Five Years Ago

I married my best friend.  He is the love of my life and I am happy and proud to be called his wife.  Even though the last few years have had ups and downs, I wouldn’t change a thing. The various trials and tribulations ha ve made us stronger individually and as a couple.  I love you TMM now and forever. Happy Anniversary!

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July 7, 2007

I’ve Had Better Days

So, today wasn’t exactly one of my best days.  I didn’t listen to instinct.  I was taking back roads to the match today and there were thunderstorms last night.  Yeah, wet clay isn’t fun to drive on.  Doubly so when it is like driving on ice and that’s pretty much exactly what happened.  All I will say is the truck is fine, a bit muddy on one side, and need of a visit to Les Schwab’s for an alignment and suspension check.

Now, I have had many people tell me that Ham Radio is pointless.  Just pick up and use your cell phone.  I was merely 12 miles outside of Moscow Idaho, an urban center.  Yeah, guess what didn’t work worth a damn and what got a tow truck sent in my direction with a winch.

If you said cell phone, you lost, it was my Ham Radio.  Cell had 0 signal.  Tow truck showed up about 45 minutes later and I showed up to the match 50 minutes after it started.  Luckily I was still able to shoot, not only that but first stage I shot everyone’s comment was I need to do something like that before I shoot.

What do you mean I hear you ask?  Well I shot the first stage in 5.11 and aced it with the exception of a single charlie. Compare that to our local Masterclass shooter who did it in 5.85 and was mainly in the charlie bracket.  I was quite pleased with myself.

I did OK on the classifier, which was a fixed time stage with a mandatory reload.  I was quite pleased with myself that I only wasn’t able to make one shot during the reload string.  There was another stage that was actually a blast.  It was a bunch of running and gunning.  You started with your mags and gun down range on two different barrels with the gun unloaded.  Adam (the Masterclass) shooter did a move to load the magazine in the gun straight out of Zombie Land.  I will post the video later.

It was a fun day for the match.  Overall I really am pissed for not listening to my instinct with regards to navigation.  Thankfully at most it’s going to cost me an alignment.  I’m taking the rest of the night off, I’m kind of feeling really stupid right now for that dumb mistake.

On Being In The Eagles Nest

Via No Lawyers – Only Guns and Money I just discovered Eagle Scouts: Merit Beyond the Badge.

A more detailed video presentation can be seen here.

Scout’s had a very large role in my life growing up.  I spent the majority of my summers away from home at summer camp, JLT, National Jamborees, backpacking, and  just about anything else under the sun.

I earned my Eagle and I still feel it worth more than anything else I have accomplished.  I share this nest with a lot of very important people and some reflect well upon the honor, others not so much.

My parents both encouraged me in scouts wanting me to succeed.  My dad’s comment as to why he supported the program reminds me even now of the significance of the program.  His comment was, “I want you to grow up to have character, not be a character.”  I would like to think it accomplished his goal.  Especially since I have been described as being a literal Eagle Scout in the fact that I will do the right thing merely because it’s right, even if it’s to my detriment.

Stepehen Ambrose in his book D-Day noted that the war in Europe could easily be seen as the Hitler Youth vs The Boy Scouts.  The facts found from this survey have been known for a very long time.  Powell’s reason for Scouting was to help mold boys into men physically, mentally, and socially.  The survey merely proves that the program accomplishes Powell’s original goals.

I proudly climbed the hill to Eagle and received a wonderful surprise after completing that journey.  That journey played a significant factor in who and what I am today.

I am an Eagle Scout from the class of 2001.  I am a Brotherhood member of the Order of the Arrow.

Those of us who have made the climb know what it means, why it’s significant, and the results of this study come as no surprise for those of us here.  We live to set ourselves apart from the rest of the pack, for those who may not understand, I give you 100 Scouts.

 Of any one hundred boys who become Scouts, it must be confessed that thirty will drop out in their first year. Perhaps this may be regarded as a failure, but in later life all of these will remember that they had been Scouts and will speak well of the program.

