Tag Archives: SLAARC

2014/08/11 (M) SLAARC/WordPress

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Some of the members of SLAARC are former Detroit Edison employees (now DTE Energy) and one of them (Bruce, W8RA) currently works for Intercontinental Transmission Company (ITC).  Bruce was curious what size transformer we had and said that there were likely numbers on it that I could read with a pair of binoculars.  I went out this morning to check, but the only info on the transformer can is a metal plate that is too small and illegible to read from the ground even with our fairly good binoculars.

Darryll (DCM Heating & Cooling) had not shown up or called by 10:30 AM.  His work doesn’t make a mess of our yard or house, at least it hasn’t yet, so it is less of a concern that he is not here working today than it was with the landscaping.  When he left Thursday he had a short list of parts he needed to get and perhaps could not do that until this morning.  Or he may have gotten emergency service requests, which take priority over new installations.  Still, we would like to have the new HVAC work completed in the next week or so to make sure it is done ahead of the natural gas hookup.

As part of that work I have to complete some of the electrical pieces, finish dry-walling the utility closet, and continue cleaning, repairing, and organizing the garage while we have the storage pod.  I then need to get to work on a long list of bus projects.  I also have a lot of desk/computer work to do and I prefer to do that when I know I can settle in for a long stretch.  I tend not to be in the right frame of mind for desk work when I do not know if/when contractors are going to show up.  It’s turned out to be a busy, and in some ways complicated, summer that way.  Darryll called late morning to say they would be back first thing Wednesday morning.  That information allowed me to adjust my expectations and settle in for a long day and evening at my computer.

My main focus was working on the page content for the new SLAARC WordPress website, which occupied me until dinnertime with some e-mail mixed in.  After dinner I started uploading blog posts beginning with the one for July 7th.  I decided that I would not select and upload photos for most of the posts in July and early August and instead create more extensive gallery posts for the landscaping work and the garage/HVAC project.

One of the things I have noticed in the past week is that our Internet connection seems to be faster, or at least my e-mail processes much quicker than it used to.  That could be the result of the AT&T repair on the 4th, which ended up moving us to entirely new wire pairs, or a change that AT&T made to our DSL service back on the 3rd (when it kept going off temporarily), or it could be that QTH upgraded their e-mail server system, or some combination of these.  Whatever the case, it seems to be an improvement.

Phil from Precision Grading called at noon to see if he could stop by sometime after 3 PM today.  It was raining gently at the time but when he called back a little after 3 PM the rain had finally opened up into a sustained downpour.  He had an 8 AM appointment in Hell (Michigan) and we agreed that tomorrow morning after his appointment would probably be a much better time for him to stop by.

We ordered a “cat tent” the other day and it showed up this afternoon.  We opened it and set up in the living room with the “door” tied open so the cats could explore the inside.  They were wary, but did go in briefly.  It’s kind of like a back-packing tent but all the fabric, including the floor, is mesh.  We thought the floor would be a solid material, but it’s not.  It will be OK for use on our deck at home, but seems less suitable for use on the ground when we are RVing.  We intended to use it for both so we are not sure if we are going to keep it.

For dinner Linda made a tomato-onion-mushroom ragu and served it over a three rice blend with a dark mixed greens salad on the side.  Later she served fresh strawberries with Lotus brand cookies and dark chocolate with bits of almond and sea salt.  Seriously, what’s not to like about that?

 

2014/08/09 (S) WP User Accounts

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We went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon for the first time in several weeks after which we visited with Chuck Spera at his shop in Novi.  A while back I helped him retrieve an RV sofa/bed that he purchased from Pat and Vickie Lintner in Osceola, Indiana (near Elkhart).  He had removed the old couch from his Liberty bus conversion and installed this new (to them) one.  He wanted to show us the result and we wanted to see it.  We sat and chatted for a while about bus conversions and then left him to work on his race car while we finished a morning errand.

We loaded our weeks’ worth of recyclables in the car before we went to breakfast and headed to Recycle Livingston from Chuck’s before returning home and having a bite of lunch (we do not eat much for breakfast at the restaurant in South Lyon).

I worked the rest of the day on cleaning up the SLAARC portion of the spreadsheet I created for generating usernames and passwords for WordPress websites.  I had just received an updated roster from the treasurer, Paul (N8BHT), and had to bring my spreadsheet up-to-date before creating WordPress users.  A portion of each of the organization websites I am creating will be restricted to current members and require a username and password to gain access.  Each user account, in turn, must be tied to a unique e-mail account.  It’s been a bit of work to set up and I am far from done at this point.  While I was working on the SLAARC info I realized that I had not finished the same work for the other two organizations so I worked on that as well.

The last few weeks have been physically and mentally demanding and we both needed and enjoyed the easier days we had yesterday and today and the one we plan to have tomorrow when a long-time friend and co-worker of Linda’s is coming to the new house for her first visit.  We watched another episode of Peroit on our Apple TV before turning in for the night.

 

2014/07/19 (S) A Busy Day

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At 7:30 AM we were about to leave for our usual Ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon when we realized some of the landscaping crew was already in the back yard.  I talked briefly with Steve to see if he had any questions for us and to let him know we would be gone for the morning.  We arrived at the Senate Coney Island a little later than usual to find a big group, some of whom were not regular attendees.  We would normally have lingered and enjoyed conversation over coffee, but we needed to get to Ann Arbor for a quick visit and to pick up my socket wrench toolbox from our son.

When we arrived at Brendan and Shawna’s house Madeline was outside pushing her push toy around the front yard.  As soon as she saw us she took off down the sidewalk towards the park.  Shawna retrieved her and got her stroller ready while Brendan and I transferred things out of and in to my car.  We then walked to Burn’s Park where Madeline played for about 45 minutes before we headed back to their house.  We had hugs all around and left.  We stopped at the Whole Foods Market in our way back to US-23 and then headed for home.

Back at the house, four landscapers were working, including Steve, and lots was getting done.  Hurray!  I got busy working on the electrical sub-panel in the garage while Linda made a run to the recycling center.  When she got back she did a load of laundry, which is normally my job, while she cleaned the lower level of the house.

I had to make a trip to Lowe’s for electrical parts and Linda had to make one in the evening to buy some 15 Amp single-pole circuit breakers, but I managed to get the old sub-panel removed, the wires labeled, the new panel hung, and all but one wire reconnected.  That wire needs to be replaced and I will do that first thing in the morning.  We turned the breaker on in the basement that feeds power to the sub-panel in the garage, turned on the main breaker in the sub-panel, and then turned each branch circuit breaker and checked to see that it was working correctly.

The reason Linda had to go get 15 Amp circuit breakers is that I discovered the old sub-panel had 14 gauge (AWG) wires “protected” by 20 Amp circuit breakers.  14 AWG wires are only rated to carry 15 Amps.  If allowed to carry more than that for any length of time they will overheat which could melt the wire insulation and lead to a short or worse, arcing, which can start a fire.  I will be placing those circuits on 15 Amp breakers in the morning.

 

20140713 (N) Pack-Rat

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Guilty as charged.  I am one of those guys who likes my stuff; it’s one of the main reasons we are not full-time RVers.  In order to get the garage and library ready for Darryll, and not trash the house in the process, we checked online for portable storage units.  We decided to order one from 1-800-Pack-Rat.  They were slightly less expensive than PODS, but the main factor was their ability to deliver a 16-foot long unit on Wednesday this coming week.  That will give us Thursday, Friday, and Saturday to clear enough stuff out of the garage to store the materials for Darryll and give him the space he needs to work.

Linda got a call from Butch at Service Motors to let her know they were back home from the Crosley Automobile Club national meet in Wauseon, Ohio and to see if she was available to come down tomorrow to finish up some critical accounting tasks related to the sale of most of their businesses assets.  The purchasers were in Wauseon for the rally and arrived at the business as I was chatting with Butch.  They plan to load all of the stuff they have bought into the five vehicles they brought with them and leave sometime on Tuesday, so Linda will be there mid-morning tomorrow and probably be home by 9:00 PM.  It will be a 15 hour day for her; 8 hours of driving and 7 hours of accounting, but she can/will do it.  I would normally go along, if for no other reason than to keep her company and share the driving, but I expect to have landscapers here tomorrow (and the rest of the week) and need to be here to interact with them.  Besides, there isn’t anything useful I can do at Service Motors at the moment so I would just be in the way and twiddling my thumbs.

We were both tired this morning and slept in a little later than normal.  That meant a later breakfast, which meant we skipped lunch and had an early dinner.  That, in turn allowed me to have dinner before going to our monthly Ham radio club meeting in South Lyon.

The morning overcast gave way to scattered clouds and blue skies on pleasant northwest winds, bringing cooler temperatures and lower humidity.  It was a perfect day for sitting on the (north facing) deck and doing sit down things, and that is exactly what we did.  Linda spent some time reading Veganomicon while I finished up a couple of blog post drafts and reviewed the SLAARC/WP website in advance of having to demonstrate it this evening for the ham radio club.  The site still needs work.  Some pages still need content, I found a few spelling errors, and I still need to resize photos so they take up less disk space and load faster.  The login feature is still working and the roster/database still displays correctly, if somewhat inelegantly.  But it’s functional enough to give the club members a preview and I will only demonstrate one photo gallery with a limited number of images so it shouldn’t be too sluggish.

By mid-afternoon it was warm enough that I decided to work in my office and get a few more blog posts uploaded to our WordPress site.  Linda made a “pasta e fagioli” recipe from Veganomicon and added some chopped dark leafy greens she had on hand.  She needed a dry white wine for the recipe and opened our bottle of Semi-Dry Riesling from Chateau Chantal, a gift from our daughter’s recent trip to the Traverse City area.  It was a little dry for my taste as a before dinner wine but paired very nicely with the meal.

I got to South Lyon just ahead of the 6:30 PM start of our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) monthly meeting.  The business meeting was short.  We then had a lengthy presentation/discussion of our ARRL Field Day participation followed by a short preview of the new WordPress website.  It was generally well received and I got a few good suggestions during the discussion.

When I got home around 9 PM we had chocolate cake (vegan, of course) with raspberry sauce and relaxed for a while before turning in for the night.

 

2014/07/10 (R) Home And Garden

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On Tuesday I agreed to demonstrate the new SLAARC WordPress website at our ham radio club meeting this coming Sunday.  I would like to spend some time working on the site between now and then but it is well enough along at this point to give folks a preview at the meeting, time permitting.  My current goal is to unlock the public portions of the website by the August meeting and then supply each of the members with their username and password shortly thereafter.  My “stretch goal” is to have the site set up so a member’s username and password also allows them to edit their roster record in the Participant’s Database.  It’s a stretch goal because it is unlikely I will meet it unless I really stretch myself, which is to say, I put aside a lot of other tasks to concentrate on this on, or I work more/harder and sleep less.  Yeah, like that’s going to happen.

