Jun 25th, 2006 by bwann
Two battery side-post extensions that were too long, bolt cutters and file later, I have solved nothing. I still have alternator whine in my radio. I’m going to have to try moving my positve lead from the accessory bus to the battery directly.
Later… I redid the positive side. It’s a big improvement, but not a completely solved problem. There’s still a tinge of high pitched whine over 2500 RPM. “That’s good enough” but I suspect I’ll keep trying to eliminate it.
Jun 25th, 2006 by bwann
World Cup! World Cup! I haven’t watched any of the games in a week, looks like I’ve missed a lot of action. Ecuador vs England is playing at the moment… and England wins. Portugal vs Sweden is up next.
My parents came down to visit earlier last week. I’ve been a slacker and haven’t made it up to Oklahoma since Christmas, so they decided to come down here.
The day after they left, I flew out to Virginia. It was a very full trip, I was working from the time I arrived, all night long, then started early the next morning. There was no incentive for me to work all night, but I still only spent four hours at the hotel sleeping. IHOP in Sterling at 2 AM is where the action’s at. Several groups of seemingly drunk people started shuffling in around that time.
On the way home, IAD was crazy, so many people; it took about 40 minutes to get through self-checkin and security. My plane was already full by the time I got on it. So much for getting there in time to grab lunch. I couldn’t sleep on the way back because of a non-reclining chair, but it was offset by chatting with the extremely attractive Dell sales woman next to me who was visiting Round Rock. She saw me reading my “French for Travellers” book, we started talking about Europe and places she’s been and where I need to go. She tells me in Belgium I can get a plate of mussels+french fries almost anywhere I go. Odd, but sounds so good.
I spent yesterday afternoon running coax for my CB and scanner. I properly grounded my antenna mounts and re-tuned my antennas, now things work much better. Even brought out the multimeter and tested for grounding and impedance on my connectors and end-to-end. I quickly figured out my 6 watt battery-operated soldering iron was useless for soldering on PL-259 plugs. I bought a 25 watt iron, it was barely hot enough to get the job done. I had it plugged into my inverter, I was afraid it was going to melt my cigarette lighter outlet wiring, but it survived. I should’ve just bought the butane powered torch. I still have alternator whine, but I think I can fix this by buying a battery terminal extension and running it directly to the negative post on the battery.
If you want creepy, I was driving around last night listening to the scanner and picked up a baby monitor. I heard a argument between some girl and her “asshole liar” boyfriend, with a baby cooing periodically.
I picked up a general class amateur radio study guide last night and I’ve been eating it up. A chunk of the DC electronic stuff I already know, yet the radio wave propogation and antenna theory stuff was really interesting. I finally understand how capacitors filter out AC and how rectifiers work.
Listening to Morse code at 5 words per minute is painfully slow, 15-20 seems like a good starting point. Hearing 40+ wpm is insane. Here’s a 40 WPM AARL practice file. I know Morse isn’t required for a Technician class license, but it’s still cool to learn it.
While Googling for Morse code stuff last night, I found a clip from Leno with a SMS text messaging vs Morse code competition. A SMS “speed champion” was pitted against a pair of ham operators. The girl from the audience was so confident that SMS would win, but the radio guys clobbered them.
Jun 13th, 2006 by bwann
So I get this email from my apartment management saying:
Hello Bryan,
Are you thinking about moving? Sometimes, the right decision is to just STAY the course, steady as she goes. No need to rock the boat! We think you should just STAY and keep your current address! No forwarding mail, printing new checks, and sending out notices. Just STAY! You could save yourself the expense of moving and your friends would prefer a fun night out to lifting boxes. STAY and none of your important possessions will be broken, disassembled, miss-packed, miss-labeled, lost or stolen because you decided to STAY.
We’re so happy you are going to STAY here with us, and when you think you should be too. Call us today to sign a new lease and STAY!!
Sincerely,
Your Team at AMLI
What? Stay the course? Are they part of the Republican party or the Bush administration? Can I leverage this to get cheaper rent? Are they trying to coerce me into STAYing?
Date: Tue, 13 Jun 2006 08:22:28 -0500 (CDT)
From: Bryan Wann <bryan wann.net>
To: lantanahills amli.com
Subject: Re: AMLI at Lantana Hills – Don’t move STAY with us!
What kind of weird fear mongering tactic is this?
kind regards,
bryan
Then again, I suppose my lease is set to expire soon.
I so brought it.
12:55PM <raptor> I dreamed this morning I was setting up my tent and forgot a bunch of shit, like water bottles
12:55PM <raptor> I tasted the playa in my sleep
12:55PM <alex> Until it starts happening to you, there’s really no point in discussing it.
Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2006 12:12:21 -0700 (PDT)
From: Burning Man Tickets <support burningman com>
To: bwann-burn wann net
Subject: Confirmation of your order
====================================================
Burning Man Tickets Confirmation #:
====================================================
Who’s next?
