Week of 25th February, 2008

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Monday, 25th February

New fortnight starts today - a 10 shift, running the ingest system.

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Tuesday, 26th February

Two successful days - evrything ingested by day's end each day, so the trolley is empty. This is good. We normally get somewhat of a rush at month's end, so there may very well be a lot of material over the weekend - and if the rush spills over into next week I'm not greatly worried, since the first 2 days of next week are the other shift's. I'll have to do the logging VHS labels over the weekend as well.

So that's work out of the way, although I do have overtime tomorrow - I still need more green stamps, for instance to pay for the lunch outing last week.

Also I've splurged a bit - some cables for the Kenwood TH-D7 handi-talkie, so that I can programme it by computer, and get my Garmin GPS talking to it in APRS mode. If I've read the manuals correctly, the TH-D7 emits decoded APRS posits as $GPWPL NMEA sentences, which the GPS should be able to display as waypoints, the while the TH-D7 beacons my position as understood by the GPS. Of course, paranoia won't let me beacon from home - this will be a mobile thing only. I got the cables from an American vendor on eBay - took a week from USA, which is good. I found the link via Steve, N4RVE, in the eBay links at the bottom of this page on his site.

I've also added extra memory to the Acer - purchased from Crucial. And it works, not that I didn't expect it to. Mark you, PC2700 SODIMMS aren't the cheapest memory about these days - 2no. 1GB sticks cost me about UKP112. But I think it'll be worth it - should make the Acer faster on large memory tasks, like sorting directories full of .jpg files to find duplicates.

Still waiting on delivery of the NUE-PSK modem from the American QRP Club in the States. QRP is the standard amateur code for low transmission power - by professional standards all amateur operation is low power, but in amateur circles the term QRP signifies the use of less than 10 watts RF output, and a significant minority consider 5 watts the maximum permissible to qualify. Once the modem arrives, I'll probably test it by driving to the car park near the top of a nearby hill, and operating /P.

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Wednesday, 27th February

A feeds shift today, on overtime. Quite successful, marred only by an ingest system crash which threatened to cause problems with getting 3 programmes ingested after their transmission, ready for repeat early tomorrow morning. But all was resolved before my quitting time.

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Thursday, 28th February

Interviews and tests at the hospital before Jane's Mum gets her new hip replacement operation in just over a week's time. Then to the cafe for lunch.

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Friday, 29th February

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Saturday, 1st March

St. David's Day

St. David is the Patron Saint of Wales, and since I consider myself an ex-patriate Welshman...

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Sunday, 2nd March

A successful weekend. All required, and available, material ingested ready for tomorrow. First missing item is sometime after 16:00, and that not available. But there's plenty of time to get it delivered.

And all this despite considerable pain due to ingest system outages.

So that's all good enough. It'd be nice not to have to report those outages, but them's the facts of life.

We have 2 more foreign students staying with us, while they study at a local language school. They'll be here until Thursday/Friday.

In computing news, although the Belkin Network USB hub works fine, the local application that you need to run to access it tends not to shutdown cleanly when you shut down your computer. This adds one extra mouse click to the shutdown routine - no biggie.

Also, obviously, it doesn't work on startup, not until the network is up. And wireless networking doesn't start on the Acer until quite late in the boot sequence. I wish Windows had the basic intelligence to start network-related services after the network starts. Linux can do this easily.

At the Kinetic Avionics Open Day recently, it was announced that Kinetic would be offering their own Ethernet adaptor for the SBS-1 Virtual Radar, supposedly before the end of last month. Well, it's not available yet. When it is, I'm getting an SBS-1. I want to be able to leave the thing in one place, where reception of the 1090MHz signals is optimum, and access it from anywhere on the local network. This will eventually include via the car network, as well. I'll discuss that on a separate page, once I start work on it.

 
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