In fact, it was a nice enough day today that we both decided to work in the yard.  I concentrated on pruning branches, mostly dead, from two fir trees and cutting them up into manageable size pieces for the fire pit.  Linda took some time to weed the plant beds on the east end of the house and the juniper beds behind the garage.  By mid-afternoon I’d had enough of this work for the day and turned my attention towards reorganizing our RV-related computer files.

Steve (Village Landscape Development) showed up mid-afternoon with the excavator and re-positioned several large boulders on the west retaining wall so one of his crews could continue working on the walls first thing tomorrow morning.  He also brought samples of three different color bricks so I could select one for the front sidewalk.  The one I selected is slightly darker than the pre-cast steps and similar to the reddish color mortar used on the main house bricks.  The pavers will be solid, rectangular, and installed flat in a herringbone pattern on a 45 degree bias.  We also discussed placing one or two medium size boulders on either side of the upper steps to keep folks from stepping off of the porch or the side of the stairs.

For dinner we had a large salad with lots of “extras” and then opened a bottle of NV Cesar Florido Moscatel Dorado.  This is a sherry from Jerez (Spain) that our son and daughter-in-law got me for Father’s Day.  It was recommended by their friend, Jorge Lopez-Chavez, who manages the wine department at The Produce Station in Ann Arbor, MI.  We each had a small glass (it is 17.5% alcohol by volume) served at ~50 degrees F and agreed that was very good.

After dinner I finished re-organizing our RV-related computer files, backed them up to our NAS units, and the copied them to my Windows 8.1 laptop.  We watched the last episode of season four of Doc Martin using our Amazon Video account.

 

2014/06/27 (F) Family Finances

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Linda H. was up very early to go to work.  We would not have heard her get up and leave if not for the three dogs, which make quite a ruckus anytime someone comes or goes from the house.  Marilyn, Linda, and I got up a few hours later and had toast and coffee for breakfast.  I worked at my computer until 9:30 AM when we had to get ready to leave for an 11 AM appointment with our financial advisor.

We have worked with John Christensen for at least a decade.  We first met John at A. G. Edwards when my parents’ stockbroker decided to leave and John was assigned to handle their accounts.  We liked him right away and ended up moving all of accounts there, including accounts for our children.  My sister and Marilyn eventually opened accounts with John as well.  A. G. Edwards was an excellent local brokerage that unfortunately got absorbed by Wachovia.  Wachovia ultimately failed and the remnants were acquired by Wells Fargo Advisors.  John and his administrative assistant, Maggie Smith, had an opportunity to move to a new office being opened by Stifel-Nicholas in O’Fallon, Missouri and our family moved all of our business to S-N along with them.

We usually manage to make at least one trip to the St. Louis area each year, often around this time, and we always try to arrange a meeting with John if our schedules permit.  We arrived at 11AM, talked for an hour and then walked to Bristol’s for lunch.  Maggie joined us, which was great.  We have interacted with her for as long as we have worked with John, but do not know her as well on a personal level.  We got to know her a little better today.  Linda and I both had a grilled vegetable platter with asparagus, mushrooms, red and green bell peppers, and sliced green tomatoes.  They were some of the best restaurant vegetables we have ever had.

We returned to John’s office around 1:00 PM and spent another couple hours going over reports, plans, and projections before finely making a few decisions about our portfolio.  All told we were there for four hours.  I don’t know if that’s typical for financial advisors, but we appreciate that John has extensive reports prepared when we arrive, has already developed recommendations, and takes the time to go over everything with us.  Most of our financial interactions are easily handled by phone and secure e-mail during the year so having our financial advisor three states away is not a problem, especially as John and Maggie are real people with whom we have a real, face-to-face, relationship.

By the time we left the afternoon rush hour was well under way.  St. Louis is a midwest city with east coast ties.  Normal business hours here are 8 AM to 4 PM which corresponds to 9 AM to 5 PM in New York.  Kansas City, Missouri, only 240 miles west of St. Louis on the Kansas border, is a decidedly more western city, and the southern part of the state, which borders Arkansas, Tennessee, and Kentucky, is decidedly southern.  We fought our way back to Illinois through stop-and-go traffic and by the time we got back to Glen Carbon Ron and Mary had arrived from Pennsylvania.  Linda H. got home from work not long after we arrived and Mike and Clayton arrived not long after that.  They live and work in St. Louis area.  Linda, Marilyn, and Ron are siblings and Mike is their nephew.  Their other nephew, Rick, was unable to attend.  Marilyn had spent the afternoon making vegan Sloppy Joe’s.  For dinner we had a nice summer meal of green salad, Sloppy Joe’s, and chips, followed by Linda’s vegan double chocolate torte, accompanied by white and red wines.

By the time we finished dinner, wine, and conversation we had all had a long day.  For us it was a day of family finances and family.  When we finally went to bed we did not even watch an episode of Doc Martin.  As an aside, today was the SLAARC pre-setup for the ARRL Field Day event.  The main setup will be tomorrow morning and the operating event begins at 2 PM EDT.  It is the single largest, and most public, amateur (ham) radio event of the year.  We are missing it for the second year in a row because family comes first.

 

2014/06/25 (W) Summer Start

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I am normally aware of the two equinoxes and the two solstices each year and take note of their passing.  I just realized today that the summer solstice happened four days ago (on June 21st).  I checked several online sources and discovered that it occurred at 6:51 AM in the Eastern Time Zone, although it wasn’t clear if that was standard or daylight savings time.  Since that time the hours of daylight have been declining slightly each day.  Perhaps that is why I am not getting as much accomplished as I need to.  Although the summer vacation season begins Memorial Day weekend and runs through the Labor Day weekend, and climatologically “summer” corresponds to this, solar summer runs from the summer solstice to the autumnal equinox.

Linda went to the bakery today while I sat at home and waited to see if the landscape contractor would show up.  I left a message for him at 9 AM and had not heard anything by 9:30, so I headed to South Lyon to help move the SLAARC Field Day equipment out of the water tower and into Steve’s (N8AR) trailer.  We were done by 11:15 and I was about to head to Scotty’s (AC8IL) shop to return a couple of chargers when the landscaper called to let me know they would be at the house around noon.

Steve, who owns Village Landscape Development, showed up with four young men who looked up to the initial tasks that needed to be accomplished.  Three of them were not long out of high school, but the forth one, Lucas, was a few years older and more experienced.  He was the crew chief.  I indicated that we wanted to save four hosta plants, a large group of day lilies, and a large decorative grass plant, and had to show Steve where I wanted them re-planted.  I also had to indicate where I wanted the blocks from the existing retaining walls stacked.  Once that was sorted out I went inside and left them alone to do their work.

Mid-afternoon I heard the sound of Keith’s riding lawn mower and went out to check on his progress as well as the landscaping crew.  I had loaned our string trimmer and wheel barrow to the landscaping crew to clear the two slopes above the retaining walls and move the plants they were transplanting, but they needed Keith to mow the flat grass areas where they be working.  I flagged Keith down and got that sorted out with him and then went back inside and left everyone to their work.

I was not as productive during the afternoon as I would have liked to be.  I worked at my desk dealing with e-mails, RVillage groups, and computer apps, but having people at the house working is always somewhat distracting.  Linda eventually got home from the bakery and we settled into conversation about our days that took my mind off of the landscape work and other projects, at least for a while.

Steve had indicated earlier in the day that he would be back in the evening to check on the progress of the work.  His original target was 7 PM but he called around then to say that it would be around 9 PM.  He typically has 3 or 4 crews working, weather permitting.  The persistent rains this spring have carried over into summer and created big challenges for builders and landscapers.  To catch up, he puts in 14 -16 hour days.  When he got to our house at 9:20 PM there was just enough light to see and we made a quick inspection of what had been accomplished during the day.  Considering that the work did not really get underway until 1 PM, he seemed satisfied that the crew had put in a good effort and followed the directions he gave them.  That was good enough for us too.

 

2014/06/21 (S) Happy Birthday

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Today was my dad’s 89th birthday and I called to wish him a happy one.  He was 18 years old on D-Day when he landed at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France; June 6th, 1944.  His unit suffered 90% casualties during the invasion, but he survived to celebrate his 19th birthday in a foxhole in France.  Not long after that he was wounded during the push inland and spent 6 months recovering in a hospital in England before returning to duty.  He was awarded a Purple Heart for is injuries.  Only a few years ago his unit also received medals of commendation, most of them posthumously.

For all of my youth and most of my adulthood he has not discussed the events of June, 1944.  He tried to see Saving Private Ryan but had to leave the theater.  He said the invasion scene was the most realistic he had ever seen in a movie, too close to the truth for him to watch, but that the real thing was far more horrible than any film could capture.  He still doesn’t talk about his combat experiences, but in his later years he has found a great sense of pride in his former military service.

He was recalled to active duty during the Korean Conflict, but did not serve in the Korean theater.  He had finished his bachelor’s degree in civil engineering and was assigned to an Army Corps of Engineers unit where he taught soldiers how to construct various kinds of bridges and other structures in the field.

When I talked to him today he said he had come across some interesting statistics recently regarding World War II.  During the course of the war, which I took to mean from the attack on Pearl Harbor to the global end of hostilities, 16 million American men and women served on active duty.  Of those 16 million, slightly less than one (1) million are still alive today, and the youngest of them, like my dad, are in their late 80’s.  Millions more worked on the civilian side of the war effort, and I suspect the statistics for that group are very similar.

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We went to breakfast in South Lyon with our ham radio club friends as we do most Saturday’s.  The group varies in size from week to week; sometimes it’s as small as eight and sometimes, like today, over 20.  Our club was holding a volunteer examiner (VE) testing session at 9 AM, as we do on the 4th Saturday of most months, so a few folks had to leave early to run the session.  After breakfast five of us went to the Field Day site at the Lyon Township Atchison Memorial Park.  We helped Steve (N8AR) unload his riding lawn mower and four of us moved heavy metal picnic tables out of the way so he could mow the field where the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) will set up on Friday for the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) Field Day event.

Field Day is a 24 hour operating event to showcase the capabilities of amateur (ham) radio nationwide.  It starts at 2 PM EDT on the last Saturday in June and ends at 2 PM EDT the next day.  This is the second year in a row that we will miss Field Day, so we wanted to at least help with some of the site preparations

We finally had a day without rain and decided to work in the yard.  We have a lot of trees and bushes on our property that are in need of serious trimming, including the removal of dead limbs and branches.  We also have a lot of organic debris from previous trimmings lying around the yard in various places.

While Linda made a run to the recycling center I started trimming a red honeysuckle bush in front of our living room that was badly overgrown and blocked our view of the driveway from one of the windows.  When she got back from the recycling center we worked on a tree that had grown out into our pull-through driveway and down towards the ground, making it difficult-to-impossible for Keith to mow the lawn under and around the tree.

