Quad test. You know, we’ve never tested our quad antenna … we just assume we built it perfectly and use it on the field. So lets test it. Jason Ford drove up on a hill and was supposed to locate me. He didn’t have a compass but figured I was in the direction of the Norton hangers, so I drew a line through them from his location on Google Earth. I was at my apartment, he came pretty close.
As I was cleaning out some old papers I stumbled across one of my first business failures. Mom and my siblings made the candles and I went door to door..
The candles even had a guarantee.
Here’s a Y2K superbowl ad from a business that did better…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHJkAYdT7qo
ben@falconhosting$ uptime
5:53PM up 400 days, 15:35, 3 users, load averages: 0.18, 0.19, 0.12
And now each moment of time that passes sets a new record for Falconhosting.
I keep hearing from teachers and pastors statements such as:
“All sin is equal in God’s eyes”
“The Bible says all sin is equal”
Where do people get the idea that all sin is equal? Whenever I ask them why they think this their logic is as follows: All sin results in the consequence of the death penalty. Therefore all sin is equally wrong. Something is missing between the premises and the conclusion. Here’s what the Bible (NIV) says…
Romans 6:23
For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.Romans 10:9
That if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
Nothing here indicates that all sin is equal. Just because a consequence, “death”, is the same for all sins, doesn’t mean all of those sins are equal in badness. Perhaps, “all sin is bad”, or “all sin results in death” would be a more accurate statement.
Last Saturday
It was a good thing I had all the parts ready. Jason, Meredith, Bob, and I had 5 hours to build a quad directional antenna before the t-hunt. Finally, it is finished! Time to hook it up.
Jason hooking up the ICOM-2200H 2-Meter Radio to the quad antenna.
A T-hunt is where ham radio operators try to find transmitters that are hidden (in our case anywhere in the Inland Empire). The transmitters typically send out a brief signal every 10 minutes. The first step for us was to build a quad– a directional antenna. It has four elements. Two directors, the driven element, and the reflector–and mount it on my car.
Me inspecting Jason’s through the sunroof mount. It looks good Jason!
Meredith, Bob, and I calculated the element sizes for the best pickup on 146.565MHz while Jason used advanced math to cut out a perfect moonroof from plywood. The basic principle is to spin the quad around when we hear a signal–while watching the s-meter. Where the signal is strongest, that’s the direction the transmitter…
Looks like we’re finished. Lets do a road test! (notice the cool flaming hood?)
Our first road test was on the freeway heading to the starting point. 45, 55, 65….it’s holding together! I didn’t realize the amount of attention you get when you have one of these on the roof of your car. The kids were waving at us, while cruising around the neighborhoods we hear the “what the **** is that thing?” …and every once in awhile someone will call the police on us thinking we’re a ufo. The police know who we are–we have FCC licenses to do this. |:-)
“Off you go boys! Good luck hunting!” — the girls.
Meredith was the spinner, I drove, Jason handled radio #2 and the attenuation, Bob calculated the intervals between signals so we could be at a high spot whenever the transmitter went off.
This was our first hunt as a team. We found both transmitters without any help from the other hunters!
Much thanks goes to Jon and Jim who took me on their hunts and trained me, and thanks to the guy who drilled the holes in the boom for us.
Well, on my way to Awana the SHO got nailed. The light turned yellow…I used to run yellows when there was a car behind me but lately I’ve been conditioned by the Loma Linda red-light cameras to stop when the light changes…mostly because the yellow is real short. In this case it was pretty clear that I could stop safely, so I did. Then I heard SCREEEECH ….BAM! And behold! The world becomes a brighter place as my shades fly off! The car behind me didn’t have anti-lock brakes, thus it knocked off part of my bumper. Oh well, to the body shop. I think renting a car for a few days (I hope) after an accident here and there is cheaper than the occaisional running a photo-enforced red-light fine in the long run.
The church I attend, Immanuel, wasted invested money in a PhoneTree machine. Of course I was annoyed that a machine would interrupt my day. I told the PhoneTree to not call me again. It disobeyed by calling me later thus violating the Second of the Three Laws of Robotics found in Isaac Asimov’s book, I, Robot.
Law #2:
A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
Not good. The only way around this one is to argue that the second Law doesn’t apply, that PhoneTree isn’t a robot, or that PhoneTree was only designed to call people who had opted-in. I have a feeling the latter is true. Now it isn’t really PhoneTree’s fault that someone at Immanuel put my cell number on their robot calling list. I can see some good applications for PhoneTree. I think the larger issue is that someone thinks their time is so important that they can have a machine waste other peoples’ time for them. A recording just doesn’t tell people you want their help badly enough. People want to have people call them. It’s okay for a machine to assist a human to contact humans, but replacement isn’t necessary. Next thing you know people will be so busy answering robot calls they’ll have to have a robot handle them. So that’s what I’ve done. I have set Immanuel’s number to go straight to voice mail, where PhoneTree can happily talk to my answering machine.
Then, there’s Jason and Juliet, leaders of Awana Trek, who invested their time to call each and every person in their group inviting them to Awana. That’s personal touch. It says, “You are so important, I took my personal time to call you.” Those are the sort of phone calls I don’t mind.
Date formats are so inconsistent, sometimes you can’t even tell what field is what.
09/13/06 (mm/dd/yy) American
13/09/06 (dd/mm/yy) British
Neither one is really good. So we should all use Ben’s standard date format. Here’s my proposal:
06/09/13 (yy/mm/dd)
Why?
The San Jacinto Peak was a blast.
Cherise finds a Geocache so I trade a carabiner for a monkey…
We hike up through thunderstorm and hail…
The view is beautiful and so is the line of site so we make radio contacts…
Cherise sprains her knee (didn’t know that was possible) as a result we have to go at a slow pace so we end up descending the mountain by moonlight…
Our pace was so slow we were going to miss the last tram down, our cell phones had no reception (and I have Verizon) but I had brought the ham radio. I sent out a message to anyone who could get a hold of the tram, a radio operator in the valley, K6BSC, answered my call and telephoned the tram station to have them delay the last tram for us. Finally we made it back. |:-)
I converted to wordpress. It’s kind of sad to leave the simple “journal” engine I wrote in 2001, but with my time being eaten up I had to find something and Wordpress seemed like the easiest option to suit my needs. The other runnerups included: Drupal, Typo, and MODx. MODx probably would have been my second choice. Moving the old posts was simple with a few MySQL commands.
To do:
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