Merry Christmas, Baby December 25, 2007
Posted by Thor in blogging.Tags: baby, family
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Linda kept saying all day yesterday that the baby was going to be born today. She said it over, and over.
She was right. As usual, her “connection” with the people in her life was at work. Lane got the call this morning at 05:05; his daughter, Mackenzie Jo Strickland, was born at 02:21 this morning, healthy, and was about 8 lb. 2 oz., or thereabouts. He wasn’t exactly sure when he told us, being in a pretty emotional state, as any young father would be who’d been denied the Life Experience of being present when his first child is born.
The baby’s mother, Lanes “ex” girlfriend (I won’t use her name here, out of respect for her), whether she meant it to be or not, executed one of the greatest cruelties possible towards a young man: she did not call him to let him know that she was going into labor, allowing him the time honored privilege of all fathers for generations past – to pace and fret about the maternity ward waiting room, awaiting the magic of seeing his first born daughter, of hearing her first wailing cry, of seeing the purple confusion of features on what must be the most beautiful baby ever born, even if she has been made a bit ugly and deformed from being squeezed through the birth canal. All babies are beautiful-ugly, ugly-beautiful, but no young father ever sees the ugly part, or at least never acknowledges it in his heart of hearts.
Now, as Linda says, Lane is “too nice.” As badly as I know he must have wanted to rush right over the hospital to see this wondrous new life he helped bring into the world, he decided to respect the girl’s wishes, let her sleep, and not arrive until visiting hours at 11:00. Me, if I wasn’t already there, I’d be in the car and on the way before I’d hung up the phone.
Another cruelty pressed upon Lane – the baby is not to carry his name. Mackenzie Jo Strickland, not Mackenzie Jo Strickland-Farrow, or Farrow-Strickland, as Lane had hoped.
K5EHX Repeater Mapping December 11, 2007
Posted by Thor in technology.add a comment
Tom White, K5EHX, of Tulsa, Oklahoma has done some creative work combining GoogleMaps and repeater and callsign data from QRZ.COM, Repeater.org, and ARTSCI Publishing, resulting in a “cool tool”. In a nutshell, Tom’s web site offers you a chance to map a location, with the locations of repeaters and the repeaters’ coverage ranges shown. Search options include searching by Callsign, by geographic search (ZIP code or City, State), or by Tag. Tags could include a callsign, city, state, or frequency band. For example, the tags listed for the repeater belonging to KP4EOP, located in Deer Park, Illinois and operating on the 70 centimeter band are: “KP4EOP”, “Deer”, “Park”, “IL”, and “70cm”. You do not seem to be able to combine search functions; you cannot, for example, search for repeaters located in area code 60047, limited to a subset of those operating on the 2-meter band.
Performing a search against my local area code, the query returns 82 repeaters, but only 30 are drawn on the map. To utilize the full list of repeaters returned as a result of the query, I can download the results as either a .csv file, for import into a spreadsheet program for example, or I can download the data as a KML (Keyhole Markup Language) file, to use with another on-line mapping program (2d), or an Earth browser (3d), such as GoogleEarth. I chose to download the search results as a KML file, to be opened in GoogleEarth.
Out of the black hole: 100 foot tower December 3, 2007
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How ’bout a 100′ aluminum tower, for about $1,000 dollars? To be found at the Black Hole, also known as the Los Alamos Sales Company. It looks like an interesting place.
There is a short five-part film showing the place and the character that owns it at the Coudal Partners web site.
Astronomy Picture of the Day – Solar Cycle December 3, 2007
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