While we were working on this tree Linda found a Painted Turtle resting in the shade under one of the branches that almost reached the ground.  We wondered if it was the same one we had rescued a month ago as it tried to cross the road in front of our house.  I had relocated that turtle to the northeast corner of our yard near our neighbor’s pond.  We worked around the turtle for a while and enjoyed observing it, but once I was done with the trimming I relocated it to the northeast corner of the yard by the pond.  I then worked on another, smaller tree near the driveway that had a lot of dead branches.  We had several other trees on that same side of the house that had low hanging branches so I trimmed those as well.  I then moved to the area just northwest of the house and did the same for a couple of trees there.

We gathered up all of the trimmings and separated them by green (with leaves) and dead (dry and able to burn).  We hauled the dry trimmings back to our recently constructed fire pit where Linda made a pile of kindling from the smallest/driest material and started the fire.  I kept trimming trees and cutting up larger limbs into smaller pieces for the burn pile while Linda hauled them to the fire pit.  It was almost 5 PM by the time we quit working.  We were tired and a bit sore, but it felt good to have accomplished tasks that needed to be done.  There is a lot more to do, of course; we are learning just how much land five acres really is, especially with as many trees as we have.  It will take more than one summer to fully prune our arbor, but that’s OK, we have time.

If the weather holds we will likely work in the yard again tomorrow.  Keith will probably be here on Monday to mow the grass and we need to make sure all of the larger trimmings have been picked up before he arrives.  I also want to prune our pear tree and apple tree before we get any deeper into summer.  They both produced abundant and usable fruit last fall, but we were unable to reach most of it because the trees are badly shaped with too much tall, vertical growth in the center.  But that is for another day; tonight we finished season 2 of Doc Martin and started season 3.

 

2014/06/07 (S) D-Day Plus 70

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Today was the 70th anniversary of the invasion of Normandy; D-Day.  The youngest soldiers in that invasion, if they are still alive like my father, are now in their late 80’s.  The event is quickly slipping into history; in another decade, more or less, there will not be anyone left with a firsthand knowledge of the events of that day, or indeed of the whole of WW II.

As we do most Saturdays when we are home we went to our ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon.  We meet at a local Coney Island restaurant and we go for the company and conversation, not the food.  The service is excellent, however, as we have the same server every week and she knows everyone’s usual order and keeps the coffee flowing.  Linda’s standard breakfast is coffee and toasted rye bread with orange marmalade, although occasionally she has oatmeal.  My standard breakfast is coffee and a toasted English muffin with strawberry jam, but today I had a toasted bagel.  Sometimes you just have break with tradition.  On rare occasion I have the oatmeal, but it’s not really cooked the way I like.  When I want to splurge I have hash browned potatoes, cooked until a bit crispy, which I smother in ketchup laced with Tabasco sauce.  That dish is as much about the spicy ketchup as it is about the potatoes.

When we got back to the house Linda headed off to the grocery store while I put a load of laundry in the washing machine and got busy prepping the bus for travel.  The temperature had risen into the 70’s but all of the bus tires were in the shade, a good situation for checking and adjusting the tire pressures.  I removed the Pressure Pro sensors from all of the bus and car tires, checked and adjusted the cold pressures, and put the sensors back on, re-establishing the baseline settings for alarm purposes.

We had quite a bit of rain on our last outing and the bays were a bit musty so I opened all of them to let them air out.  I also opened all of my tool boxes for the same reason.  The inverter bay door has screened openings with shields on the inside that are open on the bottom.  The large shield by the GenSet radiator is secured with three screws across the top, none of which were holding.  I looked around in the garage for some suitable drywall anchors to put in the holes but I did not have (or could not find) any the right size.  A quick trip to Lowe’s, with stops at Walmart and Meijer’s for grocery items, and I had some viable options.  I had to fuss with it for a while, but I got it secured.  It was a small project to be sure but one that had been bugging me for quite some time and it felt good to put it in the done column.

Linda spent the early afternoon working on the accounting records for our GLCC chapter and then turned her attention to cooking meals for the upcoming week.  For rally situations, where we are away from our coach much more than we are there, it is easier for her to prepare dishes in advance that can be quickly and easily re-heated rather than cook from scratch.  I called Elkhart Campground and made a reservation for Sunday and Monday evenings.  Over the course of the afternoon and evening we selected clothes for the week, gathered up various items that travel with us, and loaded everything on board.  I positioned the Honda Element behind the motorcoach and connected them together for towing.  We will have a few last minute things to put on board in the morning but the final loading should be quick and easy.  It was a relaxed loading process and as we sat on the rear deck enjoying a glass of wine we reflected on how glad we were to have found this house and decided to move.  We had some of the vegetable chili for dinner and then watched Season 2, Episode 2 of Doc Martin before turning in for the evening.

 

2014/05/31 (S) End of May

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We were both finally feeling well enough to go to our ham radio club breakfast this morning in South Lyon.  We picked up a graduation card at the drug store on the way home and had a quiet late morning and early afternoon that included a light lunch and a nap.  Linda had made a spread earlier from leftover lentils, chilled it, and served it on slices of Italian bread for lunch.

Nickolas, the son of my long-time friend and colleague Kristine, recently graduated from Central Michigan University with a double bachelor’s degree in psychology and family studies.  Today was the backyard party to celebrate this wonderful accomplishment.  Kristine and I first met as doctoral students in the late 1990’s, so Linda and I have watched Nickolas grow up and blossom into a very cool young adult.

On the way home we detoured to downtown Brighton to walk around, absorb the Saturday night Brighton “vibe,” and scope out restaurants for a Tuesday get-together with Kate.  On a Friday or Saturday evening this time of year Downtown Brighton is alive with people, especially if the weather is pleasant.  We photographed various restaurants that looked interesting so we could remember their names once we got home and research their menu options and prices.  We decided to try The Pound, assuming that choice is OK with Kate, based on a couple of interesting full-meal salads and $2 Tuesday appetizers and beers.  They have an open air covered roof deck.  We will try to sit there if the weather is agreeable and seating is available.

Linda has the Amazon Video app on her iPad and we watched Season 1, Episode 2 of Doc Martin.  We (I) “discovered” Doc Martin while we were in Florida and had a good OTA TV signal from the University of Florida Gainesville PBS station.  The series has completed at least six seasons of eight episodes each, so it will take us a while to watch the whole thing, if we ever do.

 

2014/05/04 (N) Northwest Winds

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The weather yesterday was mostly cloudy with occasional light rain and the winds came up strong starting in the afternoon.  They tapered off by bedtime but resumed a hard blow this morning with low, puffy, white clouds streaming in from the northwest and making the trees dance.  It was a brighter morning than we have had most of the week as the sun played hide-n-seek with the clouds.  The temperature remained cool, making for a brisk day, but it was a nice change from the cool, overcast dreariness of the past week.  Except for Thursday, when the high temperature is supposed to hit 80, the daily high temps will be around 60 all week.

Linda made her scrumptious blueberry pancakes for breakfast and then went for a walk.  She had barely left the house when she returned, very excited, to tell me she had just seen a young albino deer running through our yard.  By the time I got outside it had moved on to the woods west of our property.  We often see the same deer day-after-day as they travel their circuit, so I also hope to see this one someday.

After checking in on the blogs I follow using the Feedly app on my iPad2 I made a couple of corrections to a recent blog post, approved a comment from our daughter-in-law (the first one has to be approved), and deleted the 59 spam comments that the Akismet plug-in/service trapped since last night.  I put a load of laundry in the washer and then spent some time looking online for a padded case for my new laptop computer and a replacement for one of our APC SmartUPS units that has failed.

With the move to tablet computers, the choice of laptops is diminishing, especially those with larger screens, and along with that fewer choices for accessories such as cases.  In the past 14 years I have always purchased larger roller cases, with separate cases for the computer that fit inside, as my laptop traveled with me every day everywhere I went.  I had the most recent of these cases with us in Florida and, after getting the computer/case and accessories out of it, I stored it in a closet (where it tended to be in the way).  The next time I touched it was when I unloaded it from the bus to bring back into the house.

It was clear from that experience that I do not need another roller case.  I do, however, want something that will protect my new laptop computer.  I think I have narrowed the choice down to the Everki Advanced or the Everki Lunar, both available through Amazon Prime.  The Advanced is very reasonably priced at under $40 and has generally favorable reviews, mentioning the ASUS “Republic of Gamers” (ROG) models in particular.  The Lunar has more storage space, and also has generally favorable reviews, but is over three times the price at just under $130.  Posts on the ASUS ROG Forum seem to favor one of the Everki backpack models, but I do not want a backpack style case.

Our failed APC uninterruptible power supply is a Smart-UPS SUA1000.  By trading it in on a SMT1000 we can save $75 off the retail price.  I need to confirm that the discounted price includes return shipping; the SUA1000 weighs 48 pounds.

I revised the RVillage Quick Start doc I created for the GLCC, CCO, and FTH RV clubs, making it generic for use by Bus Conversion Magazine or anyone else.  I then uploaded it to a new RVillage page on our website and revised a couple of other pages to link to the new one.  I then uploaded blog posts for the last three days.  I set up my new laptop in my office and installed seven more updates.

At breakfast yesterday I got a tip from Paul (N8BHT) on a used tower.  He e-mailed me the owner’s contact information later.  I called the owner, Wayne (KD8H), this afternoon and got a little more information about the tower.  It is an aluminum Heights Tower, 80 feet, with Fold-Over Kit (FOK) including the drive motor, a rotator and antenna mounting plate.  It is already on the ground and disassembled into sections.  Wayne is retired and I will likely go look at the tower tomorrow afternoon.  I e-mailed Paul (N8BHT), Mike (W8XH), and Steve (N8AR) to see if they were available to go with me.

Linda made lentil loaf for dinner with baked yams and fresh asparagus.  After dinner I drove to South Lyon for the May meeting of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club.  SLAARC usually meets on the 2nd Sunday of the month but pulls the May meetings forward a week to avoid Mother’s Day.  Our topic of discussion this evening was the upcoming ARRL Field Day operating event, which takes place the last full weekend in June.  We had a couple of new hams at the meeting and afterwards several of the guys helped Christine, KD8VEA, get the PL tone set correctly on her radio so she was able to participate in a group QSO with Steve (N8AR), Mike (W8XH), Fred (AC8VL), and myself on the drive home.  In spite of what many people think, including some older/former hams, amateur radio is alive and well in the North America and all over the world.

