ARRL Field Day

Today is the annual ARRL Field Day event. The club I am a member of in Honolulu (the Emergency Amateur Radio Club) will be operating two stations from the North Shore today. I do not know if the club will be using a single callsign or if we will be using the callsigns of control operators. Likely the latter, check the site to see who is signed up. If you are wanting to make a Hawaii HF contact, listen for callsigns that begin with KH6, KH7, WH6, or WH7. Or listen for me with a New England call: KB1PCX.

The weather is more or less cooperating right now. Getting ready to head to the other side of the island for the event.

Heading Home

Our trip over the northeastern United States is done. Chris and Sarah are married, I got some office time in, we met with friends in and around Boston, and we got to see [Karen's] Chris and Ryoko in Manhattan, along with some of Karen's friends. All in all a great trip.

I think I posted about the wedding already. Work was more or less work. We hung out at various places in Boston. We took the bus to Manhattan Thursday evening and were there until we left this morning. Saw Up (again) and The Hangover (funny), ate at some good restaurants, went to Strand Bookstore, and I finally got to go to the B&H Superstore. B&H really is crazy, check out this video:



I kept thinking the smoke monster from LOST was following us, but no, it was just the taxi receipt printers (check out lostpedia.com, that's the sound they use for the smoke monster).

I learned what the nitrogen cylinders are for that you see every so often on sidewalks. The telco and ConEd use them to keep lines dry. Are they safe? Apparently they can be hit by a car and not go boom. Nice.

I also was determined to learn what the different subway indicators mean. I see numbers, letters, shapes, and colors. Turns out shapes and colors are mostly pointless to the average user.

Right now I am over New Mexico on a Delta flight enjoying inflight wifi. Almost halfway home. More posts later.

Departure in Five Short Hours

Karen and I are headed to BOS this evening. This coming weekend is the wedding of my good friend Chris. We're arriving a bit early since I'm in the wedding. It'll be nice to be back in New England, if only for a short time.

Next week I'll be putting in hours at the Red Hat office. Towards the end of the week, Karen and I will be headed down to Manhattan to visit her brother and his girlfriend. I wanted to take the Acela down to Manhattan so this would officially be a planes, trains, and automobiles trip, but the Acela is just too expensive considering we also have a week of car rental and roundtrip airfare from HNL.

We head back home after that, hopefully not too exhausted.

Over the weekend, we picked up things that we needed for the trip and verified travel plans and such. While out and about, we stopped at a Sprint store because I wanted to see the new Palm Pre phone. I have to say it's a lot nicer than I thought it would be. The size is nice and I like the keyboard (it's actually usable, for me at least). I get my iPhone contract shackles removed in January, at which point I either keep the POS iPhone or go for something new. Perhaps by then Sprint will be on revision 2 of the Palm Pre and it'll be even nicer. The price right now looks good and the features are nice to me. Then again, I'm easily impressed. I bought the original model iPhone, after all.

I'm not leaving BellSouth Mobility SBC Wireless Ameritech Pacific Bell Wireless Cingular AT&T Wireless AT&T Death Star unless someone else pays the $175 early contract termination fee. I'll just wait.

What are the odds of my contract running to completion before Sprint is acquired? Perhaps by Death Star.

Wow, This Stuff Does End

https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHSA-2009-1076.html

One down, two to go.

Moved to github

I've moved my non-work/non-Fedora projects over to github.com. I originally hosted my own source control. I started many many years ago with CVS, then Subversion, then Mercurial for whatever reason, and finally I decided I didn't want to be my own system administrator anymore, so I shut down my server after 10 years of availability. With that came the need to find a home for email (gmail), web hosting (site5), and version control. At the recommendation of Logan, I decided to give code.google.com a try. Like the web interface, hate the use of subversion.

So now I'm using git for everything: work projects and non-work projects. As such, I've moved the following projects to github:

• vpncwatch
• pycoreutils
• darwin-free

I have not moved my osxpkgs project from code.google.com because I really just don't care about it anymore. If anyone out there wants to take over ownership of that project, let me know and I'll give it to you. osxpkgs still lives here.

Please Use The Correct Term

It has always bothered me when people say they are stuck on the tarmac when they really mean they are stuck on the ramp or the taxiway. Please use the correct term.

Back from Las Vegas

Got back yesterday from Chris' bachelor party trip to Las Vegas. We didn't plan much beyond drinking, hanging out, and gambling. We successfully helped Chris consume an admirable quantity of alcohol and we assisted in the recovery of said experiment.

David Shea and were up all night on Saturday (well, technically, we got back at 5 AM). We went over to The Bellagio and Caesar's Palace, but they were mostly full of drunk people teetering and trying to find their rooms and/or something to do.

We did get to visit In-N-Out Burger, which I'm sure Chris hadn't had in a while. I gave him a preferred customer token that I still had, but the guy at the register had never seen one before. Still got a free burger though.

The last time I was in Vegas, I did pretty well on video poker. That surprised me because in video poker, it's not possible to bluff. This time was opposite, I didn't really do well at all. However, I did better at craps this time.

Craps is an interesting game because at glance it looks like one of the most difficult games in the casino. The tables are crowded, lively, and lots of chips flying around. At least, that's how I always thought of it. But it's really super simple. Search the interweb for any number of guides for craps and you'll see how easy it is.

In all, I think everyone had a good time. I hope Chris did. We could have planned a whole lot of things to do, but I think it was really fun for everyone to just hang out and drink.