out to thousands of concurrent users but that is not the point
of the project. I see some real potential for something like this. It is on my list
of things to investigate when time permits.

The list of companies that
are using this tool is pretty impressive.

I would like to investigate using it for Ruby on Rails, ASP/ASP.NET, and some other
projects that are tied to weather systems and embedded systems. Like I said, lots
of options and the price is right.

K2 - Night Seven

The Good:


I am into the initial alignment and testing phases of the project. That means that
I put most of the case together and connect the RF, Control and Front Panel boards
together. I ran into one little bug that I was able to resolve with a little bit of
trouble shooting.

The Bad:

I am not getting the exact status message that I am expecting from the radio.
It should come up with VFO A @ 7100.00c and that is not happening. I sent an email
to the Elecraft mailing list with some details and some questions.

It looks like a real radio now. It will be interesting to see what happens with this
status message issue. I will give the mailing list a little bit of time then my next
step is to probably call into tech support for some guidance. I don't mind working
through the troubleshooting process... I just need some hints of where to look next.  --Stay
tuned.

Parallax SX28

I received my Parallax SX
Tech Pro board today.

It looks like a pretty fun system. I spent about 2 hours on the phone with friend
that bought the same board. We were able to get it hooked up and working. We also
did some back hello world kind of testing. It will take a couple of days of reading
to get a basic feel for programming this little gem.



The SX28 chip is only about $2.50 a piece so a person can actually afford to build
some projects with it.

The images were lifted (screen
captured) from the website in case they disappear over time. They are very nice
references to their very nice product.

Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur

I have been hunting for a copy of "Solid State Design for the Radio Amateur" and being
defeated in my search. Everyone keeps bidding it up on eBay so I let it go once it
become unreasonable.

At $40+ it can go to someone else's library. I will wait for the next one to turn
up. I may just move on to Experimental Methods in RF Design which is supposed to be
the newer version of this classic.

Grid Mapping

http://ve2zaz.net/WorkedGrids/WorkedGrids.htm

Looks like an interesting program. If time permits I hope to take a look at this weekend.
I discovered it on Jeff's blog.

Inflation Fears

It drives me nuts when people talk about "cost of living" and inflation.  The
government and many other places that report the data adjust the numbers so that it
does not include food or energy items.

Hello... I still have to pay for food and energy so it is a REAL cost. Please
do NOT adjust my real costs out of your formulas to make things look better.




Here is an example:


3 month rate ending 2008:


All items: 6.8%


All items minus food and energy: 3.1%

Check that out... the real number is DOUBLE what people are reporting.

----Most folks are seeing salary raises in the 1.5-3.5% range.


----Our real cost of living is growing at 4-7.5% a year.

We are in a recession.... our costs are raising faster than our incomes. Our government
is growing faster than the people that have to pay for to it.

I don't know about you but our family has been trimming costs for a couple of years
to try to live within our means.  --Call me a fiscal conservative.