 

2014/05/03 (S) Ham It Up

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Today started with breakfast out and felt like we were finally starting to get back into the flow.  We drove to South Lyon for the Saturday morning breakfast gathering of our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club, as we do almost every Saturday morning when we at the house.  Steve (N8AR) gave me a lead on someone who might be willing to build our pole barn.  After breakfast we returned home and I walked Linda through the project I discussed yesterday with Steve for redoing the rear basement walkout retaining walls, drainage, and yard grading.

I worked on our blog and Linda worked on lunch preparations while we awaited the arrival of our daughter and son-in-law.  They have had Linda’s Honda Civic Hybrid since December and were returning it, so they drove two cars.  Linda got to visit with them in late February / early March, but I had not seen them since mid December.  We had a nice lunch of mixed greens salad and vegan Sloppy Joe’s with sweet gherkin pickles on the side.  Fresh strawberries and carrot cake cookies provided a sweet ending to the meal.  We had a nice visit.

Steve from Village Landscaping Development stopped by with a brochure, business card, and the project proposal written up on a more official estimating form.  We will take a few days to think about, but it’s a very good proposal and I am 99% certain we will hire him to do this work.  It would be nice to get it done in late May to early June, between The SKP Escapade and the GLAMARAMA rallies, but it may not be dry enough by then.  If not, it will have to wait until early July after we return from the installation ceremonies for Linda’s sister who is assuming one of the top leadership positions in the St. Louis Province of the Congregation (Sisters) of St. Joseph.

A little later Phil Jarrel, from Best Precision Grading, came by to take a second look at the site preparation and grading work for the pole barn.  We walked the site and agreed that I could/should change the orientation of the building just a bit from where it is currently staked.  We also discussed how to make sure the barn was located behind the front line of the house and talked through the permitting and construction process.  He did not have any builders to recommend, but he did recommend a concrete contractor for the pit and floor.

We did quite a few construction projects at the previous house over the years but the pole barn involves elements that are new to me, and I now have to deal with a Township for a land use permit and the County for building and grading permits.  I am fairly set on the size, location, and basic design/materials, but we not have settled on a builder or materials supplier.  Consequently, we still do not have an accurate total cost estimate.  Until everything is in place, and the cost is known, nothing can move forward.  Meanwhile, the days keep flipping over on the calendar.

 

2013/12/07-12 (S-R) The Celebrations Begin

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On Saturday morning I went to our local ham radio club breakfast as I usually do.  Linda stayed home, which is not usual, as I had a website meeting immediately following breakfast.  Club president Mike (W8XH) and I previewed the new club website for a small group that included the other two officers.  We provided them with logins so they could access the site, most of which is blocked from public view, and asked them to interact with it and provide feedback.

We had ordered garage door openers so each of our children could have one.  They arrived a couple of days earlier and we finally got around to programming them on Saturday afternoon.  They arrived just in time, too, as we were headed to Katie’s (grand-daughter #2) 17th birthday dinner that evening.  Our daughter (Meghan) and her husband (Chris, Katie’s dad) were there, as were our son (Brendan), his wife (Shawna), and their daughter (Madeline, grand-daughter #1).

Katie has developed quite a taste for sushi and selected Yotsuba in Ann Arbor, Michigan for her birthday meal.  Japanese restaurants were once a rare treat for us.  As with most restaurants that are not specifically vegan, or “vegan friendly” Japanese restaurants now pose a challenge for us.  But they had things we could eat, and they were very good.  Katie is very interested in science and decided she would like to start building a library with some quality leather-bound books in it.  She specifically requested Darwin’s On The Origin Of Species… and Linda was able to find a used, mint condition copy at Franklin Books (in New Jersey).

Brendan and Shawna had a social engagement after dinner so they left to put Madeline to bed.  Linda and I followed a short while later and did baby-sitting duty for a couple of hours until they returned.  By the time we got home it had been a long but very good day.

Sunday evening was the annual South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club holiday dinner which is held in lieu of our regular second Sunday of the month business meeting and technical program.  The club decided to try a new venue this year and selected the Zukey Lake Tavern near Pinckney, Michigan from among three candidates.  Although not located in South Lyon, we had a portion of the restaurant to ourselves that was sufficient to accommodate the 40 people who showed up.  We were also allowed to order from the menu and had sufficient wait-staff to efficiently take our orders and deliver our food.  Everyone seemed to enjoy themselves and like the food; at least they ate a lot of it!

Linda pulled her usual babysitting shift on Monday and I headed for Edwardsburg, Michigan to retrieve the bus.  I originally planned to winterize it and then drive to our friends’ place in Twelve Mile, Indiana to spend a couple of days tying up loose ends on the Zena auxiliary power generator project.  I was then going to take the bus to Martin Diesel in Defiance, Ohio to have them check, service, and adjust it before returning home.  As most of this work would be done outside, I decided to alter my plans when the weather forecast called for overnight low temperatures near zero (F) for most of the week.  Pat and Vickie Lintner from our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches chapter had once again offered the use of a spare bedroom at the house in Elkhart, Indiana so I took them up on that.  That allowed me to spend the later afternoon and early evening working with Michele Henry at Phoenix Paint on an article I was writing about the exterior renovation of our coach that was done by her shop from October 2011 to August 2012.  I grabbed a salad for dinner at the Martin’s grocery store on SR-19 on the north side of Elkhart, Indiana and then headed to the Lintners’ for the evening.  (BTW:  If you are in the Elkhart area and want a really nice salad, the Martin’s salad bar is fabulous.  They also have a deli counter where you can get hot items, including potatoes.  They have fountain and bottled soft drinks and a Starbucks Coffee, all conveniently located next to a two-level seating area where you can sit and eat, and they have free Wi-Fi if you want to sit and work.)

On Tuesday morning I finished prepping the bus for travel, hooked up the car, and left Phoenix Paint around mid-morning for the drive back to our house in Howell, Michigan.  I like to change up my route, so this time I took US-12 to I-69 to I-96 to M-59 to our house, with a stop at the Mobile Truck Stop on I-96 at M-52 before exiting onto M-59.  I arrived home mid-afternoon with a full tank of diesel fuel, parked and leveled the bus, and plugged it in.  Linda was in holiday shopping mode, so she wasn’t there when I arrived.

I spent the next couple of days working at my desk trying to get a few last minute things taken care of on various websites and straightening up papers.  When we are gone for a while we prefer not to come home to clutter and chaos.  Linda went to the bakery for the day on Thursday and I headed over to Micro-Center in Madison Heights, Michigan to purchase a Buffalo Technologies LinkStation 421e dual drive Network Attached Storage (NAS) enclosure and two Toshiba 3.0 TB hard disk drives.  This new NAS was an addition to our existing Buffalo Technologies LinkStation Pro Duo 1.0 TB RAID 1 NAS, which we planned to take with us in the bus.

The drives were very easy to install in the LS421e.  On power up the LS421e initially configured itself as a RAID 0 NAS, which means it combined the HDDs to appear as a single 6.0 TB drive.  The NAS Navigator 2 software that came with the unit made it fairly easy to manage the device and I reconfigured it as a 3.0 TB RAID 1 NAS, in which the two drives are mirror images of each other.  If one drive fails it can be replaced with a drive of the same or larger capacity and the new drive will become an exact mirror of the other one.  The process required some patience, however, as the RAID 1 configuration took approximately 10 hours per Terabyte, or 30 hours total, to configure itself.  The NAS Navigator 2 software tells you this in advance, so it doesn’t come as a surprise, but it is a very long time.  A bonus to the NAS Navigator 2 software is that it will manage all Buffalo Technologies LinkStation and TeraStations on the network, so I was able to use it to manage the existing LinkStation.  That was an unexpected bonus as the existing LinkStation was originally installed and managed from a workstation computer that is no longer in service.

2013_11_08-15 (F-R) Another Busy Week

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The second week of November was another one of those weeks where we were busy every day from the time I got up until the time we went to bed, but I don’t have a clear recollection of what I was doing each day as I did not always mark it on my calendar.  I think that is because I spent a lot of time at my computers working on WordPress websites and installing packages/updates.  Some days are very clear, however.

2013-11-08 (F) The “Eyes” Have It

We had managed to snag a couple of appointment times this morning to have our eyes checked by our long-standing optometrist at the Farmington Vision Clinic.  Linda’s eyes had not changed very much, but it had been a couple of years since she got new glasses, so she decided to get a pair.  I had been experiencing intermittent “wavy” patterns and was a bit concerned about that.  The exam did not indicate any issues with diabetes or glaucoma, so that was a relief.  The tentative diagnosis was “pre-migraine ocular disturbance” which was interesting because I was not experiencing any headaches, and rarely do.  The trigger may be something that I eat, perhaps caffeine or wine, so I may need to keep a food log.  Ugh.  I like writing about the dishes Linda prepares, but I don’t like “logging” my food intake.

Chuck is in the process of prepping their bus for southbound travel, so I met up with him for lunch.  He had also gotten connected to a guy in California whose older brother was living in Michigan when he passed away back in June.  The older brother was well known in the Prevost bus community, and had a converted coach stored in the N.E. suburbs of the Detroit Metro Area.  The surviving brother needed to deal with as part of his brother’s affairs, and Chuck had offered our assistance on Sunday.

2013_11_09 (S) Schramm’s Mead

But first we had to deal with Saturday, which started with our usual ham radio club breakfast in South Lyon, Michigan.  Attendance varies, but we had a big crowd of at least 20 people.  After breakfast we decided to drive over to Ferndale and find Schramm’s Mead.  I worked with Ken Schramm before I retired from Wayne RESA.  He’s still the TV / Multi-media Production Manager there, but outside of normal business hours he is a well-known expert on the subject of mead, having written a well-respected book on the subject, and speaking at international conventions.  He and his wife Jean and their daughter Alison have been working for over a year to get Schramm’s Mead open, and that finally happened about 6 weeks ago.  They are at 327 W. 9 Mile Rd. in Ferndale, Michigan.  The meadery is located in a very “happening” part of town just a short walk west of the intersection of 9 Mile Rd. and Woodward Avenue and should be a good location for them.  Parking was plentiful, with both paid and free options.  We sampled their complete line of currently available mead products and bought three bottles.  I have added a section to the Health & Food tab of this website on Wine & Mead and refer you there for more information about mead and the offerings from Schramm’s Mead.  Let me just say here “this is good stuff.”

2013_11_10 (N) Buses & Ham Radio

Sunday found me headed to Chuck’s house near South Lyon bright and early, or at least early.  We needed to meet the guy from California at the RV storage lot in Shelby Township, so it took an hour to get there.  He was waiting for us, let us in, and led us to the bus.  It was a 1997 (~) Prevost XL (40’) Royale Coach conversion with a Detroit Diesel Series 60 engine and 6-speed automatic transmission.  It appeared to be in good shape and Chuck and I set about figuring out its state.  The chassis batteries had been left “on” and were drained.  The house and generator batteries were also “on” but appeared to be in better shape.  It did not appear to have much fuel in the tank, but with the chassis batteries drained we couldn’t get accurate readings from any of the gauges.  We got the generator started, plugged in the 24V emergency chassis battery charger, turned the house batter chargers on, and set about finding the circuit breakers and switches seeing what worked.