Of the one hundred, only rarely will one ever appear before a juvenile court judge. Twelve of the one hundred will be from families that belong to no church. Through Scouting, these twelve and their families will be brought into contact with a church and will continue to be active all their lives. Six of the one hundred will enter the clergy of his chosen faith.

Each of the one hundred will learn something from Scouting. Almost all will develop hobbies that will add interest throughout the rest of their lives. Approximately one-half will serve in the military and in varying degrees profit from their Scout training. At least one will use it to save another person’s life and many will credit it with saving their own.

Four of the one hundred will reach Eagle rank, and at least one will later say that he valued his Eagle above his college degree. Many will find their future vocation through merit badge work and Scouting contacts. Seventeen of the one hundred boys will later become Scout leaders and will give leadership to thousands of additional boys.

Only one in four boys in America will become Scouts, but it is interesting to know that of the leaders of this nation in business, religion and politics, three out of four were Scouts.

This story will never end. Like the “Golden Pebble” of service dropped into the human sea, it will continue to radiate in ever-widening circles, influencing the characters of men down through unending time.

I’ve bolded the parts that tie to myself personally.

While I haven’t actually done the Oath in 10 years, I can still rattle it off, knowing full well its meaning.  The same can be said for the Scout Law.  Yeah, that’s how deeply it ingrained itself into my soul.  I expect to be able to recite either until the day I die.

On my honor, I will do my best:
To do my duty to god and my country;
To obey the scout law and help others at all time;
To keep myself physically strong, mentally awake and morally straight.

A Scout is:

  • Trustworthy
  • Loyal
  • Helpful
  • Friendly
  • Courteous
  • Kind
  • Obident
  • Cheerful
  • Thirfty
  • Brave
  • Clean
  • Reverent

What I do find interesting, I have run into a decent number of Eagle Scouts within the gun community and I keep finding more.  This however is by no means surprising.

CQ Field Day

I’m spending the day doing field day with the local ham radio club.  We actually have a hydrogen fuel cell that we’re running all our radios off of.  We spent a chunk of the morning hooking and setting up antennas including a nice Stepper IR that was donated for use during field day.

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It took us a lot longer than expected to set that bad boy up.  We were having SWR problems and we’ve been trying to debug the issue.  First up was checking all the connections and we discovered this in one of the connections.

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That however wasn’t the problem.  The SWR was still way above 3.  What else could be the problem.  Well we bypassed the 80m tuning coil and bang, SWR dropped to 1.  I think we found the problem.  At that point it was time to grab some lunch and now I’m working on logging while my compatriot runs the radio.

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I’ll be busy until late tonight.  If you’re a fellow ham and you hear KD7PH, feel free to send a shout out. We’re going to start running some of the digital modes here in a bit but were running phone now.

It is nice being able to run that Stepper IR thought anywhere between 40m and 10m.  We haven’t tried running 80m since we pulled the coil but so far if we can hear them we can work them.  All running just measly 100 watts.

We just bumped to 15 meters to see how things will run for now.  I have to say I would like to get one of those for my house, the thought of the cost though doesn’t have me running to buy one

It is nice being able to do all this in an air-conditioned trailer.  Even though storms rolled in, the heat’s still pretty high and the humidity has gone up.  It’s going to be a fun day.

Buwahahaha!!! Awesome!

I just discovered this in Jetpack while waiting for my code to compile.

e^{\j \theta}=\cos{\theta}+\j \sin{\theta}

But wait, there’s more!

[\vec{\nabla} \cdot \vec{\mathbf{E}} = \frac{1}{\epsilon_0}\,\rho ]

Man, that is freaking awesome.  I can write formulas on the fly now and not have to resort to weird things to get the images to post.  Now I just need to get back to doing those posts on the power system.

