Sunday, October 29th

Into Africa

Looks like I'll be sent to Africa again, in November. This time it's Namibia. I'll probably be spending the whole time in Windhoek, the capital. The country is heavily German, and there is a German brewery in the capital. That will be a little consolation, I suppose.



Namibia was last in the news as the birthplace of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's baby. Apparently they paid off the government to prevent the press from even entering the country.
Jim on 10.29.06 @ 12:55 PM ET [link]


Sunday, October 22nd

WJF Montage Video

Here's a nice montage video of the World Juggling Federation championships. Amazing stuff.
Jim on 10.22.06 @ 04:19 PM ET [link]


Flash 9 for Linux

Finally there's a (pre-release) version of the Flash plug-in for Linux that doesn't have audio/video sync problems. Hooray! I can finally watch YouTube and Google videos without cringing at the sync. Download version 9 here: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer9.html.
Jim on 10.22.06 @ 04:16 PM ET [link]


Friday, October 6th

CQ

I put my home-made dipole antenna up yesterday, and tried calling my first CQ ("seek you") in morse code on the 40m band at 7110 KHz with my powerful 2W transmitter. No responses. But the 40m band was filled with those annoying international broadcast stations, so I'm not surprised that I didn't get my first QSO (contact).

Then, this morning I decided to pull the antenna down to put some loops in the coax as a makeshift 1:1 balun. Since a dipole antenna is a balanced system and the coax into my transmitter/receiver is an unbalanced system, you need a balun to prevent the RF from the antenna from radiating off the coax shield.

That project was simple enough, but I couldn't get the antenna back up in the trees. It was strung up there with 30-lb salt-water fishing line, but I actually broke it pulling it over the branches. One trip to Home Despot later and I've come up with a complicated system of ropes and pulleys, pulled over tall branches with fishing line. I hate antennas.

Maybe another QSO attempt tomorrow.
Jim on 10.06.06 @ 08:08 PM ET [link]


Sunday, October 1st

3GHz

I was pleasantly surprised this week when someone delivered a brand new Dell PC to my office at work. Apparently I was next on the upgrade rotation. The new machine is quite slick - a 3GHz Xeon processor, dual-head Nvidia graphics card, 19-inch LCD, 200+ GB SATA hard drive and 2GB of RAM. This replaces my 7-year-old 800 MHz Dell that was having memory problems.

Believe it or not, our IT guy actually asked me for my domain password. He said he wanted to "customize" the PC for me. I said no thanks, and immediately wiped Windows XP from the hard drive and installed Linux.

Now I have 2 LCDs, both connected to the dual-head video card, and Xinerama spreading out my desktop across both displays. GLX even works. Very nice. In fact, I get 3 screens when I put my old laptop next to this setup, and run Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse across the two machines. Very cool.
Jim on 10.01.06 @ 12:12 PM ET [link]



Email: jim@jimandbarb.DELETETHISPART.net
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