After letting the generator/24V charger run for several hours the chassis batteries showed no sign of coming back to life.  We still had enough hours of daylight to do something about it.  We located a NAPA Auto Parts Store less than 2.5 miles from the storage yard and gave them a call.  They had 8 of the type battery we needed (12V Group 31).  We only needed four.  We pulled the old ones out of the bus and headed over.  By taking the old ones we did not have worry about disposal/recycling of them and avoided a “core charge.”  We installed the new batteries and the DD-60S fired right up.  That’s was a beautiful thing to hear.  The chassis and brake systems aired-up correctly and the gauges all came to life.  That’s was a beautiful thing to see.

The bus had about ¼ tank of fuel indicated, or about 40+ gallons, so we decided we did NOT need to drive it someplace to fuel it right that minute.  The bus was headed to Staley Coach in Nashville, TN at the end of the week and could stop for fuel early in the trip.

I had a ham radio club meeting at 6:30 PM, and needed to get dinner, so Chuck and I made our exit and headed back to his house.  I got home in time to change clothes but not sit down and eat.  Linda made sandwiches for us to eat as we drove to the meeting.

Our November ham radio club meeting is a significant one as we elect officers for the coming year.  Mike (W8XH) agreed to run for a 2nd term as president, Paul (N8BHT) agreed to run again for Treasurer, and I (K8BRF) agreed to run again for Vice-President.  Marty (KB8JIU) did not wish to run again as Secretary, and Harvey (AC8NO) agreed to run for that position, which he has held in the past.  There being only one candidate for each officer, the slate was declared elected.  The program for the evening was put on by Mike (W8XH) and Steve (N8AR).  They demonstrated the use of Mike’s Vector Network Analyzer (VNA) to examine the characteristics of an antenna by calibrating out the effects of the transmission line.

Technical note:  Transmission lines have losses, i.e., they inherently dissipate as heat some of the energy they are trying to transfer from a radio transmitter to an antenna.  The losses depend on frequency, and if the transmission line is of low quality it will dissipate more energy per linear foot than a higher quality one at any particular frequency.  How much energy it dissipates thus depends on the inherent loss, the length, and the frequency of the signal.  When a transmitter sends energy through a transmission line it would ideally like all of the energy to reach the antenna, be transferred into the antenna, and cause it to resonate, producing electromagnetic radiation.  It never works quite that well in practice.  If there is a mismatch between the transmission line and the antenna, some of the energy will be “reflected” back down the transmission line towards the transmitter.  However, if there are sufficient losses in the transmission line the reflected energy never makes it back to the radio, which makes the radio think everything is just fine when in fact very little of the energy the radio produces may get turned into useful RF EM radiation.  Mike’s VNA allows the user to “calibrate out” the effect of the transmission line and “see” what is actually happening at the antenna.  That’s cool, and that’s a good thing to be able to do.

2013_11_11 (M) Odds ‘n’ Ends

Monday was a catch-all day for me while Linda went to Ann Arbor for her regular Monday babysitting duty.  I talked to Michele and she was encouraged that she would be able to fix the two expensive body panels that I crunched.  I called Prevost and ordered the 3rd panel that she would not be able to fix.  It would ship via UPS and arrive on Wednesday.  I updated my LinkedIn account and added all three of our phone numbers to the Federal DO NOT CALL LIST, a long overdue chore.  I called Adams Well Drilling and Water Treatment to get new whole-house sediment filters and chlorine tablets for the carbon filter unit.  We have a sediment filter housing that takes 10” long large-diameter filter elements.  They are a spun polypropylene with a dual micron rating; 50 microns on the outside and 5 microns on the inside.  It’s like having two filters in one!  The 50 micron portion removes the larger sediment that can quickly plug and filter and render it useless, leaving the 5 micron filter to remove only smaller particles.  The flow rate through this filter is excellent, and it’s easy to change thanks to the pre- & post-filter shutoff valves Adam’s installed, and the pressure relief button on top of the housing.

We had previously arranged to meet Kate for dinner.  Having just seen her in Ypsilanti, we agree to meet at the Zukey Lake Tavern in Pinckney, Michigan.  Linda and I wanted to check it out as our ham radio club had decided to go there for our December holiday meeting/dinner.  They have a very average salad bar, but I was able to get plenty to eat at it.  Linda had a veggie burger.  Not a great choice for us as restaurants go, but it will work well for the club.

2013_11_12 (T) Madeline Comes To Visit

Linda had agreed to babysit our grand-daughter on Tuesday so our son could continue working on a presentation for his department at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor.  I don’t get to see Madeline as much as Linda does, so our son offered to bring her to our house and work there while Linda and I handled baby duties.  Madeline is a busy little girl.  She is an accomplished crawler and is working on standing up and walking.  She loves her books and toys, and grandma bought some new ones to have at our house for her.  She kept us both busy while her dad worked on his computer.  He brought her Pack-n-Play and set it up in the bedroom that we have designated for her.  She went down for nap right on schedule at 2 PM and slept for ~90 minutes.  We got to play with her until sometime after 5 PM when it was time to leave.

2013_11_13 (W) & _14 (R)

Linda had called a couple of weeks ago and managed to get an appointment with our primary care physician for her annual physical due to a cancellation.  Her total cholesterol had risen a little from the last visit, which annoyed her given the way we eat, but her HDL, LDL, and triglyceride numbers all looked really good.  She was also able to talk to the nurse and find me an appointment time later in the month.  I really did not want to wait until late April or May for my next physical.

Thursday morning I went to Chuck’s bus garage to chat with him and our mobile Mechanic, Joe Cannarozzi, who had come in from Chicago to complete some work on Chuck’s coach.  Joe had also been engaged by the guy from California to drive the bus to Staley Coach near Nashville, Tennessee on Friday morning and bring the guy back to the Detroit area.  It turned out that Chuck needed new brake pads for his tag axle wheels.  We were sitting around wringing our hands about how to get those in time for Joe to finish the brake job when I realized that Joe was going to Nashville where Prevost has one of their major factory parts and service centers!  Phone calls were made, parts were ordered and put on account for will call, and it was agreed that Joe would pick them up on Friday and bring them back with him.  Sometimes bus stories do have happy endings.

I spent Wednesday and part of Thursday working at my computers.  Larry (K8UT) is a member of our ham radio club and a very accomplished web designer.  He had given me the “key” to getting a local web-server running:  LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin).  I got MySQL and phpMyAdmin installed on the Linux box but was unable to create the databases I needed in spite of spending time with the documentation.  By Thursday evening I still did not have WordPress running on our local web-server, but I was clearly making progress in that direction.  Sometimes computer stories have happy endings too.

2013_10_25-31 (M-R) FOOD At The Phase Place!

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Sometimes I get busy and don’t keep up with my posts.  When I go back even as little as a week, as in this post, I find that many of the details are already lost in the continuous flow of daily living.

With the bus work in Williamston wrapped up, I turned my attention to figuring out what body panels and small parts I needed to order from Prevost to fix the damage I did to the passenger side of the bus leaving the campground in Townsend, TN.  I spent a fair amount of time in the Prevost CatBase Viewer database.  There were enough parts involved that I made an Excel spreadsheet.  I called Prevost U.S. Parts and got Roger Anderson on the line.  After discussing this for a while, we decided that it would be easiest for me to e-mail him the spreadsheet.

Next up was final preparations for the annual business meeting of our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter (FTH), of which I am the vice-president and secretary.  There are a surprising number of documents that are involved in a simple meeting of a small group: an agenda (from the president), minutes from last year’s meeting, financial statements (which Linda and I prepare based on data from the treasurer), proposed amendments to the bylaws, and an updated roster.  All of these get converted to PDF files and uploaded to a folder in our Dropbox account.  I have provided a link to that folder to all of our members.

We made our usual trip to South Lyon on Saturday morning for breakfast with members of the South Lyon Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC).  Linda worked on recipes.  I installed the WP-Recipes plug-in and she has started using it to capture and publish recipes for some of our favorite whole-food plant-based (WFPB) dishes.  She is evening taking a photograph of the finished dish and adding it to the recipe page.  (Click on the Food & Health Tab and then on Recipes in the dropdown menu.)

While Linda worked on recipes I worked on WordPress websites.  Besides our own, I am working on websites for our FMCA Freethinkers Associate Chapter (FTH), our FMCA Great Lakes Converted Coaches Chapter (GLCC, of which Linda is the Treasurer), and our South Lyon Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC).

WordPress is constantly releasing updates and new versions.  This generally a good thing, but they always strongly advise that you backup your site (folders/files/database) before installing an upgrade.  I haven’t been doing that, so I decided on Saturday that I should.  The GLCC website is an add-on domain for our primary/personal site, so I was able to back it up using the backup utilities in the QTH.com cPanel.  The FTH website is hosted by iPower and the SLAARC website is hosted by GoDaddy, neither of which use cPanel nor appear to have built in backup utilities.  There is some provision for backup built in to WordPress.

When I used the cPanel backup utility to backup our primary/personal site and the GLCC site it was about 1 GB.  We only had 2.5 GB on our free Dropbox account, so I signed up for the 100 GB Dropbox plan.  I then went on a search for a WordPress plug-in that would do the backups on a schedule.  I selected WordPress Backup To Dropbox (WPB2D) and then installed and activated it on all four sites.  I am going to test it for a couple of weeks and see how it works.  I hope it works well as it is a very simple plug-in to use.

Our FTH meeting was scheduled as a conference call for 6:00 PM EDT on Sunday evening, October 27.  We have 40 memberships in the chapter and needed 10 to make a quorum.  6:00 PM came and went and at 6:15 PM we only had 8 people on the line.  The president polled the group and decided we would try again the next night; same time, same place.

Our SLAARC information net is held every Sunday evening at 8:00 PM.  I was a regular participant up until we moved to the new house.  Although I have our 2m/70cm base station antenna mounted on the old TV tower, I do not have the coax run to the ham shack in the basement.  Hooking up the radio is inconvenient, especially in cold/dark/wet conditions, all of which we now have.  I would like to have the ham shack set up and functioning, but it has not made it to the top of the list yet.

On Monday I drove the bus to W. W. Williams in Dearborn, Michigan to have them look at the auxiliary air system and the speedometer.  They thought the constant cycling of the main engine air-compressor was either the governor or the air-dryer purge valve.  Since the governor had just been replaced, I authorized replacing the purge valve.  They thought the speedometer issue was the “tone wheel”, the sensor, or the gauge.  The sensor was just replaced, so I authorized them to check that it was installed correctly and to pull the output shaft housing on the end of the transmission to check the tone wheel.