Well, that’s neat

During my lunch I did some browsing around and I found a really nice proof reader that has a plugin for WordPress tied into Jetpack.  Not only does it exist for WordPress though but someone created a plugin for Live Writer.

I know more often than not my writing leaves something to be desired.  This I attribute to the fact that my brain will mentally fill in words that are missing when I wrote it.  It usually takes at least 24 hours before my brain will actually catch missing material.  That’s a bit of a problem with how fast some information flows within the blogosphere.  I don’t exactly have an editor to proof my work before I hit the submit button.  Hopefully this will help with some of those deficiencies.

My brain is actually really good at filling in other people’s mistakes.  I have to seriously slow down my reading to catch mistakes.

In other news a couple of weeks ago I finally ditched the big beard since summer was finally showing up.  Normally I go bald specifically because I’m already bald on the top of the head anyway so I might as well just embrace it.

This limits my ability to have the big fat beard, which I do enjoy though it does make soup a serious pain. It just looks weird being bald and having a big bushy beard.  Also it’s really hot during summers out here and it’s just not necessary.

Now normally I go with what some would call the JayG look, bald and goatee, but that’s relatively common and frankly I just like being different.  So instead I’ve gone with the below.

With the hat on:

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With the hat off.

imageYou can’t see it, but I’m flipping someone off in this picture.  He said something about a blinding light coming off my head.  I told him to just stop staring into the sun.

I still have the beard, doesn’t look scroungy, and still allows me to be intimidating if necessary.

So what say you?  Should I just go back to the goatee, or keep the trimmed line running back?

For those of you using Google reader…

I apologize.  I don’t know what the hell just happened but for some reason Google reader appears to have “reposted” a bunch of older content.  This may be because I finished at least getting temporary categories in everything tonight so clean URLs was turned back on.

I checked both the raw feed and feedburner, neither has all the “new” posts in it.  So I’m sorry if this threw you off or was a disappointment.  Hopefully as I continue getting the bugs squashed in this new toy things will be more stable.  Overall I’m liking WordPress considerably more.  Doubly so with the much better integration with Live Writer.

If you see weird behavior though, please let me know so I am at least aware to look out for it and I might be able to fix it.  This migration has caused some weird issues.

Pardon the Nuclear Fallout

So I spent yesterday and today migrating my blog to WordPress.  This while mostly successful has had a few minor hiccups.

First up, clean URLs is currently broken.  For some reason I have to manually touch every blog post *merely clicking update* for the clean URL to work properly.  I haven’t found the PFM in the database that is changing to allow it to work.

While doing that would be an inconvenience there is another issue which makes me want to touch every post.  None of the categories imported correctly.  The database and content nodes appear to line up correctly but alas the rendering fails for some reason.  Updating the content by hand again fixes the problem.

So the wife and I are going to work on going through all 1171 posts updating their categories and getting the clean URLs straightened out.  I did spend a decent amount of time creating a list of 301 redirects for all my previous posts.  Any and all previous incoming links should still be going to their respective content.  They will just have the ugly ?p=xxxx at the end instead of the nice clear /2012/05/23/This-Post-Is-So-Awesome/ url.

The last problem was brought on by my use of Disqus.  I wanted to get an export of my comments so I could reimport them into Drupal and then import those comments into WordPress.  Disqus would be used on all future content.  Well I didn’t get an export of the comments this weekend and I got tired of waiting.  If and when they come in, I will work on getting a snap shot of the database and migrating those into the system.

I was going to leave a domain up with the Drupal blog intact, alas for some reason I have not been able to make a subdomain.  Why I do not know other than Murphy hates me with a passion.

So yeah, if you notice other stuff that’s broken let me know.  I’m working on cleaning up the mess.  On the upshot I can blog from my phone now.

If you’re feed broke, let me know.  The feedburner feed should have continued uninterrupted.  I am working on getting the contact forms back up tonight.  Any of you who have my contact info in your address book, bump me a line if you notice anything grossly out of place.