A Blog

If you, my dear reader, are close to the Tippecanoe County area you know that tonight several nasty storms came through. At first, it appeared all fine and I continued computing. Then, the power started to severely flicker and the UPS under my workstation was getting upset with the world. So, I went and hit the breaker box to flick over to generator power and then headed for the basement as a tornado warning hit the area.

It was a pretty decent time, I resumed watching the television and chit chatting on the Internet from my laptop. Then, the DSL modem lost sight of the signal in the ether and that was all she wrote. I was listening to the ham traffic flowing by about the weather in the area. After that ended, I found Verizon’s telephone number and called in the report of my being completely dead in the water. The nice lady on the other end (after getting her past the fact I don’t have a windows machine and that power cycling the modem for a second time would not make things better) dropped the bombshell that only Wednesday morning could a tech become available to fix my connection. Sigh.

It is lovely that the only two broadband companies in this area offer pretty crappy service. We can choose between Comcast, who breaks the Internet for their costumers, or Verizon who charges through the nose and offers terrible costumer service experiences. Lovely.

Hamvention, it is quite an event. A ton of amateur radio operators from around the world show up in Dayton, Ohio, at the Hara conference center for an extended weekend of presentations, shopping and fun. I have been to the event several times and it is always amazing. The parking is always terrible and there are always people wondering around with huge antennas attached to themselves some how.

It is also amazing the people you see. Over the two days I spent at the show, I saw no less than ten people I knew. Some I barely recognized from random radio events and others that I had planned to meet. On Friday, I wore the (decently awful) W9YB shirts that our former president has printed up. The printing is sort of metallic looking and the shirt is black. It isn’t very catching from a distance, but several people still managed to spot me and talk about the Purdue club. The Purdue club is getting along at the moment. After the high activity of the election season, the club is mostly going dormant as the majority of members have left for the summer.

In all, I did not spend a lot of money picking up things. I got a Creative VOIP blaster in the hope Asterisk would work, a handful of extra long sata cables for extra cheap, one of those multi-port ide/sata to usb converter kits for use in various computer emergencies, and one of the most popular Realistic/Radioshack scanners. I found that the VOIP-Blaster isn’t much good with Asterisk.. Thankfully, it was from some fellow’s parts bin. For the rest of the day today, I put the hard disk stuff to good use moving my storage pool from an aging P4 to a nice shiny Opteron system. I was happy to be productive after taking several days “off”.

As for another project on the table, I hope to get my local area repeater monitoring project back in a usable state on Csociety’s streaming server. I now have the hardware to constantly monitor the W9YB two meter repeater and scan between the 6m, 1.25m, and 70cm repeaters (since these don’t see much traffic, one receiver shared amongst them should still capture everything interesting).

So, that was my fun weekend at Hamvention. Another successful year.