I called Roger back at Prevost U.S. Parts.  He had filled in my spreadsheet and prepared a Prevost quote, so he e-mail those back to me.  I decided to hold off ordering until Michele at Phoenix Paint has a chance to look at the damage and decide if she can fix it.

Linda and I had staked out the size/location of our planned bus barn and driveway.  We adjusted the stakes slightly, moving the barn 5 feet farther from the road and squaring it up.  It’s currently 32 ft. wide by 56 ft. long with a driveway that includes a spur for turning around.  Phil from Precision Grading came by Monday evening, measured the area, and dug a couple of test holes to see what soil conditions we had.  He said we had 13 inches of good top soil in that area.  This will have to be removed and replaced with crushed concrete and 21AA road gravel, so we discussed possible locations on our property for the top soil.  Some of it will go in a depressed area behind the proposed barn location.  This area forms a lake whenever we get heavy/persistent rain.  Some it will probably go on the west side of the main garage driveway, which currently drops off more than we would like, and somewhat unevenly.  There are also low spots on the far west end of our property, and some of the topsoil will likely go there.

I spent the rest of this period working on the various websites.  In particular, I finally figured out how to configure and use the WP-Members plug-in to restrict access to selected portions of a WordPress site based on a Username and Password.  With that feature working, I focused on design (structure) and content for the FTH and GLCC sites.  I got sidetracked on Halloween with the idea of installing a “slider” (automated slideshow) in place of the default graphic in the RESPONSIVE Theme I am using for the GLCC site.  I selected and installed Meteor Slides based on its demonstration by the authors of RESPONSIVE.  It had the appearance of being very simple to install and use, and it was/is once I figured it out.  It took me 5 hours to do that, but I did.  The site is not ready for viewing yet, but I will share the address when it is.

2013_10_05 (S) Power Wa(r)shing

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The thunderstorms developed overnight as forecast.  I woke up around 3:30 AM to the strong smell of coffee, the sight of lightning, and the sound of thunder and rain.  Although the two bags of coffee beans we had roasted yesterday were closed, they were not sealed air-tight and the lovely smell had spread through the house.  We had the house closed up and the air-conditioning on because of the humidity, which probably helped circulate the smell.

It never sounded like it rained very hard, so we were surprised to find our road flooded in the usual places on our way out to our ham radio club (SLAARC) breakfast in South Lyon.  I had my usual dry English muffin with strawberry jam and Linda had her usual dry rye toast with orange marmalade.; and coffee, of course.  (We go for conversation, not the food.)  The day remained overcast and humid, but there wasn’t any appreciable additional rain.

Since we have now been in S. E. Michigan for 37 years I may have picked up some sort of local speech inflection, but if so I am unaware of it.  For most of my life people who did not know me we generally unable to guess where I was from.  The reason is that I hail from the St. Louis, Missouri area.  That may seem strange given that the Mason-Dixon Line goes right through the middle of Missouri, dividing it in half north and south, with the Ozarks in the southern portion.  That’s “hillbilly” country, and southern speech inflections are common there.  And while they are heard in the St. Louis area, more now than when I was child, St. Louis speech is distinguished primarily by being indistinguishable, that is to say, very neutral.  Add to that the fact that I was raised by an English teacher whose father was an English teacher and whose mother taught Latin (for a while), and you get a very neutral speech. Except for one word…”wash”.  For some reason I learned to pronounce it “warsh.”  The “r” in that word was my only real speech tell-tale, and it was usually too subtle and too specific for folks to pick up.  This brings me to my major task of the day.

While Linda was occupied with cleaning the inside of the bus and the house and making food for tomorrow, I got to use the power washer to clean the lower deck.  The basement would not have a walkout feature had the builder piled dirt completely around the basement walls, but they left an area unburied and formed a kind of valley leading out into the back yard.  There is a 12’ x 15’ deck set into the ground outside the doorwall, and based on the labeling of the electrical panel, it apparently once supported a hot tub.  This lower deck is under part of the upper/main deck and had gotten very dirty over the years.  In fact, it was coated with a green growth (mold/mildew I suspect) that was quite slippery, especially when wet, and a bit of hazard.  Another piece of neglected maintenance, I either had to clean it or close it off with yellow caution tape.

We have an electric power washer and it was the right tool for the job; powerful enough without being too powerful, and without the hassle of a gasoline engine.  I was also pleased to find that the well/pump did not have any trouble supplying the needed raw water.  (The outside faucets are plumbed so that well water can be supplied directly to them without going through any of the filters or conditioning equipment.)

The hardest part of this work was being slightly bent over for three (3) hours.  The trigger wand requires two hands to control, and is just short enough that I have to bend over slightly to get the adjustable nozzle the right distance from the wood to work effectively.  Getting the green stuff off of the wood was really a stripping job not a cleaning job, and I needed the nozzle about 2” – 3” from the surface to get the job done.  I found it easiest to clean about a 2’ section of each 6” wide board before moving on.

Linda worked off and on all day making the food for tomorrow since the open house starts at lunch time and runs through the dinner hour.  We have an assortment of fresh fruit and vegetables, as well as chips and pretzels, but no tree nuts as one of our guests as a serious air-born tree-nut allergy.  We have hummus and she made a vegan “ranch dressing” for dipping.

For “main course” selections she made a vegan chili that she will keep warm in the crock pot and serve on slider buns from the bakery “as needed.”  She also made one of my favorite dishes, a chilled garbanzo bean (chickpea) salad that tastes just like egg salad (as best I recall).  That will also be served on the slider buns as needed.

For dessert choices she baked eight dozen chocolate mini-cupcakes and frosted them with vanilla icing, all vegan of course.  She also made two large dishes of apple crisp using apples from our own apple tree.

Beverage choices include water, sparkling water, sparkling fruit flavored water, a variety of beers, red and white wine, and coffee.  If someone wants it, we can also make tea.

We finished up with our days work around 8 PM, a much more satisfying day than yesterday.  We had a simple dinner of Linda’s homemade granola with fresh fruit.  We went to bed excited about the open house and satisfied with the preparations.

 

2013_09_28-30 (S,N,M) Gone Fish’in

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No, I have not given up my WFPB way of eating, but one of the things I did on Sunday was to run a new network cable from our main Internet gateway (in the kitchen) to my office (in the basement).  I had to pull the cable above a suspended ceiling and then “fish” it up through the floor boards into a wall cavity.  There is a special tool called a “fish tape” that is made for this purpose.  It’s a thin but stiff piece of metal that is coiled up inside a housing with a small hook on the free end.  Because it is relatively stiff, you can push through holes and into wall cavities and other such places until it emerges somewhere, hopefully where you need it to emerge.  I have a fish tape (of course) but I can’t find it (naturally) because the garage/workshop will be the last part of our move to get organized.  So I improvised, and after several false starts ended using a scrap piece of 3-conductor sheathed electrical cable that was long enough, small enough, and stiff enough to get the job done.  But I have gotten way ahead of myself.

As usual, Linda and I went to our South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) breakfast on Saturday morning.  Well, almost as usual; we took two cars this time as Linda was headed to Ann Arbor to babysit munchkin Madeline after breakfast, and I was headed in the opposite direction to do ham radio stuff.

Madeline’s domestic servants (our son and his wife) wanted to attend a wedding on Sunday in Madison, Wisconsin and thought the three days required to drive there, celebrate, and drive back might work out better for all involved if their daughter did not make the trip.  They also figured that Madeline would do better in their absence if she was in her own home.  Madeline approved of these plans and gave them the requested 3-day pass.  Although Madeline’s aunt (our daughter) provides child care one day a week, a 3-day stint, over the weekend, in a house without television would mean no college or professional football, and would have been heroic beyond necessity.  This was clearly a job for GRANDMA, who doesn’t have functioning television in her new house anyway, so she wouldn’t miss it.  Besides, when sitting the baby, there’s no time to watch TV (or do much of anything else).

Mike (W8XH) and I had plans to work on the new SLAARC website, but first he had to help Bruce (W8RA) set up his new LP-PAN and integrate it into his ham radio station.  Working on Bruce’s ham shack is no small undertaking.  I’ve never been in the Space Shuttle simulator, but I’ve seen pictures, and sitting at Bruce’s ham station is a pretty good facsimile.  It took Mike a couple of hours, but he got it all working.  We then headed to his QTH to do the website stuff.

Mike and I are building the new SLAARC website using WordPress with the help of fellow SLAARC member Larry (K8UT), who is a bonafide expert in such matters.  A couple of weeks ago we decided to create the new website as a subdomain of the existing website, which is hosted by GoDaddy, and that was an experience in itself.  This would make it very easy, however, to later change some DNS entries and have the original domain name point to the new website.  Larry did the WordPress installation manually rather than using the automatic WordPress installer that most web-hosting companies have available (including GoDaddy).  As a result it has taken longer to get the new site functional, but Mike and I now have a much better understanding of subdomains and an appreciation for some of the complexity that is “under the hood” when using WordPress.  One more call to Larry resulted in some magic on his end, and we were finally up and running.  We then spent several hours installing, activating, and exploring themes.  We haven’t made any final decisions, but we are starting to figure out what questions to ask.  While Mike and I are anxious to move this along, we are not under any external pressure to have it ready by a certain date and want to take our time on the front end.  While it is relatively easy to change WordPress themes even after a website is populated with content, there is a point beyond which that is still going to involve a lot of work.  I like projects, but I don’t like doing projects over (and over, and over …).

I was still in WordPress mode when I got home, so I did some work on our personal website.  I created a tab (main menu item) for “Ham Radio” and created a sub-menu item for “SLAARC”.  These are just placeholders for now, but will eventually have content.  I have also fleshed out the WFPB tab as I start to build out the main menu structure.

Mike lent me an AmpedWireless dual-band WiFi repeater that he wasn’t using and I spent some time Saturday evening and Sunday morning playing with it.  It is a very cool device.  In WiFi repeater mode it will pick up a 2.4GHz and/or a 5.0GHz WiFi network and rebroadcast it.  What’s really cool, however, is that it will pick up a 2.4GHz WiFi network and rebroadcast it as 5.0GHz WiFi network.  I have been looking for a device that will do this for quite some time.  Our iPads and smartphones are all 5.0GHz capable, so using them with a 5.0GHz WiFi signal offloads that traffic from the 2.4GHz network, leaving it for 2.4GHz only devices.  The 5.0GHz band also has a lot more bandwidth than the 2.4GHz band with very few devices using it, so there is less interference and more reliable network connections.  Unfortunately, the device did not work well at our house as it appeared to be in conflict with our WiFi thermostat.

