While Cristy and the kids were out of town on their adventure I
drove north and went camping at Jay
Cooke State Park. Here are some pictures from my weekend in northern Minnesota.
Some of the pictures are from within
the park and the rest were taken in the nearby areas.
My employer recently had a family
day at Valley Fair. It was
pretty cool. The park was completely closed for the day then opened up for people
from work. It cut down on the crowds and made it more fun to bring our two older boys.
They are kind of on the young side so the short lines were really nice.
Here is a slideshow
of my kids on the kidde rides.
Scott is a great geek! He
has found another great software package. The last cool app allows you to use
a laptop or another computer as a secondary
monitor for another PC. This is similar to adding a second video card to your
PC. I them credit. It looks pretty cool, it has some practical uses including reusing
old hardware and using more energy. 
I might to try to set it up later this week if time permits. I think that it might
be worth the money. I can see some possibly use for it in the Amateur Radio end of
my home office. (The second monitor always produces RFI when I run my HF amp... this
will allow me have a second monitor but to reduce the RFI.)
Charlie has a nice
article for geeks like us.
He does a good explaining about the challenge of living in a digital age for many
of multimedia type people. Granted Charlie has much more data than most of us. I have
been pretty diligent about moving the majority of my media to optical storage. Granted
optical storage like CDs and DVDs will degrade it is MUCH slower than tape base media.
I still have some broadcast BetaCam and
small amount of 3/4"
tape that I would like to convert to a digital format while the media is still
probably in good shape.
It is really amazing how fast tape degrades. I remember from my broadcast TV days
that even fairly recent tape edited on BetaCamSP started to deteriorate enough to
notice within the first few years. Hard to believe but it is true.
I have to say that I had a pretty good weekend. I got on the road
Friday evening a little latter than planned to go camping but that was not too
big a deal given that I only had to drive about 2+ hours up
the road to Jay
Cooke State Park. This was a solo camping trip for me as the rest of the family
was off on their own adventure.
It is not uncommon for me to arrive in the campground after dark given that I
generally leave after work on Friday evenings. The road leading into Jay Cooke is
a real treat. It is twisting, turning, and in a poor state of disrepair. Generally
I don't care to much about the road conditions given that I
drive a SUV... it was designed for being bounced around. It is a completely different
matter when I
am towing a 2000 lbs trailer going down a narrow twisting road in the dark. I
ended up arriving in the park @ 9:00 which was pretty decent timing.
The check-in process at Jay Cooke was a little different that I am used to with some
of the parks that we have visited this summer. The campground is also a little awkward
to navigate in the dark. When I finally found a spot (I had a reservation... not that
they assigned me a spot 
)
the temperate was in the low
30's and the ground was very wet from all of the rain early in the day. (Some
nearby family friends indicated that they got 1.25 inches of rain during the day.)
The temperature got down into the 20's overnight. The furnace in the camper did a
good job of keeping the temperature something a bit more comfortable. I have a nice
mummy sleeping back that is rated for 35 degrees. I figure that I would throw a couple
of blankets on top and set the furnace for about 55 degrees. I was a bit cold overnight
and opted to buy a new sleeping bag in Duluth. I now own a 6 lbs bag rated for 0 degrees.
I can say that I was too warm in the bag until the temp dropped into the 20's
Saturday night. (I actually shut the furnace off Saturday night while sleeping.)
Over the leaves were still very challenging for photos this weekend. The
colors range from green to orange to red. A lot of leaves are simply falling
to the ground without changing colors. It was a pretty windy weekend which makes my
still of photography much more challenging. I did manage to take some decent photos
and I will try to get them posted on the website in the next day or two.
I also managed to spend a little of time riding
my bike on the Munger Trail which
is near my campsite. I would like to make a big effort to ride my bike next year.
I am hoping to be able to bring bikes for our entire family on these trips next year.
It would be fun to ride the Munger
Trail from Carlton to Duluth and
back. Jacob and Ben are getting big enough that they will tolerate short rides...
now they need to be conditioned for some longer rides.
I had a good time with the photography and bike riding. I actually took it easy and
got some rest while I was up there. I got on the road shortly after breakfast Sunday
morning. I returned home around 1pm. I took the opportunity to clean out the trailer,
do some laundry, do some dishes, clean the chimney, fix some of the concrete on top
of chimney, and do a little bit of work on the home network.
The original three Star
Wars movies were re-released on DVD last
week. My family happens to own a very well used sets of VHS tapes of the original
three movies. The other night Jacob and Ben decided that our family was going to watch Star
Wars after dinner. I decided that the time was right and we would watch them on DVD!
We drove over to the local Best
Buy store that is only about 5
minutes away from our house. Almost every single person in the check-out line
had Star Wars in the their hand. After waiting in line for about 10 minutes we finally
were able to check out. It turns out that the $51 sticker price was being discounted
in store to about $45 which I thought was a decent price.
After returning home and eating dinner with our family we decided to start the movie.
I was immediately distracted with the wild colors and the changes in the audio experience.
I found that the color shifts and increase in the color saturation was too much. I
watched the movie with the boys for about 20 minutes and then fell asleep on the couch.
I woke up near the end of the movie to discover that George
Lucas had added extra shots and dialog to the DVD version of the movie.
The changes to the movie proved to be very distracting to a movie that used to fell
very comfortable with. I would have been very happy with a clean print of the original
movie reproduced on DVD. In the end I am very disappointed with the changes
and George Lucas.
If I would have known about the changes and the distractions I would not have spent
the money on box set.
After talking about my little project for the past couple of weeks I finally got to
work. I used my slingshot to shoot a small weight into our tall tree in the center
of our backyard. The weight is attached to fishing line and reel. I was able to quickly
pull up a light weight rope/string and then pull up a medium strength line and my
copper wire. It took about an hour to hang and tune the new antenna for 30m.
I was a little bit nervous about how well the antenna would tune up given that my
modeling of the antenna several months (using one of NEC engines) ago did not
look very promising. Their are about 20 radials that are cut for 1/4 wave length long @
40m (1/8 wave @ 75m/80m) and 2 radials that are 1/4 wave length long at 160m. We used
1000 feet of wire for the radial project in the spring of 2004. The 30m antenna was
kind of interesting to tune up.
I have an MFJ
analyzer and had a hard time find a sweet spot which should have been close to
23 feet. I searched the range of frequencies like I normally do to determine how long
or short I might be only to discover that I couldn't find much of anything that was
resonant. I took an educated guess and figure that my antenna was too long (or tuned
too low) and start shortening it up about 4 inches at a time. Eventually after
about 5 minutes of this process the SWR started to really make some serious improvement.
I was watching the X value start to really drop and the antenna was becoming resonant
near it's final reseting spot.
In the end the antenna tune up right where I wanted it at 10.125 MHz with an SWR of
1.3:1. Currently I have antennas for the following HF bands: 160m,
80m, 75m, 40m, 30m, and a beam for 20m,
15m, and 10m. I also have beams for VHF/UHF bands: 6m,
2m, 1.25m, 70cm, and 1.2 GHz (I need to finish building my 1296 transverter and
my 10GHz system.)
73 de NG0R
Here is another interesting link: http://rbrewster.members.winisp.net/pdn.html
It is Paint.Net. More apps to play with time permits. It is another link that I found
on Scott's blog during
my lunch hour.
I was reading some RSS feeds over
lunch and saw something interesting. Notepad2
This is something that I will need to download and try out. I spend a lot of
using notepad and Primal Script. More later.
I like reading Scott's blog as
he frequently has interesting tidbits of information.