I guess now I should figure out just how long I’m staying for, how I’m getting out there and what I’m doing for shelter. I still have my water jugs from last time. This year I definately need to rig up a collection pond for greywater; dumping it into tupperware containers laying out in the sun didn’t cause it to evaporate too fast. We wound up duct taping the sorrid mess shut and dumping it into a dumpster in Salt Lake City somewhere.
This reminds me, I haven’t practiced with my poi in a number of months. Nevertheless, there will be plenty of other fire to watch out there.
P.S. Electroluminescent wire is damn cool stuff, it’s also damn expensive stuff.
Jun 10th, 2006 by bwann
A long time ago I ran across an awesome real-time flight tracker website and never could find it again. Usually whenever I tried googling for it, I usually found sites that were trying to sell me tickets or give me arrival times. I finally found what I was looking for, Flight Aware. It’s a website with a nice feel, and more importantly, useful information. It will also show you a snapshot of every flight in the US at any given time. The animated flight maps is interesting to, shows the major airways going to Europe, Asia, the Caribbean, and a few scant flights to Hawaii. Here’s my IAD->DFW flight from Saturday.
Jun 9th, 2006 by bwann
At some point this afternoon I woke up, thinking I was still in the hotel. I didn’t recognize where I was (my own bedroom), and it really scared me for a minute.
Tonight I took a drive along 360 and went to Trudy’s. Oh. My. God. Hot salsa and queso has never tasted so good. I gobbled down two baskets of chips and two bowls of salsa. All is right in the world again.
I have a serious urge to go to Europe now. Jason is running around in Amsterdam now, Teep will be there next week. It would be so awesome to meet up with one or both of them over there. While I was gone, my passport got delivered surprisingly early, and was already returned to the passport agency by USPS by the time I got back. I have no idea what it’s going to take to get it shipped back to me. Maybe now is a good time to pick up French or German.
Jun 9th, 2006 by bwann
4:30 AM EDT: What time I woke up to go to IAD.
12:00 PM CDT: Landed in Austin.
37 C (98.6 F): The temperature in Austin when I got off the plane.
23 days, 6 hours: How long I was parked at the airport.
I’m beat. As soon as I got in the plane at IAD, I fell asleep and even slept through the takeoff. About an hour later I woke up to find a cute blonde asleep in the seat next to me, which was nice. She was married, I saw a double wedding ring. I wasn’t as fortunate on the DFW->AUS flight, I was wedged up by some fat woman. I promptly got my hair cut even before I made it home. My apartment feels so strange!
Jun 8th, 2006 by bwann
Aaaaaaaaaaaaagh, still in Virginia! My trip was originally extended from Monday to Thursday. I was up all night Wednesday night tearing down our old cage and doing some work so there’d be no reason to extend my trip again. Maintenance work went sideways this morning, so here I am leaving Friday. All I can do is step aside and be amused at the situation. I’ll believe it when I’m at AUS, hunting for my truck in the parking lot. I don’t care about staying another night, I just have to get out of the damn datacenter to where there’s sun, warmth, and quiet.
May 28th, 2006 by bwann
Here I am in Ashburn, Virginia. I’ve been here for eleven days now, since May 17, for work. If all goes to plan, I should be flying back in eight more days. It’s been a hard week, with some very long exhausting hours. I finally caught up on my sleep over the past couple of days and feel a lot better now. I’ve spent all day in the hotel catching up on Lost and being lazy in general. That’s an odd thing to say, since I’ve spent all last week in a datacenter, rarely seeing daylight. But at the hotel, there’s no constant loud noise of fans and air handlers, I’m not on a schedule, not lifting boxes around, and not on my feet.
Yesterday we wandered into downtown DC for a few hours and wandered around the mall. The Air & Space Museum was closed as soon as we go there, but we got in some time at the National Museum of Natural History. I need to come out to spend a weekend at the mall and check out all the buildings. It was a great day for wandering, nice weather. I didn’t expect we’d be going to DC, so I didn’t bring my cameras with me.
May 14th, 2006 by bwann
iTerm sucks. I’ve had it with it, I’ve switched back to Terminal.app. I think the whole reason I switched to begin with was because iTerm did transparency support. I spend all my time with my head buried in terminal windows and it’s handy to see what’s behind the window. Terminal.app has since added that feature. I have no use for tabs or bookmarks, I always have multiple terminal windows open anyways because I want to see both at the same time. Neither seem to handle foreign character sets very well when I’m using UTF-8.
With iTerm, I’ve been fighting with some text click-and-drag “feature” that always bites me in the ass by doing things with text that I’m not expecting. I don’t know what triggers it, and it seems there is no way to turn it off either. I’ll go to highlight some text to copy, then some green icon appears next to it, and it tries to drag a huge chunk of text with it. I have to be careful where I release, or I’ll dump it back into my command prompt, irc, or some other window. The last straw was when I copied and pasted an email from a unix system via iTerm into a web form. The bloody app copied all the whitespace over too, resulting in a horribly wrapped post and missing new line feeds.