Wireless repeaters, access points, bridges, etc. are all designed so that they can be setup and configured wirelessly through a web-browser.  In order to accomplish this they map a specific URL to a specific IP address in the 192.168.xxx.yyy range.  In this case, 192.168.1.240.  Unfortunately, I think the WiFi thermostat also uses that IP address.  There may be a way to work around this, but I did not have time to pursue that today.  The AmpedWireless device is actually configurable in five different modes.  WiFi repeater is the default, but it can be a Wireless Access Point or a Wireless Bridge, or two other things.

As a result of playing with this device, I think I finally understand the difference between various networking technologies.  A Network Switch (NS) is a device that allows multiple devices to be connected together using network cables, with one cable going back to the router (where the IP addresses are controlled through DHCP).  A Wireless Repeater (WR) is just that; it picks up a WiFi signal and rebroadcasts it (repeats it), usually on the same frequency and channel, but with a different SSID; no cables required.  (The Amped Wireless WiFi Repeater can rebroadcast it on a different frequency and/or channel, very nice.)  A Wireless Access Point (WAP) generates a WiFi network and is connected to the main router through a network cable.  We have a Linksys WAP running now.  A Wireless Bridge (WB) is the mirror image of a WAP.  It allows multiple devices to be connected to it using cables (sounds like it’s a NS) and then communicates using WiFi with a wireless router or WAP.  This allows lots of equipment to be located remotely from the main Internet gateway/router without running a cable between the two locations.

While Linda continued her marathon munchkin duty on Sunday, I worked around the house trying to check things off my “to-do” list faster than they got added.  I didn’t succeed, but I did get a lot done.  My main focus was my office, which had become the place where stuff was getting piled so we could feel like we had put other parts of the house in reasonably good order.  I either needed to get it organized or close it off for the open house.  Some of our fellow hams are coming to the open house and will want to see the ham shack (which is also my office), so closing it off from public view wasn’t really an option.

Monday was odds-n-ends day.  I continued to try to clean up and organize my office and the basement, installed two new door closers on the front screen/storm door, and installed new hardware (tracks) for the pair of bi-fold doors on the kitchen pantry.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it takes all day.  I snagged some replacement toilet flappers from Lowe’s, a nice shelving unit for the bedroom from Staples, and a large quantity of ICE Sparkling Water from Walmart.  (It’s not my favorite place to shop, but Meijer’s doesn’t carry this product.)

Mid-afternoon there was a knock at the door.  It was a representative from a company that is subcontracting with Consumer’s Energy to possibly run a natural gas main down our street.  I walked our property with the guy and explained the rather complicated situation that has led to us having two propane tanks and what they implications of that were for us switching to natural gas.  I went ahead and signed up after making sure we could back out if we decided this really wasn’t what we wanted to do.  As of now, however, we are definitely interested in switching to natural gas.  Consumer’s Energy estimates the equivalent cost for a gallon of propane, which is currently $2.00 + or – $0.40, at $0.77.  At that ratio, our infrastructure payback would be about 3 years.  There is also the added benefit of having a constant supply of fuel without a truck having to come and fill a tank.  Value?  Priceless.

In the late afternoon I had a nice chat with Joe from EZ*Connector.  EZ*Connector is a small company in California that has designed, and manufactures, a keyed, magnetically retained, sealed electrical connector.  It comes in 7 and 14 pin configurations for non-military use and is an ideal solution to the problem of connecting a tow vehicle (bus) to a towed vehicle (car).  Our current setup requires two separate electrical cables with mechanical or friction latches.  The EZ*Connector will provide a much easier and yet superior connection.  They are just now bringing a new 14 conductor cable to market and suggested I wait until early November to order.

Linda called to say she would be home around 7 PM.  I put water on to boil to make angel hair pasta with red sauce, and she picked up a salad on the way home.  She made the sauce last week, and it was fabulous.  (I am not normally a fan of marinara sauce, but this sauce has me rethinking that position.)  A glass of 2009 Egri Merlot to wash it down, and fresh plums for dessert made a fine conclusion to a long day.

 

2013_09_14 (Sat) Ready, Set, No Go

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We were up early Saturday morning to attend the standing breakfast gathering of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club at the Senate Coney Island in South Lyon.  I was discussing our cell phone signal situation with Scott, AC8IL, and he suggested I try a passive booster system before putting money into an active repeater.  The idea behind the passive booster system is to connect two antennas (of the same characteristic impedance) together with a co-axial cable (of the same characteristic impedance).  One antenna goes outside and the other goes inside.  The inside antenna will generally be omnidirectional, since you could be anywhere in the house/building with your phone, but the outside antenna will likely be directional since it can be pointed at the most favorable cell tower.  Highly directional antennas have “gain” compared to omnidirectional antennas, which is to say, they provide a strong signal at their co-ax connector than an omnidirectional antenna placed in the same location.  This signal will be transmitted down the matched co-ax cable to the other antenna where it will tend to radiate back into space.  It works in the other direction as well.  The nice thing about this potential solution is that if I purchase antennas and coax cables that will also work with an active booster (repeater) then I only have to buy the active booster if the antennas alone are not adequate.

When we got home we continued working on preparations for our trip and the open house by hanging the last piece of wall art, at least for now.  When going to rallies Linda often prepares dinner meals ahead of time and freezes them.  This simplifies our evening meals and leaves open the possibility of going out to dinner, which RVers do a lot (at least at rallies).  Between food, clothes, toiletries, and miscellaneous other things there was a lot of “stuff” to put on board even for a short outing.  I helped pull stuff together and get it on board while attending to the updating of our Rand McNally RVND7710 GPS unit.  The map update said it would take 14+ hours to download.  It ran for about 8 hours and was indicating that it had 1 hour and 29 minutes left to go when it hung up and quit downloading.  🙁

Our AT&T High Speed Internet / Digital Subscriber Line (HSI/DSL) service is a bad joke when it comes to speed and may be at the point where I need to file a service request/complaint.  It’s only real benefit is the 150 Gb monthly data allowance.  But the service seems to be so slow that I’m not sure I could transfer 150 Gb of data in a month if uploaded and downloaded 24/7.

[A note about RV “stuff”:  The truth is that full-time RVers also have “stuff”, but it is limited by their available space and does get loaded and unloaded before and after each “trip”.  (Full-timers don’t go on trips; they just move they home around the country.)  They also have “spring cleaning”, although it can occur at any time of the year.  For many this is an annual ritual of completely emptying the RV, examining all of the “stuff”, deciding what not to put back, and re-configuring the storage of the rest.]

 

2013_09_13 (Fri) Bakery Business, WordPress, And Gutters

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Linda left early to drive to the bakery where she put in a long day.  I worked on the CEPI ATR project for a while in the morning.  The mail came around noon and contained the written proposal package for the bus barn from Morton Buildings.  We also received a box from Bus Conversions Magazine containing multiple copies of the issues in which I have had articles published this year (Feb, Mar, May, and July).  We have been distributing sample copies to potential subscribers as we travel to try and help the magazine build its subscriber base.

At 1 PM I met with Mike (W8XH) from SLAARC to work on a new website prototype using WordPress.  On Monday we had been unable to complete the installation of WordPress at Larry’s for lack of the necessary login information, but Mike had obtained that from another club member during the week.  Finishing the installation was more complicated than we anticipated and we ended up on the phone with Larry (K8UT) most of the time.  Our original goal was to investigate themes and plugins but we worked on installation and configuration instead, including figuring out how to set up subdomains through GoDaddy; first things first, after all.

By mid-late afternoon I was back home, the weather was pleasant, and I finally had time to investigate the gutters.  It came as no surprise that the downspouts were all completely clogged.  What did surprise me was the amount of fine gravel in the gutters.  This was material that had washed loose from the surface of the shingles over time and accumulated along the bottom of the gutters to a depth of 1/4 to 1/2 inch in places.  I got out the 8 foot step ladder and the long hose and spray head, switched the outside faucets to direct well water (unfiltered and untreated) and spent a couple of hours on the roof hosing out the gutters and downspouts.

This was only the second time I had been on the roof, and the first time I had inspected the entire surface.  The inspector had dubbed the roof “serviceable” during the purchase inspection, meaning that it probably did not need to be replaced immediately.  My assessment was “marginally serviceable”, meaning that it will probably have to be re-shingled next summer.  It is a relatively low pitch roof, roughly 4-in-12, so I may redo it myself.  I’ve done this work before, and although I was much younger then, I am actually in better shape now.  The key will be getting the shingles delivered to the roof rather that to the driveway.  The bonus to being on the roof was that the views were nice and I had a much better Verizon 4G/LTE signal than I do in the house, so there is still the possibility that I can get a usable signal into the house using some sort of signal booster system.

By the time Linda fought her way home through Friday evening rush hour traffic she was tired and did not feel like cooking.  It was also obvious that we would not be ready to leave for Twelve Mile, Indiana by noon the next day.  We quickly decided to delay our departure until Sunday and, relieved of that pressure, headed off to LaMarsa in Brighton for dinner.  The LaMarsa in Farmington Hills was a favorite of ours before we moved, and the one in Brighton is equally good.  Our favorite dish is Koshary, an Egyptian street food made with rice, legumes, two different pastas, fried onions, pickled beets, and a spicy sauce.  It comes with a salad with a lovely Middle Eastern vinaigrette dressing.  Dinner always comes with fresh pocket pita breads and garlic spread and the whole meal is vegan, served in a nice setting by wonderful wait staff.

 

2013_09_09 (M) More WordPress Please

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Today was babysitting Monday for Linda and WordPress day for me.  Mike (W8XH), the current president of the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC), wants to create a new website for the club and I have offered to help.  We settled fairly quickly on using WordPress to do the work, based in part on the recommendation of Larry (K8UT), and in part on the fact that I am already using it for our website and this blog.  Larry offered to help us learn how to build and maintain the site, but did have the personal capacity to actually do the work as he is already the webmaster for a large number of websites.

Today was our first in-depth technical session.  We worked for over two hours and left with our heads spinning a bit, but that was OK.  Our main focus was a lot of the “back end” stuff.  We walked through some basic domain and web-host management issues including the use of subdomains, downloading and installing WordPress, configuring the site for easy/safe backup and new version development/testing, selecting an appropriate theme and navigation structure, selecting/installing plug-ins to add functions such as subscription, member login, and a member directory, and issues related to managing images.  We left with “homework” to complete before we meet with Larry again.

Not only do I want to help create a more responsive, attractive, and useful web presence for our ham radio club, I would like to improve our website/blog and have offered to do something similar for two other organizations related to our RVing interests.  The functionality I need to incorporate into those two websites will be very similar to what we need to do with our SLAARC website, so this was a very relevant learning opportunity for me.  I am also the current vice-president of the SLAARC, and as we all know, VPs don’t usually do much, so this was an opportunity for me to do more than just be prepared to fill in for Mike if needed.

 

2013_09_08 (Sun) All Ham, All Day

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No, we have not given up our WFBP way of eating in favor of “pigging out.”  Today was almost entirely about ham (amateur) radio for me, and partly so or Linda.

One of the things that some hams like to do is attend “hamfests”, also known as swaps or swap meets, although mostly stuff is bought and sold rather than traded.  Like any hobby, amateur radio has many aspects, and hamfests are one of them.  Today was the Findlay, Ohio hamfest, which has been held each September for many years.  Six of us from the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) car-pooled, and another member followed with his family (dad and both kids are hams).  Steve (N8AR) drove and picked me (K8BRF) up at an agreed rendezvous point at 5:50 AM.  We met the other four passengers (Russ, N8EEA; Chris, K8VJ; Jim, N8HAM; and Marty, KB8JIU) at a ‘park-n-ride’ on US-23 at 6:10 AM and headed on to Findlay, arriving around 8:00 AM.

Public service and emergency communications are two of the reasons amateur radio exists at all.  Goodwill is another; ham radio is a worldwide activity and many hams simply enjoy making friendly “contacts” with other hams using nothing but the radio waves they are able to generate and receive.  Some hams make contacts in pursuit of specific awards offered by various organizations.  The American Radio Relay League (ARRL), for instance, offers the DXCC award for making verified contact with hams in 100 different countries (technically “entities”) as internationally recognized.  (DX is ham shorthand for “distant” and CC stands for “Century Club”.).  Some hams are into “contesting” where they compete with other hams to try and make the most contacts during a specific date/time window using particular methods on specified frequency bands.

Other hams are into making “QRP” contacts (low power of not more than 5 watts and often quite a bit less).  They typically use CW (Morse code) or other “digital modes”.  QRPers often design/build their own equipment, and this ability to experiment is another reason ham radio continues to exist.  Amateur radio has been around for over 100 years, and has made significant contributions to the art and science of wireless communications.  Rebuilding ham radio equipment and related gear, like shortwave receivers, is another aspect of the hobby and rebuilding/using vintage equipment is a specialized aspect of that branch of the hobby.

This brings me back to hamfests and swap meets.  Much of what is available at these events is used equipment, parts, and materials, and they tend to draw hams involved in repairing, rebuilding, and experimenting in addition to those looking for deals on used radios or components for their ham shack.  The older radios were all tube based, for instance, and there are always folks with large assortments of tubes for sale.  There is usually a fair amount of computer and network technology as well, albeit prior generation stuff.  Today I picked up 100 foot lengths of both category 6 and category 7 network cable, with connectors, for very little cost ($10 each), and a 35 foot length of 50 ohm “superflex” co-axial cable with “N” connectors on each end for less than $1/ft, a “super” good deal compared to retail.

We left the Findlay hamfest around 12:30 PM and were back at the Park-n-Ride by 2:30 PM.  Linda had gone to the Tanger outlet mall at the west end of Howell, but didn’t find the things she was looking for.  She had taken some additional photos of the front of the house in better light than the ones we had and we settled on one to use in the invitation for an open house/warming we planned to have.

To complete our ham radio day, we attended the SLAARC monthly meeting after dinner.  For the program portion of the evening Russ (N8EEA) showed photos from the summer the trip he and Emily (his XYL) made to the  Yukon and Alaska.  The main purpose of their trip was to attend the 50th wedding anniversary of a close friend and fellow ham, but they also took an HF transceiver and antenna and made contacts with members of the club along the way at scheduled times.  Following the slide presentation there was a discussion of the technical aspects of these “scheds” and how this concept might be improved should any club members make similar trips in the future.  For some reason a number of members thought this might be particularly applicable to members who had bus conversions RVs.

2013_08_09-12 (F, S, N, M) Odds And Ends

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There is a certain routine to being back at the house, and when we are here it feels like we should get back into that routine.  Otherwise, it becomes too easy to sleep in, start slow, and not get around to even thinking about doing things until the afternoon, by which time it is too late to start anything.

Friday we were still unloading a few things from the bus, finishing up laundry (me), weeding the flower beds (Linda), catching up on accounting tasks (Linda), catching up on operating system updates (me), and other such necessities of daily living.  I placed calls to various service providers and filled out an online trouble report to try and get our AT&T phone line back in service.  Based on the missed calls on our answering machine, it appears that the phone line quite working around June 25th.  What I found interesting was that our High Speed Internet (HSI/DSL) worked fine and never went out.

With necessary chores attended to I turned my attention to writing first drafts of articles for Bus Conversions Magazine (BCM).  I had started an article a while back on the exterior makeover so finished a first draft of that and sent it off to Michele Henry of Phoenix Paint for review.  I had six other projects I had worked on the last 11 months that I also thought would make good articles.  Over the course of the weekend I completed first drafts of all six and sent all seven article drafts off to the Publisher (Gary Hall) and Editor (Wendy Crosby) of BCM, sans pictures.

Until today (Monday) the weather has been delightful since we returned, with blue skies, a few puffy white clouds, highs in the low-to-mid 70’s and lows in the upper 50’s.  Friday evening we decided to get out of the house for a while so we drove to downtown Brighton and went for a walk along the Mill Pond.  This is a large pond formed by a small dam in the heart of downtown, and it has a boardwalk that runs along the east side for about 1/2 mile.  Besides people there were ducks and geese, including babies, and a swan.  We also saw bluebirds and two muskrats.  Downtown Brighton is a happening place on a Friday night.  There were lots of people at the many restaurants, but equally many out walking.

Part of our routine is Saturday morning ham radio breakfast, usually with the South Lyon Area Amateur Radio Club (SLAARC) of which we are members, but occasionally with the Novi Radio Club.  Having been gone for a while we went to the SLAARC breakfast.  It was good to see our ham radio friends and catch up on what everyone has been doing.  Folks were interested in our travels, of course, and we enjoyed sharing a little bit about that.

Back home I decided to run a computer network cable from our AT&T Gateway to my office in the basement so I could connect the computers down there to a hub and and connect it back to the Gateway.  I’ve been trying to accomplish this connectivity with WiFi, but have had limited success.  I ran a small experiment first to make sure it would work, plugging my laptop into the hub and the hub into the Gateway with all of the components in close physical proximity to the Gateway.  It worked, so I proceeded with the larger project.

I had to enlarge a hole from the basement up into the wall cavity behind Linda’s desk, and managed to nick the Cat5 cable that carries the DSL/phone signal to the Gateway.  Naturally the AT&T repair truck showed up a short time later.  That did not turn out to be problem, however, as the technician very quickly determined that the problem was somewhere upstream in their system.  He had our signals restored at the outside junction box long before I was ready to reconnect to them.

I managed to get the Cat6 network cable run through the suspended ceiling in the basement and into the office.  I put the hub in the center of the room and ran the longest cables I had from various devices across the floor and over things.  I would include a picture, but it isn’t a pretty sight.  😉  The hardwired connection isn’t necessarily faster than the wireless one, but it stays connected, which is more important than speed.

While I was at it I decided to run a new, higher quality Cat6 cable from the AT&T junction box (outside) to the AT&T Gateway (inside).  After poking around in the attics above the garage and the house, I decided that this was not a project that had to be done at this time.  As I have worked on projects in the basement I have been removing old telephone wires as we use a cordless phone system and the wiring is obsolete.  I was going to to continue that work, but decided for now to just fix the cable I had damaged and get our phone/DSL connections back on line.

Another part of our routine is the Sunday morning Howell Farmers Market.  The nice weather continued and we enjoyed strolling through the market and talking to the vendors.  We bought some corn and peppers and herbs.  We bought some more coffee beans from Irene’s Beans of Milford, and also from Teeko’s of Howell.  Teeko’s is not far from our house and they keep their beans green until you buy them.  They then roast them to your taste while you wait.  They have a very wide selection of beans, including 100% Kona and Jamaica Blue Mountain.  These are premium coffee beans and are not generally available even at upscale food markets.

On Sunday Linda split her time between weeding, her computer, and just relaxing, which usually involves reading.  Of course she also took time to make meals, which were good, as usual.  I continued working on articles drafts and started updating our GPS units.  I had the docking/update software for both units installed on an older laptop that is not very fast, even with a hardwired network connection.  I replaced the hard disk drive in that laptop some time ago with a solid state drive as I plan to use that computer to run the Silverleaf VMSpc software for monitoring the bus engine while I drive.  I figured the SSD would be more tolerant of bumps and vibrations.  It probably is, but I did not figure on how incredibly slow it would be.

It took quite a while, but I got the Garmin nüvi 465T updated.  This is a nice little GPS unit designed for truckers (the T model) with a 4″ diagonal screen.  Because it is designed for truckers, we can create profiles for different vehicles/combinations, including length, width, height, and weight.  That is very handy when driving a large vehicle.  We use it in the toad, and as a backup for the bus.  I need to move the docking software to my newer laptop if I can figure out how to do it.  Part of the problem is that I also have map subscriptions installed on the old laptop and have to move those as well.

Sunday night was our monthly SLAARC meeting in South Lyon.  Linda opted not to go, but as the Vice-President of the club for this year, I really needed to make an appearance.  Besides, the program was on how to use an oscilloscope.  The presenter was (Dr.) Steve Smith, N8AR, a member of our club and retired electrical/communications engineer who worked on the space program at one point in his career.  Steve has done a number of presentations for our club.  They are always good, and they always draw a crowd, and this was no exception.

This morning (Monday the 12th) we woke to find it very overcast with a high probability of showers for most of the day.  That meant we would not be doing much outside work today.  Our Honda Element (towed vehicle) was overdue for it’s 75,000 mile service, so we took it to Brighton Honda right after breakfast.  While I was getting it written up Linda picked up my favorite Amy’s frozen pizza for dinner as she had plans for dinner and movie with Diane; their belated annual birthday night out.

I planned to continue working on my articles for BCM, selecting, adding, and annotating photos to illustrate them.  But first I decided to install the docking software for our Rand-McNally RVND7710 GPS.  That was easy; the software resides in the non-volatile memory of the unit, which connects to the computer via a USB cable.  I checked for updates; there were some, so I installed them.

I then decided to purchase the Lifetime Map updates, which I had not done previously.  I accomplished that easily enough but had a little trouble getting the docking software to accept the Activation Key.  Closing the software, powering the GPS down, turning it back on, and re-launching the docking software got it to work, but that wasn’t part of the instructions.  Great; time to download and install updated maps, which I did.  It took eight (8) hours!  I know our Internet connection is not very fast, and  I have no idea how much data got downloaded, but 8 hours?!  Unfortunately that tied up my laptop for most of the day, so whatever else I had hoped to accomplish got delayed.  But that was OK; it rained all day, and a slower pace with a subdued tone somehow seemed appropriate.